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Racial Uplift In A Jim Crow Local: Black Union Organizing In Minneapolis Hotels 1930-1940, Luke Mielke

American Studies Honors Projects

In the 1930s and 1940s, Minneapolis hotels employed two-thirds of all African-Americans working in the city. For black workers in Minneapolis, hotels were a site rife with contradictions: while these jobs offered prestige and union wages, they simultaneously drew upon hotel’s appeal to white customers’ slavery fantasy by promoting an atmosphere of racialized luxury. My research examines how narratives of respectability and racial uplift—generally at odds with the militant working-class politics of unions—became important for black hotel workers in Minneapolis, whose ability to conform to middle-class patriarchal norms was jeopardized by the submissive stereotypes promoted by hotels. Despite its status …