Color Bar

Into the red and green conference room of Greater Miami Beach's Americana Hotel stepped pink and grey President George Meany for the annual midwinter huddle of his A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive council last week--and he forthwith boomed out a judgment that may haunt him for months.

What, asked a reporter, did Meany think about the likelihood that Harlem Democrat Adam Clayton Powell Jr. will become chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee next year? "Terrible," said forthright George Meany. "He has a bad voting and absentee record. He uses his position to stir up racial hatred. It's terrible to think that we will have a man like that as chairman."

Many unionists share Meany's opinions of Powell, pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, husband of Entertainer Hazel Scott and congressional eight-termer.* They also fear that Powell, by using his old technique of tacking hopeless civil rights riders on to favorable labor bills, will effectively block the bills. Despite this sound suspicion, Meany's public blast against Powell backfired, brought to the surface some old inter-union disputes that threaten to split the A.F.L.-C.I.O. In particular, it rekindled a smoldering feud between Meany and able, aging (70) Asa Philip Randolph, head of the Sleeping Car Porters union and conspicuously the only Negro in the A.F.L.-C.I.O. high command. Honest A. Philip Randolph is no steady supporter of crafty Congressman Powell, but he felt obliged to defend Powell and rebuke Meany.

Though both oppose segregation. Meany and Randolph have been scrapping over the issue for months. Moderate Meany has steadily but quietly pressured unions to drop their color bars; in his 20 years of leadership the number of all white A.F.L. unions has dropped from 26 to only one -- the 97,000-member Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen. Even so, there are Jim Crow locals aplenty, and Randolph publicly criticized Meany at the union's convention last fall for not purging them. Meany blew up, roared at Randolph, "Who the hell appointed you as guardian of all Negroes in America?" Since then, Randolph has been working round the clock to show him who. He is busily whipping together the "Negro American Labor Council," which aims to embrace the 1,500,000 Negro members of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. With such numbers, Randolph could press to crack open the all-white locals (in the building trades, among papermakers, boilermakers, etc.), get Negroes into apprentice training programs now closed to them, and lift Negroes to loftier positions in the A.F.L.-C.I.O. command. Chapters of Randolph's all-Negro group are abuilding from New York to the Pacific Coast. Despite Meany's opposition to such racially based splinter groups, the founding convention is set for Detroit this May. And Meany's whittling of Congressman Powell cannot help sharpening the splinters.

* Powell's trial on two-year-old charges of evading federal income taxes will finally come to court in Manhattan on March 7.

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