LABOR, POLITICS, AND RACE.

The autobiography by Henry Johnson, a black CIO organizer in the Chicago meatpacking industry, offers a fascinating insight into the complex relationship between race and class-consciousness in the history of American workers. What follows is the transcript of a 1937 interview, conducted by a Works Progress Administration (WPA) worker, with Henry Johnson. The transcript is included in the papers and records of the WPA's "Negro in Illinois" survey, held at the George Cleveland Hall branch of the Chicago Public Library. The materials contained in the survey include a large number of interviews on the Afro-American migration from the South during the World War I period and the subsequent growth of social, political, and cultural institutions in Chicago's black community. Johnson was born in Siblo, Texas at the turn of the century. His father worked as a logger and plasterer and had been a member of several unions well as the IWW. The standard picture we have of southern white racism is re-focused by Johnson's descriptions of important instances of inter-racial cooperation in his and his father's lives.