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FREEDOMWAYS FOURTH QUARTER 1972

forced to examine it in more and more detail in order to better understand the many facets of the battles we were in during the last decade and a half.
The beginning of that common bond of struggle between these two worlds of the working people in America went through victories and success, strains and disruptions but the bond remained. It was revitalized and strengthened in the years of the great Depression and President Roosevelt's "New Deal." Mass production workers in the coal mines, on the ships and in tobacco plants and packinghouses gave new energy to the struggles for process in our country in that great mass movement known as the CIO. 
It is most significant for us that the CIO in organizing the unorganized not only stuck a major blow for the working men and women of our country to enjoy a greater share of the abundant wealth they were creating, but black and white workers in that period also made a special contribution in their assault upon certain practices of racial discrimination in the field of employment and accommodations. "An injury to one is an injury to all" became their battle cry and to the extent that they applied that slogan was precisely to the extent that they forces the economic royalists of big business to yield to certain demands. 
These bitter battles bore fruit and some of the sharpest struggles of that period were led by the members of this Union. 
One recalls with pride the significant Packinghouse Workers' strike of 1948, one of the largest and bloodiest strikes in the history of that industry, in which every provocation by the employers was defeated and the strike won even while several of our members suffered martyrdom. 
The main feature of the years following World War Two was one in which these years were marked by a major effort on the part of those who had fought Labor over the years to break up he fraternal bond of struggle that had developed between organized Labor and the Black Community. A segregationist federal government headed by Harry Truman became the main vehicle for carrying out this assault upon the "New Deal" coalition and the main weapon in this assault was the hysteria of "McCarthyism."
Many elected Union leaders were tricked, bribed or otherwise corrupted into becoming servants of the Truman administration and the Democratic Party  in carrying out this policy designed to split the Labor Movement. Union brothers were turned against Union brothers as wild charges of "subversion" and "treason" were leveled against

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