Race, migration, and port city radicalism: New York's Black longshoremen and the politics of maritime protest, 1900--1920

“Race, Migration and Port City Radicalism: New York's Black Longshoremen and the Politics of Maritime Protest, 1900–1920” stands at the juncture of waterfront labor history and the growing literature on black migration. Set during the early twentieth century, this study analyzes the rise and decline of black working-class political culture as it developed among waterfront workers who migrated into the Port of New York during the first major wave of northward migration. By examining post-emancipation working-class formation as a diasporic phenomenon, this study analyzes the relationship between shifting capital investment, black migration, and the rise of radical maritime protest. The geographical parameters are set in the western Atlantic in the key port cities that served as migratory pathways in the formation of the largest enclave of black workers in the world's leading global city.; The emergence of federal labor policy with the advent of the First World War provided additional leverage for New York's black longshoremen to protect their precarious occupational foothold. With their ranks increased by incoming streams of radical southern and Caribbean migrants, black dockworkers used the federal mediation process that governed the longshore industry to their advantage. Thus, they emerged at the forefront of radical protests during the great postwar strikes in New York's Port, at times aligning their actions with white waterfront workers, but also charting separate paths of protest to safeguard their own interests.; While black dockworkers strove valiantly to challenge racial inequality in the longshore industry during the first two decades of the century, the age of black maritime protest would prove to be a short-lived affair. With the end of federal labor mediation policy in 1920, black dockworkers suffered acute occupational displacement as the dissolution of the federal mediation process removed formal channels through which longshoremen could seek redress for workplace conflicts. Frustrated by declining federal interest in labor grievances, black longshoremen joined the harbor strikes that temporarily paralyzed the shipping industry.; From the standpoint of the state, however, these port uprisings were not only unpatriotic but they threatened the operation of the new American Merchant Marine, which was the nation's designated vehicle for expanding international trade. With federal officials and shipping magnates in agreement that a compliant longshore workforce provided the foundation for increasing foreign trade and challenging British maritime supremacy in commercial affairs, the suppression of waterfront protest became inevitable. As a result, black dockworkers, having secured significant wartime concessions on the piers, found themselves once again relegated to the margins of the waterfront workforce following the armistice.