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CHAPTER EIGHT civil rights postal unionism (1963–1966) There is no doubt that 1963 was a pivotal year for civil rights activism, and that the nape especially was deeply involved, fusing black labor and civic protest traditions. At their 1963 convention in New York City, President Ashby Smith called for convention delegates, including the women’s auxiliary, to mobilize in order to secure passage of the Civil Rights Bill. Times had changed, according to Paul Tennassee. Acting Postmaster General Sidney Bishop was the convention’s keynote speaker, and, in Tennassee’s words, ‘‘Virtually, the entire speech was on civil rights as it a√ected African Americans.’’ A more significant address, however, was given by former Alliance president James B. Cobb, now a postal o≈cial: ‘‘I’m on the side of management now, I represent the big shots, but I haven’t forgotten that my hair is kinky and my skin is black, I haven’t completely forgotten those days when organizations in the pod turned their backs and when Bill [former nape Welfare Director William Jason] and I tried to go down to have a conference. . . . We have several things to our advantage. We’ve never had a Caucasian clause, we have never been a craft, and we have been interested in the philosophy of the workingman. We now have a program , which I am grossly identified with, management and employee cooperation and we have had another program of Equal Employment Opportunity .’’∞ (Three years later, Cobb went even further when he contrasted the Alliance’s civil rights unionism with afl-cio business unionism in the May 1966 Alliance Leader: ‘‘In the Civil Rights struggle, how active can a labor union be? This has been the one area where it has been hard to distinguish the Alliance from other civil rights groups, because the Alliance has never failed to pursue this right even beyond the realm of the postal service.’’)≤ Cobb, despite his management status, summed up his union’s key tenets as a combination of black racial solidarity and working-class advocacy. He did so by invoking his own historical memory of having been both a class- and raceconscious black worker. Whether spurred or chastened (or both) by the criticism he had received in 1961 for abandoning his own members by the head of 192 | civil rights postal unionism the Philadelphia naacp, Cobb now declared the Alliance to be an exemplary model for other unions and the post o≈ce, with its historical fusion of black labor and civic traditions.≥ The National Alliance, however, was still maintaining a balancing act between black labor unionism and black middle-class ‘‘civic-ism’’—at the same time engaged in (mostly) ‘‘friendly competition’’ with its ally, the militant, industrial, antiracist npu. The npu practiced a form of civil rights unionism that might be called ‘‘interracial syndicalism’’—organizing all workers in one industry and opposing racial and all other divisions and di√erentials wherever they found them. The Alliance, on the other hand, personified civil rights unionism in making primary the fight for equality, uniting workplace and community struggles, and leading the struggle to unlock the crafts, promotions , and union locals previously closed to blacks. Their important work (and the npu’s) in the labor and civil rights movements has unfortunately been omitted in popular narratives of both movements. The Alliance during this time pressured the post o≈ce to open up the crafts and management positions to blacks, and do away with disciplinary double standards based on race. Many were also active in the campaign to pass the civil rights bill, which Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law in 1964. The section of the Civil Rights Act the Alliance praised most was Title VII, which made equal employment opportunity the law of the land. But it only received lukewarm support from the afl-cio. No mention was even made of the bill or the law in the monthly journals of the other postal unions except the npu.∂ The Alliance’s reluctance to merge with other postal unions or the afl-cio was therefore understandable. Yet even within victories there were setbacks for the Alliance and the npu. In 1963, the year after Jim Crow postal union locals were abolished and postal unions won government recognition, the first national labor agreement was signed between the post o≈ce and its ‘‘national exclusive’’ unions that did not include the Alliance or the npu.∑ In addition, the primary reasons...

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