Ernest Calloway Fused Civil Rights and Class Struggle
Twentieth-century black labor leader Ernest Calloway never became a household name. But through his work in both the Teamsters and the NAACP, he embodied the transformative potential of a united labor and civil rights movement.
Ernest Calloway (at right) with the rank-and-file organizing committee of the International Shoe Company, outside the Cherokee Plant at 3400 Lemp Avenue in St Louis, Missouri. (State Historical Society of Missouri, Ernest Calloway Papers)
On August 6, 1957, St Louis mayor Raymond R. Tucker, the quintessential technocrat, sourly watched the votes get tallied. His initiative, backed by the city’s business elite, to amend the city charter in order to blunt the power of local aldermen and unions went down in defeat. An unlikely coalition of forces including the NAACP, the Teamsters, black ward leaders, and small business interests voted down the measure by a three-to-two margin.
The victory encapsulated a period when the city’s civil rights and labor movement elements were confident and ascendant in their power. The St Louis NAACP had doubled its membership in less than a year and boasted a thriving trade union division. Teamsters Local 688, representing ten thousand mostly warehouse distribution workers, developed an innovative “community stewards” program that mobilized members around local political fights and racial justice issues.
Instrumental in all of this was Ernest Calloway, research director for Teamsters Local 688 and president of the St Louis NAACP. From his early life in the Kentucky coal fields as a United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) supporter to his golden years as a stimulating lecturer at St Louis University, Calloway offered a compelling theory and practice for exercising working-class power with a sophisticated political analysis that is all too rare in our time.
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