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343 On July 1, 1964, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decertified the racially segregated Independent Metal Workers Union as the collective bargaining agent at Houston’s Hughes Tool Company. In a unanimous decision, the five-member board determined that the union had failed to fairly represent all workers at the company and systematically had discriminated against African Americans. The ruling ended nearly fifty years of Jim Crow unionism at Hughes Tool, one of Houston’s premier manufacturing plants.1 Ivory Davis, a black material handler and longtime employee at Hughes Tool Company, filed the discrimination charge against the union that ultimately led to its decertification. Davis’s action against the union stemmed from the white leadership’s refusal to file a grievance on his behalf after the company’s management denied him an apprenticeship because of his race. The union’s labor agreement with Hughes Tool reserved apprenticeships for whites only. In 1962 Davis and the black union leaders decided to challenge the validity of the racially biased labor contract between Hughes Tool and the Independent Metal Workers Union (IMW). Davis’s action was the beginning of a two-year struggle that combined the efforts of the federal government, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and African American unionists in the IMW to break Jim Crow’s grip over Hughes Tool’s workforce.2 Ivory Davis’s struggle for shop-floor racial equality at Hughes Tool Company , however, has a deeper meaning when placed within the context of the early 1960s and the growing militancy of black workers nationwide who demanded justice and equality in industrial America. Black workers capitalized on the country’s growing commitment to civil rights and desegregation to launch an assault against institutionalized racism in organized labor.3 They received help from new federal policies such as Pres. John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925, which required fair employment practices in companies awarded government contracts; from the NAACP’s increased attacks on racism within No Gold Watch for Jim Crow’s Retirement The Abolition of Segregated Unionism at Houston’s Hughes Tool Company michael r. botson jr. 344 Michael R. Botson Jr. organized labor; and from the willingness of individual black workers to fight racism within unions.4 This study examines an important episode in the struggle of black workers to abolish Jim Crow segregation in labor unions. The IMW’s refusal to process Davis’s grievance presented the union’s black leaders with an opportunity to put an end to the IMW’s racism. With the help of the NAACP, they pushed the NLRB to decertify the IMW for discriminating against Davis. The crusade against the IMW is important because it marked a major turning point in the NLRB’s policy in protecting the rights of black workers. For the first time in its history, the NLRB ruled that racial discrimination by labor unions is an unfair labor practice prohibited by the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRB’s decision was of great significance not only because it purged Jim Crow unionism from Hughes Tool but also because it created the legal means to desegregate all labor unions.5 Segregated labor organizations had been part of Hughes Tool Company’s history. In the 1920s, the management established two employee welfare organizations , segregated by race. Whites belonged to the Employees Welfare Organization and blacks were restricted to the Hughes Tool Colored Club. The NLRB disbanded both groups in 1940 when it was determined that they were management-dominated unions, which became illegal under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. In 1941 former members of the defunct welfare groups responded to the NLRB’s decision by organizing the Independent Metal Workers Union (IMW). The IMW spurned affiliation with either the AFL or CIO, and instead acted as a single-employer union that represented only workers at Hughes Tool. It established two locals and segregated them by race; Local No. 1 was exclusively for whites and Local No. 2 was for blacks. Except for a brief period between 1943 and 1946 when the CIO-backed United Steelworkers of America wrested their bargaining rights away, the IMW remained the dominant union at the plant.6 To a significant degree, Hughes Tool Company promoted racial segregation in order to capitalize on racism’s divisive effects within the unions. Beginning with its segregated welfare organizations and then its relationships with the IMW and CIO unions, management remained committed to segregating the workforce. Experience demonstrated that...

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