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If you wanted a snapshot of maybe fragile optimism in the late 1880s, you could look right at the New Orleans waterfront.
You had hundreds of black cotton screwmen.
These are the really skilled guys, packing cotton into ships, celebrating some genuine progress.
Yeah, despite, as they said, much opposition and prejudice.
Their lawyer even declared they were standing at the head of the colored associations.
It felt like a moment.
A powerful image, definitely.
But the deep dive we're doing today, it really zooms in on how that hope just slammed into reality between, what, 1893 and 1901.
Exactly.
We're tracing this incredibly fast drop from that era of good feeling into serious violence and then, amazingly, this phoenix -like recovery of biracial union power.
Right in the middle of the Jim Crow era taking hold.
Right.
It's quite the story.
That's the core puzzle, isn't it?
How did things fall apart so fast?
What forces just ripped apart that early promise?
And I think the key insight here is realizing how economic needs, just basic survival, eventually pushed back against white supremacy on the docks.
That's it.
The waterfront became this crucible.
You had these huge national crises hitting at the same time as very specific local issues.
So around 1893, two big things converged.
Okay.
What were they?
First, you had the massive national economic crisis, the depression of 1893 to 1997.
That meant jobs disappeared, wages got slashed for everybody.
A really tough time nationwide.
Absolutely.
And second, the whole political climate in the South was just deteriorating rapidly for black citizens.
The source mentions how the Mississippi Plan, you know, systematic disenfranchisement and segregation was basically becoming the American way.
It was locking in racial hierarchy.
So national trouble and worsening local racial politics.
How did that play out specifically on the New Orleans levy?
Let's get into that local breakdown.
Well, at the very top of the heap, you had the white cotton screwmen.
They were often called the aristocrats of the levy.
Right.
The highly skilled guys.
Highly skilled, commanded great wages like $6 or $7 a day, which was huge then.
But crucially, they fiercely protected this work rule,
the 75 bail rule.
It limited how much cotton they'd load in a day.
Okay.
So a way to control the pace of work and keep earnings high.
Exactly.
But that rule became their Achilles heel.
The big shipping companies, many foreign owned, hated it.
They operated these huge steam ships on really tight schedules.
Speed was everything.
And the 75 bail rule slowed things down massively.
They saw the high wages and that rule as the backbone of all the excessive charges at the port.
It made the union workers expensive and slow from their perspective.
So the companies were actively looking for a way around them for cheaper, faster, non -union labor.
And they found it because of the White Union's own policies.
Precisely.
The White Screwmen's Union imposed this incredibly strict 20 gang quota on the Black Screwmen's Union.
20 gangs.
So what about 100 men?
Just 100 men.
Even though the Black Union, association number one, had around 500 members wanting that skilled work, it created this huge pool of excluded but qualified labor.
That sounds completely unsustainable.
It was.
And it directly led to a split.
You had association number one trying to work within that tiny quota.
But then you had this larger breakaway group form.
The Black Screwmen's benevolent association number two.
Association number two.
And they decided, forget the quota.
Forget trying to cooperate with the White Union under these terms.
They went their own way, pursuing independent competition.
So how did association number two actually get work?
I mean, they were up against the established powerful White Union.
Simple economics, really.
They immediately went to the shipping agents like Charles Stoddard and offered to work for less.
They charged 35 cents per bail.
Which was how much lower?
15 cents lower than the White Union's rate.
And crucially, they completely abolished the 75 bail limit.
They'd work faster and cheaper.
Stoddard hired them specifically, as he put it, as a guarantee against trouble.
Meaning if the White Union ever struck over that 75 bail rule, he had this large, skilled, cheaper Black workforce ready to step right in.
Classic split labor market tactic.
So the author describes this as, Black workers finding an uneasy and often unpleasant alliance with poor employers.
It wasn't about solidarity at this point, it sounds more like.
Leveraging their exclusion to survive during a depression.
It was absolutely a survival strategy.
A difficult calculation maybe, but purely strategic in that hostile environment.
Use the tools you have.
Which brings us right to the next maybe inevitable phase, section two.
The violence and how employers exploited the situation.
That move by association number two, relying on cheaper Black labor,
must have just enraged the White aristocracy.
Absolutely.
The reaction was swift and furious.
And it started with some really harsh rhetoric, which was definitely fueled by demographic anxiety.
Oh, so?
Well, the Black population in New Orleans had actually grown faster in the 1890s than the decade before.
About 21 % growth versus 12%.
And you started hearing White workers complain, like one quote in the source says, that the levy felt like darkest Africa.
Claiming Black workers were taking over everything.
So fear, fear of losing status, fear of losing jobs, especially with the depression biting hard.
Exactly.
That fear quickly turned into an ultimatum.
In October 1894, the White Screwmen's Benevolent Association, the SBA,
flat out demanded that employers fire all Black screwmen, period.
Wow, no compromise, just total exclusion.
Total exclusion.
And that was basically the death knell for any formal interracial cooperation that still existed.
The main biracial body, the Cotton Men's Decatur Council, just dissolved a few days later, on October 17th.
Why did it dissolve?
Well, as one teamster bluntly put it, they saw no use in belonging to a council, which was only maintained for the benefit of the White men.
The trust, the cooperation, is just gone, officially dead.
And then came the violence, the riots.
Describe what happened, cuz this wasn't just a small fight, was it?
No, no, this was organized terror.
One night,
armed, masked White men attacked six different ships where Black screwmen were working or had left their tools.
They systematically destroyed property jack screws, logs, essential equipment, throwing it all into the Mississippi River.
How much damage are we talking?
Roughly $4 ,000 worth, which was a fortune back then, enough to seriously cripple the Black Union financially.
And it didn't stop there.
The violence escalated.
Pistols, rifles.
Actual shootings.
At least five shootings reported, yes.
Yeah.
And tragically, one Black screwman, Jay Gordon Taylor, was either pushed or fell into the river during the chaos and drowned.
That's horrific.
And did other Whitewater front workers join in?
They did.
The White Longshoremen quickly followed the screwmen's lead.
They unilaterally ended the half and half work sharing deal they had previously honored with Black Longshoremen.
Half and half, meaning they split the work roughly equally.
Yeah, it was a system to share the available jobs.
But the White Longshoremen just tore it up.
They drove about 1 ,400 Black Longshoremen completely off the main sections of the levee, forcing them into that lower wage enclave controlled by agents like Stoddart and Sanders.
OK, this is critical.
The White workers started the violence, but the employers, the corporations, they actively used this crisis, didn't they?
How did they solidify this division?
They went straight for legal power.
Agents Stoddart and Sanders, representing major shipping lines, secured U .S.
Circuit Court injunctions.
Federal court orders.
Injunctions against whom?
Doing what?
Against the White Union members, specifically barring them from interfering in any way with the Black workers Stoddart and Sanders employed.
It's key to see why they did this.
OK.
It wasn't really about protecting Black workers' rights, you know.
It was about protecting management's right to use cheaper labor.
The injunctions effectively broke the White Union's ability to strike or protest, locking in that non -union lower wage Black workforce and cementing the employer's control and cost savings.
So the courts were used to enforce a two -tiered wage system based on race.
That's exactly how it functioned.
And politically, things were just as bleak.
Any hope for Black workers to use political influence was also shut down.
How so?
Well, there was this reform movement, the commercial elites, called the Citizens League.
They actually won control of the city partly by criticizing the old political machine, the ring, for being too cozy with White labor unions.
OK, so maybe some hope there.
You'd think, but no.
As soon as the Citizens League got power, they turned right around and strongly supported measures to disenfranchise Black voters, which happened formally in the 1898 Louisiana Constitutional Convention with literacy and property tests.
So betrayed politically after being attacked economically and physically?
Completely shut out.
Excluded by White unions, hammered by federal injunctions used by employers, and then stripped of the vote by the very reformers they might have looked to.
The result?
Utter defeat for the White screwmen and longshoremen, too.
They lost everything.
Control over jobs, work rules, wages, because they had destroyed the solidarity of the workforce.
They were now facing destitution themselves.
A truly devastating outcome for organized labor on the docks.
So after the violence died down, what did things look like in the late 1890s?
This leads us into section three, the path somehow back to reconciliation and a new alliance between 1897 and 1901.
Yeah, it was the absolute low point, the nadir, for union power overall.
The Whitecraft unions elsewhere in the city just doubled down on racism, forming the explicitly Whites -only Central Trades and Labor Council, CTLC, in 1899.
Segregation was the rule.
And Black workers.
They organized separately, but powerfully.
Under leaders like James Porter, they created their own federation, the All Black Central Labor Union, CLU, and it thrived.
The AFL eventually charted it, and by 1903, they had something like 10 ,000 or 12 ,000 members across various trades.
So you had these parallel segregated labor movements.
But the White waterfront workers, the ones who had lost so badly,
they must have learned something from that defeat.
That economic reality had to hit home, right?
It hit home hard.
It was inescapable.
They finally truly understood that they were powerless to enforce a Whites -only policy on the docks.
Why?
Because their skills, while valuable, weren't so unique that employers couldn't just replace them entirely with the large, organized and now experienced Black labor force.
The very force they had tried to exclude.
Exactly.
The economics of the waterfront, the sheer availability of competent Black labor, dictated that racial division meant defeat and lower wages for everyone.
If they wanted any power back, they needed solidarity.
And did that realization change their behavior?
It seems so.
There's a telling detail from the 1900 Robert Charles riot, a period of intense anti -Black violence in New Orleans.
Unlike in 1894, the White riverfront workers largely stayed out of that violence against Black people.
It suggests a new strategic caution, a recognition that attacking Black workers was ultimately self -destructive for them economically.
OK, so the stage is set for a change.
What was the actual turning point?
The source points to a strike in 1901.
Yes, the 1901 Longshoremen's Intramur strike.
This time, the White Longshoremen initiated it over wages and wanting Union foremen back.
But their strategy was completely different from 1894.
How so?
What was the first thing they did?
Their very first priority was to form an alliance with the Black Longshoremen.
They created a joint executive committee right from the start.
So unity first this time.
Unity first.
And it worked.
They presented a united front.
The employers couldn't easily replace them all.
And they won their demands pretty quickly.
By late September,
job control was reestablished.
And there was another key moment during that strike involving the screwmen wasn't there, an attempt to break the unity.
Yes, a shipping agent, LeBlanc, tried the old divide and conquer tactic.
He offered the White screwmen work on hatches that were traditionally controlled by Black screwmen, trying to peel them away and create conflict.
And what did the White screwmen do?
They rejected it, actively refused.
They finally understood that playing the race card only benefited the employers.
They chose solidarity over the chance for short -term work gained at the expense of Black workers.
That refusal was huge.
A massive shift from just a few years earlier.
A fundamental shift.
And that successful collaboration, that refusal to be divided, led directly, almost immediately, to forming the Dock and Cotton Council in early October 1901.
The Dock and Cotton Council, this sounds like the institutionalizing of that new alliance.
That's exactly what it was.
It brought together eight key waterfront unions, black and white.
You had screwmen, longshoremen, cotton yardmen, teamsters, and significantly, the Black Coal Wheelers too.
And how was it structured?
Because structure matters, right?
Critically.
It was built on the principle of equal voting power for each union,
regardless of size or the race of its members.
And black leaders held prominent positions.
James Porter, the leader of the Black CLU, served as the council's secretary.
It embedded solidarity into the very fabric of waterfront labor organization.
So if we zoom out again, connect this back to the big picture, what's really remarkable here?
What's remarkable is when this happened.
This powerful, functional, biracial labor alliance was forged and solidified during the absolute peak of Jim Crow segregation in the South.
Disenfranchisement was done, segregation laws were multiplying, yet on the docks.
Economics trumped ideology.
It appears so.
The specific economic reality of the New Orleans waterfront crucially,
the constant threat that divided workers could be replaced, made interracial unity not just desirable, but essential for all workers, black and white, to regain any control over their jobs and earn decent wages.
So this whole story, this chapter, it's really a stark lesson, isn't it?
The white workers tried using race to protect their privileged position.
And it backfired spectacularly.
It led to the collapse of all union power, the loss of their own work rules, rock bottom wages, and utter destitution.
They had to unlearn that racism and relearn the practical necessity of cross -racial solidarity to climb back.
The dock and cotton council then wasn't just a union agreement.
It was a functioning, powerful challenge to the logic of white supremacy itself.
Absolutely.
Not based on high -minded political theory, but on sheer economic reality and the power of organized, united labor on the ground.
Which leaves us with a final thought, maybe something for you, the listener, to chew on.
The success of this dock and cotton council, this fragile piece, it seems rooted in that ever -present threat of replacement by cheaper, non -union, or racially divided labor.
White workers needed black workers because they could be replaced otherwise.
So what happens to that kind of pragmatic unity when that immediate external economic threat fades?
When maybe skills become more specialized, or the labor market tightens differently?
Does the underlying social and political desire for segregation, which certainly didn't disappear, eventually reassert itself?
Something to think about.
Lots to consider there.
Well, thank you for joining us for this deep dive into a really complex and fascinating slice of New Orleans history.