'From Labor Sit-Downs to Civil Rights Sit-Ins: A Genealogy of Liberal Civil Disobedience' by William E. Scheuerman in (2024)
The Review of Politics 1 - 25 comments
Addressing the twenty-fifth anniversary convention of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) on April 27, 1961, in Detroit, Dr. Martin Luther King drew a direct line from the militant auto worker sit-down strikes of the mid-1930s to the recent wave of civil rights sit-ins at southern lunch counters. King praised the young activists for their “nonviolent and courageous struggles” against racial segregation, underscoring the kinship between their efforts and those of automobile worker sit-downers at Flint, Michigan, and elsewhere. The UAW strikers had been forced to confront “recalcitrant antagonists,” many of “which said to you the same words we as Negroes now hear: ‘Never . . . You are not ready . . . You are really seeking to change our form of society . . . You are Reds . . . You are troublemakers . . . You are stirring up discontent and discord where none exists . . . You are interfering with our property rights . . . You are captives of sinister elements who exploit you.’” King lauded the trade unionists for forging “new weapons” that had inspired the civil rights activists engaging in nonviolent direct action: “in part of your industry you creatively stood up for your rights by sitting down at your machines, just as our courageous students are sitting down at lunch counters across the South.” Despite detractors’ claims that the original sit-downers “were destroying property rights,” the automobile industry had remained “in the hands of its stockholders and the value of its shares has multiplied manifold, producing profits of awesome size.” Sit-inners now faced the same groundless accusation that they threatened property rights. Nonetheless, King concluded, “we are proudly borrowing your techniques, and though the same old and tired threats and charges have been dusted off for us, we doubt that we shall collectivize a single lunch counter or nationalize the consumption of sandwiches and coffee.” Just as labor sit-downs that rippled across the country in the 1930s had resulted in a “better life” for workers and, indeed, “the whole nation,” so too would the lunch counter sit-ins improve the situation of black Americans and the entire country. 3 Neither movement constituted a violent attack aimed at dismantling private property.
Aware of the sit-inners’ debts to the 1930s sit-downs, King was reminding its overwhelmingly white, male delegates of their influence on a new generation of young black activists. Historians have corroborated King's attempt to draw links between the civil rights movement and organized labor, in part by acknowledging the role of unions such as the UAW in supporting—and sometimes bankrolling—their efforts. They have also observed that the 1930s sit-downs inspired midcentury political activists affiliated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and related organizations, some of whose leading figures (e.g., James Famer, James Lawson) served as mentors to the young activists responsible for the wave of lunch counter sit-ins that swept the South in 1960. With the exception of Marc Stears, political theorists and historians of US political thought have neglected those links. Despite her impressive recent discussion, Erin Pineda ignores the origins not only of the sit-ins, but also of the liberal theories they inspired, in 1930s US labor struggles. To correct for this oversight, I argue that Rawlsian ideas of civil disobedience that emerged in the 1960s and early ’70s can only be properly interpreted with recourse to the complicated history of the early civil rights movement's appropriation of the labor sit-down strike. In the spirit of Pineda's call for scholars of civil disobedience to read “political theory texts in context,” I reinterpret Rawls in the context of a messy but basically successful effort by civil rights activists, sympathizers, and especially the lawyers who defended sit-inners in the courts to circumvent the repressive, ultimately disastrous state and legal response that the 1930s sit-downers had garnered.
Although the story is a complicated one, a key problem faced by the 1960 sit-inners was clear enough: in National Labor Relations Board v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation (1939), the US Supreme Court had neutered the sit-down strike which had been one of organized labor's most efficacious political tools during its 1930s New Deal–era resurgence. In a controversial ruling, the Court majority reversed a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) order requiring Fansteel, a Chicago-area steel firm, to rehire dismissed sit-down strikers. The justices characterized the sit-down against Fansteel as a violent, lawless seizure of property incongruent with the rule of law and property rights. Predictably, when civil rights activists subsequently borrowed from militant labor's toolkit, they faced hostile voices that reproduced this take on the sit-down. Even former president Truman, in April 1960 comments at Cornell University widely reported by the media, accused the young sit-inners of simply imitating the (supposedly) “Red” sit-downs of the 1930s. When arrested and charged, sit-in activists soon faced state and legal action that deployed Fansteel to discredit them: hostile voices followed the Court majority by characterizing the sit-ins as illegal and also disruptive, violent, and destructive of property. Activists and their lawyers—in particular, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund (LDF)—successfully responded by highlighting not just the sit-in movement's principled commitment to nonviolence, but also its focus on basic civil and political rights. The sit-ins, they emphasized, entailed no principled challenge to private property.
My retelling of the familiar story of the sit-ins refocuses attention on the nexus between the labor and civil rights movements and resituates influential 1960s debates about civil disobedience. I argue that the Rawlsian interpretation of civil disobedience implicitly followed vital strands of the strategy of delinking the lunch counter sit-ins from the workplace sit-downs. David Lyons repeats a commonplace criticism of Rawls's model of civil disobedience as offering a philosophical codification of a distorted, sanitized interpretation of the civil rights movement. One immediate result, as critics such as Robin Celikates argue, has been an influential yet overly restrictive notion of civil disobedience. Although this article ultimately endorses elements of these views, Rawls built on a significant, politically as well as legally savvy, discursive strategy that emerged within the early civil rights movement itself. The move to distinguish civil rights struggles from those relating to economic justice was not foisted upon activists by ivory tower racial liberals; rather, it was a key component of the movement's own strategy. Those critical of Rawls downplay that crucial part of the story because their contextualization of the 1960s sit-inners misses major pieces of the puzzle.
I begin by briefly revisiting the 1930s sit-down strikes, their impact on midcentury antiracist activists, and the legacy of Fansteel (section 1), before turning to the 1960s sit-inners and the exacting political and legal challenges they faced (section 2). After examining how one of the sit-in movement's key institutional players, the NAACP LDF, responded to those challenges (section 3), I revisit the 1960s and early ’70s debate about civil disobedience. As I hope to show, the NAACP legal strategy is absolutely essential if we are to make sense of that debate. By focusing on Rawls's liberal account and Michael Walzer's astute critique (sections 4–5), I offer a reinterpretation of the debate that properly foregrounds the civil rights movement's complicated relationship to the 1930s sit-downs.
