Unions,” Frederick Douglass argued that there was “abundant proof almost every day of their mischievous influence upon every industrial interest in the country.” W. E. B. Du Bois called trade unions “the greatest enemy of the black working man.” Booker T. Washington, who was born a slave and opposed unions his entire life, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1913 that “the average Negro who comes to town does not understand the necessity or advantage of a labor organization which stands between him and his employer and aims apparently to make a monopoly of the opportunity for labor.
