The "Best Union Members": Class, Race, Culture, and Black Worker Militancy in Chicago's Stockyards during the 1930s

PAUL STREET


FEBRUARY 15, 1938, was a tense day at the Wilson & Company meatpacking plant in Chicago's South Side stockyards district. That afternoon, eighty-seven workers in the Wilson's sheep-killing "gang" idled the plant's entire sheep division for nearly an hour. Those workers stepped down from their raised work platforms, leaving valuable sheep carcasses spoiling and dangling from overhead conveyors, to protest the discharge of veteran black worker Johnny Johnson, who had been fired because blisters prevented him from tying lamb legs at the pace demanded by his foreman. The striking workers included both blacks and whites. Given the predominantly black composition of the stockyards' cattle-, hog-, and, especially, sheep-killing departments in the 1930s, however, the strikers were mostly African Americans. Faced with dramatic, interracial resistance at a strategic beginning point in the continuous-flow slaughtering, processing, and packing process, Wilson took Johnson back on another job.