AFL-CIO. The Case for Civil Rights: “As We See It”

Washington, D. C. Department of Civil Rights, American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, [1956]. An early AFL-CIO civil-rights publication reproducing an address by secretary-treasurer William F. Schnitzler before the Jewish Labor Committee’s Third National Trade Union Congress on Civil Rights. Schnitzler declares racial equality a central obligation of organized labor and calls segregation morally and spiritually indefensible. He condemns the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens’ Councils, defends the AFL-CIO’s support for school desegregation following Brown v. Board of Education, and demands vigorous federal enforcement rather than further “deliberate” delay. The address also describes the federation’s Civil Rights Department and internal machinery for investigating discrimination, while extending its appeal for equality to Black Americans and Americans of Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese descent. Two concluding news items report mass picketing against discriminatory New York stores and UAW president Walter Reuther’s appeal—made jointly with Martin Luther King Jr.—for federal intervention in Montgomery, Alabama.

A revealing document of organized labor’s public alignment with the emerging national civil-rights movement shortly after the AFL and CIO merged in 1955. Boris Shishkin is identified as director of the AFL-CIO Department of Civil Rights. Moderately worn and handled, with creasing, scattered staining and foxing, and small marginal tears; complete and legible.

Folded sheet (8 ½” x 7”), [4] pp. Slightly mis-folded, faint foxing, creasing and handling. Not found by us separately cataloged in OCLC. Item #15256

Price: $125.00