The recent effort by 6,000 predominantly Black workers to unionize an Amazon warehouse complex in Bessemer, Ala., is only the latest chapter in a long history of Black labor organizing. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Their efforts, like King’s in the 1960s, were made possible by the work of Ben Fletcher. Fletcher was a Black labor organizer from Philadelphia who organized a union whose membership was roughly one-third African American, one-third Irish and Irish American, and one-third immigrants from other European countries. Despite leading his era’s most effective interracial, multiethnic union — this history that has been largely overlooked. Fletcher’s advocacy of radical unionism and socialism, like King’s after him, illuminates the intersectional struggles for economic and racial equality that still resonate in America in 2021.
Born in 1890, Fletcher was a working-class Black Philadelphian whose parents were probably born enslaved in 1850s Virginia. They moved to Philadelphia in the late 1880s, presumably to escape poverty and the rising discrimination and violence that Black Southerners experienced after Reconstruction’s demise.
At the time, Philadelphia possessed the largest Black population of any city outside the South, yet racism defined the Black experience in the City of Brotherly Love. In his first book, “The Philadelphia Negro,” Black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois argued that racism defined Black residents’ lives.
Never graduating from high school, Fletcher joined hundreds of thousands of rural Black and White Americans and European immigrants who sought work in America’s third largest city, an industrial behemoth that produced everything from battleships to buttonhooks. However, most employers refused to hire Black people, thereby confining them to low-wage jobs, including loading and unloading ships along the Delaware River. As a teen, Fletcher probably walked the mile or so from his South Philly apartment to the riverfront to “shape up,” the abusive hiring system that pitted workers against each other and forced them to bribe hiring bosses for a day of backbreaking, poorly paid work.
In 1910, Fletcher joined the Industrial Workers of the World, the country’s most colorful and radical union because of its unapologetic embrace of socialism and internationalism and rejection of racism, xenophobia and sexism. Five years earlier, the IWW was founded by an assortment of leftists, including Eugene Debs, much-loved leader of the Socialist Party; Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, legendary organizer of coal miners and child labor abolitionist; “Big Bill” Haywood, leader of the most militant, socialist union of Western miners; and Lucy Parsons, the Black anarchist and widow of Albert Parsons, a Haymarket “martyr” from Chicago’s eight-hour movement. These radicals founded a union whose purpose was no less than overthrowing capitalism worldwide. The IWW preamble boldly declared: “There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things in life.”