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  • "The Past Has Taught Us a Lesson":The International Longshoremen's Association and Black Workers in Mobile, 1903-1913
  • Robert H. Woodrum (bio)

Denouncing the "slave methods used on working the colored men" and proclaiming they would "not stand it any longer," more than a thousand black longshoremen went on strike in Mobile for three weeks in the fall of 1903 in an effort to improve their wages and working conditions along the city's waterfront. The workers, members of the fledgling International Longshoremen, Marine, and Transport Workers' Association (simplified later to the International Longshoremen's Association or ILA), demanded that employers effectively double their hourly pay.1

Perhaps more important than increased wages, Mobile's black longshoremen wanted control over their labor, a bold demand in [End Page 100] early twentieth-century Alabama. First, the members of ILA Local 398 called for recognition of their organization, demanding that there "be no discriminating against members of the union." They also insisted that union foremen, the African American men who were in charge of raising work gangs and supervising their labor, control the reporting of the time that longshoremen spent loading and unloading cargoes. Normally in Mobile, white stevedores—middle men for the shipping interests who procured labor to load and unload ships—controlled this part of the job. The striking members of Local 398 protested that when African American longshoremen "made eight hours time they were only given six for it, and when a demand was made for it they were driven away with threats and told not to come around again." Control of the time by union foremen was a right that white workers, primarily represented by the independent Workingmen's Timber and Cotton Benevolent Association (WTCBA), already enjoyed along the waterfront.2 Black unionists protested that "the white men are allowed to keep their own time when at work and they get every hour of it, but in their case the time is kept by a representative of the stevedores."3

The walkout by Local 398 lasted about three weeks. By mid-November, the railroads, shipping interests, and stevedores gleefully reported that they had recruited enough nonunion longshoremen to break the strike. Union members, desperate for work, began to cross picket lines. "It was said last night," the hostile Mobile Register proclaimed, "that there was a general restlessness among the union men, and the belief was current that the morning will see the 'strikers' returning in bodies to their old employers." So many longshoremen had already returned to work, the newspaper claimed, that it would not be long before "the old time songs were again heard on Pier 4."4 [End Page 101]

The ILA may have been weakened, but it was not completely driven from the waterfront in 1903. Black ILA leaders from Mobile rebuilt their locals and continued to attend the organization's national conventions. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century white timber and cotton workers, who had maintained independent unions in Mobile, affiliated with the ILA. The entrance of white workers into the national union led to a major dispute that exploded on the docks in 1913, ending with the union in tatters.

The strikes of 1903 and 1913 can be viewed as the beginnings of a long struggle between dock workers and their employers over the terms and conditions of their labor. An equally strong conflict emerged between black and white workers over control of the skilled jobs loading cotton and timber that whites in Mobile monopolized for decades. African American longshoremen held the least skilled and lowest paying jobs along the waterfront. In the early 1900s, however, they sought to use the ILA, a national union, to make inroads into the cotton and timber work. The bitter strike that erupted in 1913 saw these tensions come to a head, with black and white dock workers striking against companies and each other. Although white workers prevailed in this early struggle, the impulse for unionism persevered among African Americans in Mobile, and the ILA reemerged during the World War I era and, finally, during the New Deal, when the organization established a permanent presence in the city.

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