Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly

By Peter Cole

PM Press; 2021; 324 pages; $24.95
Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition.

Reviewed by Peter Babiak

This book is about a man we should know about: Ben Fletcher, a black union organizer with the famed International Workers of the World, a union dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism. Fletcher believed that the mission of industrial unionism is to organize all workers “regardless of race, color or trade” so they could collectively counter the power of the business class. With the revitalization of black radicalism and the upswing in labour agitation for a decent minimum-wage in the US, to say nothing of the antipathy towards union-busting corporations like Amazon, it’s a good time to rethink the role of social and economic class — not only the privileged categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality — in the formation of “identity.”

After the more academic “Foreword” and “Introduction,” the book reads like an authentic biography compiled from original writings and speeches by — and about — a black man who started working on the Philadelphia docks forty years after the Civil War and by 1913 was leading a powerful IWW union local. Through almost one hundred historical documents — personal letters, editorials, pamphlets, handbills, even police and government memos — a picture emerges of a rhetorically-gifted, funny, and whip-smart defender of working people, and a believer in the ideal of industrial unionism, the idea that workers should be organized into “one big union” rather than be rendered into piecemeal organizations based on “race, color or craft differences,” as most unions were and often still are.

As Fletcher wrote in 1929, black people were experiencing “Race Consciousness,” which many considered an end-point in itself; though a necessary step, he argued that the celebration of race — like what the Harlem Renaissance writers were doing at the time, for example — must be “displaced with Class Consciousness” because, though they may be black, they are also workers in a capitalist economy. Which doesn’t mean race is irrelevant. The labour movement, he argues, “thinks and acts in terms of the White Race.” Today we’d call this “White privilege.” but calling attention to one’s identity is to call attention to differences in a limited polemical strategy. “Only by unifying our forces” — whether races, ethnicities, or genders — will working people get a fair deal from business. There is cultural distinction in every group, yes, but there is economic leverage in the collective organization of workers. The recent union drive at Amazon, which sadly failed, is helpful here: Amazon has no problem embracing the inclusive rhetoric of race, gender, sexuality; they do have a problem with a union’s talk of “class” though, because that would cost them more in wages and benefits.

When the Wobblies were organizing longshore-men in Baltimore, Fletcher called on all workers, “Negroes, polish, Italians, [and] Lithuanians,” to chip in, which they did. In an op-ed he wrote about “forming the structure of another society” based on the eventual abolition of the wage system, which could only be achieved by organizing all workers together. Fletcher made it north of the border, too, and after one such occasion in 1927, a man who heard him speak in Thunder bay wrote a letter to the editor at the Philadelphia Tribune lauding “this labor apostle of color.”

The book recalls a time when regular working people met at union halls to talk about political and social issues. We don’t think much about the “working class” and “unions” anymore, though we should. We should also know a thing or two about people like Fletcher, a man whose name belongs alongside prominent black activists like James Baldwin, Angela Davis, and Cornell West, all of whom knew that people must start seeing the world through the lens of class if they hope to make it a better place.