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The November/December 1971 issue of the Insurgent Worker featured a fairly typical lead article about a recent job action at the Melrose Park International Harvester plant. IH Melrose was a massive factory that produced, among other things, bulldozers and other tractors. Entitled “Harvester Workers Walk Off Over Discrimination,” the piece told an inspiring story of worker solidarity in an antiracist context.185 The incident began when a “notorious racist” foreman in the small tractor department reassigned an older black worker—referred to throughout only as “Tiny”—into a job where he was responsible for work that had previously been handled by two white workers. Having set the worker up for failure, the foreman twisted the knife: Tiny would not receive the same bonus as his coworkers because he had not kept up with the work load. This sort of petty power-play was a daily occurrence at any large factory, and the racial aspect was hardly unusual. The official response from the union, United Auto Workers Local 6, was decent enough, if unexceptional: the departmental steward accompanied Tiny to the foreman’s office to initiate a grievance for racial discrimination.

“What happened next,” in the words of the article, “was beautiful,” but it was not exactly predictable. Tiny’s coworkers shut down their assembly line, and then proceeded to inform other nearby departments and lines about the incident. In solidarity with Tiny’s grievance, workers in at least four other departments walked off their lines, and hundreds of them gathered spontaneously outside the office of the racist foreman. This action clearly violated the standard procedure for handling grievances, and management representatives threatened the workers with suspension if they didn’t return to their stations. No one complied. At this point the UAW representatives stepped in to broker a compromise: if the workers went back immediately, only the steward on Tiny’s line would be suspended. This too was unacceptable to the assembled workers, and they stood their ground until the company agreed to settle Tiny’s grievance on the spot and pay him his bonus. Having won their demand, the workers returned to their jobs.

The Insurgent Worker does not indicate whether or not any STO members were involved in this action, but it certainly reflects the group’s approach to fighting white supremacy within the framework of the workplace organizing described in the previous chapter. By struggling, and winning a victory (however modest), around the demands of a black employee, the workers had enhanced their collective sense of power while taking a stand against racism. As the article noted: “A significant thing about this walkout was that it was initiated and led by black workers over the issue of white supremacist discrimination, and the majority of white workers supported the action and joined the walkout. All the workers regarded Tiny’s problem as their problem. This is the meaning of class solidarity.” In this sort of situation, STO’s primary objective was to draw white workers into such struggles, despite the hesitation of many whites to view discrimination as an issue that affected them. These efforts were not driven exclusively, or even primarily, by moral considerations. Instead, the organization’s opposition to white supremacy was rooted in a detailed theory of US history, a sophisticated analysis of world affairs, and a precise strategy for revolution, each of which deserves careful examination.

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Just as Don Hamerquist had taken the lead in articulating the theories that grounded STO’s approach to workplace organizing, so in turn did Noel Ignatin pioneer the group’s understanding of white supremacy. Where Hamerquist took his cues from Antonio Gramsci, Ignatin rooted his analysis in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois was a black intellectual and historian from Massachusetts, long-time editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a proudly unorthodox Marxist throughout most of his life. His 1935 masterwork, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, challenged the traditional white historiography that viewed the post-Civil War era as an unfortunate blot on the otherwise glorious history of the United States. Instead, said Du Bois, Reconstruction represented the most radically democratic period in US history, and the closest the country had yet come to working-class rule. Just as the Prison Notebooks served as the ur-text of STO’s theory of consciousness and thus of its workplace campaigns, so did Black Reconstruction function as the pivot of the group’s theory of US history, which in turn was the first building block of its analysis of white supremacy.

Almost alone among historians of his era, Du Bois placed the experiences of black people at the very center of the history of the United States. The contradiction between the rhetoric of democracy and the reality of slavery “was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States.”186 Slavery was the central experience of black workers, who constituted “the ultimate exploited.”187 It was also an indispensable component of the developing economic power of the US after the Revolution. This combination of misery and success was explosive: “It was thus the black worker, as the founding stone of a new economic system in the nineteenth century and for the modern world, who brought civil war in America. He was its underlying cause, in spite of every effort to base the strife upon union and national power.”188 These efforts included not only those of the leading political and military figures during the war, but also those of historians—whether of the right or of the left—who in later years recorded and interpreted the causes, course, and consequences of the war.

If the black experience had been the essential trigger of the Civil War, it naturally followed that the actions of black people during the war were pivotal in determining its outcome. Here, Du Bois highlighted the importance of the mass escapes that steadily depleted the slave population of the South over the course of the Civil War, as blacks fled toward the Union lines. This was “the quiet but unswerving determination of increasing numbers no longer to work on Confederate plantations, and to seek the freedom of the northern armies.”189 Even before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the geographic movement of black people damaged the Confederacy’s ability to function while simultaneously offering the Union army additional, and often enthusiastic, laborers (and in some cases soldiers). In describing these events, Du Bois gave a novel twist to a traditional concept of working-class radicalism by naming the process a “general strike” of slave laborers. Such an interpretation, equally unacceptable to right-wing and left-wing historians of his era, represented a bold re-interpretation of the Civil War as an economic conflict in which the conscious decisions of masses of slaves were decisive factors.

Similarly, Du Bois sketched a vision of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era far different from that offered in standard histories. While acknowledging the ineptness and even corruption of some black leaders of the era, he argued strenuously that Reconstruction represented the most democratic and progressive era in United States history. Partly this was a question of the new freedoms, including the vote, granted to black men, and of the deliberate attempt to eliminate racial distinctions in public matters. But this was not all: state and local governments of the Reconstruction period also instituted free public education and took steps toward providing health care to the poor. Once again, Du Bois borrowed from the lexicon of the radical left, initially describing the black-led government of one state as “the dictatorship of the black proletariat in South Carolina.”190 In providing a detailed account of the accomplishments of the various Reconstruction governments, Du Bois extended even further his argument that black activity was the key element determining the course of US history.

But racism did not die with slavery, and Reconstruction was replaced with the brutal, white regime later known as Jim Crow.191 How to explain the persistence of white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction era? To answer this question, Du Bois examined the interaction between black workers and white workers, and his conclusions were again contentious. Building upon his unorthodox usage of terms like “general strike” and “dictatorship of the proletariat,” he directly challenged the white left’s tendency to separate the struggles of working people—who were assumed to be white—from the black movement, before, during and after the Civil War. In particular, Black Reconstruction identified the source of this false distinction in the different treatment given to white workers and black workers after the end of Reconstruction:

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them.”192

These same opportunities were all systematically denied to black people on the basis of their race. Thus a sharp difference in social status existed even when black and white workers shared roughly equivalent economic circumstances. The continued existence of white supremacy was the result of the willingness of white workers, especially but not exclusively in the South, to side with their class enemies (the capitalists) and accept continued economic exploitation in exchange for the “public and psychological wage” of being able to look down upon black people.

Du Bois also detailed the way in which the “wage” prevented the white-led labor movement from living up to its full potential in spite of militant campaigns like the struggle for the eight-hour day. Speaking of attempts to unionize in the aftermath of Reconstruction, he wrote: “One can see for these reasons why labor organizers and labor agitators made such small headway in the South. They were, for the most part, appealing to laborers who would rather have low wages upon which they could eke out an existence than see colored labor with a decent wage. White labor saw in every advance of Negroes a threat to their racial prerogatives …”193 This psychological wage was sufficient to divide the working class when it most needed unity, and the revolutionary opportunity presented by Reconstruction was lost.

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The grand narrative offered by Du Bois, of slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, served as the fulcrum of STO’s theory of US history, but it left two key topics unaddressed: the origins of white supremacy and racial slavery, and the post-New Deal rise of the black freedom movement. To address the former, STO looked to the pioneering research being done by Ignatin’s long-time comrade Ted Allen. Allen, a white communist militant from New York, had been a member, along with Ignatin, of the CP splinter known as the Provisional Organizing Committee, and the two had long shared a common interest in Du Bois and his theory of US history. In between day jobs as diverse as coal mining, mail delivery, and teaching high school, Allen managed to conduct impressive original research on the historical origins of racial slavery in North America.194

Allen’s work reflected the influence of Du Bois both in his stark challenge to mainstream historiography and in his deliberately unorthodox twists on left analysis. Arguing first that “the capitalist system of production was in force from the beginning” in the slave-holding colonies, he followed Black Reconstruction in rejecting popular Marxist notions of slavery as a semifeudal economic system displaced only in 1865 with the victory of the industrial North in the Civil War.195 But Allen went further, declaring provocatively that slavery had not always been racially based, and that white supremacy as we know it was the result of strikingly conscious decisions made by colonial slave-holding capitalists almost two centuries before the Civil War. In assessing the colonial history of Virginia in particular, Allen focused on the second half of the seventeenth century as the period when a previously multiracial population of bond servants was divided into a pool of white workers indentured for a limited term of several years and a pool of black workers who were converted into permanent and hereditary chattel slaves.196 This division was, according to Allen, the result of uprisings like Bacon’s Rebellion, in which black and white bond servants sacked Virginia’s colonial capital of Jamestown in 1676.197 Allen’s research produced significant evidence, from primary documents such as the colonial records, demonstrating that, fearing the power of such a unified group, the colonial elite intentionally granted specific privileges to white servants—especially the eventual prospect of freedom—that were denied to blacks. The unstated quid pro quo was that white workers were expected to help police the black population, rather than unite with them in subsequent rebellions. This often took the form of white bond servant participation in armed slave patrols and militias that repressed any spark of resistance. Here, said Allen, was the origin of white supremacy as an ideology, and of the “public and psychological wage” identified by Du Bois. Colonial Virginia was the birthplace of the white skin privilege.

As for the other end of the arc of US history, both its publication date of 1935 and its stated topic prevented Black Reconstruction from addressing the inspiring trajectory of the black freedom movement in the period extending from the New Deal through the post-war era. The bridge between Du Bois’s psychological wage and the white skin privilege analysis of the late sixties was precisely the civil rights movement, and in particular the evolution of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The origins of the civil rights movement lay in the cross-pollination between long-standing black demands for freedom and the strategic orientation toward direct action that had come to prominence through the CIO organizing drives of the thirties and forties. The exigencies of World War Two had made it clear that the ruling class commitment to white supremacy could at least be modified if sufficient pressure was brought to bear. For instance, A. Phillip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement used the threat of a major demonstration by African Americans and organized labor to force the US government to prohibit racial discrimination in both military and civilian spheres of the defense industry.198 Beginning in the mid-fifties, the civil rights movement attempted to replace the external pressures of war with the internal one of direct action. From the beginning, the movement was black-led, but the commitment to the goal of ending racial segregation ensured an integrated movement. Cofounder Ella Baker brought Du Bois’s influence into SNCC, which developed as a multiracial organization of young radicals so devoted to direct action that an arrest record quickly became a badge of honor.199 As the sixties progressed, however, the interaction between predominantly southern blacks and largely northern whites led to a growing awareness of the relative privileges experienced by the white students: those from the North could leave the struggle whenever they chose simply by returning home, but even those from the South received less harsh treatment from the white power structure. None of this made white activists necessarily less committed to the cause, but eventually the black leadership of SNCC came to a realization: if freedom for black people was ever to be achieved, two parallel struggles were needed, one in which blacks fought for their liberation, and another in which progressive whites struggled with other white people in order to convince them to support black liberation.200

Large numbers of white radicals, especially those centered around SDS, took this perspective seriously, and began to act on it with little, if any, conscious awareness of Du Bois’s concept of the psychological wage or Allen’s notion of white skin privilege. At the same time, the antiwar movement provided another resonant theme for radicals of the late sixties, who watched anti-imperialist movements develop throughout the third world, most famously in Vietnam and Cuba. For many, white supremacy could be viewed as the domestic manifestation of imperialist capitalism. In this context, white skin privileges were one aspect of a broader oppression of the global majority of humanity. Further, the development of youth culture (both pop- and counter-) over the course of the fifties and sixties provided another pillar for the antiracist sentiments of the white new left. As the historian Paul Buhle notes,

Subjectively, the role of Black culture in the teenage lives of the future New Left prepared the way. Only Communist or very racist parents, it is safe to say, perceived the breadth of this influence from sports to music to sexual fantasy.… To affirm solidarity with Blacks in any political sense was a minority act; but the sympathy towards Black culture reached further among millions of ordinary teenagers than any previously Left-orchestrated effort could have envisioned.201

The convergence of specifically North American experiences—both cultural and political—and a global assessment of revolutionary momentum contributed to the openness shown by many white radicals to some form of the white skin privilege analysis as the sixties progressed.

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