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IN THEIR RECENT DEBATE the labor historians Herbert Hill and Nelson Lichtenstein critiqued each in Hill's dissection of the latter's biography of United Automobile Workers President Walter Reuther, a rejoinder and a rebuttal.1 They took issue over Reuther's work regarding racial discrimination in the automobile industry and union movement. Hill has consistently argued, and here I simplify, that the union leader's "race" record was spotty at best while Lichtenstein in his scholarship avers his subject's performance has been spotty at worst.
In his review of Walter Reuther, Hill puts it that "In the UAW, local unions were disciplined for violating organizational policy on a variety of issues, especially 'unauthorized' work stoppages, but not when the most blatant violations of the union's formal antidiscrimination policy occurred. The message was widely understood throughout the UAW: that the union's civil rights stance could be violated with impunity and that regional directors were never challenged by the Reuther leadership on this issue ... Lichtenstein describes the rare exception ... while ignoring the many other circumstances where it failed to act."
In response Lichtenstein vigorously defends his position but concedes that "Reuther was an opportunist, but not always in the worst sense of that term. He saw himself, at least subjectively, as one who challenged the status quo, but he nevertheless accommodated . . . the increasingly conservative institutional and social pressures that confronted the union movement."
Although Hill did not raise the issue of the Trade Union Leadership Council (TULC), an independent caucus of black activists in the UAW that operated in Detroit, Lichtenstein clarifies his argument, saying "The UAW leader's complicity with the auto industry's system of racially-coded employment came under attack, within the UAW itself, when the Trade Union Leadership Council burst on the scene late in the 1950s. Led by articulate blacks such as Horace Sheffield and Willouby Abner, TULC successfully challenged Reuther's claim to speak as a principled advocate of black auto workers."
This essay explores the objectives TULC set itself and what it achieved in the decade 1957-67. It will endeavor to evaluate efforts to serve the needs of African-American members of the "most progressive union in America," the UAW, in the context of increasing union bureaucratization on the one hand and the escalation...