Talkin’ 1937 and KC labor history with Bill Clause

Ask Bill Clause, of good-hearted nonprofits KKFI 90.1 and CrossCurrents Culture, how he came to write 1937: A Helluva Year, a musical steeped in the history of Kansas City and the labor movement, and he can’t help but start time-lining. “When you look back at history, there are certain watershed years,” he explained to The Pitch this week.

Then, like any good student of history, he showed his work, starting with 1848, the year of Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Elizabeth Cady Stanton‘s women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Then 1917 gave humanity the Russian Revolution and World War I.

And then there’s 1937, when the watershed was here.

“It’s not as well known, because labor history is not as well known,” Clause says. “But in 1937 A. Philip Randolph — the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters – came to the Paseo Baptist Church to sign the first collective bargaining agreement with an all-black union. Randolph would later be a significant organizer of Martin Luther King’s march on Washington that led to the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”

The surprise success of an all-black union after a 12-year strike is just the first of the great labor victories chronicled in 1937‘s stories and songs by a cast of almost 20. (Judy Clause directs.)