American Workers Union rally, mid 1930s Photo courtesy UMLS WHMC

By late 1934, community-based mobilization continued with the organization of the American Workers Union (AWU), which sought to organize the unemployed and to mobilize community support on picket lines to obstruct the use of the unemployed as scabs. The AWU was able to gain a tremendous following. The AWU became a racially integrated coalition and included women nut pickers in its leadership ranks.

The AWU provided key support for strikes among newly organized workers in the AFL. In key federal labor union strikes of 1935-36, the AWU helped collect food, provided critical assistance, and forced city agencies to give relief to strikers --all strategies begun by the nut pickers' union. '

The AWU produced cooperation among socialist, Communists, the unemployed, trade unions, churches, small merchants, social workers, and professional associations and even black community groups such as the Urban League,. A well-organized Ministerial Alliance was a moral force behind many of the activities of the AWU, and its interactions with relief and union activists gave those organizations a degree of legitimacy and moral authority that had eluded the UC. It was this movement that made the sit-down tactic familiar to St. Louis workers.

Unemployed Workers occupy city hall, April 1936, to protest relief cut-offs. Integrated groups of workers fought to keep the city from cutting families from needed assistance. The goal of the American Workers Union, which organized the sit-in, was to unite unemployed and employed workers in order to keep the unemployed from use as a source of strikebreakers. Occupying relief stations and other seats of power had become a well-honed practice, and connected to the struggle for rights for the jobless. Some of the same people were the core community support for the CIO movement.

Workers hosted sit-ins in relief offices on a regular basis. In April 1936, for instance, a racially integrated group of women and men, mostly members of the AWU, took over the city's Aldermanic Chambers, refusing to leave until the city agreed to withdraw the threat to cut off relief to fifteen thousand families.

These community and workplace struggles had created alternative networks among workers outside the AFL. During 1935 and through 1936, the AWU continued to play a key role in raising consciousness of the need to unite the unemployed and the employed as well as work and community issues. Thus, the Left's trade union approach was distinguished from the AFL's in the period before the CIO, not just by industrial versus craft unionism per se but also by the effective linkage of workers' struggle with community-based mobilizations.

The possibilities raised by these connections affected the aspirations of radical activists such as Sentner. Sentner's involvement with the nut pickers and other black workers was transforming. The CP's focus on the black working class had helped to revive radical traditions and models for the labor movement, a vision of unionism that propelled Sentner into a lifetime of activism, where he sought to realize democratic, inclusive possibilities in the labor movement. That the CP was also an organization based on authoritarian and hierarchical principles antithetical to democratic ideals was a paradox that Sentner would never fully confront or resolve. But there is little doubt that to Sentner, the party would be an instrument to bring about a democratic, socialist future. "Every bone in his body was about democracy," avers Toni Sentner. "He lived and breathed the idea that the more democracy, the more power for workers. That was what socialism meant to him."