Labor & African Americans

Organized Labor & African Americans

Organizations

• A. Phillip Randolph Institute
• Black Workers for Justice
• Coalition of Black Trade Unionists

Documents — Labor

• African American Workers Want to Form Unions, AFL-CIO
• Black Labor's Voice Amidst the Madness, Bill Fletcher, Jr.
• The Black-Labor Alliance: Strengthening the Partnership for Economic Justice, Tom Donohue
• Black Workers and the Labor Movement, Abdul Alkalimat
• Building Bridges: The Challenge of Organized Labor in Communities of Color, Robin D. G. Kelley (PDF)
• Choices for Black Labor, Bill Fletcher, Jr.
• Job Quality and Black Workers: An Examination of the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, Steven C. Pitts (PDF)

Documents — Economics

• Bush Economics Bad News for African Americans (AFL-CIO)
• Foreclosed: State of the Dream 2008, United for a Fair Economy
• Two Steps Back: African Americans & Latinos Will Lose Ground under Social Security "Reform" (Economic Policy Institute)
• Weaker Job Market Re-opens Racial Income Gap, Economic Policy Institute
• What a Recession Means for Black Americans (Economic Policy Institute)

African American Labor History

General

• African Americans and the American Labor Movement, James Gilbert Cassedy
• Important Dates in Black Labor History (SEIU)
• Labor Unions in the United States (Encarta Africana)
• The Power of Remembering: Black Factory Workers and Union Organizing in the Jim Crow Era, Michael Honey
• Servitude to Service: African-American Women as Wage Earners, Rita G. Korman (PDF)

Organizations

• Alabama Sharecroppers' Union (1)
• Alabama Sharecroppers' Union (2)
• Association of Black Caulkers
• Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
• Colored Marines Employment Benevolent Association
• Colored National Labor Union
• Congress of Industrial Organizations
• Industrial Workers of the World — Philadelphia Dockworkers
• Industrial Workers of the World — Southern Wobblies
• League of Revolutionary Black Workers
• Mississippi Freedom Labor Union
• National Negro Congress
• National Negro Labor Council
• Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee
• Sharecropping — Southern Tenant Farmers Union — Sharecroppers Union
• Southern Tenant Farmers Union
• Waiters Protective Association of New York

Events

• Atlanta Washerwomen's Strike
• Charleston Five — The Case
• Charleston Five — The Victory
• Charleston on the Black Waterfront — Historically
• Memphis Sanitation Strike (AFSCME)
• Memphis Sanitation Strike (photos)
• New Orleans General Strike
• The Thibodaux Massacre

People

• Carl Brooks
• Ned Cobb (Nate Shaw)
• Jim Cole
• Frank Crosswaith
• Frederick Douglass
• Benjamin Fletcher
• Fannie Lou Hamer
• Hubert Harrison
• Norman Hill
• Robert L. Hill
• Hosea Hudson
• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Malcolm X
• Thurgood Marshall Addresses the AFL-CIO
• Isaac Meyers
• E. D. Nixon
• Lucy Parsons
• A. Phillip Randolph
• James Rapier
• Bayard Rustin (1)
• Bayard Rustin (2)
• Tyree Scott
• Moranda Smith
• Moranda Smith Addresses the CIO
• Maida Springer
• Maida Springer — Extensive Interview
• Ernest Thompson
• Coleman Young

Links

• African American Labor History Links, AFSCME
• Black Labor History, American Labor Studies Center
• Black Workers Resources, UC Berkeley Labor Center
• Blacks, Unions, & Organizing the South, 1956-1996, Rudolph Lewis
• Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project
• Working Families in Historic Civil Rights Struggles, AFL-CIO

Black History Month

• How Negro History Week Became Black History Month
• Carter G. Woodson, the "Father of Black History Month"

Resources on African American Labor in the DC 37 Library

Books:

• All God's Dangers, Theodore Rosengarten
• Black Labor in America, Milton Cantor
• Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle, Michael Honey
• Blood on the Forge, William Attaway
• Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, Dan Georgakis and Marvin Surkin
• For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America Since 1865, Robert Zieger
• The Harder We Run: Black Workers Since the Civil War, William V. Harris
• A Hubert Harrison Reader, Jeff Perry (editor)
• Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present, Jacqueline Jones
• Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, John D'Emilio
• The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, Nell Irvin Painter
• Race and Labor Matters in the New U. S. Economy, Manning Marable, Immanuel Ness, Joseph Wilson
• Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica, Gerald Horne
• Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers, Michael Honey

Videos/DVDs:

• 10,000 Black Men Named George
• A. Philip Randolph: For Jobs and Freedom
• At the River I Stand
• Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin
• Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle
• Struggles in Steel

These materials are available to be checked out at the DC 37 Library. Please note, this is only a small sampling of the hundreds of books, CDs, and other material about African Americans and labor at the library.

Local 2627 in the News — African Americans

• Articles concerning Local 2627

African Americans & the Environment

• See the "Environmental Racism" section on Local 2627's Labor & Environment webpage.