Herbert Hill; NAACP labor director, voice against discrimination; 80

By Steven Greenhouse
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
September 4, 2004

Herbert Hill, who as the NAACP's labor director in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the loudest and most effective voices raised against racial discrimination by unions, died on Aug. 15 in Madison, Wis. He was 80.

His death, which came after a long illness, was announced by the University of Wisconsin, where he was an emeritus professor of Afro-American studies.

Through sharp oratory and myriad lawsuits, Mr. Hill played a pivotal role in the multi-decade effort to pressure many labor unions to allow blacks and other minorities to become members.

But Mr. Hill also accused others of dragging their feet on desegregation, including Hollywood studios, General Motors, General Electric and many New York City construction companies. Acting as a national watchdog on job discrimination, he also criticized President John F. Kennedy and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as not being vigorous enough in fighting segregation.

After becoming labor director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1951, Mr. Hill concentrated his fire on labor unions, asserting that many were oblivious to blacks' concerns and remained exclusively white through techniques like steering new positions to the relatives of union members.

Mr. Hill, who was white and once worked as an organizer for the steelworkers union, faulted many unions, saying the carpenters, electrical workers, sheet metal workers, plumbers and operating engineers, among others, had engaged in "a broad pattern of racial discrimination and segregation" by excluding blacks, maintaining segregated union locals and having separate seniority lines by race.

Thanks in part to the NAACP's efforts, including victories in lawsuits, these unions and others eventually began serious integration efforts.
Mr. Hill told The New York Post in 1959: "The real corruption of the American labor movement is not the fast-buck boys or the racketeers who have wormed their way in. The real corruption is moral. It's when unions say they're against discrimination and then go right on keeping Negroes out of membership and out of jobs. There's your real dry rot."

His blunt criticisms so angered union leaders that some of the most powerful urged the NAACP to fire him, saying he was sabotaging unions and sowing tensions between the labor and civil rights movements.

Broadening his efforts beyond labor, Mr. Hill criticized Hollywood in 1955, saying, "The motion picture industry still treats the Negro as an invisible man, as a menial."

In the 1960s, he led the NAACP's effort to file discrimination complaints against General Electric, Shell Oil and Lockheed. He organized pickets at GM facilities in 23 cities and at construction sites around New York and filed an unsuccessful lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court seeking to halt many state and city construction projects because of segregation.

In 1977, Mr. Hill, still crossing swords with organized labor, expressed fury that unions had won a Supreme Court ruling that intentional discrimination must be proved before the courts would view seniority systems as discriminatory. Seniority systems could hurt blacks because they were often recently hired and were thus usually the first workers laid off during downturns.

After that ruling, Mr. Hill said, "The AFL-CIO has used the Nixon court to get the heart out of Title VII," the federal law barring job discrimination.
In August 1977, he quit the NAACP, saying at the time, in a reference to the AFL-CIO's president, "George Meany will shout hooray." He then became a professor of industrial relations and Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin. There, he met and married Mary Lydon, a professor of French, who died in 2001. He leaves no survivors.

In Madison, he developed a reputation as a serious scholar and helped to build one of the nation's largest and most successful departments of African-American studies. His books include "Black Labor and the American Legal System" (1978), "Race in America: The Struggle for Equality" (1993) and "Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality" (2001).

Herbert Hill was born in Brooklyn on Jan. 24, 1924, and graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1942. He received his bachelor's degree in 1945 from New York University and a master's in 1948 from the New School of Social Research, where Hannah Arendt was his adviser.

In the summer of 1947, he did volunteer work for the NAACP, helping to integrate recreational facilities in New York. In 1949, he became a full-time NAACP organizer, and two years later became its labor director.

In his years at the NAACP he became an authority on contemporary black literature and culture, writing and editing several books on those subjects. His book "Anger and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States," was published in 1966.

At the NAACP, he often played the outspoken heavy, while the group's president, Roy Wilkins, maintained a more soft-spoken, congenial public posture, although he protected Mr. Hill from the attacks of labor leaders.

In a 1977 interview, Mr. Hill seemed to accept that his strong, blunt views had caused a parting of the ways with some former union allies.
" These people are no longer my friends," he said. "I take these ideas and values much too seriously. I cannot be friends with the enemies of black progress."

Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040904/news_1m4hill.html

 

By Nat Weinstein on a mailing list archive:

As I remember:
>> Herbert Hill was a member of the SWP [Socialist Workers Party] when I joined in 1945. He was
>> very active in the "Negro" movement and I attended an SWP organized
>> street meeting in Harlem--it may have been organized formally by the
>> Harlem NAACP--that year or the following year (?). Hill was a fiery
>> agitational speaker and was the main speaker at that event. The SWP
>> had done consistent work in the Black struggle during WWII . The
>> Harlem and Brooklyn branches had recruited many Black comrades. In
>> Brooklyn at its height we had some 80-90 members, most of whom were
>> Black. In 1946, I believe, we had a street meeting on the corner of
>> Fulton Street and Lexington Aves in Bedford Styvesant and a large SWP
>> branch headquarters down about a mile or so on Fulton Street in the
>> Downtown area under the Lexington Ave. L (elevated "subway").
>>
>> Hill left the party, as I remember in 1946 or 47. . . I
>> am just guessing, that he was so talented he thought he could go
>> further in the NAACP on his own, and he certainly did.
>>
>> I ran into him a few times after he had been made labor secretary of
>> the National NAACP in the period after Sylvia and I had got deeply
>> involved in the NAACP's Brooklyn branch right after the murder of
>> Emmet Till, in 1955.
>>
>> Hill, as I remember, was either a jazz musician or circulated in the
>> Bohemian jazz millieu. It was very common for musicians in the 20s,
>> 30s, 40s and 50s to feel entirely at home with Black musicians in
>> those circles. So for him the question of racism probably led him to
>> revolutionary politics as it did many white musicians in those days.
>> (Wasn't it in the late 1950s that white musicians were dubbed by
>> radical writers as "white Negroes"?)
>>
>> Well I just meant to confirm that Herbie was indeed an active member
>> of the SWP at the time indicated--how much earlier, I never knew.