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Crossing the Color Line: Labor & the Civil Rights Movement in Durham

Panel Introduction

As the Civil Rights movement began to gain ground in the 1960s, many unions threw their support behind the cause. United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther for example frequently advocated for the movement, saying “the struggle for civil rights and the struggle for equal opportunity is not the struggle of Negro Americans, but the struggle for every American to join in.”

As Reuther’s speech indicates, many union members viewed civil rights as directly tied to labor organizing, hard work cannot be truly respected if the worker faces discrimination. Along with the United Auto Workers, many other prominent unions like steelworkers and packing house workers joined the Civil Rights movement. These organizations both supported the Civil Rights movement financially and turned out supporters to attend protests and demonstrations.

Many in the Civil Rights movement also supported the labor movement. Leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for example organized on behalf of chemical workers and was assassinated advocating for the rights of sanitation workers in Memphis. Dr. King was a consistent ally of the Labor Movement and viewed it as essential to the Civil Rights movement, saying “the coalition that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the Negro and the forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined.” Labor unions still support the Civil Rights movement today. During protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, for example, over 60 unions helped organize walk outs to protest police brutality.

While many of the unions that supported the Civil Rights movement were located in Northern cities, Southern unions still played a major role in advocating for equal political rights. One example of this is the textile and tobacco workers in Durham, North Carolina.