On this Labor Day, I decided to post an edited version of Paul Robeson’s speech, “Forge Negro-Labor Unity for Peace and Jobs,” delivered at the National Labor Conference for Negro Rights in Chicago in 1950. [For the sake of space, I excluded the sections on Africa in World Affairs and The Truman Plan for Africa. I would urge you to read the entire speech.]
Forge Negro-Labor Unity for Peace and Jobs
Paul Robeson
I am profoundly happy to be here tonight.
No meeting held in America at this mid-century turning point in world history holds more significant promise for the bright future toward which humanity strives than this National Labor Conference for Negro Rights. For here are gathered together the basic forces—the Negro sons and daughters of labor and their white brothers and sisters—whose increasingly active intervention in national and world affairs is an essential requirement if we are to have a peaceful and democratic solution of the burning issues of our times.
Again, we must recall the state of the world in which we live, and especially the America in which we live. Our history as Americans, black and white, has been a long battle, so often unsuccessful, for the most basic rights of citizenship, for the most simple standards of living, the avoidance of starvation—for survival.
I have been up and down the land time and again, thanks in the main to you trade unionists gathered here tonight. You helped to arouse American communities to give answers to Peekskill, to protect the right of freedom of speech and assembly. And I have seen and daily see the unemployment, the poverty, the plight of our children, our youth, the backbreaking labor of our women—and too long, too long have my people wept and mourned. We’re tired of this denial of a decent existence. We demand some approximation of the American democracy we have helped to build.
Who Built this Land?
For who built this great land of ours?
Who have been the guarantors of our historic democratic tradition of freedom and equality? Whose labor and whose life have produced the great cities, the industrial machine, the basic culture and the creature comforts of which our “Voice of America” spokesmen so proudly boast?
It is well to remember that the America which we know has risen out of the toil of the many millions who have come here seeking freedom from all parts of the world:
The Irish and Scotch indentured servants who cleared the forests, built the colonial homesteads and were part of the productive backbone of our early days. The millions of German immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century; the millions more from Eastern Europe whose sweat and sacrifice in the steel mills, the coal mines and the factories made possible the industrial revolution of the Eighties and Nineties; the brave Jewish people from all parts of Europe and the world who have so largely enriched our lives on this new continent; the workers from Mexico and from the East—Japan and the Philippines—whose labor has helped make the West and Southwest a rich and fruitful land.
And, through it all, from the earliest days—before Columbus—the Negro people, upon whose unpaid toil as slaves the basic wealth of this nation was built!
These are the forces that have made America great and preserved our democratic heritage.
They have arisen at each moment of crisis to play the decisive role in our national affairs.
The Strength of the Negro People
In the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of Negro soldiers who took arms in the Union cause won, not only their own freedom—the freedom of the Negro people—but, by smashing the institution of slave labor, provided the basis for the development of trade unions of free working men in America.
And so, even today, as this National Labor Conference for Negro Rights charts the course ahead for the whole Negro people and their sincere allies, it sounds a warning to American bigotry and reaction. For if fifteen million Negroes, led by their staunchest sons and daughters of labor, and joined by the white working class, say that there shall be no more Jim Crow in America, then there shall be no more Jim Crow!
If fifteen million Negroes say, and mean it, no more anti-Semitism, then there shall be no more anti-Semitism!
If fifteen million Negroes, inspired by their true leaders in the labor movement, demand an end to the persecution of the foreign-born, then the persecution of the foreign-born will end!
If fifteen million Negroes in one voice demand an end to the jailing of the leaders of the American progressive thought and culture and the leaders of the American working class, then their voice will be strong enough to empty the prisons of the victims of America’s cold war.
If fifteen million Negroes are for peace, then there will be peace!
And behind these fifteen million are 180 million of our African brothers and sisters, 60 million of our kindred in the West Indies and Latin America—for whom, as for us, war and the Point Four program would mean a new imperialist slavery.
The Issues of Our Time
I know that you understand these problems—and especially the basic problem of peace. You have already outlined the issues in your sessions, and they are clear to liberty-loving men around the world.
Shall we have the atom-bomb and hydrogen bomb and rocket-ship and bacteriological war, or shall we have peace in the world; the hellish destruction of the men, women and children, of whole civilian populations, or the peaceful construction of the good life everywhere?
This for all men is the over-riding issue of the day. From it all other questions flow. Its solution, one way or the other, will decide the fate of all other questions which concern the human family.
For the warmakers are also the fascist-minded; and the warmakers are also the profit-hungry trusts who drive labor, impose Taft-Hartley laws and seek to crush the unions.
Depending on how we succeed in the fight for peace, then, we shall find the answers to the other two major questions of the day.
Shall we have fascist brute rule or democratic equality and friendship among peoples and nations; the triumphant enshrinement of the “master race” theories our soldiers died to destroy, or liberty and freedom for the American people and their colonial allies throughout the world.
And finally, shall we have increased wealth for the already bloated monopolies in the midst of rising hunger, poverty and disease for the world’s poor; or shall the masses of toiling men and women enjoy the wealth and comforts which their sweat and labor produce?
American Imperialism vs. the Colonial World
Yes, these are the issues.
They will be resolved in our time—and you may be sure that you have met, not a moment too soon. Because in the five years since V-J Day the American trusts and the government which they control have taken their stand more and more openly on the side of a cold war which they are desperately trying to heat up; on the side of the fascist and kingly trash which they seek to restore to power all over Europe and Asia; on the side of the princes of economic privilege whose every cent of unprecedented profits is wrung out of the toil-broken bodies of the masses of men.
Mr. Truman and Mr. Acheson want us to believe that they seek peace in the world. But the people’s memory is not so short.
How well and how bitterly do we recall that soon after Roosevelt died American arms were being shipped to the Dutch—not for the protection of the Four Freedoms, not to advance the claims of liberty—but for the suppression of the brave Indonesian patriots in their fight for independence.
That was 1946, and today—four years later—we have the announcement of another program of arms shipments to destroy a movement for colonial independence—this time arms for the French imperialists to use against the brave Vietnamese patriots in what the French progressive masses call the “dirty war” in Indo-China.
These two acts of the Truman Administration are significant landmarks of our time!
They cry out to the world that our nation, born in a bloody battle for freedom against imperialist tyranny, has itself become the first enemy of freedom and the chief tyrant of the mid-century world. They warn more than half the world’s population who people the vast continents of Asia and Africa that, until the course of our foreign policy is changed, they can no longer look to the U.S. government for help in their strenuous struggles for a new and independent life.
And, to be sure, they have already averted their gaze from us….
The Task of Labor
Your tasks, then, are clear. The Negro trade unionists must increasingly exert their influence in every aspect of the life of the Negro community. No church, no fraternal, civic or social organization in our communities must be permitted to continue without the benefit of the knowledge and experience which you have gained through your struggles in the great American labor movement. You are called upon to provide the spirit, the determination, the organizational skill, the firm steel of unyielding militancy to the age-old strivings of the Negro people for equality and freedom.
On the shoulders of the Negro trade unionists there is the tremendous responsibility to rally the power of the whole trade-union movement, white and black, to the battle for the liberation of our people, the future of our women and children. Anyone who fails in this does the Negro people a great disservice.
And to the white trade unionists present—a special challenge. You must fight in the ranks of labor for the full equality of your Negro brothers; for their right to work at any job; to receive equal pay for equal work; for an end to Jim Crow unions; for real fair employment practices within the unions as well as in all other phases of the national life; for the elimination of the rot of white supremacy notions which the employers use to poison the minds of the white workers in order to pit them against their staunchest allies, the Negro people—in short, for the unbreakable unity of the working people, black and white, without which there can be no free trade unions, no real prosperity, no constitutional rights, no peace for anybody, whatever the color of his skin. To accept Negro leadership of men and women and youth; to accept the fact that the Negro workers have become a part of the vanguard of the whole American working class. To fail the Negro people is to fail the whole American people.
I know that you who have come from all parts of the nation will meet this challenge. I have watched and participated in your militant struggles everywhere I have been these past years. Here in Chicago with the Packinghouse Workers; with auto workers of Detroit; the seamen and longshoremen of the West Coast; the tobacco workers of North Carolina; the miners of Pittsburgh and West Virginia; and the steel workers of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and Minnesota; the furriers, clerks and office workers of New York, Philadelphia and numerous other big cities and small towns throughout the land.
I have met you at the train stations and airports, extending the firm hand of friendship. You have packed the meetings which followed Peekskill to overflowing, thus giving the answer to the bigots and war-makers. I know you well enough to know that, once the affairs of my people are in the hands of our working men and women, our day of freedom is not far off. I am proud as an artist to be the one who comes from hearty Negro working people—and I know that you can call on me at any time—South, North, East or West—all my energy is at your call.
So—as you move forward, you do so in the best traditions of American democracy and in league with the hundreds of millions throughout the world whose problems are much the same as yours.
These are peoples of all faiths, all lands, all colors, and all political beliefs—united by the common thirst for freedom, security, and peace.
Our American press and the commentators and politicians would discourage these basic human aspirations because Communists adhere to them as well as others. Now I have seen the liberty-loving, peace-seeking partisans in many parts of the world. And though many of them are not, it is also true that many are Communists. They represent a new way of life in the world, a new way that has won the allegiance of almost half the world’s population. In the last war they were the first to die in nation after nation. They were the heart of the underground and anti-fascist movements and city after city in Europe displays monuments to their heroism. They need no apologies. They have been a solid core of the struggle for freedom.
Now, Mr. Truman and Mr. Acheson would have us believe that all the problems of this nation, and the chief difficulties of the Negro people are caused by these people who were the first anti-fascists.
I, for one, cannot believe that the jailing of Eugene Dennis for the reason that he contended that the House Un-American Activities Committee lacked proper constitutional authority because it harbored as a member John Rankin who holds office as a result of the disfranchisement of the Negro half of the population of Mississippi and most of the white half as well—I cannot believe that Dennis’ jailing will help in the solution of the grievous problems of Negro working men and women.
Mr. Truman calls upon us to save the so-called Western democracies from the “menace” of Communism.
But ask the Negro ministers in Birmingham whose homes were bombed by the Ku Klux Klan what is the greatest menace in their lives! Ask the Trenton Six and the Martinsville Seven! Ask Willie McGee, languishing in a Mississippi prison and doomed to die within the next month unless our angry voices save him. Ask Haywood Patterson, somewhere in America, a fugitive from Alabama barbarism for a crime he, nor any one of the Scottsboro boys, ever committed. Ask the growing numbers of Negro unemployed in Chicago and Detroit. Ask the fearsome lines of relief clients in Harlem. Ask the weeping mother whose son is the latest victim of police brutality. Ask Maceo Snipes and Isaiah Nixon, killed by mobs in Georgia because they tried to exercise the constitutional right to vote. Ask any Negro worker receiving unequal pay for equal work, denied promotion despite his skill and because of his skin, still the last hired and the first fired. Ask fifteen million American Negroes, if you please, “What is the greatest menace in your life?” and they will answer in a thunderous voice, “Jim-Crow Justice! Mob Rule! Segregation! Job Discrimination!”—in short white supremacy and all its vile works.
Yes, we know who our friends are, and we know our enemies, too. Howard Fast, author of the epic novel Freedom Road who went to jail this past Wednesday for fighting against the restoration of fascism in Spain, is not our enemy. He is a true friend of the Negro people. And George Marshall, Chairman of the Civil Rights Congress, who went to jail last Friday and whose fight for the life of Willie McGee of Mississippi is one of the great democratic sagas of our time—he is not our enemy; he is a true friend of the Negro people. And John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood screen writers, who went to jail the day before yesterday for maintaining their faith in the sacred American doctrine of privacy of political belief—they too are friends of the people.
Our enemies are the lynchers, the profiteers, the men who give F.E.P.C. the run-around in the Senate, the atom-bomb maniacs and the war-makers.
One simple reason why I know that we shall win is that our friends are so much more numerous than our enemies. They will have to build many, many more jails—not only here but all over the world to hold the millions who are determined never to give up the fight for freedom, decency, equality, abundance, and peace.
….
Your meeting tonight as men and women of American labor is in good time because it places you in this great stream of peace-loving humanity, determined to win a world of real brotherhood. It will enable you, I hope, to place the Negro trade unionists in the front ranks of a crusade to secure at least a million signatures of Negro Americans to this Stockholm appeal for peace.
As the black worker takes his place upon the stage of history—not for a bit part, but to play his full role with dignity in the very center of the action—a new day dawns in human affairs. The determination of Negro workers, supported by the whole Negro people, and joined with the mass of progressive white working men and women, can save the labor movement, C.I.O. and A.F. of L., from the betrayals of the Murrays and the Greens, the Careys, Rieves and Dubinskys—and from the betrayals too, of the Townsends, the Weavers and Randolphs. This alliance can beat back the attacks against the living standards and the very lives of the Negro people. It can stop the drive toward fascism. It can halt the chariot of war in its tracks.
And it can help to bring to pass in America and in the world the dream our fathers dreamed—of a land that’s free, of a people growing in friendship, in love, in cooperation and peace.
This is history’s challenge to you. I know you will not fail.
For a brief introduction to Paul Robeson’s life look at this documentary: Paul Robeson: A Man for the Future
Dr. Eddie,
Today I celebrate Labor Day remembering my deceased spouse, parents and hard working ancestors. I will always be reminded of Paul Robeson’s Ol’ Man River, “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’”
Enjoy a relaxing day!
I find myself almost in tears that we as a nation have not had the grit and the grace to take a step back and consider that we are indeed a nation of immigrants, including in some sense our First Nations, who came here from Siberia and perhaps elsewhere so many thousand years ago, and our peoples of African ancestry who came here in chains and yet found the wherewithal to contribute so mightily to building our infrastructure, establishing productive agriculture and creating a rich culture of art, music, rhetoric and moral courage without which we would not BE a people at all. Many thanks for the reminder. All my raggedy-ass Scots-Irish ancestors appreciate the mention, too.