PATTERNS OF WORKERS’ EDUCATION

 

are taught the history and the role of the Negro in industry and how organized
labor may promote his interests. An attempt is made to form interracial
groups so that they may serve “as an opposition force to every manifesta-
tion and form of racial chauvinism in the labor movement.”* The National
Urban League has organized similar councils.” In some areas the groups
prepare Negroes for some particular vocation or trade, thus combining voca-
tional education with workers’ education.”

The Workers’ Alliance of America, representative of the unemployed, has
actively promoted Negro interests since the race constitutes a large part of
membership in some localities. Results vary from community to community,
since educational work for the entire constituency, Negro and white, is
developed on a local basis. Through workers’ education, those unemployed
or on work relief learn how organized action may improve their social and
economic status, Instruction is pragmatic, showing members how to exert
pressure upon local, state, and federal legislatures and thereby secure more
adequate social legislation.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

In 1930 John Kennedy stated that specific forces stimulated the beginning
of workers’ education. He described the process as follows:

Workers’ education in America was born at a time when the progressive
forces of the labor movement were in the ascendency. This, of course, was not
accidental. These who were interested in the organization of basic industries,
the amalgamation of craft unions, the building of a labor party, and the waging
of an aggressive struggle for a better life for Labor all along the line realized
the role that workers’ education could play in gathering data, developing
understanding, building the morale and creating a technique to carry on this
struggle.*

These influences seem to have shaped education in the trade unions today,
Three organizations atypical of the trade unionism of their time, the Inter-

“Emmett Dorsey, “The Negro and Social Planning,” Journal of Negro Education,
Vol. 5 (January, 1936), p. 109.

“Fools and Cowards Cut Their Own Throats (leaflet distributed by the Negro
Workers’ Councils of the National Urban League).

Workers’ Bureau of the National Urban League, The Workers’ Council Bulletin,
No, 20 (March 1, 1938), p. 2.

* “Next Steps in Workers’ Education,” Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Conference
of Teachers in Workers’ Education, What Next in Workers’ Education, at Brookwood,
February 21-23, 1930, p. 65.

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