Ben Fletcher

Description

Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly tells the story of one of the greatest heroes of the American working class. A brilliant union organiser and a humorous orator, Benjamin Fletcher (1890 - 1949) was a tremendously important and well-loved African American member of the IWW during its heyday. Fletcher helped found and lead Local 8 of the IWW's Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union, unquestionably the most powerful interracial union of its era, taking a principled stand against all forms of xenophobia and exclusion.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 24 décembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629638485
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly , Second Edition
Peter Cole
This edition 2021 PM Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-832-4 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-62963-862-1 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-62963-848-5 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934738
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA.
Contents
FOREWORD
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
INTRODUCTION
WRITINGS AND SPEECHES BY AND ABOUT BEN FLETCHER
1 Soapboxer
2 On the Importance of the IWW Press
3 The Seventh Convention of the IWW
4 Philadelphia Organizing
5 The Strike at Little Falls
6 The Eighth Convention of the IWW
7 War on the Waterfront
8 Solidarity Wins in Philadelphia
9 Free Ford and Suhr!
10 Transport Workers Strike in Philadelphia
11 Philadelphia Strike Ends
12 The Struggle in Baltimore
13 IWW Growing in Baltimore
14 Providence MTW
15 Boston Organizing
16 Federal Investigation of Fletcher Begins
17 A Bad Man or Gun Fighter
18 The Rebel Girl Remembers
19 Fletcher Indicted
20 Fletcher Investigation Continues
21 Fletcher and Cape Verdeans
22 The Search for Fletcher Continues
23 The Chase Is On
24 Fletcher Arrested (Finally)
25 Fletcher on Trial
26 Fletcher and Haywood Cutting It Up
27 Fletcher Sentenced
28 Fletcher Holding Court
29 We Won t Forget
30 Fletcher in Forma Pauperis
31 Du Bois on Fletcher and the IWW
32 The Messenger on Ben Fletcher
33 Fletcher s Prison Letters
34 Fletcher s Black Radical Networks
35 Fletcher Reflects on Past and Future
36 Fletcher Out on Bond-Still Troublemaking
37 The Price of Progress
38 The Abolition Movement of the Twentieth Century
39 Organizing the Atlantic Coast
40 On the Baltimore Waterfront
41 Fletcher s Sterling Honesty and Humor
42 Solving the Race Problem
43 The Forum of Local 8
44 The Task of Local 8
45 Advice from a Black, Radical Friend
46 A Miscarriage of Justice
47 Feds Oppose Releasing Fletcher
48 A Call to Solidarity
49 Free the Local 8 Four!
50 Feds Can t Figure Out Why They Imprisoned Fletcher
51 Why Should These Men Be Released?
52 Free at Last!
53 Longshoremen Fighting for Life
54 Philadelphia s Waterfront Unions
55 The Negro and Organized Labor
56 Solidarity-Black White
57 Fletcher Speaks in Philadelphia
58 Fletcher Won t Give Up the Waterfront
59 Communist Praises Wobbly
60 Defy the Blacklist
61 Speaking Tour
62 Hello, Detroit
63 Speaking to Finnish Workers in Canada
64 Fletcher Visits Work People s College
65 Fifteen Hundred Have Listened, Spellbound
66 Claude McKay on Local 8
67 Fletcher Thrills Crowd in Philadelphia
68 Industrial Unionism Black Workers
69 The IWW Negro Wage Workers
70 Race Consciousness
71 Heartache
72 A Thousand Join in One Day!
73 Fletcher Recalls Nearly Being Lynched
74 Cuts to the Bone of Capitalist Pretension
75 Fletcher Knows Which Side He s On
76 IWW Attempts a Comeback
77 A Communist Cynically Exploits Fletcher s Story
78 Fletcher Corresponds with Anarchist Archivist
79 The IWW Celebrates Fletcher s Life
80 Fletcher s Obituary in the New York Times
81 Philadelphia Tribune Obituary
82 Brooklyn Eagle Obituary
83 Atlanta Daily World Obituary
84 A Tribute to Fletcher
85 Brave Spirit
86 Fred Thompson on Meeting Fletcher
87 Esther Dolgoff Remembering Fletcher
88 A Fellow Philadelphia Longshoreman Remembers
89 Ellen Doree Rosen Remembers Fletcher
90 Harry Haywood on Fletcher
91 Fletcher Meets Joe Hill?
92 Fletcher and T-Bone
93 Give Them a Chance
94 As Black as I Am
95 Anatole Dolgoff Remembers Fletcher
96 Sam Dolgoff s Children and Fletcher at the MTW Hall
APPENDIX
Colored Workers of America: Why You Should Join the IWW
Justice for the Negro: How He Can Get It
The Negro Worker Falls into Line
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Foreword
Robin D.G. Kelley
Fletcher is the real type of Southern Nigger Agitator with no education, poor grammar. He is about 5 ft. 9 in. in height weighs 185 lbs.; and is reputed by the police as a bad man or a gun fighter. He did not display any of that to agent.
-Report by Agent Henry M. Bowen, FBI, Boston, July 4, 1917
Rereading Peter Cole s marvelous Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly amid a global pandemic has been something of a revelation. Of course, sheltering in place in order to reduce community spread of the COVID-19 virus is a far cry from the kind of confinement Ben Fletcher experienced in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary or what millions of imprisoned souls currently endure-caged men and women unable to escape the coronavirus and its potentially lethal consequences. But, truth be told, my epiphany about Fletcher s life and significance derived not from some lofty reflections on the meaning of freedom from a place of confinement. The real source was Hollywood.
Like everyone else privileged enough to shelter in homes with internet and cable access, between Zoom talks, reading, writing, cooking, and cleaning, we watched TV. In honor of May Day, I streamed Reds , Warren Beatty s three-hour masterwork about the Russian Revolution told through the romance of John Reed and Louise Bryant. I hadn t seen it since its theatrical release, which would have been the early part of 1982. A sophomore in college and diehard Marxist who had spent the previous summer reading the first two volumes of Capital and all three volumes of Lenin: Selected Works , I vividly recall tearing up as Reed and Bryant joined the throngs of workers marching down the streets of Petrograd toward the Winter Palace, singing the Internationale in Russian. But seeing it again after all of these years, I suddenly remembered why I found the film unsettling. For one thing, the radical Reed came across at times as a xenophobe. In one scene, Reed argued against uniting his Communist Labor Party with the rival Communist Party of America led by the Italian-born Marxist Louis C. Fraina because the latter wasn t truly American.
Reed: We can t merge with [Louis] Fraina. We can t deal with him on membership eligibility. He wouldn t accept half of our people. The man is gonna do nothing but alienate himself from any potential broad base of support. He s sociologically isolated, programmatically he s impossible to deal with
Bryant: You mean he s a foreigner?
Reed: Don t do that, Louise.
Bryant: Six months ago, you were friends.
Reed: These people can barely speak English. They don t even want to be integrated into American life.
Even more troubling was the film s thorough whitewashing of the Left. Here was a considerable slice of American Communist history without Negroes or even a Negro Question. One would never know from the film that John Reed was the first American to address the Communist International (Comintern) on The Negro Question in America. Delivered on July 25, 1920, just three months before his untimely death, his speech excoriated US racism, condemned lynching and disfranchisement, and heralded a new revolutionary movement among black workers and intellectuals such as A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, editors of the socialist-leaning Messenger magazine. Yet, while urging Communists to support black struggles for social and political equality, he argued that their main task should be to organize Negroes in the same unions as the whites. This is the best and quickest way to root out racial prejudice and awaken class solidarity. The IWW, he insisted, had been doing this all along. 1
In fact, Benjamin Harrison Fletcher should have shown up in Reds , and not just in cameo. Reed first met Fletcher in 1910, and like everyone in the IWW s circle, came to regard him as one of the most talented organizers the Wobblies ever produced. Even those hostile to the Wobblies acknowledged Fletcher s venerated status among American labor leaders. The Messenger dubbed him the most prominent Negro Labor Leader in America. A target of the post-World War I Red Scare, Fletcher also became one of the most prominent black political prisoners in the country-second only to Marcus Garvey. Indeed, he was the only African American among the 101 Wobblies convicted of violating the 1917 Espionage Act, for which he served two and a half years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. Even after his death in 1949, long after the heyday of the IWW and his leadership of the Marine Transport Workers Union, Fletcher was still a widely respected figure in the labor movement. A fairly conservative black-owned newspaper, the Atlanta Daily World , ran a glowing obituary calling Fletcher one of the most brilliant Negroes ever associated with a leftist organization and highly respected for his scholastic ability and his oratorical efforts. The author s point that Fletcher was jailed because mass hysteria swept the country and new laws, Criminal syndicalism made its appearance as a weapon to prosecute supposed subversives was not lost on readers living through a new and more virulent Red Scare.
But by the time Reds hit the big screen, the name Ben Fletcher had faded into obscurity. In fact, it was precisely the whiteness of Reds that led me to books such as Philip S. Foner s American Socialism and Black Americans , where that I first encountered Ben Fletcher. I found traces of him in Sterling Spero and Abram Harris s classic 1931 text, The Black Worker , in Robert Allen s Reluctant Reformers , in Melvin Dubofsky s massive history of the IWW, We Shall Be All , and obscure history journals. 2 But even these excellent sources could not fully capture his complicated experiences as an independent black socialist labor leader, the breadth of his intellect and strategic brilliance, his triumphs and disappo