"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.
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.
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.
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.
Part I: Black labor in the old south. Blacks in the crafts and industries of the old south ; Slave craftsman in America ; Industrial slavery ; Hiring-out of slave mechanics Self-purchase by slave mechanics ; A slave mechanic's escape to freedom ; Occupations of free blacks in the south -- Part II: Race relations in old southern industries. The debate over the use of free or slave mechanics ; Petitions and protests of white mechanics against black mechanics ; Free black workers and the law ; Labor violence in black and white ; Observations on race relations -- Part III: Free black labor in the north. Northern free black occupations ; Discrimination against free black workers in the north -- Part IV: Living conditions and race relations in the north. Pauperism ; Colorphobia ; White abolitionists and jobs for free blacks ; Anti-black labor riots ; Northern free black kidnapped and sold into slavery -- Part V: Black workers in specific trades. Free black waiters ; Black seamen ; Black caulkers -- Part VI: The free black workers' response to oppression. Free black uplift : unions, cooperatives, conventions, schools ; Integrate or separate? -- Part VII: The northern black worker during the Civil War. The worsening status of free black workers in the north ; Anti-Negro riots in New York City ; Blacks in the Union Army and Navy ; White northerners anticipate the addition of ex-slaves to the labor force -- Part VIII: Condition of the worker during early Reconstruction. Reconstruction in the south ; Labor discontent in the south ; Condition of black workers in the north during Reconstruction -- Part IX: Exclusion of blacks from white unions during early Reconstruction. Race discrimination in the Cooper's Union, 1868 ; Lewis H. Douglas and the Typographical Union ; Exclusion of blacks from other unions -- Part X: The demand for equality. White labor and black labor : the black viewpoint ; A white labor voice for black equality -- Part XI: Black response to colorphobia. The National Labor Union and black labor, 1866-1869 ; 1869 Convention of the National Labor Union ; The first black labor leader : Isaac Myers, the Baltimore caulkers, and the colored trade unions of Maryland.
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.
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.
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.
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.
