Northern Industrial Unions Exclude Black Workers While Companies Use Them as Strikebreakers

Most Northern industrial unions in the early twentieth century — the AFL's craft unions in particular — excluded Black workers from membership through explicit constitution provisions or tacit practice. This exclusion meant Black workers were barred from the highest-wage skilled jobs in Northern industry. Employers exploited this dynamic by hiring Black workers as strikebreakers, deepening racial resentment that exploded in riots like East St. Louis (1917) and Chicago (1919). The cyclical dynamic — union exclusion, strikebreaking, riot, justification for further exclusion — was a deliberately engineered system that divided the working class along racial lines.