Digging in to Black Labor History at GW

The official theme of Black History Month 2025 is “African Americans and Labor,” an opportunity to examine the way work of all kinds intersects with the Black experience, as well as how Black workers, thinkers and organizers influenced the American labor movement.

At the George Washington University, anyone interested in exploring that history has valuable resources to draw on through the Special Collections Research Center in the Division of Libraries and Academic Innovation (LAI). Perhaps the most sweeping of GW’s labor-related archives is the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Labor History Archive, established at GW in 2010. A treasure trove of historical material on the Teamsters, its contents include decades of administrative files, more than a century of official publications, recordings, personal papers and more.

Much of the American labor movement was marked by racial discrimination and conflict, a fact marked and mourned by turn-of-the-century scholar-activist W.E.B. Du Bois and many of his contemporaries, including legendary organizer Eugene V. Debs. The exclusion of Black laborers from large labor organizations like Debs’ American Railway Union not only left Black workers unprotected, but also weakened the movement by leaving unions more vulnerable to strikebreaking.

But unlike many labor organizations of the time, the Teamsters’ original 1903 constitution didn’t limit membership to white Christian men, Teamsters Labor History Archivist Vakil Smallen said. Teamsters themselves credit this fact to T.A. Stowers, a Black delegate from Chicago who spoke up against such language during the 1903 Teamsters convention. (GW’s Teamsters Archive doesn’t include a copy of this earliest constitution, but does have one from 1915.)

The archives at GW don’t contain much explicitly labeled material on Black labor history, Smallen said. But for an interested researcher, that could make them an even more compelling treasure trove, surfacing stories that have been hidden in the archives up to the present.

Even a shallow dive into the online Teamsters Archives reveals plenty of material on the union's Black members, if not—especially in the early years—always a direct engagement with their concerns. (A 1917 piece in Teamster Magazine defensively emphasizes the inclusion of Black workers in the union not to champion those workers' rights, but to deny charges of violence leveled by members of the Equal Rights League.) A piece from 1942, “No Color Line in Teamsters’ Union,” appears to be a careful rebuke reminding white members of the importance of solidarity: 

“If a man is working beside you shoveling coal or driving a truck, he is entitled to the same wages and conditions that you are. The Negro, from our experience, has made a good union man wherever organized, and it is the duty of our general membership to see to it that he enjoys the same conditions for the same kind of work and is given the same understanding and consideration when grievances occur, as any other member.”

Two decades later, as the civil rights movement took hold in the 1960s, the magazine reflects evolving organizational commitment to the issue. The April 1965 issue featured murdered civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo, wife of a Teamsters member, on its cover. A front page editorial in the October 1964 issue called out racist backlash to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as anti-labor rhetoric:

"Trying to inflame workers against civil rights advances, the ‘backlashers’ are breeding the false rumor that the Civil Rights Act will require White workers to give up their jobs to Negroes…In plain talk, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is designed to protect the rights of every American and not to give a special privilege to the few. Anyone who represents the law otherwise is engaged in the age-old practice of using trick words to put worker against worker."

GW’s Special Collections Research Center also hosts the National Education Association (NEA) Archive, collecting the history of the United States’ largest labor union, which represents public educators and support staff of all stripes. Like the Teamsters Archives, the NEA Archives record a complex history with regard to civil rights that could provide fascinating material for a motivated researcher, NEA Archivist Selena St. Andre said.

“We have a lot of material from the American Teachers Association, which represented historically segregated teacher professional associations, mostly in the South, and merged with the NEA in 1966,” St. Andre said.

The NEA Archives also contain NEA-related professional papers of Mary Hatwood Futrell, a GW alumna and emeritus faculty member of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development who served as NEA president for a then-unprecedented six years starting in 1983. In that capacity, Futrell was a tireless advocate for students and teachers from underfunded schools, especially in Black communities.

“Any interesting story you wanted to tell, critical as well as uplifting, there’s something within the collection that you could discuss,” Smallen said.