It seems very clear to me that these workers were fired because of their organization activities and because of their membership in the Newspaper Guild. If the original discharges were motivated by economy there is no reason why Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Morse [part owners of tine plant] should not have granted the guild an opportunity to talk it over with them. The workers impressed me as being reasonable. The failure of Mrs. Morse and Mrs. Davis to attend the conference in Mrs. Herrick's office last evening after they had promised the Mayor to attend simply serves to make more clear that the real issue in this case was a determination on the part of the employers to defeat unionization.
October 15
ELINOR M. HERRICK,
Director, Regional Labor Board,
LITTLE else need be said about the causes of the editorial strike at the Amsterdam News, influential Negro New York paper, which began on October 9, although one might quote the opinion of William H. Davis, part owner of the News. "They were fired for guild activity," he said.
The fifteen locked-out workers knew that the strike was inevitable as far back as last August, when Mrs. Davis first balked even at discussing a guild contract at her shop. In December Mrs. Davis, with her lawyer Aiken Pope present, threatened to discharge the officers and active members of the Amsterdam News guild unit immediately. After this, Romeo Dougherty, the sports editor, resigned from the guild. On October 6 Mrs. Davis notified Obie McCollum, the editor, that she had deposed her husband as general manager, and that Romeo Dougherty had been appointed to the newly formed Executive Committee. By October 10 day and night picketing of the News plant was in full swing.
Strike headquarters were set up by the guild at the Hotel Dumas, a block away from the plant. The emergency committee of the New York Guild set aside $400 weekly for strike benefits to the locked-out workers and strike costs. A broad committee of Harlem cultural, religious, trade-union, and social leaders was set up to aid the strikers.
No sooner was the strike under way than Mrs. Davis discovered that the Amsterdam News was not a weekly paper run for the sake of the advertising profit. No, the Amsterdam Newss was a great national Negro institution, and the guild *as an outlaw, racketeering, dues-collecting outfit only interested in wrecking a great Negro institution. A few days later William Pickens of the N. A. A. C. P. discovered a new issue. The strike, he affirmed, was immoral, because it was a strike of Negro employees against Negro exploiters.
Heywood Broun, as president of the American Newspaper Guild, immediately brought a $250,000 libel suit against Mrs. Davis and her clique. (If the suit is won all moneys will go to the guild.) He also answered Mr. Pickens in person at an Angelo Herndon protest meeting held in a Harlem church. Pickens, speaking before Broun, had had very little to say. Broun got up and remarked that Pickens have said anything at all, since his stand on the Amsterdam News strike had disqualified him as a spokesman for progressive thought. The Negro audience cheered.
Broun's attitude, that the one issue in this strike is the right of all workers to organize, is the prevailing one in Harlem today. Within two weeks the paper's circulation dropped some 53 per cent, and six of the largest advertisers were forced to withdraw their ads. How great the pro-strike feeling really is in Harlem can be seen from the actions of the advertisers. The Howard radio shop advertised in the first scab issue. Bill Chase, locked-out staff cartoonist, went down to picket the Howard store. Within thirty minutes the manager called up strike headquarters and begged them to take Chase away. He also agreed to keep his advertising out.
The first mass picket line on press day persuaded more than one newsboy not to handle the scab paper. The Davises had eleven pickets arrested. Magistrate Overton Harris was forced not only to release the arrested pickets, but also to affirm the guild's right to throw a picket line around the shop.
Immediately after this decision the red herring of the race issue was dragged across the trail by Mrs. Davis. Editorially, the News howled about the guild being a "white man's guild," and challenged it to get Negroes jobs on white papers. At the same time Ira Kemp, head of a small Negro nationalist society and very close to the scab clique, parked a truck in front of the strike headquarters. Between large American and Ethiopian flags the truck carried a big sign demanding to know why white Communists and Socialists were helping the white, outlaw, dues-collecting guild to wreck a great non-commercial Negro institution.
The people of Harlem have not been taken in by this mud-slinging campaign. They are angered by the spectacle of the same Amsterdam News which has hitherto campaigned for Negro equality in all labor unions now accusing the American Newspaper Guild--one of the rare labor unions in which there is not the slightest trace of discrimination--of being anti-Negro. The whites in the guild, from President Heywood Broun down, have been and are picketing, collecting funds, and donating funds to their seventeen locked-out fellow-workers. No sooner had the strike started than Broun demanded that the guild's constitutional clause barring all prejudice "should rise up from the page and join the picket line of our brothers in Harlem."
When Mrs. Davis hurled her stink-bomb, the strike committee was quick with its answer:
Just as the reactionary Southerner hurls the ugly phrase "nigger lover" at any white man who makes common cause with the Negro, so does Mrs. Davis hurl the phrase "white man's guild" at a union in which whites and Negroes are on an equal footing. The Amsterdam News, by attacking the unity of black and white newspapermen, is sacrificing the best interests of our race to its own selfish ends as an employer of labor.
The guild never wanted the race issue to be raised, and its answer to Mrs. Davis has probably spiked the attempt.
The formerly pro-labor editorial policy of the paper has had its effect on the former readers of the paper. Three weeks after the strike began, the paper carried a front-page story signed by Edgar T. Rouzeau, a guild member who did not join the strike. "I believe," ran the lead, "that the Amsterdam News may be discontinued as a publication most any day. It is losing revenue daily and is without an emergency fund. It is heavily in debt already."
Mrs. Davis is frantic. Her emotional appeals accomplish nothing. Beginning with the next issue, the price of the paper will be cut from ten to five cents. Already a wide boycott of advertisers is under way. The women of Harlem dropped notes in their milk bottles to the effect that they would stop taking Sheffield's milk unless the quarter-page ad was removed. The ad has been removed.
The strike has demonstrated two facts. The first is that white employers and black employers have one thing in common--they are against all labor unions of any description, white, black, or non-discriminating. The second is emblazoned weekly in the masthead of the scab sheet in the label of the A. F. of L. Allied Printing Trades Council of New York. If the Newspaper Guild were affiliated with the A. F. of L., would A. F. of L. printers get out a paper on which A. F. of L. editorial workers were striking?
