I am pushing 85 as I write this and take you back to a sleepy Sunday in 1943 when I am six years old and my father has brought me to the Five-Ten-Hall. While a small clutch of men, including my father, speak animatedly about things that buzz above me, my eyes are locked on one man in that group. I follow him wherever he steps, at a certain distance, too shy to approach. I am engrossed in the light that reflects purple and dark blue off his forehead and cheeks and by the contrast of his totally black skin and the whites of his eyes. No doubt such interest is not new to him. When our eyes meet, he smiles at me in a kindly way. The name of this blackest of men was Benjamin Harrison Fletcher. He was among the greatest of IWW organizers and one of the pioneer civil rights leaders of the early twentieth century: unsung and forgotten today.
Ben died in 1949. My parents, who knew him well died in 1990, and the comrades of Ben’s circle have moved along with them. But I’m still around, and like an old tree with roots in the past, the last living connection to him. That connection will not last long, so I feel the need to pass on what I know about this extraordinary human being.
Ben was my first conscious knowledge of the black race. He appeared an old man whose health was shot when I knew him: a bit heavy with a paunch and with thick working man’s shoulders that sloped oddly—the result of a stroke my father told me years later. This very black man, a mere five feet four inches tall, looked nothing like the relatively light skinned, magnificently muscled heavy weight champion Joe “a credit to his race” Louis that certain white people of the time found acceptable; or a generation later, like Sidney Poitier. Handsome, ram-rod straight posture, who came to wear his dignity like a suit of armor. Instead, Ben projected good humor and decency—you wanted to be in his company. But there was something sad that seeped through. Matilda Robbins was a Wobbly organizer who knew Ben in the full bloom of his youth and power, at a time when he was responsible for the organization and welfare of ten thousand men. She remembered Ben as “soft spoken” and that his “eyes seemed to reflect the tragedy of his race.”
The ten thousand men (give or take) that I refer to forged—in the face of a gale of racial hatred—the largest and perhaps only interracial union of its time. That union was known as Local 8, a branch of the Marine Transport Workers, IU 510, of the IWW. Peter Cole describes the essence of Local 8 in his superb Wobblies on the Waterfront.
Local 8 was a black-led, black majority organization that included in its ranks African Americans, West Indian immigrants, Irish Americans, other European Americans, as well as Polish, Lithuanian, and other European immigrants. These men included Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and freethinkers. They worked in a variety of waterfront trades, although the deep sea longshoremen (those who loaded and unloaded cargo vessels in international trade) always were the core of the union. Anyone interested in inclusivity in a diverse society need go no further than Local 8, a union of unskilled workers who managed to do what most American institutions still have not achieved: equality and integration in its own ranks.
And for many people, Local 8 was synonymous with Ben Fletcher.
Matilda Robbins recalls:
On one of my organizing assignments which took me from the textile towns of the South to those of the North I stopped in Philadelphia where Ben was organizing longshoremen. I met him for the first time when I heard him speak one night at the IWW hall. I remember how strongly he held the attention of the grim-faced, work-marked men. How their faces brightened with understanding of … the need for solidarity and resistance against the shipping companies who kept them divided. Ben won the confidence of both black and white workers by his exposition of how they were being used against one another…
Day after day and night after night he covered the waterfront, twenty miles of it, repeatedly at the risk of his life. He took me to the slums in the City of Brotherly Love where longshoremen and their families lived. He agonized over their degrading poverty. He was of them. He was with them.
Ben was about 23 years old at the time. His early life and background is obscure to us. His parents moved from Virginia to Philadelphia late in the 19th Century where in 1890 Ben, one of four children, was born. Philadelphia at the time was the site of the largest Black community outside the south. His parents sought opportunity there: work, as did thousands of other black families in the late nineteenth century. By 1910 Ben registered as a laborer on the docks.
But Philadelphia was, and is, a complex city and Ben was subject to many currents growing up. He may have become a committed rebel through contact with socialists and Wobblies passing through. Some speculate he crossed paths with Joe Hill, though I personally doubt it. My guess: he may have begun work as a laborer and joined the Wobblies already there, organizing on the job. Mother repeated on many occasions that Ben told her he was influenced by the Quakers growing up, and that “he could have had an easy life as a member of the black high middle class, working in the printing trades, and gave it all up.” But she was vague about the facts. In any case, he spoke and wrote in the language of an educated person. My father often said he was a mesmerizing speaker, able to not merely hold an audience, but bring it to its feet.
Peter Cole lets contemporary accounts describe the bracing, heart-rending character of Local 8 business meetings:
No finer spirit of brotherhood can be found anywhere than exists in this organization. Upon entering the hall, during meetings, one is met with the fact of a Negro chairman and a white secretary sitting side by side and conducting the meeting. From the floor, white and colored workers rise, make themselves heard, make motions, argue pro and con, have their differences and settle them, despite the Imperial Wizard Joseph Simmons’ and Marcus Garvey’s “race first” bogey.
Black and white chairmen were rotated on a regular basis with strict adherence to the rule that all ethnic and racial groups get an equal chance. The Wobblies trained their fellow workers, many of them illiterate, to administer union affairs. Union dues were collected by the union, and not deducted from the men’s wages by an employer-run check-off system. Bargaining with the ship owners was conducted by elected committees. There were no contracts. Agreements were enforced by the solidarity of the men. Ben and his fellow Wobbly organizers received nothing material for their efforts. They labored on the docks alongside the men or held side jobs to keep alive. They generally hopped freight trains to get from one city or port or mining camp to another.
You are mistaken if you think the men joined the IWW purely for more money. The union was the expression of their self-respect; they were not slaves, even if their bosses and respectable society viewed them as such.
At picnics, the workers mingle fraternize, dance, eat and play together. Nor do Negro workers dance, eat, and play among themselves; but both white and black men, white and black women, and white and black children, eat play, and dance together just as they work and hold their meetings together.
This, the tangible expression of Martin Luther King’s Dream, Ben Fletcher and his fellow Wobblies, white and black, accomplished before King was born. They were in the tradition of the abolitionists, of John Brown and Frederick Douglass, of those who dedicated their lives to the proposition that no man should be another man’s slave. Compare the humanity of these forgotten men to their conservative rival, Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, who wanted no part of blacks in his organization.
Eventually, somewhere in the mid-twenties, Local 8 went down. I will not go into the causes; Peter Cole’s book and other accounts describe the events. It adds up to a compelling tale. Ben remained a Wobbly lifer, doing what he could. He never wavered in his belief that the best way to promote racial integration was to unite men in common cause against economic tyranny; that in the struggle both white and black workers would learn love and brotherhood.
Ben on Trial
In 1918, Ben, along with 100 fellow Wobblies, was convicted of violations of the Espionage Act, passed a year earlier in the run up to WW1. The trial, a sensation of its day, lasted four months.
John Reed’s description of the presiding Judge, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, is classic: ”Small on the huge bench sits a wasted man with untidy white hair, an emaciated face in which two burning eyes are set like jewels, parchment-like skin split by a crack for a mouth; the face of Andrew Jackson three years dead.”
The jury reached its verdict in less than an hour. It found each of one hundred and one men guilty of the particular charges leveled against him, exactly as presented by the prosecution. Without exception, never mind there was no espionage committed in the common meaning of that word, nor was any individual on trial tied to a specific act.
Free Speech was the “crime” the jury convicted the Wobblies of, better known as the exercise of their First Amendment Rights. The real issues were the Wobblies’ lack of enthusiasm for The War, their advocacy of the overthrow of capitalism and the wage system, and their racial and social inclusiveness.
On the down to earth, gut level, financial and manufacturing interests feared the Wobblies’ growing influence, and were pressuring President Wilson to crack down on them. WW1 and the Espionage Act provided the opportunity. On the same day federal agents charged the Wobblies, they ransacked the offices and halls of the IWW throughout the country in a coordinated operation, and confiscated its files and membership lists—no search warrants, hearings—fuck that stuff!
The years 1917–1921, roughly, bracket the Red Scare: the paranoid fear that the nation was being subverted by radicals, socialists, foreign elements. It was an attack of political malaria akin to the bouts of hysterical anti-Semitism that flare up in other cultures. It dies down, but is never eradicated. The Red Scare meant open season on the IWW, on the Socialist Party, on all political nonconformists—or alternately on those people the dominant culture simply did not like, such as the devout Mennonites, the homeless and the undeserving poor
The Wobblies were regarded as no better than vermin by the powerful and “respectable” elements of society. I am not speaking metaphorically. A few quotes from newspapers reflect the foul odor of the times.
“America’s cancer sore.”
“The first step in the whipping of Germany is to strangle the IWWs. Kill them just as you would kill any other kind of snake…. It is no time to waste on trials… All that is necessary is evidence and a firing squad.”
On the other hand, we have this impeccable standard of journalism from the Los Angeles Times:
“The average Wobbly it must be remembered, is a sort of half-wild animal…They are all in all a lot of homeless men wandering the country without fixed destination or purpose, other than destruction.”
To attend trial, Ben had to travel west from Boston, I believe. However, his train was delayed and he arrived a few hours late. But the court room guards took one look at his black skin and would not let him in. Said he had no business there! And, so, it was for Ben to convince them he belonged there because he was a defendant. As Ben put it later, he had to fight for his civil right of admittance to a sham trial at which he was to be sentenced to 10 years in Leavenworth by a racist Judge. Ben told the thing dead pan. He had a wicked, ironic sense of humor.
He faced the trial with that same ironic, detached sense of humor. Not that he wasn’t concerned, but one look at Judge Landis and he knew the fix was in. He was not fooled as some Wobblies were by Judge Landis’ folksy manner or by his small gestures of humanity: supplying spittoons for the men (Wobblies, it must be said, were not a refined bunch), and making provisions for them to be able to shower and shave before entering the court room. “A cracker,” Ben spat out to Mother years later, which for him was extreme language, for Ben never used profanity, or harsh language. In Landis Ben saw the man with the whip, the slave master. He did not bother to take the stand in his own behalf. Instead, he used his energy to cheer up his comrades.
The only black man at a dull trial, he was “glad to add a little color to the proceedings.”
“Your honor,” he said when allowed to speak in court, “If I may correct your grammar. Your sentences are far too long.” At which Landis chuckled and slammed down the gavel. “Ten years.” Plus a crushing $30,000 fine. {This, the version Ben told Mother.)
Peter Cole recounts how…
While waiting in the infamous Cook County jail—the same prison where the Haymarket martyrs were hung thirty years before—to be loaded on a train for Leavenworth, Fletcher again sought to make light of the situation while simultaneously calling into question the authority of the entire proceedings. Years later in Moscow, Big Bill Haywood recalled Fletcher holding a mock court. Imitating Judge Landis, ‘looking solemn and spitting tobacco juice’, Fletcher ‘swore the prisoners as a jury; calling the guards and detectives up to him he sentenced them without further ado to be hanged and shot and imprisoned for life.’
Life in Leavenworth
So Ben was sent to Leavenworth, the only black man among his 100 fellow Wobblies. However, he was not an isolated soul. Ben’s standing among the black longshoreman of Philadelphia and up and down the East Coast waterfronts was huge. He had the respect of the black leaders of his time, among them W.E.B, DuBois—who praised the IWW as one of the few organizations actively trying to improve the lives of black people—and A. Philip Randolph, editor of the black radical Messenger, and President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Forty years later, Randolph would play leadership roles in the March on Washington and passage of the Civil Rights Act. He worked tirelessly for his friend’s release.
For good reason Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, circa 1918, was known informally as “hell’s forty acres.” The legendary Wobbly poet and journalist Ralph Chaplin—author of “Solidarity Forever,” and sentenced to twenty years at the Chicago trial—witnessed practices in Leavenworth right up there with the Spanish Inquisition:
A dozen [Mennonite Conscientious Objectors] refused to work because their beards were cut off and were not permitted to remove buttons from their clothes, as their religious beliefs required. They were handcuffed to the bars of cell block B (arms over head) for more than two weeks. They had to stand on their toes to keep the cuffs from cutting into the flesh of the wrists. When they grew too tired to do this,’ their fingers would swell, turn blue and crack open and blood would trickle down the upraised arms.
Other torture practices were less creative, such as throwing into “the Hole” those Wobblies who protested inhumane working conditions on the coal pile. There, prison guards—some with machine guns trained on the men and others wearing baseball masks for protection—“proceeded to club them senseless.”
We have Steve Martin Kohn’s account—in his essential American Political Prisoners—that “Fletcher was punished for a variety of offenses, such as ‘loafing,’ ‘disobeying orders,’ ‘creating a disturbance,’ and ‘talking.’” But I have no idea what exactly he was subjected to. Being a jet-black man did not help, of that I am sure. Ben spoke to Mother of many things; her innate compassion had that way of drawing stoical men out. However, he never spoke to her of his prison experiences. He was a gentleman of his time and such things were not for a lady to hear. He did say that often the black trustees were the cruelest toward him. Mother, to her amazement, claimed he was not bitter. “They do not understand,” he said simply.
The Wobblies refused to grovel. President Warren Harding in response to protests and appeals and the waning Red Scare offered them the opportunity to apply as individuals for pardons. Most refused. Fifty-two signed a petition saying that since they were unjustly convicted as a group, they should be pardoned as a group. He finally pardoned them in 1923. The War was over. The men had been imprisoned five years. The government’s point had been made. The Wobblies’ wings had been clipped, or so he thought. It was time for a new chapter.
Ben returned to the Philadelphia docks where he encountered markedly changed circumstances, not for the better. Local 8 went down, despite the best efforts of Ben and his Wobbly comrades throughout the twenties. There were too many pressures, too many unfavorable factors, as I’ve mentioned. I for one regard Local 8 a triumph rather than a failure.
Later Years
How should a impoverished black man whose health was shot after twenty-five years on the docks and in prison earn a living? Ben found work hand-rolling cigars in Philadelphia and New York. Cigar making was a traditional Cuban trade, and long a focus of anarcho-syndicalist activism. I suspect Spanish Wobblies—perhaps Manuel Rey or Frank Gonzalez or Marcellino Garcia—helped him out. But hand-rolling cigars is not easy work either. Ben moved to Brooklyn in the 1930s within walking distance of his old Philadelphia comrades: E.F. Doree’s widow and Walter Nef, who was married to her sister. They constituted a support group. Ellen Doree Rosen remembers Ben fondly in her moving family memoir, A Wobbly Life. She writes that Ben had married a much younger woman, Clara, who made him pretend in public he was her uncle or some sort because she was ashamed of the age difference between them. Granted I was a child, but I do not remember Clara that way and my parents who knew them well never mentioned it. I remember Clara as pretty, extremely polite with exquisite manners. Classy, you might say. And she was definitely the boss. Clara was a nurse. Ben found work as a janitor. Later they lived in a brownstone, at 813 Hancock St in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, long a black neighborhood. I do not know if they owned the building, but they had some kind of arrangement where they rented out rooms. By the time I knew Ben he was not able to work much; he took care of things, kept the place clean when Clara was on the job.
Ben’s life was not at all solemn. He had that great sense of fun, especially when “hanging out” with his Wobbly buddies. Probably his best friend was a colorful character on the fringes of the Wobblies named Andrew Homer—who happened also to be a close friend of our family. So we saw a great deal of Ben. Andy was white and from Mobile Alabama, the product of an old and large southern family. “Homers all over the place,” as he put it. He was a character out of the pre-modern south of Ben’s generation. Erskine Caldwell captured his flavor in Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre; the Beverly Hillbillies TV series of years ago is the more up-to-date, white-bread version. Presently a refrigeration mechanic, he wore blue coveralls with shoulder straps over his pot belly all the time and beady glasses over his veined blob of a nose. The back yard of his North Bergen, New Jersey home was his shop: rusty machinery scattered all over the place; a broken down wreck of a car shorn of tires; a big vat of chemicals in the center of the yard with a tripod pulley system over it to dunk his customer’s malfunctioning condensers. All in all a nice complement to the well-trimmed, flowered lawns of his neighbors—and you can be sure they fully approved of it.
And there is no denying the man was a first rate vulgarian who consumed prodigious quantities of bourbon. But like many of the Wobblies I knew who grew up the hard way, he was incredibly resourceful, knew a million ways to scratch out a living. And he was loyal with a deep soft heart. There was room always in his ramshackle home for Father, Mother, brother Abe and me. Stay as long as we wanted, he did not care.
Andy was beaten as a child. Escaped from a reformatory—and I can only imagine what reformatories were like in the Alabama of 1910 or so. Later he became an air force pilot, 1918 or so, I have no idea how, only that he chuckled that his mother sent him a worried letter imploring him not to fly too high. Apparently, he did and crashed his plane in Panama or was it Tampico. I have no idea why or what he was doing there. In any case he was injured badly enough to receive a veteran’s pension, and of more importance was laid up next to a Wobbly with a broken back named Lawrence “Dutch” Ecker. No one knows if he was really Dutch but that is what he was called. While there, over a period of months, in the tropical heat, Dutch in his strange accent proceeded to educate Andy. Gave him pamphlets on Marx, anarchism, the IWW. Andy became a life-long Wobbly. He made it a practice of naming his children after his Wobbly buddies. The first, Larry, was named for Lawrence Ecker, his mentor; the second for Benjamin Harrison Fletcher. Ben and Clara were delighted with little Ben; he was the grandchild they would never have. They doted on him. I have a photo of big Ben, his beautiful face filled with pride, holding little Ben close to him.
So here was Andy, crude white man from the deepest South, who had not a racist bone in his body. I can tell you it was not simply a matter of naming his child after Ben. Andy loved Ben.
Each week he made the inconvenient trek to central Brooklyn by car to collect Ben and Clara and return them in the evening. He had a school boy’s respect for “teacher” Clara. He talked dirty, scatological to Ben’s glee when she was out of ear shot. But when she was near, Andy was all attention, good manners and charm! He’d even clean the tobacco juice from the walls before she came, was on his best behavior, since he knew Clara would not put up with his “stuff.” Toward Mother, Andy behaved differently. She would make faces and turn away from Andy’s vulgarity as if in pain; that amused him and he laid it on thick.
I’ll not forget my last image of Ben. Sam took me to see him one Saturday afternoon, 1948 or so. He would die less than a year later, in 1949. He was not well at all and looking back I am sure it was the reason for our visit. Clara and Ben lived in the basement of their brownstone; the windows were high at street level and the rooms were dark. Sam and Ben had a good time laughing and gossiping about the old days. Clara went off to work. Ben flipped on the TV set, one of those anti-diluvium Dumonts with the round, ten-inch screen. We had no TV so I stared in awe at this marvel of technological progress. Ben had on the ball game. It was the Brooklyn Dodgers. Ben watched the tiny black and white action intently. Suddenly the tension was broken. With the poor camera work of the day, you could barely see the flickering image of a player no larger than an ant scooting around the bases. Ben thumped his hands up and down in joy. He turned to me, his eyes bright in the dark room as Sam and I prepared to leave. “He got a hit! He got a hit! You see that? He got a hit!”
It was Jackie Robinson.
Ten years after Ben’s death, in 1959, I met Martin Luther King. He had just finished an address to the faculty of Miami University (Ohio); a graduate teaching assistant, I was technically faculty and allowed in. The leader of the Montgomery Alabama bus boycott and the awakening Civil Rights movement of the deep south, he was already a figure, nationally known, but not yet of transcendent importance. Selma, The March On Washington, I Have a Dream, the Memphis Balcony all lay before him. The meeting was well attended; fifty or so liberal professors, all white. I felt he was speaking cautiously to his audience: a little stiff, not in his element, alert not to offend. He was seeking support, funds. On a speaking tour, some stops behind him, more to go, maybe a bit tired. None of this subtracted from the feeling that you were in the presence of an impressive man. He came to the center of the room after his speech where an informal queue waited to shake his hand. And that is how we met. Ten seconds at most. There was nothing special to note about the encounter and I would have forgotten it except that the hand I shook that day was the hand of Martin Luther King.
“Dr. King, I enjoyed your speech,” was all I could think of to say under pressure of those waiting behind me. If each of us knew then about events to come, I could have said more; that my parents and I knew a good friend of his, Bayard Rustin, who was instrumental in helping him formulate his philosophy of nonviolence and who would be a key figure in the March on Washington.
That night I called my father. I told him I heard King speak and shook his hand. “What do you think of him,” he asked. “He’s an impressive fellow,” I answered.
My father paused. Then I heard him harrumph in that way he had when not comfortable with the conversation. “Let’s see if he measures up to half the man of Ben Fletcher,” he growled.
Coda
Ben had an impressive memorial service in 1949. Perhaps a hundred old time Wobblies and friends attended. My father spoke along with others and was referred to in press notices as a “youthful” Wobbly. The youthful wobbly was 46 years old at the time. Sad to say, Ben has faded from memory these past sixty years or so, He is buried in the poor section of Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, in an unmarked grave. The authorities there are not sure of its precise location—a situation which, on deeper thought, I find altogether fitting.