If you have a lot of time, you might spend it nosing around my labor history web site. Start with the time line at https://lilleskole.us/labordallas/hist/histdate.htm. There are very few honest books about Texas labor, but Patricia Evridge Hill’s “Dallas, the Making of a Modern Industrial City” and Michael Phillips “White Metropolis” are worth your time if you have some.

If you are as short of time as I, read this.

Dallas labor was slave labor from the city’s inception in 1841 to well past 1865. Milestones were the execution of a slave woman in 1853 and the downtown fire of 1860, which was used as an excuse to get people to vote for secession. Three slaves were murdered for it and all slaves were given lashes. Not much more is known.

Dallas and Tarrant barely voted for secession, and the 8 counties northward voted against it.

Violent Texans ended the Reconstruction Era in 1868, long before the rest of the nation. Hardly anything is known about it in Dallas. The person who was supposed to head the Freedman’s Bureau in Dallas was murdered in East Texas and never arrived.

The Knights of Labor established several chapters here in 1882. Their great rise, and their downfall, were associated with our area. The big influx of members came about because of their successful fight against railroad baron Jay Gould in the Great Southwest Railway Strike. It originated at a convention in Sherman in 1885. A year later, Gould broke the contract and hired murderers to break the union.

The downfall of the Knights may have also come about because they failed to support the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago during their show trial 1886-7. A new organization called American Federation of Labor was named in 1886. They nominally supported the Haymarket martyrs and found a way to outlast both of the previous national labor federations by organizing only the most skilled and highest paid of laborers. They also enthusiastically supported government foreign policy to the detriment of international solidarity, and that helped them avoid the punishment that destroyed the Industrial Workers of the World.

Just about the only AFL union that successfully organized everybody on a worksite instead of only the elite was the United Mineworkers of America. They had some great battles, including the Ludlow strike that included a massacre of women and children. In Thurman, Texas, West of Fort Worth, mineworkers put together a militia to send to Colorado.

The idea of organizing everybody, not just the elite, outlasted the Industrial Workers of the World. In the early days of the Great Depression, socialists and communists did their best to organize “industrially.” Often, it took the form of organizing the unemployed.

T.E. Barlow, a Communist organizer, was murdered in the Tarrant County Jail in 1933 for the crime of organizing unemployed workers. Carl Brannin, socialist organizer that turns up here and there all over labor history of the period, helped organize a sit-in at the Dallas City Hall that lasted a month. Brannin lived out his old age in Dallas and I had the honor of knowing him. I believe his last public action was to oppose the nuclear reactor being built at Commanche Peak.

In 1935, the Mineworkers were able to convince the AFL to form a Committee for Industrial Organizing. Immediately, the progressive union organizers went to work and reaped the reward of their previous decades. The Autoworkers union was put together in 1937. AFL leaders demanded that the new unions divide out their elite workers, but they refused and were kicked out of the AFL. They formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and started organizing everything that moved.

Inspired by the CIO, the old craft unions in the AFL also began adopting industrial organizing. Unions that had limited their membership to skilled machinists or electricians, for example, started organizing entire factories and entire industries.

In the 1930s, Wallace Reilly (yes, he owned the print shop now known as Reiley Echols) was state president of the AFL and resisted the coming of the CIO, as did also and most notably the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas police. I think that millinery workers were the first to try to penetrate the Dallas anti-union barricades. Textile workers were next. A lot of women suffered and a lot of them spent time in Dallas jail.

In 1939, major aerospace plants were built in Dallas and Fort Worth. Eventually, the Autoworkers got the one in Dallas and the Machinists won in Fort Worth. But the CIO still hadn’t had a successful breakthrough.

The giant Ford assembly plant in East Dallas was the CIO’s big target. But the Dallas Morning News, head of the Citizens Alliance then and now, and the Dallas police had other ideas. Ford also hired goons to beat up, tar&feather, and even assassinate union organizers. None of them were ever prosecuted.

In 1941, the CIO got a break. The new attorney of the new NLRB was visited by three former employees at Ford. They had been fired, possibly for stealing, and wanted the NLRB to help them get their jobs back. Their jobs, as they explained to the young lawyer, was to beat up union organizers and sympathizers. They provided detailed descriptions of their activities.

The NLRB used their written complaints in the lawsuit that eventually forced Ford to allow the UAW to organize them nationwide. I have the lawyer’s complete story as provided by his son, who was County Treasurer for some while. The lawyer, whose name I think was Nat young, was the first person to accept our “Hero of Labor Award” at a Labor Day Breakfast around 1990.

The successful UAW local in East Dallas looked around for someone to organize the giant North American Aviation plant at the far western edge. They came upon Jack Anderson, who personally told me how the African American trash haulers organized the plant. The rest of the history of unions at that plant is detailed on my web site, already mentioned.

The CIO was well established. By the early 1950s, it was headed by Roy Evans, a friend of mine. Evans became an officer of the AFL-CIO when they merged in 1955. In 1958, the UAW pulled out of the federation and Roy had to find another union, but he went on to serve a term as President of the combined federation in Texas.

Another outstanding “graduate” from my union in western Dallas (Grand Prairie) was Pancho Medrano, also a friend of Roy’s and mine. He was a boxer and was chosen to be Sergeant at Arms at the new union at North American. Later, he was chosen by UAW President Walter Reuther to head up Civil Rights work. If you hear of milestones of the civil rights movement, you may also hear that Pancho was there.

I believe it was 1962 when Pancho became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Texas Ranger violence against Farmworkers. The suit was won and the Texas Rangers, once the scourge of all working families, has not been known to use violence against strikers again.

By 1984, the old “North American” factory was known as LTV and the union as UAW Local 848. During a long contract fight 1984-5, I began to be known as an organizer of workers, and organizer of retirees, and, especially, a communications director. I’ve continued that work to the present.

Union militancy had more or less died with the 1955 merger and the AFL-CIO was suffering a long period of decline. From around 35% of the workforce organized, they fell to below 10%. In 1987, some of the most active unions from the CIO days organized Jobs with Justice to restore solidarity. In 1990, my wife and I established North Texas Jobs with Justice with a meeting at Local 848.

 Our first action was to have a labor contingent in the Dallas MLK parade. After that, we carried out solidarity actions with unions, churches, civil rights organizations, and community groups regularly.

The AFL-CIO began to catch up nationally after a “palace coup” election in 1995. They made sweeping improvements, but they didn’t take effect in Dallas until 2013. After that, I gave up Jobs with Justice and devoted all my efforts to AFL-CIO. We did some amazing things.

The AFL-CIO took over an older retiree organization and established the Alliance for Retired Americans around 2001, the year before I retired early. They chartered Texas in 2006. I am a charter member and its longest-serving president. One of my first projects was to get national to hire Judy Bryant as state organizer. The Texas Alliance, TARA, allows everybody to join, union or not.

Allowing everybody to join was also a strength of the Young Active Labor Leaders when it was established by the Texas AFL-CIO around 2020. TARA and YALL are powerhouses of solidarity for the labor movement. YALL is unchartered and TARA is a 501c4. Both are considered “constituency groups” even though they are like no other.

In April, 2025, I learned that national AFL-CIO had a plan to merge Dallas and Tarrant into a new labor federation similar to the one in Houston. On January 1, the Dallas Central Labor Council was terminated. I was its final president.