Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Allies of a Different Sort \\ 203
Robbins) chose the International Socialist Review, the most militantly left-wing
major socialist organ, to publish an unprecedented series of fifteen articles analyzing
the situation and criticizing the socialists for failing to take an active role
in support of basic civil and economic rights for African Americans. His conclusion
was unambiguous:
The Socialist Party must take a definite attitude on the Negro problem,
and must not be afraid to proclaim. And this attitude must include something
a good deal more tangible than the promise of "full products of one's
labor in the cooperative commonwealth." It must include, if it is to be logical
and honest, a clear, unmistakable demand for the entire abolition of all legal
restriction of the. rights of the Negro... .The attitude of the Socialist movement
must not only be passively correct and decent, but actively aggressive. 15
Rubinow's powerful critique gained adherents among the tiny sector of Black
socialists and among the party's left-wing, which had begun to demand solidarity
with Asian-American, Mexican-American, and other nonwhite workers. For
the most part, however, socialists stubbornly insisted that the "race question" had
to be subordinate to the class struggle. 16
The outbreak of mass strikes by unskilled and usually new immigrant workers,
beginning in 1909, stimulated a wider vision of working-class radicalism and
challenged both the Socialist Party and Samuel Gompers' increasingly conservative
AFL. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905, ardently
sought to organize the lowly worker of every kind and location, into a movement
which bypassed political bodies by creating the infrastructure of a new,
egalitarian society within the shell of the old one. Despite the attraction the
Wobblies held for African Americans and the foreign-born, the IWW had little
luck organizing African Americans, and when they succeeded their efforts were
concentrated in Southern agriculture, primarily the lumber and sugar cane industries.
17 Jewish labor leaders for their part ferociously resisted IWW entreaties,
instead entering established AFL unions or founding independent bodies like the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers. The only significant example of Black-Jewish
solidarity within the IWW took place on Philadelphia's waterfront during and
after World War I. In this case, the IWW-affiliated Marine Transport Workers
Union was a predominantly Black union led by one of the most talented African
American labor leaders of the twentieth century, Benjamin Fletcher. Although
5,000 members of the 8,700 member union were Black, it is significant that the
bulk of Fletcher's white support came from Jewish and Polish workers.
Nevertheless, by 1923 Fletcher's experience with racist white workers overwhelmed
his enthusiasm for "One Big Union." "Organized labor," he wrote, "for
the most part be it radical or conservative, thinks and acts, in the terms of the
White Race." 18
Fletcher wasn't completely off the mark, even in regard to his beloved IWW.