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FREEDOMWAYS       THIRD QUARTER 1973

President and many held that rather than support Truman as directed by Murray, individual unions should be free to make their own choice.* Those unions that refused to endorse the Marshall Plan or denounce the Wallace campaign were quickly characterized as being communist-dominated. The Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine and the 1948 Presidential campaign triggered the motion on the part of the national leadership of the CIO to once and for all eliminate alleged communist controlled unions from its midst. In 1949, this action occurred. An amending of the CIO constitution in 1949 permitted the expulsion of ten unions with a total membership of over one million. A sad commentary on a union that in 1938 had structured itself so that neither the National CIO nor the National executive board would gain the power to expel any of its affiliates. This was done because those who founded the CIO opposed the practice of the AFL which granted the top leadership of the AFL the authority to expel unions which did not completely comply with the policies of AFL leaders. Here, our concern is with the civil rights programs of these unions that were expelled. Evidence suggests that they were in the forefront of the fight for racial justice and peace. Boyer and Morais have argued:

The expelled unions were the soul of the CIO. . . . It was the expelled unions which had fought for world peace and the Bill of Rights, had warned of mass atomic destruction and approaching depression unless cold war policies of Big Business were reversed. 

... It was these unions that had fought the hardest for Negro representation in trade union office. It was they that had led the fight for equal pay for equal work for women and it was they that had fought for the rights of such minorities as Puerto Ricans and


*There is no serious treatment given here of the 1948 Progressive Party campaign. Failure to treat this matter is not done because the writer places little importance on this development. On the contrary, the campaign was important because it offered an alternative to the Cold War policy supported by both major parties. Many black trade unionists and civil rights activists were highly active in this campaign. The important role of blacks in the Wallace campaign warrants extensive treatment. Henry Moon, for instance, writing in 1948 offered this viewpoint of the campaign: "Mr. Wallace's championship of the underdog, his demand for an end to racial discrimination, his defiance of the South's segregation pattern and his call for the century of the Common Man have enhanced his stature among colored citizens. Nor have they been unduly disturbed by the name-calling to which he has been subjected-Communist dreamer, dilletante, agitator." Further, it is noteworthy that of the twenty Congressional areas where the Progressive Party ran black candidates for Congress, that some of those same areas are today represented by blacks in Congress. (Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Georgia, St. Louis, Philadelphia)

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