Labor, Civil Rights, and the Hughes Tool Company

Introduction

introduction ON JULY 1, 1964, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decerti fied the racially segregated Independent Metal Workers (IMW) Union as the collective bargaining agent at Houston’s Hughes Tool Company. The ruling ended nearly fifty years of Jim Crow unionism at Hughes Tool, one of Houston’s premier manufacturing plants. But much more importantly, for the first time in the Labor Board’s history it ruled that racial discrimination by a union violated the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and therefore was illegal.1 In a unanimous decision, the five-member board revoked the certification of the IMW because the union had failed to fairly represent African Americans at the company by systematically discriminating against them. In 1962 Ivory Davis, a black material handler, longtime employee at Hughes Tool, and union member, filed charges against the company and union with the Labor Board that eventually led to the decision. Davis’s action against the union stemmed from the white leadership’s refusal to file a grievance on his behalf after 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 race-based labor contract between Hughes Tool and the IMW. They did so by taking the unusual step of seeking to decertify their union as the collective bargaining agent for the company’s employees. Their 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 at Hughes Tool to break Jim Crow’s grip over the company’s workforce. 3 Ivory Davis’s struggle for shop floor racial equality at Hughes Tool has a deeper meaning when placed within the context of the early 1960s civil rights movement 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. They received help from new federal policies such as President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 issued in March 1961, which called for an end to racial discrimination by federal contractors such as Hughes Tool; from the NAACP’s increased attacks on racism in organized labor; and from the willingness of individual black workers, such as Ivory Davis, to fight racism within their unions. The Hughes Tool decision sharply defined the role unions would play in protecting black workers’ civil rights. The NLRB now demanded that unions enjoying its protection must take responsibility for eliminating racial segregation and discrimination along with their traditional missions of improving wages and working conditions, and protecting seniority rights. For black unionists the NLRB’s ruling at Hughes Tool reverberated with the same promise of equality generated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, which had struck down segregation in public schools ten years earlier. The justices of the Court unanimously concluded in 1954 that Jim Crow segregation had no place in American schools because “[s]eparate educational facilities [for blacks] are inherently unequal” and deny them equal opportunity guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Brown ruling overturned fifty-eight years of racial segregation in public education that the Supreme Court had legalized in 1896 with its decision in Plessy v Ferguson. The NLRB’s Hughes Tool decision overturned twenty-nine years of legalized racial segregation in unions that the NLRA, the nation’s primary labor law, had codified in 1935. Using the legal argument formulated by the Court in Brown, the NLRB overturned its previous decisions that defended Jim Crow unions by declaring that segregated unions are inherently unequal and deny African American unionists equal protection and opportunity under the law. The Hughes Tool case laid the foundation for ending Jim Crow unionism, just as Brown paved the way for ending public school segregation . The NLRB’s decision earned the company a prominent place in the national struggle for civil rights within the labor movement.2 Historians have devoted a great deal of energy to studying the desegregation of public places such as schools and racism within orga4 introduction nized labor. But as the historian Alan Draper has pointed out, few studies focus strictly on the...