The National Labor Union, Colored National Labor Union and Chinese labour

In 1869, although both the National Labor Union (NLU) and Colored National Labor Union (CNLU) held separate conventions, both organizations voiced resolutions against the importation of Chinese “coolie” labourers.  The CNLU sought to petition Congress to prevent the “importation of contract coolie labor” becoming a “system of slavery.”^⁠  While the NLU also pressured Congress to honour the Anti-Coolie Act 1862, passing a resolution opposing, “the importation of a servile race, bound to fulfill contracts entered into on foreign soil.”^⁠

However, John Mercer Langston, a former employee of the Freedmen’s Bureau and president of the National Equal Right League, believed, rather than division, American workers (including Chinese labourers) could be unified.^⁠  In a speech delivered at the Colored National Labor convention, Langston drew a picture of the diverse American workforce within a frame of unionism, politics, and common interests.  Langston declared:

We know the maxim, ‘in union there is strength.’ It has its significance in the affairs of labor no less than in politics. Hence our industrial movement, emancipating itself from every national and partial sentiment, broadens and deepens its foundations so as to rear thereon a superstructure capricious enough to accommodate at the alter of common interest the Irish, the negro and the German laborer; to which, so far from being excluded, the ‘poor white’ native of the South, struggling out of moral and pecuniary death into life ‘real and earnest’ the white mechanic and laborer of the North, so long ill-taught and advised that his true interest is gained by hatred and abuse of the laborer of African descent, as well as the Chinaman, whom designing persons, partially enslaving, would make, in the plantation service of the South, the rival and competitor of the former slave class of the country, having with us one and the same interest, are all invited, earnestly urged, to join us in our movement, and thus aid in the protection and conservation of their and our interests.^⁠

References

New York Times, September 12, 1869.

New York Times, August 21, 1869.

John Mercer Langston cited in Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis, eds., The Black Worker: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present, Volume II: The Black Worker during the Era of the National Labor Union, 54.