Crossing the Color Line: Labor & the Civil Rights Movement in Durham

Of North Carolina’s major urban centers, Durham boasts a long history of both labor organizing and African American political and civil rights activity. The Durham Central Labor Union (CLU) was formed in 1926 and, by 1959, boasted a membership of roughly 15,000 members. In 1935, politically-active black Durhamites formed the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs (DCNA). Along with the city’s local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the two organizations helped to advocate for and educate Durham’s black residents.

By the 1950s, both union leaders and civil rights organizers in Durham began to work together, often behind the scenes, to foster a spirit of political cooperation and mutual support. In 1951, the Durham CLU and DCNA worked together to endorse and elect the city’s first Jewish mayor, E. J. “Mutt” Evans, who consistently worked to advance the causes of both labor unions and Durham’s black community during his decade in office.

One of the most successful arenas of bi-racial cooperation during this period came in the form of voter registration. In 1958, representatives from both the North Carolina State AFL-CIO and the state chapter of the NAACP met in secret in Greensboro to formulate a plan to enact a campaign to register black voters across the state. The leaders of this conference drew on some of the tactics that had already been implemented in Durham a decade before. 

In 1948, a group of liberal professors from Duke University, Durham CLU leaders like Wilbur Hobby, and African Americans from both the DCNA and NAACP formed an organization known as the Voters for Better Government. After they took control of political power in the city, they began to work towards racial equality in city politics. The group moved the city’s one black voting precinct to Hillside High School (which, at the time, was squarely within one of the city’s largest black neighborhoods) and set about replacing voter registration officials at this precinct from an all-white group to a more racially mixed group of individuals that made many of the city’s black residents more comfortable with the process of voter registration. Because of these changes and others, Voters for Better Government was able to raise the number of registered black voters in Durham from 400 in 1948 to over 2,000 by 1950.

This coalition between organized labor and civil rights groups in Durham continued to mature into the 1960s, as both groups sought to advance their individual causes and those of Durham’s working class population. Politically, one of their most successful campaigns came in the 1963 municipal elections. Prior to the election, Evans had announced that he would not seek reelection. When Wensell R. Grabarek, an accountant and former member of the city’s board of alderman, announced his candidacy, the Durham CLU and DCNA wasted little time in endorsing his run for office. The joint-endorsement proved to be the deciding factor in Grabarek’s election as mayor, with the vote totals from both constituencies accounting for just over half of his total votes in the city election. 

Over the course of his near decade in office, Grabarek helped to alleviate some of the pressures and tensions over issues surrounding the segregation practices of local businesses and providing modest support for wage and racial discrimination in Durham public schools supported by the Durham CLU’s City School Employees Union. 
The support of both the DCNA and the Durham CLU for the same or similar policies throughout the 1960s helped to push Durham to the forefront of civil rights and pro-labor policies in North Carolina. National political leaders and journalists consistently highlighted the coalitional efforts of the Durham CLU and the city’s civil rights organizations as a model of successful opposition to the anti-labor and segregationist politics of the broader U.S. South.