Today marks 150th anniversary of the founding of the Knights of Labor, the first national workers’ organization in the U.S. that sought to unite all workers around a vision of replacing monopoly capitalism with a society based on values of social solidarity. #1u 1/16 
At their peak in 1886-87, the Knights of Labor claimed close to a million members (at a time when the U.S. population was between 50 and 60 million), organized in close to six thousand local assemblies. 2/16
The Knights pursued diverse tactics to achieve the “cooperative commonwealth” and improve the lives of working people: they called strikes to demand higher pay from employers, formed local labor parties to push for worker-friendly legislation, and organized cooperatives. 3/16
They played a leading role in the eight-hour movement in the 1880s, which culminated in a national strike for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1886. 4/16
Historians James Gregory and Jonathan Garlock wrote in a recent post for @LaborOnline that the Knights’ membership “was not only extensive but extraordinarily diverse ... [and] cut across racial, gender, and ethnic lines.” 5/16 lawcha.org/2019/10/04/rem…
British historian @Steven_Parfitt1, writing earlier this year, described the Knights’ collision with southern segregation at their 1886 convention in Richmond, Virginia: 6/16 discoversociety.org/2019/01/02/foc…
“The Order’s General Master Workman (President), Terence Powderly, was introduced by a black delegate from New York, Frank Ferrell ... 7/16
“... and respectable white society was further scandalised when the biracial New York delegation energetically desegregated several Richmond theatres and refused to observe the colour bar at their lodgings. 8/16
“Many white Southern (and some northern) Knights refused to enter assemblies with their black co-workers, and the idea of the Knights as a colour-blind organisation is a nonsense, yet many biracial assemblies did indeed open. 9/16
“Some organisers, white and black, even paid ... with their lives, lynched by racist Redeemers. Their determination did not go unrecognised by black Americans, who remained unusually loyal to the Knights even when the movement began to decline at the end of the 1880s.” 10/16
Parfitt also writes that “the same applied to women,” noting that “in their Declaration of Principles the Knights made a demand that still resonates in our age of the gender pay gap: equal pay for men and women for equal work.” 11/16
and that “Knights also saw (mainly female) reproductive labour as equally important to (mainly male) industrial labour,” leading them to organize not only women who worked for wages but also housewives as members — something few unions since have done. 12/16
The Knights of Labor eventually succumbed to competition from the exclusive craft unions of the American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886, and never really recovered from the recession of 1893. 13/16
There were also limits to their solidarity — especially in their later years, the Knights actively participated in racist and sometimes violent attempts to expel Chinese and other Asian workers from the country. 14/16
Yet, as Parfitt concludes, “Their enthusiasm for ending wage slavery and building the co-operative commonwealth, creating labour and popular alternatives to the established parties, promoting the struggles of black and women workers... 15/16
“... and joining with workers from other countries and not merely keeping them out, are things from which American and other unions can still learn.” 16/16
