Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality (review)

Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality. By Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999. 165 pp., $34 cloth, $19 paper.

Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz, intellectual collaborators for 15 years, have provided us with a valuable and rich historical resource in this highly readable oral history of black packinghouse workers and their attempts to gain equality and justice both on the job and in society generally. This book, now in paperback from its 1996 hardcover, is actually more a collection of oral histories than a single work, but the authors have done a good job of connecting common threads throughout. Meatpackers covers the experiences of black packinghouse workers in cities as diverse as Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, Fort Worth, and Waterloo, Iowa.

One theme that runs throughout the book is the importance of activism, and how activism within the labor movement often paralleled activism within the broader struggle of blacks to achieve social justice. Rowena Moore, black meatpacker in Omaha, catapulted to labor activism from a foundation of involvement within the city's black women's clubs and the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Her participation eventually stretched to spearheading a movement to erect a national monument to Malcolm X in appreciation of his mature political theory. Civil rights activism often paralleled the black meatpackers' search for equity at the workplace. Rowena Moore's experiences in Omaha, Charles Pearson's in Waterloo, Iowa, and Frank Wallace's, Eddie Humphrey's, and Mary Salinas's in Fort Worth all make this point clear.

In fact, the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) was the first union to join Martin Luther King's and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's drive for civil rights during the 1950s. Even blacks such as Philip Weightman, of St. Louis and Chicago, initially turned off by unionism because of his experience with a discriminatory union, found managerial capriciousness far more insidious, and enthusiastically joined the UPWA, eventually becoming an international vice president and head of the union's grievance department.

Other themes are striking. Black male packinghouse workers often amplified their black sisters' calls for industrial equity. They functioned as the allies of black women in their struggle to achieve both racial and gender fairness at the workplace. African-American packinghouse unionists were also, as these oral histories make abundantly clear, instrumental in shaping, and sometimes capturing, local chapters of the NAACP. In Chicago and Waterloo, many black workers viewed the local NAACP as an elitist, "silk-stocking . . . tea-sipping" organization that was not responsive to their concerns or ideas — until black workers, moved by "a racialized class consciousness," seized control of the local NAACP reins.

One of the most telling points that comes through the narratives is the power that black workers gained from hewing to a strong, traditional work ethic. Far from pushing these workers rightward, their acknowledgement—indeed their embrace—of such a work ethic actually fortified their credibility and insistence on liberal demands for economic and social justice. Halpern and Horowitz should be congratulated for providing this useful and intriguing oral history resource.