Senator Hickman's Remarks on the History of Black Workers' Struggles in Maine
Maine’s A. Philip Randolph Institute chapter held its official launch dinner on December 3 in Portland featuring guest speakers, Senator Craig Hickman and National APRI President Clayola Brown. APRI -Maine is an organization within the AFL-CIO for people of color to fight for economic justice and racial equality both within the labor movement and in the broader society.
APRI was founded in 1865 by Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979), former head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin (1912-1987). Both Randolph and Rustin successfully pressured President Franklin D. Roosevelt to end discrimination for Black workers in the defense industry by proposing a Black-led March on Washington in 1941.
FDR’s order allowed hundreds of Black workers to get jobs in Maine’s shipyards in World War II. Rustin later organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Two years later Randolph and Rustin founded APRI to forge an alliance between the civil rights movement and the labor movement.
Senator Hickman — the first African-American man to serve in both chambers of the Maine Legislature — gave a powerful speech at the APRI dinner about the history of Black workers’ in Maine, their fight to end slavery and their collective struggles for workers’ rights and a stronger voice within their unions. Below are his remarks:
::
Good evening colleagues, neighbors, and friends. It is an honor to be invited to speak at the official launch of the A. Philip Randolph Institute - Maine Chapter. Congratulations. I thank Cynthia Phinney and the AFL-CIO for your invitation and most importantly, for your work. I think Andy O’Brien for his loving stewardship of Maine’s labor history. I thank the Maine Irish Heritage Center for hosting this historic event. I thank, especially, those who prepared and who served the food.
And I quote:
“At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything, and if you can’t hold anything, you won’t keep anything. And you can’t take anything without organization.”
“Freedom is never granted: It is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted. And the struggle must be continuous, for freedom is never a final fact, but a[n]… evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political, and religious relationship. Freedom and justice must be struggled for by the oppressed of all lands and all races...”
“I don’t ever remember a single day of hopelessness. I knew from the history of the labor movement, especially of the black people, that it was an undertaking of great trial. That, live or die, I had to stick with it, and we had to win.”
“Winning Democracy for the Negro is winning the war for Democracy.”
Those are the timeless, wise words of A. Philip Randolph. The Institute launch observed here this day, in his name, by dedicating itself to continuing the struggle for racial equality and economic justice, honors the legacy of this courageous Black man, this transformative labor and civil rights leader and chair of the 1963 March of Washington.
Portland, Maine, has a proud history of Black-led movements for justice that in many ways were shaped by our relationship to the sea.
The ancestors of Maine’s indigenous Black community arrived on our shores in chains and were auctioned off at slave markets in Wells and Kittery. Black slaves in Maine built the foundation of the colonial economy with their forced labor and made vast fortunes for white shipyard owners, sea captains, textile barons and merchants, who all had a stake in the slave trade.
But our ancestors also resisted, emancipating themselves from chattel slavery by escaping from bondage and suing for their freedom. Cambridge Little, London Atus, Sarah Peters, Mum Betts, also known as Elizabeth Freeman, among them.
As they transitioned from bondage to wage labor in the early 1800s, they found themselves shut out of most occupations due to the color of their skin. Instead, Black Mainers eked out meager livings on the working waterfronts and out at sea, performing hard manual labor and service jobs for unbearably low wages to support their families.
As one 19th century observer wrote, Portland’s waterfront “resounded with the song of Negro stevedores,” whenever “a cargo of coffee or molasses came alongside a wharf or when lumber was being loaded aboard.” Alongside these dockworkers, Black sailors worked as porters, stewards and cooks, making up about a fifth of the sailors who departed Maine’s shores.
In addition to being away from their families for weeks and months on end, Black men of the sea faced incessant discrimination and were often abused by white shipmates and officers. Some of them were lost at sea.
At the same time, their hard-earned wages, low as they were, helped create financial security for the Black community compared to other parts of the Northeast. They also financed the creation of anti-slavery organizations and churches. The Abyssinian Meeting House on Newbury Street became the main anchor of Portland’s free Black community, a meeting place for abolitionists who delivered fiery anti-slavery oratory that captured the imagination of a people.
They were called the Sons of Neptune.” Politically astute and worldly, you might consider them the 19th century version of social media for the African diaspora. They spread news and information from faraway ports about the Haitian Revolution and Pan Africanist and other freedom movements. They smuggled abolitionist literature and revolutionary pamphlets to slaves in Southern ports.
Portland’s Black sailors, teamsters, hackmen, barbers, and laborers assisted countless formerly enslaved workers escape through Maine to Canada on the Underground Railroad, which, incidentally, ran right through the tunnels underneath my farmhouse in Winthrop. Southerners feared the influence of Black sailors on enslaved workers so much that they arrested, jailed, even kidnapped and sold them into slavery when they came into port.
It wasn’t until World War II, that the sea once again provided employment and a pathway to financial security for Black Mainers as they built the “arsenal for democracy” to fight the fascists in Europe. For decades, Black workers were excluded from labor unions based solely upon the color of their skin. But after A. Philip Randolph threatened to launch a march on Washington of “100,000 loyal Negro American citizens,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an executive order banning discrimination against Black workers in the defense industry.
For the first time, Black workers in Maine were not only able to join unions, but they were also able to serve in leadership positions. As a member of the Industrial Union of Marine and Ship Building Workers of America (IUMSWA) Local 50, a Black welder named Silbert Billouin became heavily involved in his union and joined the housing and welders’ shop committees at the South Portland shipyard in 1943. He was the first Black man in Maine to attend a state Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) convention as a union delegate. He also served on a Portland city committee to address discrimination in housing, a battle we still fight today.
The CIO actively engaged members in anti-racism education because it sought to organize all workers in a shop — whites, blacks and women — under one union, as opposed to organizing workers by craft, which maintained racial hierarchies. CIO leaders understood that the wealthy and corporations use racism to divide and exploit the working class and as a barrier to building worker power.
The great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. summed it up powerfully in his remarks on the steps of the capital of Alabama after the March from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. And I quote:
“Our whole campaign in Alabama has been centered around the right to vote. In focusing the attention of the nation and the world today on the flagrant denial of the right to vote, we are exposing the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the Southland. Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward … clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land.
“[And so] if it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus Chris, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.
“Thus, the threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the Negro and the white masses alike resulted in the establishment of a segregated society. They segregated southern money from the poor whites; they segregated southern mores from the rich whites; they segregated southern churches from Christianity; they segregated southern minds from honest thinking; and they segregated the Negro from everything. That’s what happened when the Negro and white masses of the South threatened to unite and build a great society: a society of justice where none would pray upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty, where greed and poverty would be done away; a society of brotherhood, where every man would respect the dignity and worth of every human personality.”
Back here in Maine, Black shipbuilders served on CIO negotiating teams and were appointed to a committee to address racism at the shipyard. From this workplace organizing, they were much better positioned to advance social and economic justice, exactly as A. Philip Randolph told us.
Black CIO members and their white brothers and sisters in the unions crusaded against Maine’s two senators for voting against the anti-poll tax and anti-lynching laws. In the 1960s, the spirit of the CIO lived in the UAW as it joined hands with Dr. King to fight racial discrimination and end segregation across the nation.
Like all American institutions, unions have too often been tainted by supremacist ideology and patriarchy. This painful history of locking out workers based solely upon the color of their skin, must be recognized, reconciled, and repaired.
When Black people, and other people of color, have a stronger collective voice in their unions, they remain a powerful force, a driving force, for economic freedom and justice for all. The A. Philip Randolph Institute will be a valuable organizing tool, bringing workers of color and their allies together from all over Maine to build the sturdy hull of a fair and just and humane society.
Once again, I congratulate you on the launch of your new chapter in Maine.
And so as we go away this evening, let us go away more than ever before committed to the struggle… and committed to nonviolence. Let us tell the truth and shame the devil. Let us keep faith with one another. Let us lead with love.
We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.
In solidarity. Take care of your blessings.