Today in Labor History December 11th, 2023

 

The Colored Farmers National Alliance and Cooperative Union

A small group of black farmers organize the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union in Houston County, Texas. They had been barred from membership in the all-white Southern Farmers’ Alliance. Through intensive organizing, along with merging with another black farmers group, the renamed Colored Alliance by 1891 claimed a membership of 1.2 million - 1886

Ten days after an Illinois State mine inspector approved coal dust removal techniques at New Orient mine in West Frankfort, the mine exploded, largely because of coal dust accumulations, killing 119 workers - 1951

The U.S. Department of Labor announces that the nation's unemployment rate had dropped to 3.3 percent, the lowest mark in 15 years - 1968

Forty thousand workers go on general strike in London, Ontario -- a city with a population of 300,000 -- protesting cuts in social services - 1995

"They elected J. J. Shuffer president and H. S. Spencer secretary. Richard Manning Humphrey, a white, accepted the position of general superintendent. After the alliance received a charter from the federal government in 1888, Humphrey began organizing chapters throughout the South." - from http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/aac01

"R. M. Humphrey, a white Baptist minister of Irish decent who served in the Confederate Army, and who also served as the General Superintendent and the chief spokesman of the Colored Farmers Alliance, wrote in 1891 that "The total membership is nearly 1,200,000 of whom 300,000 are females, and 150,000 males under twenty-one years of age, leaving 750,000 adult males." - from http://www.populist.com/Colored.Populists.html

"But black labor was also caught in the racial realities of their day. The sheer existence of independent black labor was an affront to the southern society of the Gilded Age. Only 20 years after the end of the Civil War, much of the white supremacist violence used against African-Americans was about tying labor in place–powerless, cheap, and controllable." - from http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/12/this-day-in-labor-history-december-11-1886