-
Chapter 19. Herbert Hill
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
chapter 19 Herbert Hill Thurgood Marshall once described Herbert Hill as “the best barbershop lawyer in the United States.”1 That he was, and a whole lot more. Hill was a warrior, a strategist, a polemicist, a man who identified himself as “an unreconstructed abolitionist.”2 As labor secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he was a combatant in a war against men and women who, by history, politics, and religion, should have been in his camp. So when he found them to be laggards or opponents of the civil rights impulse, he struck back with a ferocity that was determined and righteous. “My policy is to tell the truth and hit them hard,” he said in 1963.3 Hill became labor secretary of the NAACP when the American trade union movement stood at its economic and organizational apogee right after World War II. Born in 1924, he graduated from New York University in 1945 and attended the New School for Social Research from 1946 to 1948, where he studied under the émigré political scientist Hannah Arendt. He was a member of the Socialist Workers Party in these years and a sometime organizer for the United Steelworkers . He frequented Harlem jazz clubs, read voraciously in what was then called Negro literature, and became as knowledgeable and comfortable with African American politics and culture as was possible for any white Jewish New Yorker. Because of Hill’s familiarity with radical politics and the labor movement, NAACP secretary Roy Wilkins hired him in 1949 to solicit contributions, conduct membership drives, and build political support for the NAACP’s civil rights initiatives within the flush and muscular union locals that then occupied so many strategic points throughout the American industrial archipelago. He would also prove highly useful to the NAACP in the 1950s when the organization, under pressure from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and segregationist politicians, sought to purge Communists and other radicals from its ranks. In his travels to Youngstown, Erie, Toledo, and Detroit, Hill quickly found that after he had made his formal presentation to the local, and once the white local union officers had Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 242 5/24/13 8:04 AM Herbert Hill 243 left the room, he was approached by stay-behind African American workers who poured out to him all the bottled-up frustrations and complaints that festered in even the most progressive of the midcentury industrial unions. So Hill’s work for the NAACP soon turned into one of persuasion and negotiation where possible, and litigation, denunciation, and protest where necessary, on behalf of African American workers who were trapped in the most insecure, segregated, and underpaid jobs. Hill was a brilliant and determined crusader who made the most of the limited legal remedies available against workplace discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s. He brought actions before the National Labor Relations Board to decertify unions that violated the nondiscrimination provision in federal contracts, and he carried cases against both labor unions and employers to state antidiscrimination commissions. Hill consciously fashioned this employment rights campaign after the larger NAACP fight to dismantle de jure segregation and discrimination in education, housing, and at the ballot box. He drafted an effective and widely distributed NAACP Labor Manual that described the complex gamut of discrimination tactics in the workplace and advised African Americans that the NAACP was ready to aid them in their fight against such inequities.4 Hill’s insurgency took on the character of a civil war, not just within the top leadership of the labor-liberal civil rights coalition, but also among the old socialists , the erstwhile radicals, even the set of 1940s Trotskyist intellectuals who had done so much to politicize Hill in the first place. Some were now union officers and staffers: their resistance, equivocation, and hypocrisy fueled Herbert Hill’s outrage for the rest of his life. Nothing infuriated him more than the complicacy, condescension, presumption, and outright racism that he found in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). In 1960 the ILGWU still traded on its socialist roots, its pioneering role in the New Deal, and in some circles its Jewish and Italian communitarianism. Yet anyone who bothered to look could also see that a stratum of aging Jewish liberals was presiding over a trade union that systematically excluded African Americans and Puerto Ricans from advancement in both the shop and the union hierarchy.5 In his NAACP memoir, Gilbert Jonas, who worked with...