Struggles in Steel (1997)
Struggles in Steel (Braddock Films, 1997)This compelling, 86-minute documentary takes on the task of illustrating the civil rights movement in the heavily segregated steel industry and its the equally segregated union, The United Steelworkers of America (USWA) at the time when the industry—devastated by mismanagement and global competition—began to crumble. It is a powerful picture of working-class life through the 20th century, told in a combination of interviews and documentary footage.
There are a series of story lines that merge in struggles in Struggles in Steel.
At a personal level, Raymond Henderson was a typical black American worker: after graduating from high school and going in the Army, he worked for 18 years at U.S. Steel’s Duquesne Works outside Pittsburgh. The documentary, for which Henderson serves as a narrator, traces his personal experiences with discrimination in the mill. Henderson also became the head of the local NAACP and, as the industry began to decline, he asked “my high school buddy, Tony Buba” to help record the experiences of other black steel workers.
The interviews with black steelworkers make up the major part of the documentary. Many of the workers, now elderly, remember years—decades, even—of humiliation during their early years in mills like US Steel in Pittsburgh and Birmingham, and Bethlehem Steel outside Baltimore. Their stories of being denied promotions, of training some white worker “and then a week later, he your boss,” of coming in early on a shift to watch the cranes operate, hoping for a chance to become the operator are painful to hear—and to tell: their memories are so strong that several of the workers break down while describing their experiences.
Eventually the black workers took advantage of the passage of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 to challenge the segregated seniority lists which restricted their promotion opportunities. For the class action, certified by a federal judge in Alabama, to go forward, the workers were also forced to sue their own union, The USWA. Ultimately, the Justice Department created a “consent decree” that ended both the class action and individual law suits. The settlement involved some minimal back pay—so insignificant that some black workers refused to cash the checks—and expedited promotions. The higher union officers grudgingly gave ground by appointing all-white “civil rights committees” to implement the consent decree so the resolution dragged on for years. For the black women interviewed, there was a double layer of discrimination-- race and sex.
There is a marvelous tone among these black steelworkers: anger, humor, the camaraderie of shared bad experiences, courage and eventually some satisfaction. Ironically, one “success” of this early struggle is illustrated by a new generation of black steelworkers who are now union officials and staff reps, properly dressed in ties and white shirts.
If black steelworkers were looking for a triumph, the destruction of the U.S. steel industry made it impossible. As black workers reached some sort of equality, the steel industry began to collapse. The documentary provides news footage of steel mills being demolished, with shots of desolate streets and boarded-up stores (an echo of Roger and Me) with a commentary by Henderson, who lost his job and his economic security and searched for almost a year to find another job—at about half the pay of the mill. As a kind of afterward, workers adamantly stress the importance of union representation, despite the problems they encountered.
It is a difficult position to review a documentary to which I have been so close. I run the Labor Studies program at a community college just up the road from the Sparrows Point steel mill featured in the documentary. I have been working on a general history of the steelworkers at the plant, so I feel that there are two deficiencies in the documentary:
- While the documentary provides the memorable story of the struggle of black workers, it shows only one response from a whiter worker, who quit a committee because he felt it was moving too slowly to implement the consent decree. In fact, many white union members, officers and staff took courageous—and political risky—stands in support of eliminating segregation as far back as 1941.
- At the same time, the movie—for reasons of time, space and focus—does not show the depth of the opposition from other white workers. Today, more than 33 years later, the bitterness of some white steelworkers toward the consent decree still looms large. In 2006, a former West Virginia miner named Ted Priester, now a Bethlehem Steel retiree, was one of the loudest complainers about a Black History Month program at the college which featured a showing of Struggles in Steel. On April 6, 2007 he wrote in The Dundalk Eagle, the community newspaper: “Our government need not apologize to black people for slavery that happened 150 years ago. No one living had anything to do with it. Our government should apologize to the white workers who worked at Bethlehem Steel in the 1960s when the consent decree was enforced by our government and they gave black workers thousands of dollars and gave nothing to white workers. I had to qualify and take a test to get a higher-paying position. They gave my position to a black steelworker who did not test or qualify for the position and cut me back to a helper. Where is my apology?”
Bill Barry Community College of Baltimore County bbarry@ccbcmd.edu
