On January 5, 1869 – Black workers formed the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU) during the National Colored Convention (NCC) in Washington, DC.
The convention focused on securing the right to vote, access to education, and constitutional rights in the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era. The was a reaction to the forming of the National Labor Organization in 1866 that excluded Black workers.
In August 1866, more than a year after the Civil War ended, trade union leaders formed the first major national labor organization in the United States – the National Labor Union (NLU). Despite national-level attempts to welcome all workers, regardless of color, NLU locals excluded Black workers from joining their organizations.
Struggling to find representation in their workplaces, 214 Black trade workers from 21 states assembled at the January 1869 NCC to establish the CNLU, organize Black labor collectively, across employers, trades, and geography, and improve the racialized conditions oppressing Black workers at the time.
This CNLU became the second major national labor organization in the country. It mirrored the NLU philosophically and structurally, but as an organization for Black workers in skilled trades, with additional aims to advocate for equal representation for Black workers in the workforce, government aid for education, and farmland for poor Black workers in the South.
The founding president was Isaac Myers, a caulker who served until 1872, when he ceded the position to civil rights activist Frederick Douglass.
This article appeared in the January/February 2026 issue of The American Postal Worker magazine.
