The Revels Cayton Initiative For Industrial Unionism (RCIFIU) believes that Industrial Unionism is a wonderful Black idea that helps all laboring people.

Revels Cayton, a Garfield Bulldog from Seattle, Washington, was a pivotal 20th Century industrial unionist in North American Pacific maritime seaboard. His Black leadership transformed the Marine Cooks & Stewards Union (MCS) from a weak Caucasian ethno-craft union to an authentic and powerful industrial union.

You don’t have to be Black to use the idea of industrial unionism, nor do you have to be Black to benefit from this idea. In fact, the whole point of Industrial Unionism is that it should be used by and for all laboring people, regardless of nationality or race.

Nevertheless, we believe the historical record does show that Industrial Unionism is a Black idea, and we believe its Blackness is important.

Therefore, here are some texts that we would like you to read and discuss with us:

1) The Minutes, taken by no less than Frederick Douglass himself, of the first CNLU Convention on December 6th through 10th of 1869 — (Sixty-six years before the CIO, thirty-six years before the IWW, and three weeks before the Knights Of Labor).

2) Organized Labor & The Black Worker 1619-1981, by Philip S. Foner, 1981. (Unlike many other good books by the same author, this book was conspicuously kept out of print for the 36 years between 1981 and 2017!)

3) Southern Horrors: Lynch Law In All Its Phases, by Ida B. Wells-Barnett, 1892. (In order to understand why labor union organizers, of all races, have been historically targeted by lynching in America, alongside Black people in general–whether union organizers or not–it is necessary to study the role lynching plays in relation to the labor and capital of the industrial revolution. This short book by Ida B. Wells-Barnett does this, particularly in its last chapter – “Self Help”.)

4) Black Reconstruction In America, by W.E.B. Du Bois, 1935.

5) Ben Fletcher: The Life And Times Of A Black Wobbly, by Dr. Peter Cole, 2021.

6) Women, Race & Class, by Angela Y. Davis, 1981.

(Angela Davis, in 1971, became the first female political prisoner to ever receive the support of a Convention Resolution by the International Longshore & Warehousemens’ Union–ILWU. The ILWU was organized in pursuit of the idea of Industrial Unionism. On Juneteenth of 2021, Angela Davis was formally inducted into Local 10 of the ILWU as an honorary member.)

7) Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica, by Gerald Horne, 2009.

8) Revels Cayton: African American Communist & Labor Activist, by Sarah Falconer, 2005.

9) Cleophas Williams: My Life Story in the International Longshore & Warehouse Union Local 10, by Cleophas Williams, posthumously. Published by Clarence Thomas, 2023.

10) Mobilizing In Our Own Name, by retired ILWU longshoreman Clarence Thomas, 2021.

11) The text of this Resolution Number 52, from the 7th Convention of the ILWU, held in 1947, in defense of industrial unionism.

12) The verbatim text of that 7th ILWU Convention floor’s discussion of this Resolution 52, which includes the testimony of Revels Cayton as a delegate to that Convention.