Download or read book The Challenge of Interracial Unionism written by Daniel Letwin and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores a tradition of interracial unionism that persisted in the coal fields of Alabama from the dawn of the New South through the turbulent era of World War I. Daniel Letwin focuses on the forces that prompted black and white miners to colla

Download or read book Wobblies on the Waterfront written by Peter Cole and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise and fall of America's first truly interracial labor union For almost a decade during the 1910s and 1920s, the Philadelphia waterfront was home to the most durable interracial, multiethnic union seen in the United States prior to the CIO era. For much of its time, Local 8 was majority black, always with a cadre of black leaders. The union also claimed immigrants from Eastern Europe, as well as many Irish Americans, who had a notorious reputation for racism. This important study is the first book-length examination of how Local 8, affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, accomplished what no other did at the time. Peter Cole outlines the factors that were instrumental in Local 8's success, both ideological (the IWW's commitment to working-class solidarity) and pragmatic (racial divisions helped solidify employer dominance). He also shows how race was central not only to the rise but also to the decline of Local 8, as increasing racial tensions were manipulated by employers and federal agents bent on the union's destruction.

Download or read book They Saw Themselves as Workers written by Julia Oestreich and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'They Saw Themselves as Workers' explores the development of black membership in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) in the wake of the "Uprising of the 30,000" garment strike of 1933-34, as well as the establishment of independent black labor or labor-related organizations during the mid-late 1930s. The locus for the growth of black ILGWU membership was Harlem, where there were branches of Local 22, one of the largest and the most diverse ILGWU local. Harlem was also where the Negro Labor Committee (NLC) was established by Frank Crosswaith, a leading black socialist and ILGWU organizer. I provide some background, but concentrate on the aftermath of the marked increase in black membership in the ILGWU during the 1933-34 garment uprising and end in 1940, when blacks confirmed their support of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and when the labor-oriented National Negro Congress (NNC) was irrevocably split by struggles over communist influence. By that time, the NLC was also struggling, due to both a lack of support from trade unions and friendly organizations, as well as the fact that the Committee was constrained by the political views and personal grudges of its founder. Yet, during the period examined in "They Saw Themselves as Workers," the ILGWU and its Local 22 thrived. Using primary sources including the records of the ILGWU and various locals, the NLC, and the NNC, I argue that educational programming was largely responsible for the ILGWU's success during the 1930s, not political ideology, as others have argued. In fact, I assert that political ideology was often detrimental to organizations like the NLC and NNC, alienating many blacks during a period when they increasingly shifted their allegiance to the Democratic Party. Conversely, through educational programming that brought unionists of various racial and ethnic backgrounds together and celebrated their differences, the ILGWU assimilated new African American members and strengthened interracial working-class solidarity. That programming included such ostensibly apolitical activities as classes, dances, musical and theatrical performances, sporting events, and trips to resorts and places of cultural interest. Yet, by attracting workers who wanted to expand their minds and enjoy their lives outside of work to combat the misery of the Depression, the ILGWU cemented their devotion to the union and its agenda. Thus, through activities that were not overtly political, the ILGWU drew workers into the labor movement, and ultimately into the New Deal coalition in support of President Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. As the union flourished, part of an increasingly influential labor movement, it offered African American workers a better path to political power than the Negro Labor Committee or the National Negro Congress during the mid-late 1930s.

Download or read book A Renegade Union written by Lisa Phillips and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-12-30 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dedicated to organizing workers from diverse racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, many of whom were considered "unorganizable" by other unions, the progressive New York City-based labor union District 65 counted among its 30,000 members retail clerks, office workers, warehouse workers, and wholesale workers. In this book, Lisa Phillips presents a distinctive study of District 65 and its efforts to secure economic equality for minority workers in sales and processing jobs in small, low-end shops and warehouses throughout the city. Phillips shows how organizers fought tirelessly to achieve better hours and higher wages for "unskilled," unrepresented workers and to destigmatize the kind of work they performed. Closely examining the strategies employed by District 65 from the 1930s through the early Cold War years, Phillips assesses the impact of the McCarthy era on the union's quest for economic equality across divisions of race, ethnicity, and skill. Though their stories have been overshadowed by those of auto, steel, and electrical workers who forced American manufacturing giants to unionize, the District 65 workers believed their union provided them with an opportunity to re-value their work, the result of an economy inclining toward fewer manufacturing jobs and more low-wage service and processing jobs. Phillips recounts how District 65 first broke with the CIO over the latter's hostility to left-oriented politics and organizing agendas, then rejoined to facilitate alliances with the NAACP. In telling the story of District 65 and detailing community organizing efforts during the first part of the Cold War and under the AFL-CIO umbrella, A Renegade Union continues to revise the history of the left-led unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Download or read book Hugo Black of Alabama written by Steve Suitts and published by NewSouth Books. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 701 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three decades after his death, the life and career of Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black continue to be studied and discussed. This definitive study of Black’s origins and early influences has been 25 years in the making and offers fresh insights into the justice’s character, thought processes, and instincts. Black came out of hardscrabble Alabama hill country, and he never forgot his origins. He was further shaped in the early 20th-century politics of Birmingham, where he set up a law practice and began his political career, eventually rising to the U.S. Senate, from which he was selected by FDR for the high court. Black’s nomination was opposed partly on the grounds that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. One of the book’s conclusions that is sure to be controversial is that in the context of Birmingham in the early 1920s, Black’s joining of the KKK was a progressive act. This startling assertion is supported by an examination of the conflict that was then raging in Birmingham between the Big Mule industrialists and the blue-collar labor unions. Black of course went on to become a staunch judicial advocate of free speech and civil rights, thus making him one of the figures most vilified by the KKK and other white supremacists in the 1950s and 1960s.

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 Race Class and Power in the Alabama Coalfields 1908 21 written by Brian Kelly and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lucid and supremely readable study, Brian Kelly challenges the prevailing notion that white workers were the main source of resistance to racial equality in the Jim Crow South. Kelly explores the forces that brought the black and white miners of Birmingham, Alabama, together during the hard-fought strikes of 1908 and 1920. He examines the systematic efforts by the region's powerful industrialists to foment racial divisions as a means of splitting the workforce, preventing unionization, and holding wages to the lowest levels in the country. He also details the role played by Birmingham's small but influential black middle class, whose espousal of industrial accommodation outraged black miners and revealed significant tensions within the African-American community.

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 571 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 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 The Quest for Streetcar Unionism in the Carolina Piedmont 1919 1922 written by Jeffrey M. Leatherwood and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-23 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since the courtroom doors closed in 1919, the tragic Charlotte Streetcar Strike has haunted the collective memory of the Carolina Piedmont region. During a season of labor unrest, it briefly made national headlines. Five men were killed and at least twelve others were wounded by gunfire during a demonstration against Southern Public Utilities, a subsidiary of James B. Duke’s Southern Power. For many who lived afterward in North Carolina’s “Queen City,” the strike and riot were events better left forgotten, while, for later generations, the “Battle of the Barn” has become an item of curiosity. As the centennial approaches, this book represents the result of over ten years’ worth of primary research about the Charlotte Streetcar Strike, a story that rightfully belongs to a larger narrative about the AFL’s campaign to organize transportation workers among the textile mill towns of North and South Carolina. Prior to the 1919 Charlotte Strike, the national streetcar union had overcome fierce anti-labor sentiment, from South Carolina’s state capital of Columbia to the Upcountry citadel of Spartanburg. To AFL organizers, Charlotte represented the last link in the Piedmont chain.

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 Like a Family written by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-30 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its original publication in 1987, Like a Family has become a classic in the study of American labor history. Basing their research on a series of extraordinary interviews, letters, and articles from the trade press, the authors uncover the voices and experiences of workers in the Southern cotton mill industry during the 1920s and 1930s. Now with a new afterword, this edition stands as an invaluable contribution to American social history. "The genius of Like a Family lies in its effortless integration of the history of the family--particularly women--into the history of the cotton-mill world.--Ira Berlin, New York Times Book Review "Like a Family is history, folklore, and storytelling all rolled into one. It is a living, revelatory chronicle of life rarely observed by the academe. A powerhouse.--Studs Terkel "Here is labor history in intensely human terms. Neither great impersonal forces nor deadening statistics are allowed to get in the way of people. If students of the New South want both the dimensions and the feel of life and labor in the textile industry, this book will be immensely satisfying.--Choice

Download or read book Winning the War for Democracy written by David Lucander and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars regard the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) as a forerunner of the postwar Civil Rights movement. Led by the charismatic A. Philip Randolph, MOWM scored an early victory when it forced the Roosevelt administration to issue a landmark executive order that prohibited defense contractors from practicing racial discrimination. Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946 recalls that triumph, but also looks beyond Randolph and the MOWM's national leadership to focus on the organization's evolution and actions at the local level. Using the personal papers of previously unheralded MOWM members such as T.D. McNeal, internal government documents from the Roosevelt administration, and other primary sources, David Lucander highlights how local affiliates fighting for a double victory against fascism and racism helped the national MOWM accrue the political capital it needed to effect change. Lucander details the efforts of grassroots organizers to implement MOWM's program of empowering African Americans via meetings and marches at defense plants and government buildings and, in particular, focuses on the contributions of women activists like Layle Lane, E. Pauline Myers, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Throughout he shows how local activities often diverged from policies laid out at MOWM's national office, and how grassroots participants on both sides ignored the rivalry between Randolph and the leadership of the NAACP to align with one another on the ground.

Download or read book A Companion to the American South written by John B. Boles and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the American South surveys and evaluates the most important and innovative writing on the entire sweep of the history of the southern United States. Contains 29 original essays by leading experts in American Southern history. Covers the entire sweep of Southern history, including slavery, politics, the Civil War, race relations, religion, and women's history. Surveys and evaluates the best scholarship on every important era and topic. Summarizes current debates and anticipates future concerns.

Download or read book Texas Labor History written by Bruce A. Glasrud and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-20 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A helpful new source for scholars and teachers who wish to fill in some of the missing pieces. Tackling a number of such presumptions—that a viable labor movement never existed in the Lone Star State; that black, brown, and white laborers, both male and female, were unable to achieve even short-term solidarity; that labor unions in Texas were ineffective because of laborers’ inability to confront employers—the editors and contributors to this volume lay the foundation for establishing the importance of labor to a fuller understanding of Texas history.

Download or read book Energy Citizenship written by Trish Kahle and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2024-10-29 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the modern United States is the history of coal—and of coal miners. Trish Kahle reveals miners as forgers of a coal-fired social contract that was contested throughout the twentieth century as Americans sought to define the meaning of citizenship in an energy-intensive democracy. Energy Citizenship traces the uncertain relationship between coal and democracy from the Progressive Era to the election of Ronald Reagan, examining how miners’ democratic aspirations confronted the deadly record of the country’s coal mines. Miners and their communities bore the burdens of energy production while reaping far fewer of the benefits of energy consumption. But they insisted that death in the mines, far from being inevitable, was a political choice. Kahle demonstrates that coal miners’ struggles to democratize the workplace, secure civil and social rights, and obtain restitution for the human toll of progress reshaped U.S. laws, regulatory administrations, and political imaginaries. Energy policy in the twentieth century was about not only managing fuels but also negotiating the relationship between coal miners and the rest of the country, which depended on the electric power and steel produced with the coal they mined. Placing coal miners at the center of a sweeping new history of the United States, this book unmasks the violence of energy systems and shows how energy governance cuts to the heart of persistent questions about democracy, justice, and equality.

Download or read book A Working People written by Steven A. Reich and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-09-12 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, historian Steven A. Reich examines the economic, political and cultural forces that have beaten and built America’s black workforce since Emancipation. From the abolition of slavery through the Civil Rights Movement and Great Recession, African Americans have faced a unique set of obstacles and prejudices on their way to becoming a productive and indispensable portion of the American workforce. Repeatedly denied access to the opportunities all Americans are to be afforded under the Constitution, African Americans have combined decades of collective action and community mobilization with the trailblazing heroism of a select few to pave their own way to prosperity. This latest installment of the African American HistorySeries challenges the notion that racial prejudices are buried in our nation’s history, and instead provides a narrative connecting the struggles of many generations of African American workers to those felt the present day. Reich provides an unblinking account of what being an African American worker has meant since the 1860s, alluding to ways in which we can and must learn from our past, for the betterment of all workers, however marginalized they may be. A Working People: A History of African American Workers Since Emancipation is as factually astute as it is accessibly written, a tapestry of over 150 years of troubled yet triumphant African-American labor history that we still weave today.