On August 6, 1957, St Louis mayor Raymond R. Tucker, the quintessential technocrat, sourly watched the votes get tallied. His initiative, backed by the city’s business elite, to amend the city charter in order to blunt the power of local aldermen and unions went down in defeat. An unlikely coalition of forces including the NAACP, the Teamsters, black ward leaders, and small business interests voted down the measure by a three-to-two margin.
The victory encapsulated a period when the city’s civil rights and labor movement elements were confident and ascendant in their power. The St Louis NAACP had doubled its membership in less than a year and boasted a thriving trade union division. Teamsters Local 688, representing ten thousand mostly warehouse distribution workers, developed an innovative “community stewards” program that mobilized members around local political fights and racial justice issues.
Instrumental in all of this was Ernest Calloway, research director for Teamsters Local 688 and president of the St Louis NAACP. From his early life in the Kentucky coal fields as a United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) supporter to his golden years as a stimulating lecturer at St Louis University, Calloway offered a compelling theory and practice for exercising working-class power with a sophisticated political analysis that is all too rare in our time.
Ernest Calloway is not a household name. Robert Bussell’s Fighting for Total Person Unionism and Clarence Lang’s Grassroots at the Gateway provide some of the only scholarly glimpses into this fascinating figure.
His life and political career perfectly embodied the rise and fall of the civil rights–labor–New Deal coalition that reshaped US politics in the twentieth century — a period when the struggle for civil rights was grounded in economic justice, institutionally rooted in the labor movement, and tied to a broader vision for a radical restructuring of society.
Through a lifetime of transformative union organizing, hard-nosed electoral campaigns, civil rights crusading, and rigorous analysis, Calloway represented the great synergistic potential of this coalition.
At the age of four, Calloway joined four other families in a migration to yet another mining camp. His father, who he described as an “ex-farmer, ex-gambler, ex-gun toting unionist,” was an itinerant miner in West Virginia and a United Mine Workers of America stalwart. In 1913, the family made its way to the coalfields of Jenkins, Kentucky.
Perhaps young Calloway’s future could be seen in his father, who quickly became the civic bedrock of Jenkins. At this time, black migrants constituted 25 percent of the region’s miners. Calloway’s father built the first black church and managed to convince company officials to convert a pool hall into the first black school.
Before the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) emerged in the 1930s, the UMWA was one of the few labor unions that organized black workers and upheld some degree of racial egalitarianism internally. It was unique among American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions for having not just black members but also black officials and staff. Calloway’s father became the first UMWA secretary in the area and remained a union activist his whole life.
Life in a mining town offered vivid lessons in unbridled class struggle and class domination.
Life in a mining town offered vivid lessons in unbridled class struggle and class domination. Calloway later described these places of his childhood as filled with “battle-grounds, graveyards, company towns and brutal memories of corporate feudal barons of coal seeking to reduce coal mining to a system of industrial peonage.” He believed the “feudal social structure” of the coal mines made miners “the most class-conscious worker in an industrial society whose class lines are alleged to be the most fluid in the Western world.”
The complete control that coal companies exerted over their workers’ lives planted the seed for a societal vision where workers controlled their destiny, which would stay with Calloway his whole life. His father’s positive experiences with unions and interracial organizing would also rub off.
In the summer of 1925, Calloway ran away to the excitement of Harlem, working as a busboy and getting exposure to the nightlife and the arts. Though he had to return just eight months later after hearing his mother was dying of cancer, his Harlem journey “had taken its toll with a new restlessness and curiosity about the world beyond Appalachia.”
From 1926 to 1930, Calloway worked alongside his father in the Kentucky coal mines. Lacking stimulation, he “got mixed up with the usual drinking-gambling bouts plus certain troubles with women.”
His father’s small-scale successes notwithstanding, there were precious few political and social outlets for working-class black people like Calloway. With Jim Crow firmly entrenched in the South and racially discriminatory craft unionism fortified in the North, black political prospects during this period were dramatically curtailed. So Calloway took to the road again, this time to California.
During his wandering, Calloway had a quasi-spiritual experience that he claims altered the course of his life. As he walked amid the mountains near the Pacific Ocean, going without sleep for forty-eight hours, he had a vivid dream of a woman being devoured by worms. Calloway took this to be a sign of his aimless, embarrassing life.
“I was 24 years old and it was the day I became a man,” he would later write. “It was the day life and living in the heart of the Depression took on a new meaning. It was the day I became inquisitive. . . . It was the day my revolt began.”
In 1933, he returned to Jenkins, Kentucky, but this time with renewed political purpose fueled by personal tragedy when a friend of his was lynched. He corresponded with national NAACP director Walter White about forming a branch in Jenkins, but was stalled by “too many petty Negro politicians who were afraid to bring pressure to bear where it would be effective.”
At this time, the NAACP, and black political activity more broadly, were dominated by the more affluent middle-class elements emphasizing elite brokerage instead of mass mobilization. This was partly a response to Jim Crow, which blocked other forms of democratic political expression and organization. In the absence of viable paths toward engagement in electoral politics or the labor movement, black elites would by default fill the vacuum.
But as 1934 rolled around, this dynamic slowly began to change. Working-class organization and militancy in response to the Great Depression swelled, aided by the leadership and skills of left-wing activists. Civil rights organizations responded to the changed conditions by beginning to shift their focus toward working-class issues and forms of organization.
Calloway became involved in the Urban League’s workers’ council, which attempted to educate black workers about trade unions and build closer ties with the labor movement. He wrote for the League’s Opportunity magazine about the conditions of black workers in the Southern coalfields.
The task of the labor movement was to be an expansive social movement, not just a narrow sectional interest.
Impressed with his writing and organizational skills, Opportunity editor Elmer Carter and Urban League director Lester Granger helped get him a scholarship to attend the Brookwood Labor College. Brookwood would be formative for Calloway, expanding his intellectual horizons and sharpening his analysis of US society and politics. Here he would solidify his conviction that the task of the labor movement was to be an expansive social movement, not just a narrow sectional interest. Decades later in an essay for the Missouri Teamster, Calloway wrote that Brookwood “was a new invigorating experience. It opened up the intriguing world of social ideas to me.”
After Brookwood, Calloway got more practical organizing experience through work with the unemployed movement in Lynchburg, Virginia. The Virginia Workers Alliance fought discrimination in the administration of Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects. He also assisted the Industrial Department of the local black YMCA with workers’ education. Here again, he saw the power and potential of interracial organizing. Meetings with black and white women workers from the local hosiery mill were convened without any major issue.
Having anchored himself intellectually and accumulated some organizational experience, Calloway was prepared politically for a tidal wave that would upend both US and black politics: the coming of the CIO.
On May 30, 1937, Republic Steel workers on strike in Chicago were met with fierce repression that resulted in the death of sixteen workers and imprisonment of hundreds more. Earlier that same day, Ernest Calloway arrived in Chicago and got a job on a WPA project researching Chicago’s slums. He eventually secured a position with the Chicago WPA worker education adult program and joined the adult teachers’ union.
Through the WPA, Calloway established relationships with black political figures like union leader A. Philip Randolph and sociologist Horace Clayton. More important for his union career, it was in Chicago that Calloway encountered black union leader Willard Townsend and the struggle to organize the black baggage handlers at railroad terminals known as “red caps.”
Similar to the Pullman sleeping car porters, the red caps had a prestigious reputation among the black community that hid a more ugly reality. They relied mostly on tips for their income and took a great hit during the Depression. The existing union was only going to organize them on a segregated basis, so the International Brotherhood of Red Caps (later to become the United Transport Service Employees of America) was formed instead.
Calloway was brought on as the union’s education director and chief editor of Bags and Baggage, the union newsletter. Here he began to develop his creative vision for worker education that he would continue to implement his entire life. Far from a traditional dry union newsletter, Bags and Baggage featured cartoons, poems, social commentary, and stories of rank-and-file activity. Horace Clayton described it as “the best example of of workers education in a Negro trade union.”
The flowering of the red caps union was made possible by the existence of the CIO, which the red caps had decided to affiliate with in 1942. The CIO embodied the kind of crusading workers’ movement that Calloway and his fellow students had dreamt about at Brookwood. By the time that Calloway began working with the red caps, the CIO had swept its way into the heart of vital American industries like auto manufacturing, steel, meatpacking, rubber, and much more.
The movement represented the forging of class identity and power for the working class as a whole, but this renaissance was particularly profound for black workers. Unlike the AFL, the CIO unions set out to organize all workers regardless of race, proving in practice what they pledged in rhetoric. By 1940, the CIO had already organized 400,000 new black workers into labor unions, quadrupling black union membership nationwide.
Black organizations such as the NAACP and Urban League, as well as many black churches, recognized the opportunity presented by the CIO and began to reverse their previous skepticism toward unions. In the summer of 1936, the NAACP’s Crisis magazine reasoned that black workers “have everything to gain and nothing to lose by affiliation with the CIO.” In some cases, perhaps most notably during the United Auto Workers’ 1941 strike against Ford, the NAACP played a crucial role in winning over black workers to the union.
By 1940, the CIO had already organized 400,000 new black workers into labor unions, quadrupling black union membership nationwide.
CIO unionism, partnered with New Deal social policies and a booming wartime economy, created remarkable advancements for black workers during the 1940s. Black income growth rose from 40 percent to 60 percent of whites, and black life expectancy grew five years (compared to three years for white). In short, black workers actually benefited more from the CIO than white workers.
But beyond the bread and butter, the CIO became a critical institutional home for black civic mobilization around broader social and political issues. In many parts of the Deep South, the CIO represented an egalitarian challenge to the Jim Crow regime. Often CIO union locals were the only institutions in the society consciously fostering interracial unity through integrated social events. The connection between the CIO and civil rights was perhaps best expressed by Thurgood Marshall when he said, “The program of the CIO has become a Bill of Rights for Negro labor in America.”
Calloway actively worked to promote the CIO among black workers. Of course, he wasn’t naive about the CIO, and he cautioned blacks to have realistic expectations. “The CIO does not claim perfection,” he wrote for the Negro Digest in 1945. “Signing a CIO card does not immediately convert a prejudice-ridden Tennessee hillbilly into an aspirant for a race-relations award.”
But in these hundreds of thousands of new black trade unionists, he saw an organic leadership for the black civil rights struggle. Writing for the Chicago Defender in 1942, he said, “Negro unionists must assume greater leadership in Negro communities instead of permitting individuals who represent none but themselves to monopolize group leadership.” Seeing the potential to go beyond black elite brokerage, he went on to say, “This is a day of representative leadership with rank and file democratic controls.”
Calloway was not content to concern himself only with black politics. The CIO trade unionists were the “shock troops of the New Deal” and only part of a broader coalition to remake US society in the interests of the working-class majority. “We have a second front to create at home. A solid liberal-labor-Negro front with a minimum organized program for the conquest of all poverty and inequalities.”
He threw himself into all the political opportunities that had opened up in the 1940s. Outraged by the hypocrisy of a Jim Crow army fighting fascism abroad, Calloway became one of the first black people to seek conscientious objector status on the basis of racial discrimination. This issue had garnered attention partly through A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement, which had included the abolition of racial segregation within the army as part of its demands. After over a year of litigation, Calloway was finally deemed physically unfit for service in 1943.
The first decade of the CIO was for Calloway, as for black politics more generally, incredibly inspiring and productive. He had established himself as a writer and union activist and experienced firsthand how the labor movement could be used to advance the cause of black civil rights.
But he was still a wanderer at heart, and increasingly felt straitjacketed within the UTSE. In 1949, he set off for England to study for a year at Ruskin College in Oxford, an opportunity afforded by a British Trades Union Congress scholarship. For someone who envisioned a broad social role for the labor movement, this was a perfect time to see the Labour Party in action. After winning substantial parliamentary majorities in the postwar elections, Labour was successfully implementing transformative social democratic reforms like the formation of the National Health Service.
He envied the achievements of the British labor movement, which only increased his yearning for an independent labor party in the United States. In a letter to Urban League leader Lester Granger, Calloway lamented the fact that US labor’s political perspective amounted to “the vacuous phrase of defeat your enemies and reward your friends.” On the contrary, the labor movement “must now think in terms of total community and the contribution it can make in establishing an equitable social order.”
In many parts of the Deep South, the CIO represented an egalitarian challenge to the Jim Crow regime.
After returning from England, Calloway worked for the CIO’s unsuccessful Operation Dixie drive to organize the South, but was clearly drifting away from the USTE. So again he became a political orphan, until getting a call from Harold Gibbons. Calloway first met Gibbons in Chicago in the WPA worker education program. Gibbons then was an organizer with the adult teachers’ union, but now served as president of the powerful Teamsters Local 688 in St Louis.
Gibbons invited Calloway, now age forty-one, to St Louis to help him build ambitious programs in the local. It would be the beginning of a lifelong friendship and political collaboration and allow Calloway to organize the “total community” in the ways he had always dreamed.
Harold Gibbons, like Calloway, came from a coal-miner family and possessed radical political ambitions. First starting out as an organizer with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), his involvement in the 1937 Chicago taxi drivers’ strike won him over to the cause of industrial unionism.
He quickly developed a reputation for militancy as an organizer for the Textile Workers Organizing Committee (TWOC). In 1941, he accepted an invitation to St Louis to help lead warehouse workers who were part of the United Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Employees of America.
In 1949, Gibbons made the controversial decision to merge his union with the Teamsters to form Local 688, which had 9,000 members. Gibbons was able to create a strong local with a pioneering spirit. When Calloway arrived in St Louis in the spring of 1950, he encountered a union that was well-prepared to receive his energetic input.
His first official title was “administrative assistant” to Gibbons, but really he assumed a grab bag of duties. “Calloway’s sphere of influence was immense,” said Mike Ryan, the local’s education director in the 1960s. Other staffers described him as the “intellectual in residence” or “house utopian.”
Local 688’s power was proportional to its ability to deliver big for its members, prioritizing member security and the ability to express solidarity even in the hostile post-Taft-Hartley environment. Most 688 contracts included employer-paid healthcare, pensions, and employer-financed recreational programs. Perhaps more important, many contracts also featured the right to strike over grievances and to refuse to handle “hot cargo” produced by an employer whose workers were on strike.
Not surprisingly, the union’s power drew the attention and ire of the local business elite. In 1953, local and even federal investigations were conducted against the local in an attempt to find corruption. Calloway believed the Chamber of Commerce instigated the investigations. An internal FBI memo to J. Edgar Hoover confirmed as much when it said that “considerable pressure” to investigate the local “is being exerted by industrial leaders in St. Louis.”
Calloway became an influential figure in the Central Conference of Teamsters and celebrated the union’s ability to raise labor standards on a regional level. In his introduction to President Jimmy Hoffa’s annual report to the Central Conference, he pointed out how Teamster agreements in trucking, specifically the Central States Cartage and Over-the-Road agreements, “uprooted the idea of regional and sectional wage differentials” and “created a dynamic wage floor in the industry.”
These contracts had significant implications for racial equality given the substantial number of black Teamsters in the South. Calloway led a delegation of black Teamster business agents and organizers from across the South to meet with Martin Luther King Jr in Atlanta. Among the many things discussed, King and Calloway shared agreement that these national-level contracts went a long way toward closing racial wage gaps.
Gibbons and Calloway both shared the belief that working people needed to be developed to their full potential as human beings, not just the part of them that worked. It was this perspective that inspired Local 688’s most innovative project: the community stewards program.
Calloway helped develop a memo in the early 1950s that motivated this initiative. It outlined the “wide view and the narrow view” of the labor movement’s goals, with the narrow view being that the local “would train stewards to do the job in the shop and nothing else.” Local 688 rejected this view, explaining, “The union member is also a citizen and his interests as a citizen coincide with the interests of his fellow citizens.” A staff orientation handbook reinforced this: “Members must be seen as total human beings and not as economic units only.”
Among the many things discussed, King and Calloway shared agreement that these national-level contracts went a long way toward closing racial wage gaps.
The program applied the shop steward system of organization within a workplace to the ward system of political power. Local 688 members in all of St Louis’s twenty-eight wards would be represented by community stewards, who would solicit grievances about local neighborhood issues and work with the union to address them. Members were encouraged to attend local community meetings in their ward, and a “community grievance form” was even created.
The local put real resources into this project, designing an eight-week training program on political advocacy skills. Community stewards would first try to go to the local alderman to get a resolution, but if not they would proceed to pressure the appropriate city agency or even the mayor himself.
The community stewards chiefly took on transit and sewage issues. They gathered 40,000 petition signatures for public ownership of St Louis’s transit system and even assisted with making plans for the proposed public system. Though voters rejected the plan in 1955, community stewards demonstrated an ability to mobilize large numbers of people.
Their campaign for better sewer service saw more success. The city had chronic flooding and drainage problems, not to mention bad odors caused by the open sewers. Local 688 community stewards fought for public administration and overhaul of the sewer system, which voters approved in February 1954. By the mid-1950s, Local 688 had pursued over 250 community grievances dealing with a wide array of issues impacting their members’ lives, including trash collection, street signs, and lack of stop signs.
The local gained further credibility with St Louis’s black community when it confronted the plague of rat infestation, which had become an important public health and civil rights issue. In February 1955, Reginald Harrington, a two-month-old baby, was hospitalized from rat bites. Black community steward Floyd Glisper made the local aware of it, and they sprang into action.
Community stewards forced the issue by holding public hearings, testifying before the Board of Alderman, and garnering significant media attention. As the city dragged its feet, the union built a coalition including other labor unions, the NAACP, and the Metropolitan Church Federation. Finally, in March 1957, the Board of Alderman approved a settlement that guaranteed regular inspections.
The fight over rat infestation enhanced the local’s prestige among local civil rights organizations and the black press. Calloway began to explore other institutional avenues for carrying out a civil rights and civic revolution in St Louis.
Having established a successful record in Local 688, Calloway believed that the principles of trade union organizing could and should be extended into the fight for black civil rights. He set his sights on transforming the local NAACP chapter, shifting its focus and orientation more toward working-class people and issues.
He led the St Louis NAACP membership drive in 1951, and served as vice president in 1952. When its president Henry Wheeler ran for the Missouri legislature in 1955, Calloway was asked by the youth faction to run for the position. During the election, local business interests openly supported his more conservative opponent George Draper. Calloway won despite the opposition and immediately launched into his work with great zeal and skill.
Believing in mass mobilization, he started an ambitious membership drive to make the NAACP into a mass organization. He utilized existing networks and black organizations to bring in 5,500 new members. His wife, Deverne, helped recruit members of women’s clubs, while in Local 688 alone Calloway convinced 173 black trade unionists to join. Fifteen percent of all trade unionists in the city were black, and the St Louis NAACP ranked second in the country in the number of unionists recruited.
‘Members must be seen as total human beings and not as economic units only.’
On top of this, Calloway led a voter education drive that registered an incredible nine thousand black voters in its first month. By the end of the decade, the St Louis NAACP was the sixth-largest chapter in the country. While he may have had the reputation of a “house utopian,” Calloway was also clearly an incredibly skilled practical organizer. Fellow member and colleague Margaret Bush Wilson remarked that Calloway “ran the NAACP with a level of competence that I had not seen before. He learned this from his union.”
With a thriving Local 688 and NAACP chapter, both with Calloway in a central leadership role, progressive forces in St Louis were ready to launch a decisive political battle against Mayor Raymond Tucker and the pro-business forces he represented.
Tucker wanted to curb the power of the city’s unions and wards in order to clear the way for business to attract new investment. “Aldermanic courtesy” gave aldermen the ability to veto development projects in their districts. Local 688, with its refusal to remain exclusively focused on workplace issues and consistent forays into city politics, was particularly concerning for Tucker.
Civic Progress, a group of St Louis business and civic leaders, proposed a change to the city’s charter to reduce the size of the Board of Alderman, increase the number of at-large aldermen, and give increased executive authority to the mayor’s office.
Calloway saw this proposal as economic blackmail, “a ‘treaty of surrender’ to the Chase banking interests of New York who were demanding this as a condition in making extensive investments in the St. Louis area.” He also worried this change would “contain the growing political influence of the Negro community by carving out a new political ghetto for the increasing Negro population.”
Calloway threw the NAACP and Local 688 into high gear to defeat the charter change. The community stewards system built in Local 688 provided the perfect infrastructure for the task and allowed for deep grassroots mobilization. The measure was defeated by a three-to-two margin in an audacious display of political power that out-organized the traditional ward system.
The Teamsters-NAACP tag team proved particularly effective in mobilizing black voters. In most citywide elections black voter participation was 20 percent, but 60 percent of black St Louisans voted in the charter fight and rejected it by a five-to-one margin.
Observers took note of how the anti-charter coalition could upend power dynamics in the city. Herbert Task of the Post-Dispatch declared, “This combination of forces creates a new power in St. Louis which must be reckoned with.” Globe-Democrat reporter John Hahn speculated that the Teamsters “could become the strongest pressure group in the city because they may well move into the position to deliver more votes on any given election than anyone else.”
Defeating the mayor’s charter change would indirectly help to further the development of black electoral politics. But Calloway wanted to use the NAACP to fight more directly for “the foremost social and economic problem of our community, the tremendous income gap between white and Negro workers.” In line with his concern for workers as citizens, he believed access to more skilled employment would give black people “dignity and self-respect that makes for good functional citizenship.”
Following the charter campaign, Calloway launched the Jobs Opportunities Council (JOC) through the NAACP. Instead of the usual elite negotiations, he wanted the JOC to “provide the vehicles for mass participation.” The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), at that time still a small organization, joined the NAACP in coalition.
The first targets were grocery and retail chains because of their high visibility and vulnerability to economic boycotts. Black workers in St. Louis’s dairy, soft drink, and brewing industries constituted only 3.6 percent of the workforce.
He set his sights on transforming the local NAACP chapter, shifting its focus and orientation more toward working-class people and issues.
At A&P, where only four blacks were employed above the porter level, the JOC formed “Freedom Lines” and handed out “customer concern” cards that read “We want more than token employment of Negroes in your business.” After receiving over 5,000 such cards, in January 1958 A&P agreed to hire more blacks in skilled positions. Meanwhile the JOC got the meat cutters’ union to acquire its first black apprentice.
The JOC achieved a string of other modest but significant successes at companies like the Taystee Bread Company, National Tea, and Kroger. But fissures also occurred that were representative of broader divisions among black activists over strategy, tactics, and class position.
CORE partnered with the NAACP to fight for clerical and sales jobs at Famous-Barr, planning for a mass demonstration. Middle-class professional elements within the NAACP undermined the effort by responding favorably to management’s offer to allow integrated seating in its tea room instead. Partly they were upset that they weren’t consulted about the protest and saw the increasing usurpation of their leadership role by black working-class forces. This maneuvering by the black middle class made Calloway decide to not run again for NAACP leadership in 1958.
Generational divisions opened up as well. The youth wings of the NAACP and CORE increasingly became interested in forms of direct action that Calloway and others of his generation felt were misguided and unstrategic. After two students were arrested at a sit-in at a local diner, high-school students picketed outside, which led to fifty more arrests. Calloway said the students acted on a “purely agitational, piece-meal, highly emotional and isolated basis.”
A large faction of youth activists defected from the NAACP to CORE. While Calloway was not against militant direct action in general, he believed it should be used as part of a clearly defined overall strategy set by an organization. Somewhat anticipating the thoughts expressed by Bayard Rustin later in “From Protest to Politics,” Calloway believed that St Louis was becoming ripe for a “planned social revolution” that would require skillful political participation rather than direct action alone.
Despite no longer being in the NAACP leadership, he remained heavily involved in local civil rights organizing. Calloway was a central figure in some of the city’s first black electoral breakthroughs. John J. Hicks, pastor of Union Memorial Methodist Church and JOC steering committee member, was encouraged by local organizers to run for a school board seat in 1959. Calloway was picked as his campaign director and organized a robust get-out-the-vote operation that delivered Hicks the largest vote tally of all candidates.
The next year Calloway managed the campaign of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters activist Theodore “Ted” McNeal. His victory in a five-one landslide made him the first black person elected to the Missouri state senate. In 1962, Calloway’s wife, Deverne, became the first black woman elected to the Missouri House of Representatives.
These activities continued to enhance his reputation as a dynamic political powerhouse, with the St. Louis Chronicle characterizing him as “a whiz at tidy organization and political know-how.” Calloway seemed to be able to excel at all arenas of political struggle, whether it was issue-based mass organizing, electoral campaigns, or popular education.
In late December, he started a weekly newspaper called Citizen Crusader that he put together with Deverne and other local activists. Perhaps hearkening back to his days as editor of Bags and Baggage, Calloway described the magazine as “an off-set, off-beat, do it yourself community newspaper.”
The organizational savvy and muscle of St Louis’s civil rights movement, in large part thanks to Calloway’s leadership, helped push the city to become a vanguard on racial justice. While there were many examples around the country of fruitful labor-civil-rights alliances, the Teamsters-NAACP collaboration in St Louis was among the most productive and ambitious. At a stage when civil rights battles in most of the country were focused on access to public accommodations, in St Louis civil rights activity took on structural issues like jobs, education, and housing much earlier.
Middle-class professional elements within the NAACP undermined the effort by responding favorably to management’s offer to allow integrated seating in its tea room instead.
But even with this progress, the issue of jobs for black workers remained a problem and the focus of Calloway’s attention. Calloway became president of the A. Philip Randolph–inspired Negro American Labor Council (NALC), drawing membership mostly from Local 688 and the BSCP. St Louis NALC helped organize a contingent of three hundred to attend the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Black trade unionists were central to the planning and building of the march, and economic justice was strongly emphasized in its programmatic demands.
Afterward Calloway participated in a panel with A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and John Lewis where the fight for good jobs was named as the most important issue in the next stage of the civil rights movement. Back in St Louis, NALC tried to make voluntary “Fair Share of Jobs Covenants” with major employers, a kind of tripartite agreement between the companies, unions, and civil rights organizations.
But this approach often became bogged down and failed to deliver meaningful results. After a long fight with the Southwestern Bell telephone company, Calloway and his lieutenant Ted McNeal decided to accept their concession of upgrading two black workers to telephone operator positions. This move drew criticism from younger and more militant NALC activists, and signaled that Calloway was perhaps becoming out of step with the mood of his base. The St. Louis Defender suggested that the deflating conclusion of the Southwestern Bell campaign “ended the reign of gladiator Ernest Calloway as king-maker and string-puller in the Sepia community.”
Gradually Calloway began to question whether the focus on fair employment, or the “FEPC approach” as he put it, was appropriate given the rapidly changing economic conditions. Fair employment made sense in the context of an expanding full-employment economy. But increasingly the issue for black workers was the lack of good jobs available in the first place, not the inability to get them because of discrimination.
In an October 1963 speech, Calloway put forward that the fair employment approach was like using “salve to cure cancer” and amounted to “the distribution of the restricted number of meaningful jobs available.” He believed robust federal action was needed to truly address the problem, and advocated for policies like massive public workers programs, the shortening of the workweek, and even creating a “Division of Technological Change” in the Department of Labor.
The urban riots of the mid-1960s, which demonstrated the degree to which equality before the law failed to address the deteriorating material conditions for black people in urban ghettos, served to further impress upon civil rights leaders the importance of class. Bayard Rustin claimed that the devastating Watts riot of 1965 was when Martin Luther King “really understood” just how crucial economic justice was for racial equality.
As black power became ascendant and urban riots rocked the nation, Calloway watched with concern and disappointment. He saw poor urban black communities as a “powder-keg of hopelessness” that the civil rights movement could not address if it didn’t successfully take on economic issues.
After the Watts riot, Calloway wrote in the Missouri Teamster, “Middle-class Negro expectations which have been partially achieved through law must now give way to a new conquest of the deep-seated inequalities and their all-inclusive causes at the broad base of the Negro community.” Years later, he put it even more bluntly: “One of the great weaknesses of the civil rights movement during the last 50 years is that most of the black poor have never been part of it.”
Early on, Calloway was able to recognize the widening class divide among black Americans and the fact that automation and structural economic changes “have intensified the traditional gap between the black middle class and the black poor to the point of institutionalizing the gap that is reflected in the emergence of third-class Americans or the separatist black under-class.”
Calloway met the War on Poverty, the Johnson Administration’s attempt to deal with black poverty and urban unrest, with deep skepticism and contempt. Its starting premise blamed poverty on pathological cultural deficiencies of the poor themselves instead of the economic system’s inability to provide good employment. Bayard Rustin believed that this framework propagated “delusions that the poor can be helped to organize themselves out of poverty.”
While Calloway was not against militant direct action in general, he believed it should be used as part of a clearly defined overall strategy set by an organization.
Calloway agreed with Rustin and wrote that the War on Poverty “diverted from the ferment of social change,” and that its main purpose was to “contain the ‘poor’ . . . without disturbing traditional economic and political balances in the urban complex.” Responding to the misguided emphasis on poor peoples’ motivation, he countered, “There is nothing like sufficient income in our competitive society to improve motivation, work habits, and the desire to upgrade one’s education and productive potential.”
The 1968 election for an open congressional seat provided a referendum on two competing visions for racial justice in St Louis. Calloway threw his hat in the ring against William Clay, one of the young Turks who left the NAACP for CORE in favor of more militant direct action. Calloway saw him as a rank opportunist and egomaniac, but Clay was not to be underestimated as a political operator.
Both candidates ran on a fairly similar platform that demonstrated how much traction social democratic policies had within black politics, even among black power advocates like Clay. Calloway emphasized public works programs and progressive taxation, while Clay ran on a thirty-five-hour workweek and raising the minimum wage.
Calloway lost by a decisive four-to-one margin. By 1968, his social democratic sensibilities did not capture the imagination of St Louis’ urban black community; Clay’s radical-sounding black nationalism did. Nationally, the economic dimension of black civil rights lost ground to a focus on a combination of cultural nationalism, antiwar organizing, and black capitalism. Clay would go on to be an influential founder of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Throughout the 1960s, the civil rights struggle was arguably the most dynamic social movement reshaping US society. While undoubtedly the labor movement served as a key institutional ally in this and other efforts for social change, Calloway saw worrying signs of stagnation and bureaucratization. In St Louis, Calloway helped shape Local 688 into a beacon of creative, community-based organizing. But similar examples across the country were becoming increasingly hard to find.
In the mid-1960s, Calloway wrote a series of articles for the Missouri Teamster sounding this alarm. While the economy was expanding and the nonagricultural force continued to grow, union density fell from a peak of 36.1 percent in 1954 to 29.5 percent in 1966. He saw a combination of interrelated factors causing this, and pinpointed the need for labor unions to concentrate efforts in white-collar industries, the South, and small- to medium-size firms if labor was to reverse its fortunes.
For Calloway, US labor’s fatal flaw had been its inability to develop as an independent political movement. He contrasts this with European unionism, which he states “evolved as economic outposts for established anti-capitalist political organizations of workers,” which gave their activity “a strong political thrust.” But ever since the passage of Taft-Hartley, “US unionism entered a new stage of deep-seated political ineffectiveness.”
Increasingly the issue for black workers was the lack of good jobs available in the first place, not the inability to get them because of discrimination.
Going even deeper, Calloway sensed a spiritual death within labor and wondered, “Has American trade unionism out-grown its historic usefulness as a dynamic social force?” He found it troubling that labor was not taking account of the profound changes occurring in society and was “occupying a position of ‘dead center’ in an order in constant movement.” He chided US labor for reveling in its “comfortable position of self-satisfaction, new affluence and easy living” and encouraged the movement to “forsake its cozy, affluent Miami Beach complex and return to the turbulent ‘rice paddies’ of American life.”
Calloway looked back on the early fighting years of the CIO with nostalgia. In a piece titled “What Happened to Simple Union Contracts?” written for the Missouri Teamster, he complained that a union contract “used to be a simple human document that all parties clearly understood.” But now it has become less a symbol of social struggle and more like “the circuitous language of lawyers, the meaningless jargon of efficiency experts and the store-bought mouthings of the college-trained personnel complex.”
Calloway observed the 1970s with a mixture of hope for the rank-and-file insurgencies taking place in major unions and sober reflection on the massive structural economic barriers that the labor movement now faced. In a 1976 lecture at Forest Park Community College, he praised the “insurgent mood” that had returned to unions and referenced a letter from the UAW’s Victor Reuther about union reformer Ed Sadlowksi in the United Steelworkers.
Calloway seemed to be able to excel at all arenas of political struggle, whether it was issue-based mass organizing, electoral campaigns, or popular education.
But he also warned of the increasing globalization of the economy and weakened structural position of labor. The modern economy had shifted to a “new arrangement of capital, technology, planning, and decision-making that is essentially institutional in character and economically omnipotent in function and purpose.”
In a prescient warning, Calloway noted:
Carried to its ultimate this trend towards economic globalization could reduce our economy and manufacturing enterprise to a coupon-clipping or a modern rentier economy. Here we are given a nation without an industrial base — without factories, without plants and without an industrial workforce.
But before Calloway retired from his union post, Local 688 would wage one more epic battle that struck at the heart of power relations in the city. This fight, which Calloway called “a small October Revolution,” seemed to embody all the elements of the social movement he believed was needed to radically transform this country.
Housing was an issue that Local 688’s community stewards program took on from the beginning of its inception. Nationally, housing became an urgent issue for the civil rights movement after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Both black power and social democratic advocates recognized that the increasingly deplorable housing conditions (as well as persistent segregation) in cities was a major cause of urban unrest and a problem that the landmark civil rights legislation did not address. It was also a thorny and complicated issue to organize around, as Martin Luther King’s ill-fated and unsuccessful 1966 Chicago housing campaign demonstrated.
Recognizing all of this as well as labor’s role in the fight, Calloway began in the mid-1960s to draw up grand plans for a “trade union oriented war on the slums.” He focused on the Tandy area, not least because he lived there alongside five hundred other black Local 688 members. Home to thirty thousand residents, it had an estimated 4,300 dilapidated buildings and 6,450 homes needing repair.
The Tandy Area Council (TAC) was formed, which in typical fashion Calloway described as an effort “to relate the articulate group-interest thrust the Negro trade unionist” has practiced in the workplace “to the sixteen hour period in the community where he lives.” Wisely, Calloway made sure the TAC had involvement and buy-in from key black Local 688 members and figures in the black community.
Nationally, the economic dimension of black civil rights lost ground to a focus on a combination of cultural nationalism, antiwar organizing, and black capitalism.
Replicating the community stewards model, Local 688 led the TAC in canvassing Tandy residents for grievances and engaging in a variety of activities. They forced landlords to fix apartments, made city officials punish delinquent landlords, and got buildings unfit for housing to be condemned. Bearing the imprint of creative labor union consciousness, the TAC actually tried to negotiate a kind of “Wagner Act” for landlords.
The St Louis Housing Authority relied on rents to fund public housing maintenance, which residents felt was barely existent. After attempting to raise rents, the tenants began the first public housing rent strike in US history in February 1969. Local 688 was an instrumental ally to the strikers, providing funding and meeting space throughout. The city, desperate to end the crisis, leaned on the Teamsters to exercise a leadership role.
Local 688 proposed an innovative kind of tripartite agreement whereby a St Louis Civic Alliance for Housing was created to manage local housing projects, with tenants comprising one-third of the board of directors. On October 29, 1969, this groundbreaking agreement was cemented, and rents were rolled back. Local 688 staff ran daily operations and negotiated lowered maintenance costs through deals with building trades unions.
Calloway deemed the whole struggle a “small October revolution.” In the age of a burgeoning black-nationalist mentality, he saw this experience as a rare example of urban black political protest rooted in material concerns. Writing for the St. Louis Sentinel, he declared that the rent strike was “one of the few ghetto-based conflicts firmly rooted in social reality and intimately related to the pressing problems of living, breathing people.” The strike even played a role in getting the Brooke Amendment to the 1969 Housing Act, which capped public housing rent to 25 percent of family income.
For Calloway, US labor’s fatal flaw had been its inability to develop as an independent political movement.
Calloway hoped the fight for quality public housing would become part of a broader transformative program for working people and not stay mired in petty urban political maneuvering. He warned, “There are those who have staked out political proprietorships, and view public housing essentially as their own little vote-herding preserve.”
Despite all these efforts, the Pruitt-Igoe complex eventually was slated to be razed. The Civic Alliance for Housing disbanded in 1972, but for nearly a decade Local 688 demonstrated a roadmap for how housing activists could make tangible progress and substantively intervene in the management of public housing.
In 1973, after four decades of active organizing and involvement in the labor movement, Calloway retired from the Teamsters and took a teaching position at St Louis University. He would carry on writing for the Missouri Teamster and refine his analysis of labor, civil rights, and power dynamics in society at large.
He continued to bear witness to the early warning signs of social decline both local and nationally in every important realm. Within St Louis, he decried the city’s steadily declining black voter registration rates and lack of social planning from political elites.
Calloway could only observe the beginning stages of the crumbling of the labor-civil-rights coalition and New Deal economic order. He was one of many black political activists that built this order, and perhaps better than anyone he embodied the creative and transformative potential of this coalition to improve US society. Always fighting against “a narrow racializing of all important issues,” Calloway sought to place racial discrimination within the context of structural economic forces shaping the material conditions of working people.
Always fighting against ‘a narrow racializing of all important issues,’ Calloway sought to place racial discrimination within the context of structural economic forces shaping the material conditions of working people.
Through all of Calloway’s activities — helping to win standard-setting union contracts, mobilizing shop stewards to confront local community issues, challenging job discrimination, intervening in city politics, fighting for quality public housing, or registering voters — he cultivated an actual base and constituency for protracted political work involving real stakes and material aims.
Calloway died in 1981. Black politics has steadily drifted from the principles and mode of operation exhibited during the heyday of the labor-civil-rights alliance. Increasingly the focus of racial politics for black political elites has become affirmative-action policies that disproportionately benefit the upwardly mobile, high-status job appointments, and minority business development.
The current framework of antiracism, propagated by theorists such as Ibram X. Kendi, focuses more on psychology, individual atonement, and interpersonal relations instead of broader political economy. As recent scandals involving Black Lives Matter demonstrate, contemporary movements around racial justice have failed to build durable constituency-rooted institutions.
Calloway deplored the tendency “to create small isolated groups of social protest on single issues” instead of building a “unified community instrument to deal with the various aspects of human inequity and social need.” We can look to his life and work as a model for how to build a comprehensive and powerful movement to challenge inequality in all its forms.
