Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

112 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:89
plant during the Little Steel strike (May to July 1937), for which the
Columbia ASU, mocking President Butler, awarded him an honorary
Master of Labor Relations degree. 70 In 1939, Burke joined the staff of the
New York City-based Local 65 of the CIO’s Retail and Wholesale Workers
Union.
The majority of Local 65’s leaders and members were Jewish, and the
union deeply appreciated Burke’s principled stand against Nazism at
Columbia, and what he had given up for it. Two of Local 65’s members
were arrested in Washington, D.C., in March 1938 for picketing the German
embassy to protest Hitler’s annexation of Austria. They were charged
with violating a new Congressional act prohibiting the picketing of foreign
embassies. Local 65 staged a two-day work stoppage to protest Germany’s
Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938, not long before it hired Burke.
Local 65’s newspaper hailed Burke’s “impressive reputation as a fighter—
on every count: . . . as a Golden Gloves champ . . . [and] in the world-wide
arena too,” referring to his leadership of the anti-Nazi demonstration at
President Butler’s mansion. 71 Burke helped Local 65 organize the corrugated-box
industry in the New York area. In 1947, as director of Local 65’s
Warehouse Division, he led the first postwar sit-down strike in New York
City, at Brooklyn’s Industrial Container Corporation. 72 Burke conducted
organizing campaigns during the early 1950s for the Distributive, Processing,
and Office Workers Union among migrant farm workers in California
and Arizona and retail, hotel, and restaurant workers along Texas’s Gulf
Coast.
From the late 1950s until 1963, Burke was an official of New York
City’s Local 1199 of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union,
AFL-CIO, among the unions most actively engaged in promoting civil
rights. Burke had been involved in civil rights work as a Columbia student,
when the ASU picketed two barbershops near the campus that refused service
to African Americans the very week of the Heidelberg demonstration.
73 During a Local 1199 strike, Burke had the honor of meeting Martin
Luther King Jr. at the airport in New York and escorting him to address the
union rank-and-file. In 1963, Burke moved to California, where he worked
70. FBI Correlation Summary. Main File 100-110762. Subject: Robert Burke,
February 28, 1958.
71. New Voices, April and December 1938; Union Voice, April 1, 1945.
72. Union Voice, October 26, 1947; The New York Times, October 22, 1947.
Burke served in the U.S. army toward the end of World War II. He had tried to
enlist in the Marines and as a paratrooper, but was disqualified by shoulder and
knee injuries incurred as a boxer. In the army Burke was a truck driver, stateside.
John Burke and Terry Burke, telephone interviews by Norwood.
73. Columbia Spectator, May 12, 1936.