By Cheryl Ross
The fight lasted nearly 17 years. Two years into it, Beatrice Lumpkin recognized that her husband and his cause were becoming an epic chapter of American labor history. Beatrice, a history major back in the 1930s, decided to keep track of the twists and turns. She began recording interviews with workers, collecting newspaper articles, taking notes. She kept up her notebook through 1996–through marches, court showdowns, broken marriages, suicides, early deaths, and deep despair, as the steelworkers slowly got their hands on some $19 million that was due them.
During these years, there was a girl in Georgia named Hattie Martin whose father and mother worked as chauffeur and cook for a white woman. Martin’s mother, Ma Bess, was a firebrand and refused to live in the woman’s house. The woman asked why, and Ma Bess said, “Because I don’t believe that black people should live in white people’s houses. That’s like slavery.”
When Frank was 13, a friend dared him to grab a power line. He’d seen birds sit on the line then fly away, but the jolt seared off two fingers. Fortunately, he could go on picking with eight. When he was 15, Frank quit school to pick full-time. He spent the extra money on clothes for himself, but wound up sharing them with his brothers anyway.
A brother of Frank’s found higher wages in Buffalo, New York, in the early 1940s, and the other Lumpkins followed. Frank, by now married to a drugstore clerk from Orlando, settled for a job paying $9 a week at a five-and-dime; places requiring skilled workers balked at his missing fingers. When he located construction work at $30 a week he had to go to Niagara Falls for a union card because the Buffalo local wouldn’t give him one. Frank helped build an aircraft plant, then got a job there as a janitor. Soon he was working for Bethlehem Steel as a chipper, someone who chips the defects from the metal. Meanwhile, his sister Jonnie hired on as a janitor at the same aircraft plant. The only jobs open to African-Americans there were janitorial.
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In 1943 he joined the merchant marines and, soon after, the racially integrated National Maritime Union (NMU), which the communists had a big hand in running. The NMU joined with seven other maritime unions in striking for more pay and a shorter workweek. Throughout the strike, Frank heard Jonnie’s credo–wealth for all, not for the few–ringing in his ears. As the years went by, this credo shaped his life.
The book became the focus of her life. In 1998, after two years on the project, she had a manuscript of almost 300 pages in what she believed was close to publishable form. She sent it to a journalist who was a family friend and asked him to recommend publishers. Instead, he returned the text with edits and a suggested reorganization. Six months later Beatrice sent a revised manuscript to university presses in the states where her husband had lived–Georgia, Florida, New York, Indiana, and Illinois. They all rejected it. It required more work; it was unsuited to the publishers’ needs; it was not “objective.”
