STRUGGLES IN STEEL: A STORY OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN STEELWORKERS,sis an informative and moving documentary chronicling the little known history of African-American steelworkers from 1875 to the present. The workers' enlightened struggle and bittersweet victory is told through the emotional stories of candid witnesses, detailing decades of injustice and determination. Compelling interviews with over 70 working men and women from Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Birmingham, give a voice and face to those who participated in the battle on two frontsagainst all-white union leadership, as well as steel company management.
After almost a century of strife and less that a decade after the 1974 consent decree instituting reforms and affirmative action policies, U.S. steel mills began closing in record numbers. "We're surviving people, and have survived in spite of what's been done to us or in spite of what's been held against us," recounts a dedicated laborer.
Before the Civil War, more than 2,000 slaves worked in the iron mills of the South, creating a skilled work force that the Northern iron companies were quick to exploit after the war. When a labor dispute shut down the industry in Pittsburgh in 1875, African-American workers were brought in, setting a pattern that would continue for decades. Strike breakers were resented by whites for working for lower wages, and at the time, unions were not willing to accept minorities. African-American workers were placed in hazardous, low-paying "Negro jobs" for decades, including and throughout the civil rights era of the 1960s.
"A white man would come in, and you had to train him," recounts Virgil Pearson, a veteran steelworker. "In two weeks, he was your boss." Through the years of partial gains and tremendous losses, African-American activists came to trust the government far more than the steel companies. Following a series of lawsuits based on Civil Rights legislation, a consent decree was brokered in 1974 by the EEOC, U.S. Department of Justice, nine steel companies and the United Steelworkers of America. The decree established goals and timetables for the hiring and promotion of minorities, specifically African-Americans, women and Hispanics. By the 1980s, the industry's decline decimated most steel jobs, leaving those gains attained by more than a century of steel employees and a new African-American labor movement by the wayside, as both blacks and whites stepped together into the unemployment lines.
Ray Henderson, a former mill worker, was outraged when a local television station showed a program about the closing of a major steel mill in Duquesne (outside of Pittsburgh) and no blacks appeared on the program. Henderson, who had worked at the mill for 18 years, knew first-hand that African-American workers had formed a critical part of the labor force in that area for over a hundred years. A civil rights worker and head of the mill's grievance committee, Henderson was at the forefront of the fight for equal rights on the job.
He approached his white friend from high school, Tony Buba, now a noted independent filmmaker, to collaborate in his effort to set the record straight.
STRUGGLES IN STEEL provides an important historical foundation with the current debates regarding race and affirmative action in American society. Much of the factual history is based on the landmark book, "Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania 1875-1980", by Dennis C. Dickerson, Ph.D., who also serves as associate producer, scriptwriter and consultant.
