own separate
organization. This resulted in the creation of the National Negro Labor
Convention. This split between black and white workers tended to push
blacks into political action while whites put all their efforts into
economic advancement.

The Knights of Labor was formed in 1869, and it did seriously try to
organize blacks and whites. In the North it operated mixed locals, and in
the South it had separate black and white organizations. It employed both
black and white organizers. In 1886 its total membership was estimated at
700,000 of which 60,000 were black. The following year its total
membership had shrunk to 500,000, but its black membership had increased
to 90,000. The early labor movement which strove to organize the mass of
industrial workers was soon replaced by skilled trade unions which aimed
at the organization of a labor elite.

Although the American Federation of Labor did not profess racial
discrimination as a deliberate national policy, many of its individual
trade unions did, and, because of its federated structure, the A. F. of
L. had no power over local discriminatory practices. Whites in skilled
trades used unions to maintain an exclusive control in those trades, and
they deliberately strove to relegate blacks to the lower ranks of
industrial labor. Barred from the road to advancement, black labor became
a permanent industrial proletariat.

The Freedmen's Bureau was the one federal attempt to raise the social and
economic standing of the ex-slave. Along with the American Missionary
Association, the Freedmen's Bureau did significant work in education.
Hundreds of teachers staffed scores of schools and brought some degree of
literacy and job skills to thousands of pupils. However, beyond the field
of education, the bureau did little except to provide temporary help.
Begun as a war measure, when the Radical Republicans came into control,
they put it on a more permanent footing. Even liberals, however, were not
prepared to support a long-term social experiment, and, after some half
dozen years, the Bureau was terminated. This left the Afro-American
community without the economic base necessary for competing in American
society on an equal basis.

The one achievement of Reconstruction had been to guarantee minimum of
political and civil rights to the ex-slave, but white supremacy advocates
were adamant in their intention to destroy this advance. Where terror
and intimidation were not successf