Gabriel barber

     The Rev. Gabriel Barber III is a lifelong witness and participant to change. His life and work trace an arc of civil rights progress from northern-style segregation to an influential local political career. In 2007, the city of Rock Island dedicated the Gabriel and Lee Barber Park to honor Gabe and his wife Qulia (nicknamed Lee), who also had a public service career.

     Gabe’s 41-year work at Farmall — until the plant closed in 1986 — was the nest for his political career. He was a longtime union steward, a position that often led to grassroots political involvement, helping to build what is said to have been the state’s strongest county Democratic Party organization outside of Chicago.

     Semi-retired from his latter career as a Baptist minister, Barber sat down for several sessions of reminiscing in the west-side Rock Island home he’s shared with Lee for decades, where they raised three kids. True to his calling as a minister, he’s a captivating speaker even at living-room tones, the varying cadences evoking an immediacy to long-ago memories.

     Gabe was born in 1929, and as a teenager he was part of the 50-year Great Migration of African Americans from the rural south to northern cities largely to take jobs in factories, hoping for a better life. He left his home in Clarksville, Missouri, and came to Rock Island, following his father, who came ahead to take a job at Farmall.

     In 1945, at the age of 16, Gabe began working in the Farmall plant himself, in the foundry making mold castings for tractor parts — the hottest, dirtiest, most dangerous work. The foundry was one of the only places available for black employees.

     “When I first started at Farmall, you know we as blacks couldn’t work on the assembly line and tractor repair and all that. I worked in the foundry shoveling sand on the second shift at first. Shoveling sand, putting it through a riddle tool for the mold castings.”

     In the city of Rock Island, too, hundreds of miles north of the Mason-Dixon line, he found his movements limited to the area called the West End.

     “It’s been something, because I come here when times was pretty tight. All of the action was here on 9th Street. We couldn’t go to a movie downtown, we couldn’t go to a restaurant downtown, and they wanted us to ride the back of the bus.

      “Down where that old post office is now, that whole square block was a park with about three water fountains that you’d go and drink out of. But they didn’t want us to drink out of them. 

     “They had one policeman, he told us we couldn’t sit out in the park. Now, the pigeons was crappin’ all over the seats, and when you got to sit down, if you not careful, you might set in some. They didn’t care nothin’ about the pigeons, but didn’t want us to sit down there. Oh, it was somethin’ else. It was somethin’ else. So it took time to change its course. Same way in Davenport.”

     By the mid-1950s, Gabe and other African American Farmall employees were sprung from the foundry as the plant desegregated, thanks to a change in union representation from the Farm Equipment workers, known then as the FE-UE, to the United Auto Workers, the UAW. The change also meant the beginning of Gabe Barber’s union and political careers. How did the UAW open the plant for minority workers?

     In the late 1940s, as the Cold War gathered steam, intense pressure was brought to bear to purge unions of Communist Party members among their leaders, enabled by provisions of the Taft Hartley Act of 1947. The FE-UE, known for militant tactics to assert worker control on shop floors and support of progressive political causes, indeed had party members among its leadership.

     The strengthening UAW, on the other hand, was led by a powerful labor figure in Walter Reuther, a self-described anti-Communist who played a key role in the weakening of unions with Communist Party affiliations and the purging of party members from the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

     Reuther also was to become a passionate supporter of the growing civil rights movement, marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. “Reuther made civil rights a major part of his trade union politics and overall national profile,” says labor historian Matthew Mettler. 

     Initially, though, that did not include interference in shop-floor management decisions. Also, “in the case of the Quad-Cities union decertification elections, the FE pummeled the UAW and Reuther on the issue of blacks not being promoted and argued, I believe correctly, that the UAW wouldn't be able to do much because they sold out on shop-floor militancy,” Mettler says.

     So what likely happened is that the company, which preferred the UAW, unofficially intervened and promised black workers (“of which there were many”) that supporting the UAW would work out in their favor, Mettler says.

     As the UAW began a campaign to take over representation of International Harvester employees from the FE-UE in the early 1950s, both unions had their loyalists. At IH plants in the Quad Cities, the debate was occasionally engaged with the help of brass knuckles, garnering nationwide attention.

     Gabe knew where he stood.

     “When the FE-UE was the union, we blacks could only go where the dust and dirt was. People begin to wake up a little bit, and they started to find out that the FE-UE was only doing what it just had to do for the people. And then, the UAW said, well, we’ll take a vote. We’ll move in. So the UAW started saying what they could do, if they was in. ‘We could fix that; you could, if you qualify for a job, work wherever it was.’ Oh that sounded good to us, you know. Man, looka here, because the people drivin' them trucks — they clean, man. They wasn’t dirty, wasn’t nothin.”

     To be sure, Gabe found hard work on the assembly line when he got there, but he never minded hard work. He also found some resistance among his new white co-workers on the line, who had tricks to make other line workers look bad. Those workers saw threats in the new arrivals. And after all, they lived in a place where black people couldn’t sit downtown even in crapped-on park benches.

     But Gabe says the UAW had his back in those work disputes. So immediately he gave back: He became a union steward, which meant he could ‘check out’ from line work to investigate worker complaints, and otherwise get to know the work people did and their relations with supervisors.

     “I was department union steward, take care of the complaint of an individual. You’d have to know what he’s talking about, where he works, conditions he’d work under. I was in the corner of that person. ‘I’m going to try to get you off without any time off. But it’s going to be on your record.’

     “They’d say, ‘suspension for four or five days.’ Well I’m trying to get where they don’t get a suspension, because he’s a working man, he’s got a family. I’m pleading for him, he’s got children at home — ‘there’s other ways you can punish him without doing that.’ ‘Well, we’re going to write him up. If he does it one more time we’ll give him time off.’”

     Those developing people skills and negotiating skills led to political involvement as a Democratic Party precinct committeeman, and eventually a successful run for the Rock Island County Board, where he served for 30 years. He could take unpaid time off from work for his public service duties.

     “Anytime I had a meeting with the county, they had to let me off. The union negotiated that, that anybody involved in politics or holding an office in the public sector, they would get the chance to be off. We were paid from the job we went to, per diem from the county, every meeting we had.”

     Later, Gabe moved to tractor-repair work at Farmall. He worked hard, he says.

     “Made a good living. We was always working overtime. I didn’t mind working.”

     He came north as a teenager in hopes of better opportunities. He learned that his own opportunities came with a price to be paid in assisting the opportunities of others. He didn’t mind.

     “When I look back over our groundwork, and what we went through, you know, it’s a good experience. It’s a good experience when you want to deal with time and change. Because there has been some changes, great changes. But we still have to make sure that we keep the hidden things from poppin’ up, if you see what I mean.”