Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945.

Ferguson, Karen

Kimberly L. Phillips, Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915-1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1999)

ONE OF THE PARADOXES of interwar African-American labour history over the last decade is that the most influential studies have been about the South, the least industrialized and unionized region of the United States. Nevertheless, the South scholars, led by Robin D.G. Kelley, have pumped new life into Black labour history by skillfully applying their understanding of African-American society, culture, and politics to uncover and understand the distinctive identities, perspectives, and activism of Black workers. Now Kimberley Phillips has brought this methodology North, to Cleveland, along with the Southern migrants who are the subject of Alabama North.

Philip's first four chapters comprise a familiar narrative for those who have kept up with recent scholarship on the Great Migration and its aftermath. She interweaves insights from other social, labour, and cultural historians to illuminate the story of the Black Alabamians and Georgians who came to dominate Cleveland's Black community during World War I and decades after. We learn again of the complex web of individual, familial, and communal values and exigencies which impelled and shaped migration to the industrial North. We read once more of the limits imposed on African Americans in the industrial economy during the war, and their expulsion from it afterwards. We rediscover the anxieties of a Northern city's tiny, but established, pre-migration Black community which acted on the newcomers' threat to its precarious social position by condemning the Southerners' behaviour and culture and excluding them from leadership or even inclusion in the city's existing Black institutions.

In many ways, then, this is not a new story, but Phillips' synthesis of others' insights on Black farmers and workers, the migration experience, and Northern community building allows her to explain and subtly reinterpret Southern migrants' actions and Northern experience. For example, by emphasizing that most if not all migrants had experience of wage labour before moving North, and that indeed many had industrial experience in Alabama's foundries or Kentucky's railroad camps, she reveals that Southerners arrived in Cleveland with not only a strong racial identity but also a developed class consciousness. Their pre-migration experience as African Americans explained their ambivalence or opposition to a labour movement whose first priority in the North as in the South was always to protect White workers' privilege even when it opportunistically, and very sporadically, welcomed Black workers. The Southerners' experience as workers, however, also precluded their co-operation with Black elites who admonished the m to co-operate with anti-union industrial management. Instead, the migrants focused on self-organization, engaging as always in the day-to-day resistance they had learned in the South, and when possible, breaking out into open resistance as Blacks and workers. Thus, Cleveland's Black hotel waiters and housekeepers who crossed the picket line, when members of the Whites-only Hotel and Restaurant Employees' Union were locked out in 1930, did not see themselves as scabs; rather they were union members who had organized themselves into the National Association of Colored Waiters after being shunned by their fellow workers whose job action to establish White supremacy in the city's hotel workforce led to the lockout.

The migrants' distinct identity and outlook unalterably reshaped the internal politics of Cleveland's Black community and the city's labour movement as the city moved into the crucial years of the 1930s and 1940s. Creating an urban culture utterly separate from the "respectable" elite, and informed explicitly by Southern folkways, religion, and institutions, Cleveland's migrants solidified and expanded their position in the city's Black community during the 1920s, with a continuing stream of Southern arrivals bolstering their ranks. From their strengthened position, the migrant community forged a militant new politics to confront the Depression crisis. Led by Alabama-born John O. Holly, migrants created and joined the Future Outlook League (FOL), which brought together thousands of Black Clevelanders, including aspiring entrepreneurs, Communists, self-described "housewives," and industrial and service workers in a militant and confrontational "don't-buy-where-you-can't-work" campaign. Ignoring the condemnatio n and open opposition of the middle class, which eschewed open confrontation with Whites, the FOL's mass boycotts and pickets forced dozens of White-owned businesses across the Black community to hire African-American employees, and its organization of an Employees' Union sought to protect and expand its hard-won victories. During the war, the FOL began to be Black industrial workers' staunchest and most effective ally when waffling CIO locals proved antagonistic or unreliable in defending African-American workers' interests, and as a newly worker-oriented NAACP and Black middle class struggled to shrug off their well-deserved reputation for elitism. Thus the FOL won national renown when it launched an ultimately unsuccessful but nevertheless precedent-setting, class-action suit against major defence contractors who refused to hire Black women. It also pressured recalcitrant CIO leaders to support African-American workers needed to win power struggles against the AFL in defence industries. As everywhere in th e United States, only the shibboleth of anti-communism could stop the labour movement's incipient democratic interracialism, spurred in this case almost entirely by the aspirations and activism of Black Cleveland's migrant majority.

This book breaks new ground in important ways. In no other Northern study have we read of such an autonomous and militantly class-conscious Black working class directing community life politically as well as culturally. Nor have we had such a comprehensive and subtle examination of the mutually ambivalent relationship of African-American workers and the CIO, convincingly complicating the analysis of apologists for the industrial labour movement. Further, Phillips's work makes essential connections between cultural expression and political activism, thus reorienting the proletarianization model which has long dominated labour history's treatment of Black migrants in the North. However, these strengths are sometimes weakened by inadequate analysis. Too often Phillips fails to provide the connections between the migrants' culture and their activism necessary to substantiate her argument. For example, she deals at length with the migrants' Southern-origin religious beliefs and worship style but then never connec ts this apparently essential element of their worldview to the shape their political and labour activism eventually takes. In fact, she never explicitly demonstrates why Cleveland's workers' activism is distinctively "Southern."

Part of the difficulty is that of editing and emphasis. While the first two-thirds of the work provide a useful synthesis of the migration experience and a review of Northern Black workers' struggles during World War I and the 1 920s, it sometimes seems aimless and repetitive. Indeed, it is not until the fifth chapter that Phillips begins to develop her argument in earnest, and the meaning of the preceding chapters becomes clear. Streamlining this lengthy prologue and offering readers more regular signposts would lend her work even more significance. Such editing would have also given her more room for analysis, thus allowing her to connect her valuable insights on migrants' culture and religion more explicitly to their politics and activism, which is, after all, the point of her work.

In the end, however, Phillips has broken new ground by bringing Black labour history North once again, where it needs to arrive if we are to have a full understanding of the 20th century, African-American community, and its heroic geographic, political, and social journeys.