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“I had gone in there thinking I was going to be a cultural worker”: Richard Durham, Oscar Brown, Jr. and the United Packinghouse Workers Association in Chicago
The UPWA's District 1 had long been recognized as a leader within a wider union that was considered among the most activist-oriented in the country on issues of civil rights and anti-discrimination and in fostering democratic structures among its rank-and-file workers.3 But as Brown's narrative indicates, there were limits to the reach of these policies as the 1950s proceeded.4 In a more recent recollection that appears in an autobiographical film about his life Brown reflected positively on his brief UPWA experiences.5 Such reflections were complex. Together, Brown and Durham became pivotal figures in the union's program department and anti-discrimination (A/D) campaigns operated out of Chicago through the mid-1950s and helped form a black caucus movement within the union-that eventually helped get African American UPWA Wilson Plant leader (and future U.S. congressman) Charles Hayes elected director of the local District 1 of the union.6 Brown recalled how through his UPWA work, he \"learned the politics of organization.\" The labor movement was becoming more confined within the strictures of the world's Cold War racial order-which demanded obedience to the interests of the capitalist West above all, no matter their level of engagement with civil rights measures or racial reforms.8 Such a conflicting trajectory is at least partly reflected in recollections of Richard Durham by diverse UPWA figures from the period. Through his work with the unions paper and program departments, Durham helped promote the work of acclaimed left-nationalist African American authors like John Oliver Killens who wrote the novel Youngblood (1954)-a book about southern racial violence and interracial working class solidarities.15 Such diverse activities are found in the rich archive of the UPWA Papers and manuscript collections at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Northeastern Illinois area libraries and archives, and through oral histories found in these locations.
Journal Article