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297 The evolution of the small, craft-oriented, black-led labor union in an urbanindustrial setting is one of the more understudied aspects of American labor history. The struggle for black workplace rights was not unique to the unskilled, and the pervasiveness and influence of black labor extended beyond the ranks of prominent labor organizations to penetrate the circles of urban craft unions. The experiences of two urban-based black craft unions in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Operators (IATSE)— a union consisting of stagehands, projectionists, motion picture craft workers, and technicians—provide such an example. Although small and somewhat obscure , the trajectories of IATSE Locals 279-A of Houston and 249-A of Dallas intersected many important issues in American labor, cultural, political, and social history. The unique responses of the black workers in each of these two major metropolitan centers toward the communications industry, conservative unionism, workplace inequities, corruption, technological advances, mergers, government labor policy, and social reform resulted in both similarities and differences . A look at the origins and the development of each local reveals the labor-movement values held by the members of each union as they struggled to define their place among the skilled working class. Although studies on the labor movement have focused primarily on the unskilled labor force with racial and ethnic in-fighting as a central theme, the racialization of craft unions, which based their union strength and power on the physical abilities and skills of their workers, holds a special place in the historiography of American labor.1 The chartering of Locals 279-A and 249-A resulted from more than half a century of racial and economic subordination in an industry that from its inceptiondemonstratedlittlemovementtowardracialinclusion .IATSEemergedduring the 1890s as a labor organization focused primarily on redressing workplace grievances of white theater workers, and as it grew its development continued hand in hand with racial exclusion, black workers being consistently marginalBlack Texans and Theater Craft Unionism The Struggle for Racial Equality ernest obadele-starks 298 Ernest Obadele-Starks ized. At the 1895 IATSE national convention in Boston, white-controlled union locals affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) were granted sole authority to determine whether blacks would be offered membership in their unions. Most white unionists refused to accept biracial unionism and only reluctantly made concessions to black workers who desired union membership or wished to participate in their union activities and gatherings. This opposition to black unionization, which persisted throughout much of the first half of the twentieth century, stemmed in part from white unionists’ belief that blacks were not deserving of union representation.2 Not until delegates for the Texas Federal Labor Union (TFLU) crashed the 1904 AFL convention in Fort Worth did Texas’s black theater workers gain a voice in the conservative union policies of the IATSE, which typically viewed black workers as “a serious menace to the white union men.” Reaction among white theater workers to black workers’ demands was virtually nonexistent. IATSE Local 330 in Fort Worth, for example, remained indifferent to racial outcries, directing its interests toward ensuring its longevity and securing the jobs of its white workers while ignoring its pronounced racially discriminatory policies. This was a pattern that persisted throughout the industry for the next three decades.3 Local 330 was just one of many IATSE locals targeted by nonunionized black theater workers from the turn of the twentieth century through labor’s most critical decade, the 1930s. Serious challenges to the insensitivity of white IATSE workers in Texas started when black stagehands and motion picture operators in Houston, eager to start a union of their own, began picketing white-owned theaters in the city’s predominantly black districts and staging protests outside the luxurious homes of theater owners. Andrew Lee Lewis, founder of Local 279-A, the “negro auxiliary,” pointed out that these open acts of rebellion were provoked by white workers from Local 279 and their theater employers who often collaborated to “intimidate” black workers. Lewis was forced to hire full-time security to protect himself and his family after the manager of the Washington Theater held the labor activist at gunpoint for his role in organizing the city’s black theater workers. “They . . . just weren’t bothered about us,” said Lewis, who after migrating from Des Moines, Iowa, to Houston during World War I, had worked in many of the white-owned theaters in the black sections of town. To his chagrin, he...

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