let me start by saying just how much i appreciate the work of the bridges center i was reading somewhere a little quoted called it a center of publicly engaged intellectuals addressing issues of working people around the world it's a pretty good description and i really so much appreciate the work that you all do on behalf of the working people in the union movement and if you want to thank you andrew for making all the arrangements everything went really smoothly i know that's a lot of work and i much appreciate you get me who continue to fight the good fight on behalf of working people in the union movement and i sense there's a number of you in this room that would fall under that description so this is some level hopefully the story is one that will appeal to all of us and offer some insights into that fight that i think so many of us are concerned about so let me start my story here with a little prop this and then he archivist in the room i hope not because i've done a terrible job of keeping this document in any shape this is a life magazine from december twelfth one nine hundred fifty five so this is right after the merger of the a f l and the cia and what's interesting is that the you know pass this around actually what's interesting is there's a lot of talk in here about labor's newfound respect ability in power and potential power one of the pictures in here is of a guy whose name may mean something to folks in seattle in the northwest day back they beck was president of the teamsters union and so they have a picture of him in his where the five million dollar temple the teamsters built and so day back by just clicking a button  curtain comes away panel and you can see the u s capitol so there's this real sense that labor has arrived labour's powerful neighbors respectable see right mills the famed sociologist wrote a book around this time called the new men of power and that's what this is really partridge but if you go a few more pages into this there's something that caught my eye that's relevant to the story i'm going to tell and it says here a new kind of unionists for labour's new role and this is a series of three pictures of a guy named earl brown and brown works at a company in st louis missouri called butler brothers which is a warehousing and distribution operation and so one of the pictures says by day earl brown bears problem with boss the middle picture is by night brown oversees teen dance and then the third one is on sunday brown attends lutheran service and what it doesn't say is that brown was a community steward a member of the community steward program was the brainchild of two remarkable men whose lives form the basis for my study harold gibbons an earnest callaway they were remarkable interracial do a duo that left their mark certainly on st louis where they did most of their work and do and even nationally they had some influence as well the focus of their their laboratory for their work with this community stewards program was teamsters local six eighty eight in st louis missouri it was one of the largest if not the largest unions in missouri during the one nine hundred fifty s and one nine hundred sixty s fluctuated between ten and twelve thousand members this was a union that was the subject of a book by a sociologist arnold rose fairly renowned sociologist in the fifty's called union solidarity when the state department wanted people from overseas visiting dignitaries to see a union that they thought was progressive at noncommunist they would bring them to st louis to see this union and this is where they started this community unionism in the idea of community steward program was the basis for his earnest callaway  explained was that workers were not only economic beings but they were social beings that you work eight hours a day but you have another sixteen hours a day that you live as a citizen in a community and what they tried to do and what they said and what i want to specifically talk about tonight is how you could use the expertise and knowledge and power that you had as a worker in a member of a powerful union and use that to affect and improve the quality of life and enhanced your ability to be an effective citizen so that's the focus of what i'm going to talk about tonight but let me say a couple other things initially about why i think this work is significant i would argue that the teamsters are one of america's most consequential post world war two unions and also one of the least studied ones and so let me just say i should just say at the outset writing about the teamsters i'll just say that i have no special knowledge about jimmy hoffa's whereabouts just issued that disclaimer because people always ask that but the teamsters are i think really an important and consequential union that's mainly been studied innocence ational istic manner and so i think there's a beginnings of a cottage industry of scholars that are looking that this in a more again scholarly way and so i think this is an important contribution to that work st louis is also i think an understudied city and it's an important kind of crucible of many of the types of problems and challenges that cities have experienced particularly since world war two st louis once was memorably described as either a northern city with southern exposure or a southern city with northern exposure it has this kind of interesting border place and is a kind of a crossroads city but a very strong union movement in a vibrant working class this book is also very much about the civil rights and black freedom struggle which givens and callaway often said was really the moral barometer of the legitimacy of the union movement and they focused a lot of attention in terms of in a racial solidarity in a racial work it's also about the changing landscape of urban politics in the one nine hundred fifty s and one nine hundred sixty s in the role that a progressive union could play in shaping that so what i want to do is talk particularly in terms of this notion of the total person unionism the union is and that's concerned about workers in their totality their working lives and their community lives by examining two particular initiatives that were most important to my characters givens and callaway and that's the community stewards program in the one nine hundred fifty s and then a program in the one nine hundred sixty s that they call slums so first what i need to do is to get them to st louis fairly quickly because their lives run parallel to each other and i should just add i'm going to talk mostly about this political partnership they had for twenty eight twenty five years but they also had interesting lives in their own right harold givens was a very powerful leader in the teamsters union was jimmy hoffa's right hand man actually for a period of time for several on several occasions almost ran for the presidency of the union and he figures in some pretty prominent national politics that i'll get to a little bit later ernest calloway was head of the st louis as well as being a union official helped elect a number of african american first office in st louis and also had a national profile but if you want to know more about that you'll have to read the book i'm going to have to focus particularly given the time i have and i really want to have some time for q and a and to talk about the implications of this work you know to talk about their joint activity so let me tell you a little bit about these two these t men and the beginnings of who they were and get them to st louis in their political partnership so you would think that harold gibbons is white irish catholic ernest callaways african american and they grow up in america that's rigidly segregated on a racial basis you wouldn't think they had that much in common but you would be wrong they were born a year apart callaways born in one thousand nine hundred nine givens is born in one thousand ten one of the key things to understand about them is that they were both coal miner sons gibbons grew up in pennsylvania callaway grew up in jenkins in kentucky and i think out of this coal mining experience are several things they took from that they were certainly exposed to the united mine workers of america an interracial a fairly progressive union they had a real sense of us in them if i can put it that way a sense of belonging callaway would talk about you know the tight social control that mine owners operated in these coal mine you know under in these coal mining towns so they really understood what callaway would describe as corporate feudalism that's what they grew up under these were hardscrabble poor environments that they grew up under a given this work that their fathers did and how there was a boom and bust in the coal economy these were working class folks to their roots they were also talented ambitious bright young men who given this case ended up with a ninth grade education calloway got through high school or just barely they were determined to prove what the working class could do and that's something that's key to understanding then they did get their education in other ways the less conventional they givens went to the wisconsin school for workers you know that's what i do for a living is this labor education things i'm really pleased to see that that's how these guys got their education in earnest callaway would do a famous labor college north of new york city called brookwood labor college so they got there in their education through these independent institutions they were both socialist and not communist and that deserves a little bit of attention i would say that they were both members of formal socialist organizations but not for particularly long i would say that while they were not formal socialists they continued to think in what i would call a socialist idiom and that stayed with them they had some bruising encounters with the communist party i could talk a little bit more about them later but just to say that in terms of the communist party's practice of democracy the sense that its policy on race often changed and other things both givens and callaway were firmly anti communist throughout their careers but not conventional red baiting anti communist in certain ways and we can talk a little bit more about that as well they both come to chicago givens in one nine hundred twenty nine callaway in one nine hundred thirty seven in this is the place where they really hone themselves in politics and they both get involved in the industrial union movement in that particular era so givens actually becomes a teacher and the works progress administration under franklin roosevelt who teaches adult education callaway gets involved with the red caps union that's a union that represented mostly african american men who worked as porters and in terminals and railway stations and what's interesting is that it very young ages they become fairly high level labor leaders harold givens is only twenty six years old and he becomes a vice president of the national american federation of teachers pretty young right when the deed to be a president of a union at that point which is just reminds us how people were catapulted into these positions in that period and callaway self the thirty years old and he becomes the education director for the red caps and the editor of their newspaper which has the wonderful name bags and baggage and calloway to is this amazing public intellectual i mean he writes he's a guy that i mean just barely out of high school education rights brilliantly and prolifically for all kinds of publications and one of my ambitions someday if i can find a publisher is i would love to do an anthology annotated anthology of callaways writings they're just so sharp and weedy and polemical and smart and he does that throughout his career he really is a labor journalist in a public intellectual they both then get heavily involved in their unions givens goes from the f t he actually works to the textile workers organizing committee and then ends up in st louis in one nine hundred forty one where he control leads the retail wholesale drug store union and i've got a few little things here i can show you give you a little sense pictorially of these guys so he'll gibbons i'll just have to flip around real quick that i hate to mention it in this area of the room in particular the very bridges center but one of the ways he cuts his teeth is harry bridges who's head of the longshore and warehouse union tries to move into we're going to his workers in st louis and givens repulses them and actually uses anti communist stuff to to do that and that actually helps rally people around his leadership perhaps not one of his most sterling moments but again in the union movement people do defend their jurisdictions  that's held givens in one nine hundred forty one and givens really wins asperse pretty quickly in terms of organizing aggressively getting more people in the union he's a very strong advocate of racial justice and dust things in st louis in terms of pressing for racial justice that are not all that popular among certain segments even of his own union and elsewhere but he's very committed to that this is something that the labor movement absolutely has to be and then in one thousand nine hundred forty nine he makes the fateful decision to merge his union o union with the a a de f l union the teamsters and there are a lot of complex reasons for why that happened but let me just say and i'd be glad to talk more about that but one of the main ones was that given said this is the most powerful union in america that he's own union he questioned you know how committed they were to organizing new workers the resources they put in he said the teamsters will track down employers who run away and try to escape from the union their aggressive they're strong we want to be part of them callaways trajectory and i almost have them to st louis i just got a couple more things to say here but it is important kelly does something very brave and courageous in one nine hundred forty one he refuses to register for the draft at the dawn of world war two and this was quote unquote the good war right i mean to not register for the draft to say you were going to be a noncombatant was a pretty profound thing to do but callaway was very clear you know i'm african american why should i fight for rights of broad that i'm denied at home and for reasons that are not entirely clear to me from the documents i've looked at i don't know how he escaped going to jail but he was eventually ruled you know physically unfit for service and so he was able to you know he suffered no no jail sentence for that callaway continues to he goes to work for the cia own use the national paper of the congress of industrial organizations the other thing that just kind of parent that equally important in his life is he has a first marriage to a woman who writes for the chicago defender and well the interesting thing is one of these little historical quirks is i've read ninety boxes of ernest callaways life story in material i talked to fifteen sixteen people who knew him none of them knew he had a first wife and i still don't quite know why that was the case and actually just as a kind of his for any historians in the room i actually found out about it through his f b i file it was where i found you know found that he had this first wife and she dies but what's interesting is a couple years later he remarried a woman named vernon lee and they formed this very pit they become this power couple of the african american community in st louis to vernon lee is a very formidable figure she becomes the first black woman elected to the missouri legislature  earnest manages her campaign and their real powerhouse couple and i've actually got a picture of them i can show you a few minutes the other thing about calloway that is after the war he gets a british trade union congress scholarship to go study at ruskin college in london so there is or is calloway here on the right and so there are lots of people from all over the world their socialist and various types of leftist the go to this famous labor college to study callaway said that he kind of freaked the british out a little bit with his  brightly colored argyle socks and his informal american ways but what calloway gets during this time they do these tutorials there with instructors he gets a lot of time to really think and write and a couple of things emerge from that that are critical when he gets to st louis because the british labor party is in control after world war two and the union movement gets to play a pretty expansive sort of role in helping determine larger political policies and callaway says that should be something that the u s union movement should do and they also becomes very clear in his mind that racism in the in the lack of racial justice is really the achilles heel of the american union movement in terms of not exercising or practicing solidarity and again it's this moral barometer if this movement is not going to stand up on racism in unjust racial justice issues within its own ranks as well as in society it's not a labor movement that's worth very much so these are the convictions that he takes back with him to america like the way the cia conducted it that's another thing i could talk about later but just to say at that point this is the story goes he meets harold givens who we had briefly known in chicago back in the thirty's in a bar in chicago so there's another historical lesson right a lot of the most momentous decisions happen in bars so is the story goes given says the callaway look at once you come down to st louis for three months and help me set up a research department for local six eighty eight callaway agrees and three months become twenty five years of this really incredible political partnership so i think gibbons and callaway there were a couple understanding as they shared as they began to collaborate they were really interested in showing what the working class could do and you have to remember that they represented mostly low wage workers in warehouses and i think there are some lessons for us in all of this today in terms of the low wage work we're doing these are people coming out of the depression they're absolutely determined to uplift these low wage workers and this is kind of the golden era of collective bargaining and they do some very interesting things with the bargaining power they have they have a labor health institute that they established fully paid health care for workers and almost fully paid health care for their families and the employers finance it workers don't have to pay for this and while it's a joint operation the union exercises an enormous amount of control in helping with health care and they're extremely concerned with mental health as well because i think growing up as hard as they did in their lives they really wanted to build what they called a wall of security for workers they felt it was very important for workers to feel a sense of security and gibbons once put it that you know this isn't just for the individual it's for the total person that individuals are part of a larger group if you have access to leisure and recreation it enhanced as your ability to think through for so she'll problems not only as a worker but as a citizen they created a labor health and welfare camp thirty miles outside of st louis and again givens is attitude is somebody who i interviewed who knew him said you know if the boss could have a country club where he or she can go for recreation why not workers so they created a country club like atmosphere with a lake and golf and recreational activities for workers in their family and another thing that they did in the early sixty's was they built senior citizen housing using a combination of federal funds and union pension funds in an area st louis where the promise of urban renewal which in those days was of referred to as negro removal this was an area that had been devastated in st louis and the housing that had been promised didn't materialize they built senior citizen housing there because again they were looking at a quail to grave way with providing security for workers and i think just all the social engineering that they use collective bargaining to do it's just interesting to note because sometimes you think about the diminishment of labor power there's a great story that jimmy hoffa used to tell after he had met gibbons early you want in the fifty's where he says you know givens you call them givens he says you know given he said there are people in detroit that don't like me he says but those folks in st louis actually hate you because they just kind of was understandable i think to a lot of these employers i mean he wanted money and he wanted power but within certain boundaries he wasn't using them for broad expanse of social purposes gibbons they didn't quite know what he wanted and i will say this i mean corruption is an issue that often comes up with the teamsters givens did look the other way certainly on a number of things of regarding democracy and democratic practice there's no question about that but he never did sweetheart deals with employers he didn't take money himself personally he lived very well as expense account he was quite the hedonists that's another whole story but just to say that personally he was really quite incorruptible and again i've read his f b i files and they're like callaways are like this givens were like this and they just keep saying we can't get anything on this guy and believe me they tried that's another whole part of the story that asked me a question on that one later but what i want to just say by conclusion before i get into the community stuart is just to summarize this sets a building something on behalf of the working class so this is a little bit of an extended quote but i think it's important to give you a sense of givens as an callaways mentality or their worldview about what they were trying to do and what workers should try to do so they describe all of the stuff they created in st louis that i just mentioned in given said this was a job a building that was not done by college professors no offense smart lawyers or high salaried executives but by little people common ordinary people the men and women of the shops i emphasize this because all too often we have the working class have far too great an inferiority complex far too many of us fail to realize our powers our abilities our potentiality s far too often we lack the confidence to plan to tackle jobs that have to be done so that gives you a sense just of a deeply committed they were to working people having power and showing what they can do with it and that's what led to the community stewards program this first total person activity i want to talk about but they didn't want their people to hide behind these walls of security in these private welfare states that they negotiated they said that the purpose of having this power is to use it to help actually improve your community and i think if we look at our situation now and think back to there as they really thought very strategically about where they stood so the test hartley act as many of you may know passed in one thousand nine hundred seven it was an anti union act designed to curb the power labor and the thing they were most concerned about in test hartley was that the tactics they used to use eyes mass picketing secondary boycotts these things where they actually use collective power you couldn't use them anymore that's not to say that they were militant they didn't strike they didn't use collective power where they could but they realized the game was going to have to be played much more in the community sphere they also said to their workers they said look at the union is not a slot machine you get all these wonderful benefits but it's not like you pull the thing that you know you pull the lever and all these benefits come out we see you  total human beings not as economic units they used to talk about the other sixteen hours you spend eight hours a day working you spend sixteen hours a day in a community and you could have the best union contracts the best conditions in the shop all of that but if you go to a community where education isn't good housing sucks you know your infrastructure is crumbling so any of that sound familiar you know you've only come so far and so they really said was look you we can use the power and knowledge and expertise as we have as workers to improve the quality of life in the conditions in our community and they sometimes said what we want to create i love this concept is a community bargaining table they want to take the idea of collective bargaining and let's do this in a community so they were saying to that we want to take our place workers should be able to take their place in terms of dealing with political and civic elites and talk about infrastructure talk about housing talk about education talk about transportation and not only talk but negotiate so how did they do this well they created what they called a community steward program so they took the idea of people to shop steward is basically you know in a point in employment setting you have somebody who represents you well they said we're going to treat the city of st louis like it's an employer ok so st louis has wards political wards so they would say and like a department in a shop they would say that each ward twenty six in st louis was going to have community stewards people that were trained using their union expertise in the community so they would go out and solicit grievances you know they would solicit grievances from people in the community the street lights not working there's an eyesore next year house there's been flooding whatever you know they would then had their community stewards would deal with the appropriate city department sometimes with they call their city council members alderman or older persons so they would do some of that sort of work and they would get these things taken care of so there were over two hundred of these grievances in the one nine hundred fifty s of that sort that they got dealt with but they really had much larger fish to fry than just trying to minimize fixing streetlights or sidewalks they really wanted to get at the basic types of decisions that affect the quality of life in a city and so what they began to think about was in they asked workers they would have these citywide community meetings they'd say well what's bothering you what do you want to have fixed and so the initial issues that they had revolved around transportation and and sewers you know explain sewers doesn't seem real sexy but it is in a way out i'll tell you first the transportation system in st louis was privately run the fares were too high the quality was low and the source system was important because st louis is a very fragmented city the city and county have dozens of individual municipalities they didn't have a centralized sewer district to help oversee the sewer system and the serious part of it was that st louis gets lots of rain and flooding and they had a this outbreak i believe in the one nine hundred twenty so there was a real public health dimension to not having the swimmers appropriately manage and what they did was they collected signatures to get these things on the ballot so they mobilize folks and here you see this is around the transportation issue and you know thermometer on the right is the city of st louis how many signatures they got in that county is on is on the left and the counties on the right and this guy on the left  decided that's who he was so that's what they did was this type of public you know grassroots campaign they lost the transportation campaign although eventually they pay there was a public authority created to oversee transportation in this city but they won the sewer one and got the oversight of the of the sewer district and this in bold in them to get into other things they had these very signa other types of significant fights they fought for early brown the guy in the life magazine he proposed that there should be a free city free for your city college in st louis said the sons and daughters of the working class could have access to education and while they didn't win that eventually they did get a community college system in st louis so this was the projected or of that they got very interested and concerned about juvenile delinquency which was overblown in some ways as a social problem in the fifty's but if you think about people from the working class and low wage workers who had just come out of the depression to see their kids slipping away was of great concern so they and the other thing was great about the community stewards was they were like muckraking journalists they would go out and do reports they collect data they were trained to do this they actually put report together submitted it to a circuit grand jury in st louis here's our recommendations about what we should do they created a recreational center that the teamsters ran for teenagers and the thing i like the best and maybe you will too is they actually proposed creating us a drag strip where you could teenagers could drag safeway you know drag race safely but that was one of their but they were just top full of these types of ideas you know union people really you know implementing you know this activism in the community the issue that really put them most on the on the on the that i think really made the reputation the community stored in st louis was a campaign around rat control and i want to explain that a little bit it's a little bit of a funky subject in a way but also a very serious one in terms of public health and its implications and this gets into some of the bigger questions about what these guys were doing because st louis had a huge rat problem in the forty's and early one nine hundred fifty s and part of it was they had you know open dilapidated housing they the housing stock was in total decay but the city leaders and developers didn't want to do anything about it because they wanted to do downtown revitalization you know they wanted to tear this stuff up and you know they didn't want to you know be be a part of taking care of these residences and spending this money if they were going to tear them down and so there was an incident nine hundred fifty four were a young african american child two years old is severely bitten by rats and almost dies so the community stewards in a lot of in this case a lot of them were african american this is a local union by the way about twenty twenty five percent of its membership was african american about thirty percent women and there actually is a fair amount of involvement in the community stewardship program by both women and african americans so the stewards get into action muckraking journalist they take pictures they lobby they rally they go to city council meetings they end up filing a lawsuit eventually to get the city to enforce its rat control  and this is one of the moments why i just do this history stuff because i'm reading in the archives one day and i'm plowing through all this tedious stuff and i see a document marked confidential and it's from the director of the city health department and the director the city health department says we have no intention of enforcing this threat control ordinance sometimes the conspiracy stuff really is true but in any case the stewards continued to press and they got the city of st louis to actually pass and were notes that was in forcible to start to actually have rat control and this was a major public health issue but also this was a union that really was it also fighting not only for public health but for racial justice the sense as one labor leader said in st louis the conditions of people in poor neighborhoods should be you know basically they should get the same level of service and protection of public health as people in more well to do neighborhoods so it really helps cement the relationship between the teamsters union and the african american community in st louis and this is a uni also that fought for racial against racial segregation developed a plan in one nine hundred fifty one to actually help desegregate schools when the teamsters who they joined nationally said they had no interest in organizing african american cabdrivers they eyes them they work for better public housing which was mostly for african americans in st louis and i'll get back to that in a second all of this coleman dates a night hundred fifty seven in a very interesting way and i'll just say this is briefly as i can there's an effort on the part of a group of st louis had agreed they still do they have a group of civic and political leaders that had the wonderful name civic progress these are all of the top corporate political university leaders in st louis and what they want to do because they want to really move toward downtown redevelopment and they think the teamsters and some of the members of the city council are stopping it is they want to switch from voting on a ward basis to an at large basis right so that dilutes growing african american political power grow it dilutes union power because it's much harder to run citywide that it is on the basis of words so really it's just calloway put it trying to make this city safe for you know urban revitalization so the teamsters mobilized with gibbons on the community stewards and callaways head of the end up only c p and st louis this is what they call back in the day the negro labor alliance and they beat this three to two i mean they really kick their butts i mean the city elite just as totally flipped out about this business week magazine as this wonderful article which thought it was wonderful where they say that they're going to the civic progress is going to have to acknowledge the teamster power and seek it what they called a civil rep pro and deal with the problem of givens wouldn't be the thing that they could say deal with the problem of trumka or the problem of whoever but it just is a sense of the type of power they had and what's interesting is they were poised to exercise even more power they were looking at a community wide assembly that they were going to use to look at more structural issues like taxes and investments and they started to move into the suburbs where new development had come in and developers were mistreating folks and violating contracts they started to move into the suburbs they also these folks were an environmentalist before labor environmentalism was cool they're fighting against pollution within the city of st louis this is a picture in one nine hundred fifty eight  also on the cover of the book as well where they're starting to mobilize around pollution issues so they really are starting to make progress in terms of this notion of a community bargaining table but the story doesn't entirely does not have a happy ending at this point for several reasons and one of the sobering things about it is that the roots on this are not so deep and this program didn't last what happens is the teamsters get caught up in a bunch of corruption scandals in the late one nine hundred fifty s givens has his own problem with a tainted election i can talk more about that later he wins the election to a regional position in the teamsters using disputed votes seven of them to actually get elected he also becomes jimmy hoffa's right hand man manages his campaign to get elected president of the teamsters so givens goes to washington and takes some of the talented folks that were working on the community stewards program with him and they're also spending enormous amounts of money with legal fees that they used to you used to but there is another bout with total person unionism that they get into in the one nine hundred sixty so let me take you through that the trade union oriented war on the slums so briefly givens in pure talent callaways lives get a little parallel at this point i have but it's just interesting to see what happened so givens works for a hof and he really tries as best he can to enlarge hoffa's social perspective as a pretty narrow trade unionist he doesn't really succeed that well the one place where he there sixty five while she was ferrying demonstrators so that was one area where givens had some success with half a social vision but there's a but given tougher relationship it's fraught with peril they don't get all the volatile guy givens is no shrinking violet so there's a famous incident in one thousand nine hundred sixty three where john f kennedy is assassinated as you may know hated the kennedys and particularly robert kennedy john f kennedy's brother and givens was running the headquarters of the union as he often did because hoffer was travelling a lot and he waters the flag at the headquarters lowered to half staff not out of any love for kennedy but out of respect for the office of the president you've been assassinated hoffa finds out and goes ballistic says raise that flag back up and he says some very intemperate things about john f kennedy and so that's the final straw for givens while he remains loyal to hof and he goes back to st louis and begins to put his effort in doing work there the other thing about givens in the period that's interesting is it's clear that hoffa is going to go to jail he was had he was like a tough line guy in terms of dodging convictions but he finally gets convicted givens actually contemplates running for the presidency of the union puts a platform together and it would have been one of those historical what ifs of harold givens had actually become president of the teamsters but he backs away he doesn't think he has enough votes and it's interesting because then half appoints a guy named frank fitzsimmons to take his place  fitzsimmons is a pretty lackluster guy i interviewed jimmy hoffa's daughter who's a judge in st louis and she said to me you know my father often said one of the worst mistakes he ever made was not having harold come leave the union integration he manages campaigns for a number of african americans the first school board member elected his wife the first black woman elected to the missouri legislator later a first state senator the calloway ends up getting into a feud with a guy named william clay a long time  became a long time congressman from st louis and briefly callaway believes that saint louis is not birmingham or selma or the deep south that he said you can have a plan social revolution in st louis we have black electoral power that we can use t negotiate with the democratic party which now basically control st louis and he moved away from direct action play was a guy that very much believed in direct action felt we want our freedom and we're going to get it now and he and callaway become  few really feud in cal in clay is basically callaways nemesis so calloway begins to get marginalized within the black community in st louis so the way in which they reestablish the community union total union person union doesn't think in the  sixty s i want to talk about this briefly is there trade in oregon and war in the slums so you may recall this is a take off in the war on poverty you know lyndon johnson's great society the need to spend money in terms of trying to address injustice you cannot make injustice generally and racial injustice particularly in calloway's view there's too much culture of poverty argument and all of this that this is all about you need to have bitch you a poor people the better work habits and that's how you're going to deal with poverty and what  callaway says he's a structuralist he says you know this is the socialist idiom you know you need jobs you need employment you need education you need these types of hard things to do but these are the types of things we ought to be doing and so what they say is let's again take our expertise th workers have on the shop floor and apply them within a neighborhood in st louis so they take a neighborhood in st louis called tandy which is a deteriorating neighborhood to callaway who lives there along with five hundred other teamsters mostly african american they say that we could turn this neighborhood around if we have a community action program so they put together a really talented team of organizers to work on this the leader of the program is a guy who's a methodist minister we're day methodist minister who had organized peasants in bolivia and he says we're going to give i'm going to give givens a dose of saul alinsky so they get into this really hard hitting community organizing they allied with local insurgence you know the sixty's was hard for a lot of folks in the union movement how do you deal with civil rights and racial justice insurgencies the antiwar movement farm workers all of this they said we embrace this so they fought for all kinds of things within neighborhoods you know grocery prices that were too high more african american firefighters and police and again this idea of the community bargaining table there were people from the tandy area council who were teamsters who get designated by welfare rights groups to be their lead negotiators in bargaining with the city because city st louis in the city of missouri gave dettori asli low benefits to people that were poor and on welfare they also get heavily involved in tenants rights they take this knowledge about housing and they begin to fight for tenants rights it's interesting because they talk about creating a wagner act for tenants using the language you know of the labor world in terms of rights we want to take those sorts of rights and say that tenants should have them so again you see this expertise that you have as a worker using it in the community and they actually align with the united auto workers is a brief program called the alliance for labor action where the teamsters and the auto workers work jointly on these community issues it didn't work in most places because the teamsters mostly didn't care about this but givens was one of the few people in the teamsters that the united auto workers trusted they had a very successful program the other thing that's interesting in terms of the racial justice component is givens does something very courageous in  volatile time there's a group of black militants called the black liberators who were beaten up in a st louis police station after an arrest and givens gets up in a very public place in september of sixty eight and denounces police brutality in no uncertain terms the culmination of this program i'm going to spend a little bit of time one and then i'll wrap this up hopefully get time for some questions is the backing that the union in the tandy area council give a public housing tenants rent strike in one thousand nine hundred sixty nine this is the first public housing rent strike of any real magnitude in u s history and briefly put st louis has public housing it actually became kind of the poster child for this failed public housing policy you know these big high rise apartments in the middle of nowhere no amenities no services shoddily built and maintained there was one of them called pruitt i go which was actually imploded in one nine hundred seventy two is this multi story thing and there's still nothing that's been built there and that was one nine hundred seventy two there are people that are involved in this activity you know the tandy area council who know these public housing tenants and so they start to support them and this strike drags on because the tenants they just say look a lot of you know public housing becomes racially segregated a lot of the people that are in it are poor they can't afford to pay the rent increase that's why they go on strike and this is a volatile time it's nine hundred sixty nine hundred moving toward the summer so the mayor st louis goes to harold gibbons and he says because they just don't know what to do with this and they're worried st louis had avoided civil disorder in the sixty's but they're worried they're going to get it so he says t gibbons look can you do something here can you help me settle this thing you've got the credibility with all the sides you've been through negotiator that he is says yes sure i'll help you but i have some conditions so givens is conditions are that he wants to set up a new organization the st louis civic alliance for housing that's going to manage public housing in st louis and what's interesting is that they it they developed a lot of expertise around housing to the point that the secretary of housing and urban development at the time a man named george romney you may know his son but his daddy was you know actually fairly fairly moderate to liberal republican and actually believed in fair and integrated housing so romney blesses the teamsters managing this housing givens pulls together all of these elite folks in st louis headed by a guy named augie bush who's a beer magnate and had real connections in st louis is working class neighborhoods they raise a lot of money to fund this civic alliance for housing and the teamsters union runs housing public housing in st louis for two years and they the principle is the tenant should have a voice in determining policy it's really just notion that you know workers and working class people and poor people really can manage things one of the chief organizers from the tandy area council becomes the head of the st louis  teamsters actually are making public policy in st louis in big important ways but again this is not the last either after the major threat goes away there's less concern about from the business folks about providing money for this the other thing that happens is they actually have a plan to rehabilitate pruitt i go in these other big housing places to do low rise housing to raise them and to do housing is if people mattered romney first to endorse this plan and then he reneges on it because richard nixon has a southern strategy starts to play up to voters in the self doesn't want to be doing this racial justice stuff and eventually the plug gets pulled the money isn't there the st louis alliance for housing you know dies  and so most of the energy that had gone into the tandy area council in the trade union were in a war in the slums gets dissipated through the work on housing and they don't have the capacity to follow up on it they actually do have a problem that there are white workers though that say we want something in or neighborhood in south st louis and they put together a project in that neighborhood that begins to deal with community issues and it begins to have some measure of success as well so it's interesting because they didn't just do it in the black community they started doing in the white community and in the suburbs but they run into problems and i'll just say them briefly there's backlash from some of their white members because they feel they're being too favorable toward african americans i can talk more about that later but the simplest way to put this is that there were many white workers because of given racial justice advocacy they began to see themselves much more as homeowners and consumers in taxpayers rather than a citizens and so you know there's a sobering side to all of this as well and then there's an insurgency from the left that says you're neglecting the shops for shop floor that you know you're spending so much time in the community particularly united parcel service that our conditions are deteriorating and there was real truth in that that there was some level of neglect of the shop floor what's interesting is that while givens crushes this left wing insurgency they actually begin to move in some ways givens was no feminist by any means but he begins to start to see with the dawn of the women's movement the things like daycare and abortion rights are really important and actually starts to do some stuff in that issue and childcare and so there might have been a third act of total person unionism but it was not to be so let me do now the dana madi anti climax here to the story than spend a few minutes talking about apologize it's hard to distill all of this in do forty minutes i'm going to do my best here but just the way in which this ends i think is kind of interesting and important because given his demise actually revolves around his vehement support for the anti war movement opposing the vietnam war while givens in callaway or anti communist they never totally bought into american foreign policy and so they were vehement opponents of u intervention in latin america in other parts of the world and certainly vietnam so harold given speaks at the major vietnam moratorium march in one thousand nine hundred sixty nine he goes to vietnam in the early seventy's and tries to negotiate for the release of w s the first labor for peace national gathering is hosted in st louis by harold givens in one thousand nine hundred seventy two but he runs into trouble with frank fitzsimmons who took office place as head of the union because fitzsimons is sucking up to the nickname he's cozying up excuse me to the going to member of an academic here these these these cozying up to the nixon administration and they want his a they flatter the hell out of him and it's great because there's all these great tapes you can listen to people like john dean and charles colson i mean the nixon inner circle of the white house talking about harold givens and finally when fitzsimmons is engineers an endorsement for richard nixon the teamsters executive board votes and it's something like sixteen to one or twenty to one or whatever it was in favor of the nixon endorsement you know the one vote was that wouldn't go along with it was harold givens so fitzsimmons conspires there's a whole story behind it but the long and short of it is that he's able to force givens out as head of the union in st louis early in one thousand nine hundred seventy three and while givens is rim givens remains on for all intents and purposes that's the end of his career calloway retires in one thousand nine hundred sixty nine goes on to teach at st louis university by all accounts is a brilliant teacher continues to write the thing about his writing i think that's so significant in the one nine hundred seventy s he's saying that we need global unions he's talking about the rise of multinational corporations in the  seventy s and saying we better watch out with what's going on here gibbons dies in one thousand nine hundred two and it's interesting because i interviewed his daughter and his daughter told me that my father is as usual no to say that so cal givens wanted his eulogy to read concerned citizen but tragically ernest calloway couldn't deliver the eulogy because he had a stroke that left him incapacitated and unable to speak and callaway dies  seven years later in one thousand nine hundred eighty nine so just a couple of concluding remarks very quickly i mean just as as far i mean a lot of things i think that are relevant about the story i'm just going to say a couple of things really  quickly back in the sixty's callaway said you know we've reached a stagnant plateau in terms of organizing this was in the one nine hundred sixty s so i think there they thought you thought of the union movement as much more than just unionized workers so i think the things that are going on now we're going to zing low wage workers immigrant workers driver's good economy immigrants day laborers they would say these are all very very important things that a union movement should be doing i think they would say the total person unionism has its relevance and its potential look at things like affordable housing public health issues work family issues pay leave child care i think they would see rich opportunities and potential for these types of  alliances bargaining for the common good something where unions go in and bargain not just about their own demands but broader community demands i think they would have supported those i think they would say that politics really needs to be a year round activity it can't just be something that we do at elect time and it can't just be focused on candidates and parties it has to be about civic participation in more broadly and i think they would also say that the fight for racial justice they would have so applauded i think richard trumka head of the a f l c i a o when he went to st louis ferguson and said you know we've got some dirty laundry in our own house we've got to take care of and that's a type of courage that is still i think still in relative short supply within the ranks of our of our movement so i'm just to leave it there but simply to say that the link between work and citizenship i think is their most significant legacy and givens once in response to people saying the union had no right or shouldn't be doing this he said that our rol encourage our working members to use their rights as citizens in a democracy and callaway had predicted before his death the new concentrations of power seriously undermined social and democratic and situations by stablish in the supremacy of private decision making so this is the last line of the book in the last line of the talk and i'll just quote this in this context given callaways abiding faith that we're very people could use their experiences as workers to enhance their roles as citizens offers hop