Nonfiction

Each year around the world, May Day (also known as International Workers Day) or May 1^st, is celebrated as a day to honor workers and spring. During his lifetime (1917-1984), Richard Durham surely made time to herald the day.  He was committed to and involved in labor unions that championed the rights of working men and women.

During the 1950s, one of Durham’s most significant associations was with the Chicago-based United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). Considered to be one of city’s more progressive unions, the UPWA fought to protect the rights of the thousands of people who toiled in the industries that produced meat and its byproducts.

Undoubtedly, Durham appreciated the union’s logo. A black and a white hand clasped in a handshake went along with the UPWA’s slogan, “Negro and White, Unite and Fight!” ‘

And there was plenty to fight about regarding working conditions in meatpacking plants. The plants’ slaughter assembly lines, for example, were dangerous, blood-soaked environments. Some meatpacking companies didn’t provide insurance to protect injured employees, and workers on some fast-moving assembly lines were treated like prisoners.

In 1952, Durham landed a contract with the union. The organization needed a writer who could translate studies, conducted by Fisk University scholars, about the UPWA’s antidiscrimination activities into a digestible brochure for the rank and file.

Durham eventually produced a twenty-one-page brochure titled Action against Jim Crow: UPWA’s Fight for Equal Rights. The brochure married photos of union members with Durham’s attention-grabbing writing:

At daybreak on November 30, 1950, a young Negro mother left her three children with their grandmother and hurried out into the cold Chicago dawn to catch a street-car.

She was Mrs. Pauline Wilson and she needed a job.

She was an experienced packinghouse worker and she knew they were hiring at Swift and Company.

Swift—like the Wilson, Armour, and Cudahy companies—operated America’s largest meat processing plants. Durham went on to write:

At 7 a.m. [Mrs. Wilson] was rushing unnoticed down the crowded, cobblestone streets of the world’s biggest packing center, and at 7:30 a.m. she was inside the employment office of the biggest packer.

It was the third anxious morning she had raced to be among the first to apply.

“Oh-h-h-h you’re just a little bit too late,” one of the clerks shook a sad head. “We’re not hiring anymore women. Just men.”

Durham then introduced Ruth Merson, a white job seeker who rushed down the same cobblestone streets to the same company on that same November morning. Yet Merson was directed to a back office and hired with every other white woman who applied that day.

Swift foreman Bill Cummings encouraged Merson to send her friends because he thought she “looked like a good worker.” Durham conceded, “He was right. She was even better than he thought. He had hired a field representative of UPWA on assignment for its Anti-Discrimination Department, a symbol of the Negro and white unity which has made the UPWA-CIO, the most important packinghouse union in the world.”

An arbitrator eventually ruled that Mrs. Wilson and twelve other black women “were entitled to reach into Mr. Swift’s pockets for $2,600 in back pay,” Durham wrote. Additionally, Swift had to hire those women with a year’s worth of seniority.

Richard Durham continued working with the UPWA, helping the union organize its workers to support various civil rights struggles – including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Hope that you had a great May Day – and whatever work you are passionate about, have a productive month!

April is National Poetry Month. And Richard Durham was a poet who loved the freedom of expression this art form provided.

“I think it’s the highest form of writing,” he once told a reporter.

So in honor of this month and to see an example of Durham’s poetic voice, the following poem was published in Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers, edited by writer Arna Bontemps.

Dawn Patrol

Night creeps over the city;

Streets spangle with kilowatt pearls,

Lights splatter over seas of shadows

Damning the flood of darkness.

Drunken night,

A hobo bowed over a bar of time,

Brooding over a black bottle of stars

Blinking like beer bubbles,

Soon comes the police patrol of dawn,

Night slowly staggers away

And then the day.

—Richard Durham, 1941

Durham’s mother came from a hardscrabble family of sharecroppers.  They struggled to earn a living on the Mississippi farmlands they planted and harvested, trying to get out of the ongoing debt the family incurred. Probably inspired by the stories Durham’s mother told him about the “cropping” life, he wrote the following poem:

Cotton Croppers

A citron sun, a ghost of gold,

Pours thick heat down on the field.

Heat burst the bolls and floods the air

Where ragged croppers, like patches in a cotton cloud,

Dot the billowy acres,

Bag the bolls, swell the sacks.

Plod the rows; pick the cotton.

 

Wading through the turbid waves unable to feel

The glory of day for the hell of heat!

And to a winding road snaking besides the field

They have but to lift their eyes to see,

Unworried over the sun, the cotton,

The plight of the pickers,

Comfortable cars rolling by the road,

Touring through the heat

Plowing through the air.

—Isadore Richard Durham, undated

 

Happy National Poetry Month!

 Richard Durham highly respected women.

“He was a feminist,” claimed one of Durham’s long time friends – singer, songwriter and activist, Oscar Brown Jr. “Before there was any National Organization for Women or anything like that,” Brown added, Durham’s scripts advocated “equal pay for equal work” for women. Brown said that in Durham’s award winning Destination Freedom radio drama series (1948-1950), “his characterization of Harriet Tubman or of Sojourner Truth, extolled the virtues of black women.”

The following audio excerpt comes from Durham’s August 15, 1948 “Truth Goes to Washington” show about abolitionist Sojourner Truth.

Durham considered his script about Ida B. Wells to be one of Destination Freedom’s best. Durham described Wells, a fearless and outspoken journalist, as:

 “A stormy woman. Restless like a river and a tongue like a flamin’ sword.” Durham’s Wells believed that “resistance to tyranny is obedience to God,” and that a freedom that “allowed the bigoted or the powerful to restrict the freedom of others was no freedom at all.”

A vociferous anti-lynching campaigner, Wells left behind a treasure trove of writings. Therefore, Durham said that he took the “least dramatic license” in documenting her life, and he hoped his radio listeners would connect with Wells’ story of struggle and triumph in a man’s world.

“A good dramatist [tries] to make an audience feel something,” Durham explained. “That’s why the hero has to be intelligent. Whether it’s a woman like Ida B. Wells or [noted educator and activist] Mary Church Terrell, they must appear [to be] very intelligent . . . then people will identify.”

Durham continued championing women’s rights during the 1950s while working as a writer and organizer for the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), one of America’s most progressive labor unions.

Black women and white women were noticeably absent from top UPWA policymaking positions. And women suffered from salary inequities. UPWA local president Addie Wyatt said there was at least a fourteen-cents hourly difference between the pay for men and women. That “differential” disappeared by the late 1950s, progress Wyatt attributed to UPWA’s International Office and Dick Durham.

“Dick seemed to have known the kind of struggles that a little black woman like me would have fighting against the white giants,” Addie Wyatt said. He “was there to encourage you, but also to feed you with information that you’d need so that when you spoke or you wrote you’d have the facts and figures there to work with. So I was always impressed,” Wyatt concluded, “because he was not fearful of our struggle. He embraced it.”

Throughout his lifetime, Richard Durham continued to advocate for positive social change for women and men and all people seeking freedom, justice and equality.

MY BLOG

For this first post, I’d like to take you back to the mid-1940s.

During the World War II years, Richard Durham had earned a deferment from military service because of a long-standing medical condition. He stayed in Chicago, working as a reporter for the popular, black-owned and operated Chicago Defender newspaper. But like thousands of other Americans during that war, Durham regularly wrote to his friends and younger brothers stationed at army or naval bases around the world, updating them on events large and small at home.

And his writing – conversational and evocative – often bounced off the page, demonstrating Durham’s ability to transport his readers into his world.  His lyrical writing revealed his poetic roots.  Durham had fallen in love with poetry as a teenager and some of his early poems were published in local publications.

In an undated letter to his brother Earl, Durham reported on a concert he had recently attended featuring one of his favorite artists. The letter was probably written during a Christmas holiday season, since Dick told his sailor brother that he was glad Earl had received the fruitcake he’d sent. “They say the older fruitcakes get the better they taste. I wouldn’t know, though,” Durham added.  “Never kept one long enough.  Now for the main dish.”

Dick went on to describe a night in Chicago’s Civic Opera House where “people overflowed into the bandstand and many didn’t get in.” The sold out crowd was ready to party to the sounds of the Edward “Duke” Ellington Band. Duke and his long standing, hard playing band members divvied up portions of Ellington’s “Black and Tan Suite,” and they treated eager listeners to one of Ellington’s new compositions, A New World A ‘Comin. Durham thought that the long, beautiful piece was almost “otherworldly” with a “strange, subdued, joyful quality about it.” He missed however the swinging, danceable rhythms found in older Ellington hits like The Mooche or Echoes of the Jungle.

Durham wrote:

I kept waiting for an old-fashioned, round house, gut-bucket,
dirty-dozen, call-the-cops, pass-the-whiskey-quick type of jump
[tune] like Stompy Jones!
Many a jitt [jitterbug] was holding his breath waiting for it to come.
Many a cat was ready to jump into the bandstand and [dance a] Suzy-Q
where Tchaikovsky had been played the night before.
A mob of hep-chicks wanted to scream, Hallelujah!
But [Ellington] didn’t try for it.
He was shooting after different game.
He didn’t want to “bounce,” he wanted to be beautiful.
And he was.
But I wish…

Please come back for more Richard Durham gems next month.