Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality.

By Eric Arnesen. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. 332. $39.95, ISBN 0-674-00319-5.)

Although the grueling struggle by African Americans for jobs and civil rights within America's railroad unions began soon after the Civil War, the post-World War II collapse of the railroad-based economy and the simultaneous successful breaching of America's previously lily-white judicial system by blacks have dimmed public awareness of much of this history. In Eric Arnesen's new blow-by-blow account of these long struggles, he subordinates personalities to an unrelenting focus on the conflicts by which African American porters, firemen, and other railroad laborers advanced slowly toward equal rights and increased status through a tangle of interest groups and other obstacles. Supported by an amazingly detailed accounting of brotherhoods, company unions, and national unions vying for the right to represent the African American rank and file, a very clear story comes through, and the result is both exhausting and enlightening for the reader.

Black railroad laborers had begun organizing into brotherhoods during the nineteenth century. But as labor unions became national organizations, these laborers were caught between their desire for African American leaders who would fight for their interests, or joining the larger, white-dominated umbrella unions, such as the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, in which blacks constituted a racial minority with their interests subordinated to or even attacked by both the leadership and the rank-and-file whites. A. Philip Randolph faced this problem for decades as he pushed to keep the interests of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters alive through years of boom and bust. Indeed, Randolph made a statement in 1960 that serves as an apt summary of Arnesen's book. "It is a matter of history," Randolph said, "that whenever there is any contracti[on] in employment, the black man is the first and the hardest hit" (p. 227).

Again and again, other black unions confronted this war on two fronts--on the one hand, the low wages and long hours offered by employers, and on the other, the efforts of white workers to dominate railroad labor. Throughout this struggle, a small group of educated black labor leaders, lawyers, and judges who tried to help the rank and file repeatedly fell prey to the disregard of white leaders, the treachery of white employers, and the remorseless demands of the economy. The entrance of the federal government into the struggle during and after the New Deal did not resolve matters, as "efficiency" dictated the need to avoid industrial disruption by keeping racial confrontation from erupting in the workplace, and also favored recognition of the largest groups of workers, who were whites.

Arnesen has made an important contribution to the growing literature on organized labor's political gridlock, which can be attributed in part to declining economic opportunities. The book might have been improved, however, by more fully developing the historical context and perspectives of other laboring groups. Irish and Italian laborers, for example, often competed for the same jobs as blacks and Anglos, and many of these immigrants were dogged by nativist prejudice. But overall, Arnesen's extensive research and intensive presentation in this book are an excellent defense against the banal optimism that the struggle of blacks in this country can be cured by rugged individualism and social mobility.

SARAH H. GORDON
Quinnipiac University