others, such as Joseph Curran of the National Maritime Union, "Red Mike" Quill remained on the left within the labor movement — albeit in a political atmosphere in which the boundaries had shifted drastically during the Cold War — after his split with the CP. Quill was the most vocal opponent within the CIO of its merger with the AFL, attacking it for "racism, racketeering and raids". He and the TWU were early supporters of the civil rights movement, and Quill publicly opposed the Vietnam War in the early 1960s. Quill and the TWU became even more important figures in New York City politics in the 1950s. He was a key supporter of Robert F. Wagner, Jr.'s campaign for mayor of New York; Quill's former leadership of the Communist Party was repeatedly criticized during the campaign. While his union repeatedly threatened to strike, it reached collective-bargaining agreements with the Wagner administration without ever striking. Support for racial equality and Martin Luther King Quill had a longstanding distaste for racism and any other kind of discrimination. Beginning immediately in the 1930s with his ascension to the leadership of the TWU, he had made it a point not to tolerate any kind of racial discrimination under his watch. From the outset, the TWU vowed to support workers ‘regardless of race, creed, color or nationality’, making it an anomaly in the still racially segregated America and amongst other Trade Unions in New York City. The TWU matched their words with action in 1938 when the Union supported the rights of Black transit workers. At that time, Black workers could only work as either porters or cleaners, but the TWU forced the IRT to allow black workers to better positions within the company. In 1939 the TWU held the first desegregated trade union meeting in New Orleans since the Reconstruction era. In 1941 Quill pledged to fight to see that ‘the color-line is wiped out . . . and that the Negro and white workers will have equal rights in this country’. Two years later he spoke at dozens of workplace meetings in New York, warning of the consequences for all workers of the wave of race riots then occurring in the US. In 1945 the TWU ran a nationwide campaign against lynching. In the 1940s, Quill spoke out against the Anti-Semitism of Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic Priest of Irish ethnicity who had