Download or read book Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW written by August Meier and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic of labor history, with a new foreword by one of the leading figures in urban studies

Download or read book The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford written by Beth Tompkins Bates and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1920s, Henry Ford hired thousands of African American men for his open-shop system of auto manufacturing. This move was a rejection of the notion that better jobs were for white men only. In The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford

Download or read book Race against Liberalism written by David M. Lewis-Colman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2024-03-18 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race against Liberalism examines how black worker activism in Detroit shaped the racial politics of the labor movement and the white working class. David M. Lewis-Colman traces the substantive, long-standing disagreements between liberals and the black workers who embraced autonomous race-based action. As he shows, black autoworkers placed themselves at the center of Detroit's working-class politics and sought to forge a kind of working class unity that accommodated their interests as African Americans. The book covers the independent caucuses in the 1940s and the Trade Union Leadership Council in the 1950s; the black power movement and Revolutionary Union Movements of the mid-1960s; and the independent race-based activism of the 1970s that resulted in Coleman Young's 1973 election as the city's first black mayor.

Download or read book Maurice Sugar written by Christopher H. Johnson and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was Maurice Sugar, labor activist and lawyer for the United Auto Workers, who played a key role in guiding the newly-formed union through the treacherous legal terrain obstructing its development in the 1930s. He orchestrated the injunction hearings on the Dodge Main strike and defended the legality of the sit-down tactic. As the UAW's General Council, he wrote the union's constitution in 1939, a model of democratic thinking. Sugar worked with George Addes, UAW Secretary-Treasurer, to nurture rank-and-file power. A founder of the National Lawyers' Guild, Sugar also served as a member of Detroit's Common Council at the head of a UAW "labor" ticket. By 1947, Sugar was embroiled in a struggle within the UAW that he feared would destroy the open structures he had helped to build. He found himself in opposition to Walter Reuther's bid to run the union. A long-time socialist, Sugar fell victim to mounting Cold War hysteria. When Reuther assumed control of the UAW, Sugar was summarily dismissed. Christopher Johnson chronicles the life of Maurice Sugar, from his roots in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, through his resistance with Eugene V Debs to World War I, and on to the struggles of the early 1930s to bring the union message to Detroit. Firmly grounded on the historiography of the UAW, Johnson shows the importance of Sugar and the Left in laying the foundation for unionizing the auto industry in the pre-UAW days. He documents the work of the Left in building a Black-labor coalition in Detroit, the importance of anti-Communism in Reuther's rise to power, and the diminution of union democracy in the UAW brought about by the Cold War. Maurice Sugar represents a force in American life that bears recalling in these barren years of plant closings.

Download or read book Built in Detroit written by Bob Morris and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2013 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1935. In the middle of the Great Depression, after months of unemployment, Ken Morris found a job at the Briggs Manufacturing Company, the toughest auto company in Detroit. He would eventually play a pioneering role in building one of the cleanest, most socially progressive labor unions the world has known-the United Automobile Workers. Bob Morris, Ken's son, tells not only his father's story, but also the UAW's story: the battles with companies, the struggles within the union, and then the vicious attacks on Detroit labor leaders in the late 1940s. He also provides portraits of early auto industrialists, their companies, their henchmen and the gangsters they hired to destroy the labor movement.

Download or read book Detroit I Do Mind Dying written by Dan Georgakas and published by South End Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new South End Press edition makes available the full text of this out-of-print classic--along with a new foreword by Manning Marable, interviews with participants in DRUM, and reflections on political developments over the past threee decades by Georgakas and Surkin.

Download or read book Arsenal of Democracy written by Charles K. Hyde and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-04 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout World War II, Detroit's automobile manufacturers accounted for one-fifth of the dollar value of the nation's total war production, and this amazing output from "the arsenal of democracy" directly contributed to the allied victory. In fact, automobile makers achieved such production miracles that many of their methods were adopted by other defense industries, particularly the aircraft industry. In Arsenal of Democracy: The American Automobile Industry in World War II, award-winning historian Charles K. Hyde details the industry's transition to a wartime production powerhouse and some of its notable achievements along the way. Hyde examines several innovative cooperative relationships that developed between the executive branch of the federal government, U.S. military services, automobile industry leaders, auto industry suppliers, and the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union, which set up the industry to achieve production miracles. He goes on to examine the struggles and achievements of individual automakers during the war years in producing items like aircraft engines, aircraft components, and complete aircraft; tanks and other armored vehicles; jeeps, trucks, and amphibians; guns, shells, and bullets of all types; and a wide range of other weapons and war goods ranging from search lights to submarine nets and gyroscopes. Hyde also considers the important role played by previously underused workers-namely African Americans and women-in the war effort and their experiences on the line. Arsenal of Democracy includes an analysis of wartime production nationally, on the automotive industry level, by individual automakers, and at the single plant level. For this thorough history, Hyde has consulted previously overlooked records collected by the Automobile Manufacturers Association that are now housed in the National Automotive History Collection of the Detroit Public Library. Automotive historians, World War II scholars, and American history buffs will welcome the compelling look at wartime industry in Arsenal of Democracy.

Download or read book Muddy Boots and Ragged Aprons written by Kevin Boyle and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text focuses on the working people who, in the first three decades of the 20th century, made Detroit into one of the world's great industrial cities. Telling their stories through photographs with captions explaining its content and context, it examines the world as they lived and changed it.

Download or read book Managing Inequality written by Karen R. Miller and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Managing Inequality, Karen R. Miller examines the formulation, uses, and growing political importance of northern racial liberalism in Detroit between the two World Wars. In the wake of the Civil War, many white northern leaders supported race-neutral laws and anti-discrimination statutes. These positions helped amplify the distinctions they drew between their political economic system, which they saw as forward-thinking in its promotion of free market capitalism, and the now vanquished southern system, which had been built on slavery. But this interest in legal race neutrality should not be mistaken for an effort to integrate northern African Americans into the state or society on an equal footing with whites. During the Great Migration, which brought tens of thousands of African Americans into Northern cities after World War I, white northern leaders faced new challenges from both white and African American activists and were pushed to manage race relations in a more formalized and proactive manner. The result was northern racial liberalism: the idea that all Americans, regardless of race, should be politically equal, but that the state cannot and indeed should not enforce racial equality by interfering with existing social or economic relations. Miller argues that racial inequality was built into the liberal state at its inception, rather than produced by antagonists of liberalism. Managing Inequality shows that our current racial system—where race neutral language coincides with extreme racial inequalities that appear natural rather than political—has a history that is deeply embedded in contemporary governmental systems and political economies.

Download or read book Black Americans and Organized Labor written by Paul D. Moreno and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Black Americans and Organized Labor, Paul D. Moreno offers a bold reinterpretation of the role of race and racial discrimination in the American labor movement. Moreno applies insights of the law-and-economics movement to formulate a powerfully compelling labor-race theorem of elegant simplicity: White unionists found that race was a convenient basis on which to do what unions do -- control the labor supply. Not racism pure and simple but "the economics of discrimination" explains historic black absence and under-representation in unions. Moreno's sweeping reexamination stretches from the antebellum period to the present, integrating principal figures such as Frederick Douglass and Samuel Gompers, Isaac Myers and Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph. He traces changing attitudes and practices during the simultaneous black migration to the North and consolidation of organized labor's power, through the confusing and conflicted post-World War II period, during the course of the civil rights movement, and into the era of affirmative action. Maneuvering across a wide span of time and a broad array of issues, Moreno brings remarkable clarity to the question of the importance of race in unions. He impressively weaves together labor, policy, and African American history into a cogent, persuasive revisionist study that cannot be ignored.

Download or read book American Vanguard written by John Barnard and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The struggles and victories of the UAW form an important chapter in the story of American democracy. American Vanguard is the first and only history of the union available for both general and academic audiences. In this thorough and engaging narrative, John Barnard not only records the controversial issues tackled by the UAW, but also lends them immediacy through details about the workers and their environments, the leaders and the challenges that they faced outside and inside the organization, and the vision that guided many of these activists. Throughout, Barnard traces the UAW's two-fold goal: to create an industrial democracy in the workplace and to pursue a social-democratic agenda in the interest of the public at large. Part one explores the obstacles to the UAW's organization, including tensions between militant reformers and workers who feared for their jobs; ideological differences; racial and ethnic issues; and public attitudes toward unions. By the outbreak of World War II, however, the union had succeeded in redistributing power on the shop floor in its members' favor. Part two follows the union during Walter P. Reuther's presidency (1946-1970). During this time, pioneering contracts brought a new standard of living and income security to the workers, while an effort was made to move America toward a social democracy-which met with mixed results during the civil rights decade. Throughout, Barnard presents balanced interpretations grounded in evidence, while setting the UAW within the context of the history of the U.S. auto industry and national politics.

Download or read book Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America 1925 1945 written by Beth Tompkins Bates and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-01-14 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between World War I and World War II, African Americans' quest for civil rights took on a more aggressive character as a new group of black activists challenged the politics of civility traditionally embraced by old-guard leaders in favor of a more forceful protest strategy. Beth Tompkins Bates traces the rise of this new protest politics--which was grounded in making demands and backing them up with collective action--by focusing on the struggle of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) to form a union in Chicago, headquarters of the Pullman Company. Bates shows how the BSCP overcame initial opposition from most of Chicago's black leaders by linking its union message with the broader social movement for racial equality. As members of BSCP protest networks mobilized the black community around the quest for manhood rights and economic freedom, they broke down resistance to organized labor even as they expanded the boundaries of citizenship to include equal economic opportunity. By the mid-1930s, BSCP protest networks gained platforms at the national level, fusing Brotherhood activities first with those of the National Negro Congress and later with the March on Washington Movement. Lessons learned during this era guided the next generation of activists, who carried the black freedom struggle forward after World War II.

Download or read book Laboured Protest written by Oliver Ayers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians have long realized the US civil rights movement pre-dated Martin Luther King Jr., but they disagree on where, when and why it started. Laboured Protest offers new answers in a study of black political protest during the New Deal and Second World War. It finds a diverse movement where activists from the left operated alongside, and often in competition with, others who signed up to liberal or nationalist political platforms. Protestors in this period often struggled to challenge the different types of discrimination facing black workers, but their energetic campaigning was part of a more complex, and ultimately more interesting, movement than previously thought.

Download or read book The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism 1945 1968 written by Kevin Boyle and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The UAW engaged in these struggles in an attempt to build a cross-class, multiracial reform coalition that would push American politics beyond liberalism and toward social democracy. The effort was in vain; forced to work within political structures - particularly the postwar Democratic party - that militated against change, the union was unable to fashion the alliance it sought. The UAW's political activism nevertheless suggests a new understanding of labor's place in postwar American politics and of the complex forces that defined liberalism in that period. The book also supplies the first detailed discussion of the impact of the Vietnam War on a major American union and shatters the popular image of organized labor as being hawkish on the war.

Download or read book UAW Politics in the Cold War Era written by Martin Halpern and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length study of the triumph of the Reuther caucus over the Thomas-Addes-Leonard coalition in the United Auto Workers union. The dramatic defeat of the left-center coalition had far reaching significance. It helped to determine the shape of postwar labor relations, the direction of postwar liberalism, and the fate of the left. Based on manuscript sources, oral histories, and quantitative analyses of convention roll calls, UAW Politics in the Cold War Era places this union conflict in a national political context of postwar economic conflicts, the cold war, and the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act. Halpern offers a fresh point of view on the character of the two contending coalitions and the reasons for the Reuther triumph. His work is a valuable contribution to the current reassessment of the domestic politics of the early cold war years.

Download or read book Religion of White Rage written by Stephen C. Finley and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critically analyses the historical, cultural and political dimensions of white religious rage in America, past and present This book sheds light on the phenomenon of white rage, and maps out the uneasy relationship between white anxiety, religious fervour, American identity and perceived black racial progress. Contributors to the volume examine the sociological construct of the "e;white labourer"e;, whose concerns and beliefs can be understood as religious in foundation, and uncover that white religious fervor correlates to notions of perceived white loss and perceived black progress. In discussions ranging from the Constitution to the Charlottesville riots to the evangelical community's uncritical support for Trump, the authors of this collection argue that it is not economics but religion and race that stand as the primary motivating factors for the rise of white rage and white supremacist sentiment in the United States.

Download or read book African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century written by Vincent P. Franklin and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent scholarship, academics have focused primarily on areas of conflict between Blacks and Jews; yet, in the long struggle to bring social justice to American society, these two groups have often worked as allies in both the organized labor and the civil rights movements.Demonstrating the complexity of the relationship of Blacks and Jews in America, African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century examines the competition and solidarity that have characterized Black-Jewish interactions over the past century. These essays provide an intellectual foundation for cooperative efforts to improve social justice in our society and are an invaluable resource for the study of race relations in twentieth-century America. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.