Labor, Civil Rights, and the Hughes Tool Company

Conclusion

conclusion THE JULY, 1964, NLRB DECISION was more than a triumph for unionism and civil rights at Hughes Tool. It became a rallying point for equality in the workplace nationwide. The struggle had begun in December , 1918, when the company’s white machinists, patternmakers, and blacksmiths joined a citywide strike by the Houston Labor Council against the city’s largest manufacturers. Hughes Tool’s managers played a key role in defeating that strike and the company justly earned a reputation as a tough antiunion employer. Nevertheless, fifty-six years later black workers won racial and economic justice, and the successful unionization of the company in the 1930s and 1940s, a united effort of allied African American and white workers, challenges the notion that Houston was a backwater in the struggle for labor and civil rights. Acting in unison, the labor and civil rights movements in Houston empowered workers at Hughes. That empowerment ultimately paved the way for the NLRB’s landmark 1964 decision, bringing an end to segregation in organized labor. Much has been written about the roles of the state, race, and unions in labor relations and their inability to overcome organized labor’s traditional discrimination and segregation .1 The intersection of the civil rights and labor movements at the Hughes Tool Company set in motion the events that helped cause that to change. This book advances our knowledge of the roles played by the state, race, and unions in American labor relations. Moreover, there are no comparable studies of labor in Texas and it fills a signi ficant gap in our historical knowledge of the Lone Star State that the scholar F. Ray Marshall lamented more than three decades ago.2 Workers in Houston, Texas, actively engaged in the struggle for the basic 187 right to join a union and then triumphantly broke down organized labor ’s racial barriers. Scholars have previously chronicled Houston’s rich civil rights history, which resulted in desegregation victories of national importance.3 This study brings in the long neglected role of labor. Houston civil rights activists, in alliance with the NAACP and the federal government, broke down discrimination in Texas voting rights and higher education. Twenty-one years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 they played a major role in convincing the Supreme Court to strike down the discriminatory all-white primary that barred African Americans from voting in Texas’ Democratic primary elections. The whites-only Democratic primary disfranchised blacks because Texas was a one-party state at the time, and the winner of the Democratic primary uniformly won the general election. In Smith v Allwright, the Supreme Court determined that barring blacks from the Democratic primary effectively denied them voting rights for state and federal elections.4 Following this success, black Houstonians attacked racial barriers in higher education. Four years before the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v Board of Education, Houstonians took the lead integrating the University of Texas. At the urging of Houston civil rights activists, Heman Sweatt, a Houston post office worker and college graduate, applied for admission to the University of Texas Law School. University of Texas president Theophilus Painter rejected Sweat’s application and for the next four years the NAACP fought for racial equality on Sweatt’s behalf. Texas state leaders tried to undermine the suit by establishing a segregated Jim Crow law school in the basement of the state capitol. The NAACP argued before the Supreme Court that in comparison to the University of Texas’ highly regarded law school, the one to which Sweatt was relegated offered an inferior education and did not meet the legal requirements of “separate but equal.” The Court agreed, ordered the University of Texas law school integrated, and demanded Sweatt’s admission. In his seminal study of desegregation of higher education in Texas, African American scholar Amilcar Shabazz definitively concluded that “Texas, of all the southern states, recommends itself for special study because with Sweatt v Painter it gave the nation the landmark case that launched the dismantling of racial discrimination in higher education.”5 The similarities and ramifications between the Supreme Court’s decision in the Sweatt case and the NLRB’s 1964 188 conclusion decision at Hughes Tool are striking and bear witness to the critically important contribution made by black Houstonians to purge the country of the scourge of racial segregation. Between 1960 and 1962...