Download or read book Black Unionism in the Industrial South written by Ernest Obadele-Starks and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Obadele-Starks eloquently captures these workers' fight and discusses the implications of their struggle on the industrial society of the Upper Texas Gulf Coast today. Students and scholars of American labor history, race relations, and Texas history will find Black Unionism in the Industrial South a valuable scholarly work."--Jacket.

Download or read book Black Workers Remember written by Michael K. Honey and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling collection of oral histories of black working-class men and women from Memphis. Covering the 1930s to the 1980s, they tell of struggles to unionize and to combat racism on the shop floor and in society at large. They also reveal the origins of the civil rights movement in the activities of black workers, from the Depression onward.

Download or read book Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights written by Michael K. Honey and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-02-03 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely praised upon publication and now considered a classic study, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights chronicles the southern industrial union movement from the Great Depression to the Cold War, a history that created the context for the sanitation workers' strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis in April 1968. Michael K. Honey documents the dramatic labor battles and sometimes heroic activities of workers and organizers that helped to set the stage for segregation's demise. Winner of the Charles S. Sydnor Award, given by the Southern Historical Association, 1994. Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize given by the Organization of American Historians, 1994. Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Award for an outstanding book in American social history.

Download or read book Black Workers and the New Unions written by Horace R. Cayton and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book for those who want to know what really happens when, in circumstances of enormous complexity and under the impetus of the New Deal, an irresistible drive for labor organization runs head-on into an immovably imbedded race prejudice. It is based on interviews by the authors with those people most intimately concerned. Originally published in 1939. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Download or read book The Tribe of Black Ulysses written by William Powell Jones and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lumber industry employed more African American men than any southern economic sector outside agriculture, yet those workers have been almost completely ignored by scholars. Drawing on a substantial number of oral history interviews as well as on manuscript sources, local newspapers, and government documents, The Tribe of Black Ulysses explores black men and women's changing relationship to industrial work in three sawmill communities (Elizabethtown, South Carolina, Chapman, Alabama, and Bogalusa, Louisiana). By restoring black lumber workers to the history of southern industrialization, William P. Jones reveals that industrial employment was not incompatible - as previous historians have assumed - with the racial segregation and political disfranchisement that defined African American life in the Jim Crow South. At the same time, he complicates an older tradition of southern sociology that viewed industrialization as socially disruptive and morally corrupting to African American social and cultural traditions rooted in agriculture. William P. Jones is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Barrett, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Nelson Lichtenstein.

Download or read book Black Freedom Fighters in Steel written by Ruth Needleman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thousands of African Americans poured into northwest Indiana in the 1920s dreaming of decent-paying jobs and a life without Klansmen, chain gangs, and cotton. Black Freedom Fighters in Steel: The Struggle for Democratic Unionism by Ruth Needleman adds a new dimension to the literature on race and labor. It tells the story of five men born in the South who migrated north for a chance to work the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in the steel mills. Individually they fought for equality and justice; collectively they helped construct economic and union democracy in postwar America. George Kimbley, the oldest, grew up in Kentucky across the street from the family who had owned his parents. He fought with a French regiment in World War I and then settled in Gary, Indiana, in 1920 to work in steel. He joined the Steelworkers Organizing Committee and became the first African American member of its full-time staff in 1938. The youngest, Jonathan Comer, picked cotton on his father's land in Alabama, stood up to racism in the military during World War II, and became the first African American to be president of a basic steel local union. This is a book about the integration of unions, as well as about five remarkable individuals. It focuses on the decisive role of African American leaders in building interracial unionism. One chapter deals with the African American struggle for representation, highlighting the importance of independent black organization within the union. Needleman also presents a conversation among two pioneering steelworkers and current African American union leaders about the racial politics of union activism.

Download or read book Racial Conflicts and Violence in the Labor Market written by Cliff Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on community-level race relations during the 1919 Steel Strike, when intense job competition contributed to racial conflict among the nation's steel workers. As the Great Migration brought thousands of black workers to northern cities, their lower labor costs generated racially split labor markets in the industrial sector. Further, the discriminatory policies of labor unions forced many blacks to serve as strike breakers during periods of class conflict. As a result, the migration heightened racial conflict and undercut important union organizing initiatives. The 1919 Steel Strike illustrates how racial divisions crippled many American unions, a pattern that helps to explain the demise of organized labor during the 1920's. No previous studies of the 1919 Steel Strike have systematically compared community processes to determine how local events shaped the strike's outcome. Despite the failure of the 1919 Steel Strike, the varied experiences of workers in different communities reveal much about the causes of racial conflict and the possibilities of interracial solidarity. This study finds that patterns of black migration, local government repression of labor, the organizational strength of local unions, and employers' efforts to inflame racial tension all help to explain community-level variation in interracial solidarity and conflict. (Ph. D. dissertation, Emory University, 1996; revised with new preface)

Download or read book Labor in the South written by F. Ray Marshall and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1967 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysis of factors influencing the growth of trade unions in Southern states of the USA - covers historical aspects, Black employees attitude to unions and the attitude of poverty-stricken whites thereto, economic recession, stimulation of the economy and emergence of the region as a developing area in world war 2, industrial development, labour relations, strikes, union membership, the occupational structure, collective bargaining, etc. References and statistical tables.

Download or read book Reconsidering Southern Labor History written by Matthew Hild and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: United Association for Labor Education Best Book Award The American Dream of reaching success through sheer sweat and determination rings false for countless members of the working classes. This volume shows that many of the difficulties facing workers today have deep roots in the history of the exploitation of labor in the South. Contributors make the case that the problems that have long beset southern labor, including the legacy of slavery, low wages, lack of collective bargaining rights, and repression of organized unions, have become the problems of workers across the country. Spanning nearly all of U.S. history, the essays in this collection range from West Virginia to Florida to Texas. They examine vagrancy laws in the early republic, inmate labor at state penitentiaries, mine workers and union membership, and strikes and the often-violent strikebreaking that followed. They also look at pesticide exposure among farmworkers, labor activism during the civil rights movement, and foreign-owned auto factories in the rural South. They distinguish between different struggles experienced by women and men, as well as by African American, Latino, and white workers. The broad chronological sweep and comprehensive nature of Reconsidering Southern Labor History set this volume apart from any other collection on the topic in the past forty years. Presenting the latest trends in the study of the working-class South by a new generation of scholars, this volume is a surprising revelation of the historical forces behind the labor inequalities inherent today. Contributors: David M. Anderson | Deborah Beckel | Thomas Brown | Dana M. Caldemeyer | Adam Carson | Theresa Case | Erin L. Conlin | Brett J. Derbes | Maria Angela Diaz | Alan Draper | Matthew Hild | Joseph E. Hower | T.R.C. Hutton | Stuart MacKay | Andrew C. McKevitt | Keri Leigh Merritt | Bethany Moreton | Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan | Michael Sistrom | Joseph M. Thompson | Linda Tvrdy

Download or read book Everybody was Black Down There written by Robert H. Woodrum and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1930 almost 13,000 African Americans worked in the coal mines around Birmingham, Alabama. They made up 53 percent of the mining workforce and some 60 percent of their union's local membership. At the close of the twentieth century, only about 15 percent of Birmingham's miners were black, and the entire mining workforce had been sharply reduced. Robert H. Woodrum offers a challenging interpretation of why this dramatic decline occurred and why it happened during an era of strong union presence in the Alabama coalfields. Drawing on union, company, and government records as well as interviews with coal miners, Woodrum examines the complex connections between racial ideology and technological and economic change. Extending the chronological scope of previous studies of race, work, and unionization in the Birmingham coalfields, Woodrum covers the New Deal, World War II, the postwar era, the 1970s expansion of coalfield employment, and contemporary trends toward globalization. The United Mine Workers of America's efforts to bridge the color line in places like Birmingham should not be underestimated, says Woodrum. Facing pressure from the wider world of segregationist Alabama, however, union leadership ultimately backed off the UMWA's historic commitment to the rights of its black members. Woodrum discusses the role of state UMWA president William Mitch in this process and describes Birmingham's unique economic circumstances as an essentially Rust Belt city within the burgeoning Sun Belt South. This is a nuanced exploration of how, despite their central role in bringing the UMWA back to Alabama in the early 1930s, black miners remained vulnerable to the economic and technological changes that transformed the coal industry after World War II.

Download or read book For Jobs and Freedom written by Robert H. Zieger and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-04-23 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether as slaves or freedmen, the political and social status of African Americans has always been tied to their ability to participate in the nation's economy. Freedom in the post–Civil War years did not guarantee equality, and African Americans from emancipation to the present have faced the seemingly insurmountable task of erasing pervasive public belief in the inferiority of their race. For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 describes the African American struggle to obtain equal rights in the workplace and organized labor's response to their demands. Award-winning historian Robert H. Zieger asserts that the promise of jobs was similar to the forty-acres-and-a-mule restitution pledged to African Americans during the Reconstruction era. The inconsistencies between rhetoric and action encouraged workers, both men and women, to organize themselves into unions to fight against unfair hiring practices and workplace discrimination. Though the path proved difficult, unions gradually obtained rights for African American workers with prominent leaders at their fore. In 1925, A. Philip Randolph formed the first black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to fight against injustices committed by the Pullman Company, an employer of significant numbers of African Americans. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) emerged in 1935, and its population quickly swelled to include over 500,000 African American workers. The most dramatic success came in the 1960s with the establishment of affirmative action programs, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title VII enforcement measures prohibiting employer discrimination based on race. Though racism and unfair hiring practices still exist today, motivated individuals and leaders of the labor movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries laid the groundwork for better conditions and greater opportunities. Unions, with some sixteen million members currently in their ranks, continue to protect workers against discrimination in the expanding economy. For Jobs and Freedom is the first authoritative treatment in more than two decades of the race and labor movement, and Zieger's comprehensive and authoritative book will be standard reading on the subject for years to come.

Download or read book Civil Rights Unionism written by Robert R. Korstad and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2003-11-20 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on scores of interviews with black and white tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Robert Korstad brings to life the forgotten heroes of Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America-CIO. These workers confronted a system of racial capitalism that consigned African Americans to the basest jobs in the industry, perpetuated low wages for all southerners, and shored up white supremacy. Galvanized by the emergence of the CIO, African Americans took the lead in a campaign that saw a strong labor movement and the reenfranchisement of the southern poor as keys to reforming the South--and a reformed South as central to the survival and expansion of the New Deal. In the window of opportunity opened by World War II, they blurred the boundaries between home and work as they linked civil rights and labor rights in a bid for justice at work and in the public sphere. But civil rights unionism foundered in the maelstrom of the Cold War. Its defeat undermined later efforts by civil rights activists to raise issues of economic equality to the moral high ground occupied by the fight against legalized segregation and, Korstad contends, constrains the prospects for justice and democracy today.

Download or read book The Influence of Apartheid and Capitalism on the Development of Black Trade Unions in South Africa written by Don Ncube and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Hiring the Black Worker written by Timothy J. Minchin and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960-1980

Download or read book Organized Labor and the Black Worker 1619 1981 written by Philip Sheldon Foner and published by New York : International Publishers. This book was released on 1982 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 Racial Realignment written by Eric Schickler and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few transformations in American politics have been as important as the integration of African Americans into the Democratic Party and the Republican embrace of racial policy conservatism. The story of this partisan realignment on race is often told as one in which political elites—such as Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater—set in motion a dramatic and sudden reshuffling of party positioning on racial issues during the 1960s. Racial Realignment instead argues that top party leaders were actually among the last to move, and that their choices were dictated by changes that had already occurred beneath them. Drawing upon rich data sources and original historical research, Eric Schickler shows that the two parties' transformation on civil rights took place gradually over decades. Schickler reveals that Democratic partisanship, economic liberalism, and support for civil rights had crystallized in public opinion, state parties, and Congress by the mid-1940s. This trend was propelled forward by the incorporation of African Americans and the pro-civil-rights Congress of Industrial Organizations into the Democratic coalition. Meanwhile, Republican partisanship became aligned with economic and racial conservatism. Scrambling to maintain existing power bases, national party elites refused to acknowledge these changes for as long as they could, but the civil rights movement finally forced them to choose where their respective parties would stand. Presenting original ideas about political change, Racial Realignment sheds new light on twentieth and twenty-first century racial politics.