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

Most Northern industrial unions, especially AFL craft unions, excluded Black workers from membership through explicit constitution provisions or tacit practice, barring them from the highest-wage skilled jobs. Employers exploited this by hiring Black workers as strikebreakers, deepening racial resentment that exploded in riots like East St. Louis (1917) and Chicago (1919). The cyclical dynamic of union exclusion, strikebreaking, and riot was a deliberately engineered system dividing the working class along racial lines.