"Which ox is in the mire": Race and Class in the Galveston Longshoremen's Strike of 1898

Figure 1.

African American dockworkers unloading cotton in Galveston, ca. 1900. Courtesy the Rosenberg Library, Galveston, Texas.

As the war with Spain wound down in August 1898 and America charted a course toward empire, residents of Galveston hoped for a quick revival of commercial traffic in coffee, fruit, timber, manufactured goods, and especially cotton—the commodity that provided Galveston's working men with more jobs than any other industry and had propelled the Texas port to prominence among shipping hubs in the South and the nation. Throughout 1898, trade had slowed to a standstill as coastwise shippers such as the Mallory family's New York & Texas Steamship Company leased most of their vessels to the United States government for troop transport and supply. ¹ With peace, it was hoped that the major shipping companies serving Galveston would resume regular service to and from the port and that trade and prosperity would return.

When the Mallory company's coastwise steamer Colorado docked at Galveston on August 30, however, the crowd of mostly African American waterfront workers waiting on the docks gathered neither to welcome the resumption of service by one of the city's major shipping lines nor to celebrate the promise of restored prosperity. The black laboring men came instead to demand wages equal to those paid white longshoremen on other docks. ² The confrontation marked the beginning of a month-long conflict on the Galveston wharves that resulted in the deaths of two men, tested the biracial unionism of the city's waterfront labor organizations, illuminated the desires and motivations of African American labor activists, and demonstrated the limits of racial solidarity.

In 1995, Eric Arnesen lamented that even after two decades of renewed interest in African American and labor history, "we still have too few studies of the American South, of the racial outlooks and practices of white workers, of working class race relations, or even of black workers." ³ Scholarship on Southern white and black workers and their relationships has grown significantly since then, but the history of African American workers in Texas and their struggle for equality in the workplace and beyond has only just begun to be told. ⁴ Although both Arnesen and Ernest Obadele-Starks both mention the 1898 strike in their work, no detailed account or analysis of this important event has been published. The scholarship that does exist underplays the importance of the strike: Arnesen, for example, cites the strike as an instance of the limited biracial cooperation that characterized relations among waterfront workers in Galveston, while Obadele-Starks insisted that during the strike white workers "refused to help" black workers in their struggle with employers, demonstrating the extent to which "white-led unions imposed their version of racial oppression." ⁵ This article, however, argues that a higher degree of biracial cooperation existed among waterfront workers in Galveston than scholars have suggested. The degree of this cooperation illustrates the commitment of African American workers to workplace equality with white workers, the divisions among black people that hindered the fulfillment of this commitment, the overt and more nuanced ways that white and black men identified with each other as workers, and the strength of biracial unionism in Galveston at the dawn of the Jim Crow era.

Figure 2.

The Galveston waterfront at the turn of the century. Courtesy the Rosenberg Library, Galveston, Texas.

By 1898, black and white waterfront workers in Galveston had settled into an uneasy biracial alliance—separate unions that on occasion supported one another in labor conflicts. During the 1860s, the city's white cotton screwmen—specialized longshoremen who used jackscrews to pack cotton into the holds of ships in order to increase cargo capacity—had formed an all-white Screwmen's Benevolent Association (SBA) to control the labor supply and negotiate hours, wages, and work rules with stevedores and shipping companies. ⁶ The power of the SBA and the prevalence of its members in...