Chapter Seventeen
Fourscore years ago in Washington
“The future of the freedmen is linked with the destiny of Labor in America. Negroes, thank God, are workers.”
New words being added to the song of freedom. In 1867, in the District of Columbia, colored workers came together in a mass meeting. They asked Congress to secure equal apportionment of employment to white and colored labor. Their petition was printed, and a committee of fifteen was appointed to circulate it. Similar meetings were held in Kentucky, Indiana and in Pennsylvania.
A year and a half later, in January, 1869, they called a national convention in Washington. Among the one hundred and thirty delegates from all parts of the country came Henry M. Turner, black political leader of Georgia. Resolutions were passed in favor of universal suffrage, the opening of public lands in the South for Negroes, the Freedman’s Bureau, a national tax for Negro schools, and the reconstruction policy of Congress. They opposed any plan for colonization.
Frederick Douglass was elected permanent president. Resolutions were passed advocating industrious habits, the learning of trades and professions, distribution of government lands, suffrage for all—including women—and “free school systems, with no distinction on account of race, color, sex or creed.”
The January convention, though not primarily a labor group, backed industrial emancipation. Eleven months later a distinctly labor convention met and stayed in session a full week at Union League Hall in Washington.
In February, 1870, the Bureau of Labor ran an article on the need of organized Negro labor. Shortly afterward, the Colored National Labor Union came into being, with the New Era, a weekly paper, its national organ. Frederick Douglass was asked to become editor-in-chief.
People wanted Douglass to go into politics. Rochester, with a population of over sixty thousand white citizens and only about two hundred colored, had sent him as delegate to a national political convention in the fall of 1866. The National Loyalists’ Convention held in Philadelphia was composed of delegates from the South, North and West. Its object was to lay down the principles to be observed in the reconstruction of society in the Southern states.
Though he had been sent by a “white vote,” all was not clear sailing for Douglass. His troubles started on the delegates’ special train headed for Philadelphia. At Harrisburg it was coupled to another special from the southwest—and the train began to rock! After a hurried consultation it was decided that the “Jonah” in their midst had better be tossed overboard. The spokesman chosen to convey this decision to the victim was a gentleman from New Orleans, of low voice and charming manners. “I credit him with a high degree of politeness and the gift of eloquence,” said Douglass.