Unions have historically been some of the most racist and discriminatory organizations in the USA.
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/memphis-sani...
The USA has been pretty racist in discriminatory, and I think it's disingenuous to single out unions for that history. I mean, who instituted Jim Crow and profited from slavery? White voters, government officials, and private enterprise. Unions were definitely not leading that.
I had slavery in mind with the private enterprise comment.
But it's not like businesses are actually run by perfectly rational automatons according to textbook economics. They're run by owners and managers who can be just as racist as the surrounding community, and who can very well prioritize prejudice over a little more profit.
As for Unions, think about it, their major threat is cheap labor from abroad, so the way that they have historically been discriminatory has been in lobbying for anti-immigration and immigration quota (don't know if they still do that as much).
Unclear why you were downvoted. Another example of this was Plessy v. Ferguson where the railroad worked with a civil rights group to bring the case:
>...On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket at the Press Street Depot and boarded a "Whites Only" car of the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans, Louisiana, bound for Covington, Louisiana.[11] The railroad company, which had opposed the law on the grounds that it would require the purchase of more railcars, had been previously informed of Plessy's racial lineage, and the intent to challenge the law.
You're telling much less than half the story, and taking the latter half of the twentieth century in isolation without considering what came before.
U.S. unions with communist and socialist leadership were universally anti-racist in word and very often in deed. Employers often interfered with employee choice of leadership to the benefit of conservative, racist, union leaders as opposed to leftists with anti-racist commitments.
In one of the most flagrant violations of the First Amendment in U.S. history, the Taft-Hartley Act[1] criminalized membership in all manner of left-wing political organization. With the cooperation of union leaders ready to sell out their membership, many of the strongest voices for integration were purged.
Employers and union officials alike had relationships ranging from extortion to open cooperation with organized crime. The relationship between the Hoffa Sr's Teamsters and the mafia was complex, and notorious in part because it was so exceptional.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act#Anti-...