[Blacks found both racial (ie skin pigmentation) and "other" discrimination in the maritime trades.]
Indeed. There seemed to be a disproportionate number of black sailors from the islands of the Caribbean on the ships I sailed on. I remember standing close to the main mast on a Liberty ship when somebody aloft dropped a huge heavy deadly metal shackle from the crosstree. It smashed down about two feet away from me. Big bang! I think it may have even dented the deckplates. The man above cried out, a bit late, "Look out below." The AB next to me (from Jamaica, I think) looked at me, grinned, and said, "Mon, that's nonsense." It got to be a saying aboard that ship. "Mon, that's nonsense." I still mutter it to myself at appropriate moments. A fine phrase.
[The US military was segregated during WWII until the very end. Truman made the legal changes.]
In the early '60's, I had several meetings with a retired US army general, Buck Lanham. Authoritative, of course. White. Somewhat wild. He told me that he was the man who had "desegregated the army." Later, reading about him (he had been a good friend of Ernest Hemingway) I found that he had been in charge of -- oh, I don't quite know what -- some aspect of military supply. Logistics. Ever come across his name? His ideas on encouraging racial equality in the US were, to say the least, eccentric. I never heard the like of them, thank goodness.
[I understand US maritime labor unions were different than non-maritime unions; maritime management was eligible to join.]
Don't think so. Not that I ever heard. Not company shore executives. Would be amazed if that were so. But ship's officers, of course, had their own unions. Mine was American Radio Association. Deck officers were Masters, Mates, and Pilots. There was a union for ship's engineers "The Marine Engineers Beneficial Association." MEBA: I think it still exists in some form. For a few years it included a few thousand air traffic controllers. Obviously, there have been changes.
[Gotta run...I'm busy preparing an outline to post here at this site re how to teach maritime labor history. This is about as difficult as teaching the human condition.]
As for maritime labor, you might consider a look at the minor character Donkin in Conrad's great novel, "The *** of the Narcissus." Donkin is a sea lawyer, a shirker, an all round bad sailor, an image of how earliest union men might have looked to company management, though I don't think that Conrad made the "union" connection explicit. But Donkin is the kind of sailor who, when I was sailing post WW2, would have upset matters by raising a near mutiny when he found that officers had innerspring mattresses and seamen didn't. (I believe that this was one of the negotiating points in working out a contract when NMU met management -- a real contention.)
I was a member of the ARA radio negotiating committee when we negotiated a tanker contract with the oil companies in New York around 1950, and there was quite a lot of unstated animosity underlying the discussions. The maritime industry was trying to reorganize itself after the great depression of the '30's and the struggle of WW2. All around the world in those years there were strikes, not only in shipping, but also among longshore groups. If your ship was at sea when your union struck, of course the voyage would continue until you returned to a US port.
I've taught Conrad's novel in college level classes at CCNY. Students had little difficulty with it, once they recognized that James Wait, the "***" of the title is an intensely drawn character, a dying man, a doomed sailor of immense dignity, a sailor too sick to work, an isolated man around whom the book pivots, Conrad's book is a marvel devoted to the lonely dignity of men bound by duty in the last days of British sail. (I placed the book, by the way, in the syllabus right after Huck Finn, which has a surprising set of parallels with it.)
Charlezzzzz, thinking that Odysseus' management of his crew on that long home-bound trip was an early example of bad management. All of them, except the captain himself, were killed one way or another -- eaten by monsters, turned into pigs, drowned...whatever.