Note that this paper was part of a session on labor historiography.  The other paper, on gender and labor, was by Michelle Haberland.  It can be accessed via this website:  www.georgiasouthern.edu/~mah
 
 

July 9, 2004

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida

____________

The historical writing on race and labor is in a state of flux. As we speak, diverse currents of scholarship are juxtaposing, separating, and merging. The bibliographical essays cited in the sheets just handed out will suggest some of the lines of interpretation. For now, I stress three distinct tendencies currently on offer. I call them the "wages of whiteness," "black agency," and "public policy" schools.

1. First, the problem of definition.
 

A. By "labor," I mean wage-workers in general. And I mean the organized labor movement.

B. By "race," I mean African Americans. There are two problems here:

                2. Why exclude persons of Asian descent? What about Hispano-Latinos? Other persons of distinctive ethnic identity?

    The historic experience of slavery, emancipation, reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement makes the African American experience distinctive. Most migration to the US on the part of Hispano-Latinos, Europeans, and even Asians has been voluntary, however accompanied by prejudice, discrimination, and disability. As John David Skrentny has observed, Much historical and sociological evidence points to the [continuing] theme of "'black exceptionalism'" in American politics and social life. Indeed, evidence abounds attesting to what Glenn Loury has identified as "the racial stigma, or unique 'otherness,' of black Americans." According to Skrentny, " . . . recent analysis of public opinion data shows that the bases of white attitudes toward policies for blacks are different than those for other groups." Studies show, e.g., that home buyers are relatively unaffected by the presence of Hispanics or Asian Americans in a neighborhood but powerfully affected when it comes to blacks. By any measure-residential segregation; inter-racial marriage-non-black Americans place African Americans outside the pale. Indeed, surveys show that among Latinos and Asian Americans, aversion to contact with blacks is even greater than that found among whites. W. J. Wilson's surveys of employers show massive preference for Latino and Asian American workers over blacks, who employers view as lazy, violent, and irresponsible. Data for intermarriage shows rates as high as 60% among Cuban and Filipino people born in the US, as compared with 5% and 2% for black men and women, respectively. Offspring of marriages of blacks and others are invariably seen as black, while offspring of other interracial marriages usually can choose their ethnic identity.

So while a full discussion of the topic "race and labor" would both directly and indirectly entail consideration of the whole range of ethnic and racial categories, I believe that there is ample justification for our current purposes for focusing on African Americans and their relation to the world of work and labor activism.

I. The Wages of Whiteness

The phrase comes from W. E. B. Du Bois, as reflected in the title of David Roediger's influential 1991 book's title, whose subtitle is "Race and the Making of the American Working Class." The general idea is that "white" workers have benefitted from their whiteness at the expense of people of color, especially African Americans. By depriving blacks of opportunities for education, training, and access to skilled jobs, they have artificially shrunk labor markets, thus driving up the price of their own labor. Equally important, they have benefitted psychologically from the subordination of blacks, since common feelings of racial superiority unite whites of all socio-economic ranks in contradistinction to inferior "others," most notably blacks. Determination to preserve the "wages of whiteness" has permeated US labor history and has infected virtually all aspects of labor organizing and politics, as well as patterns of daily living, in workplaces and in neighborhoods. By implication at least, the construction, acquisition, and maintenance of whiteness, along with the advantages accruing to those included in its scope, is the most significant, tenacious, and powerful theme in American labor history.

Roediger's book deals almost exclusively with the ante-bellum period and stresses white workers' resistance to the anti-slavery movement, victimization of black workers in northern cities, and the fear of black economic competition and social incursion that infused pre-war white working-class culture. In a brief concluding chapter, Roediger does point to some more hopeful postwar evidences of inter-racial activism and to the severing of the connection between servility and blackness that slavery had underwritten. Even so, however, in the end, "Popular racism in the industrializing North. . . helped to doom Radical-labor cooperation" that initially had shown some signs of promoting bi-racial labor activism. (177)

Other scholars have adopted variations on the "wages of whiteness" theme, sometimes explicitly, sometimes not. Alexander Saxton's work on working-class racism, which dates back to the 1960s, focused initially on the uses for white workers in California of the Chinese "other" as the "indispensable enemy" and has more recently broadened out to examine the ways in which racial others underwrote the real or perceived interests of white workers generally in the 19^th century. Noel Ignatiev's influential book How the Irish Became White (1995), outlines the process by which a despised "race"-the Irish-shed their negative racial identity by distancing themselves from their fellow exploitees, African Americans, while books by Matthew Frye Jacobson and Karen Brodkin apply this concept to other groups and/or extend it more generally. Mel McKiven examines the centrality of racial subordination in the workplace and community order that white steelworkers in Alabama established in industrializing turn-of-the-century Birmingham. Bruce Nelson, Michelle Brattain, and Thomas Sugrue bring the story into the 20^th century. In Divided We Stand (2001), Nelson discovers patterns of division and subordination that were based on implicit denigration of African Americans in the steel mills and wharfsides, even among white unionists who voiced theoretically egalitarian notions of cross-ethnic solidarity, while Brattain's The Politics of Whiteness (2001) points to the limits to effective unionism that embrace of whiteness posed for postwar southern textile workers. Thomas Sugrue's award-winning study of racial conflict over housing in post-war Detroit examines the populist ideology of white working-class resistance to black residential incursions in the Motor City.

Whiteness scholars stress the themes of the privileges inhering in "whiteness" and the ways in which groups once marginalized became included in the white majority. Thus Thomas Gugliegmo's study of Italian identity in 20^th century Chicago, which otherwise highlights the degree to which Italian Americans sought to sustain their distinctive ethnic identity, tells us that ". . . European groups exhibited remarkable unity when it came to opposing 'colored' groups (mainly African Americans). . . .. Even former enemies like the Sicilians and Swedes . . . joined forces to fight African Americans. For all their differences, various European groups could often agree at least on this--that the 'colored' races needed to be kept out of 'their' communities" and workplaces. Jacobson, Guglielmo, and others also point out that in the 1930s and 1940s, white labor activists and radicals, ideologically committed to racial justice, found themselves invoking the very racial dichotomy-"black and white, unite and fight"-that validated the "otherness" of African Americans.

In a special category belongs the strident work of activist scholar Herbert Hill. A former Labor Secretary of the NAACP, Hill for at least the past twenty years, without actually invoking the whiteness trope, has been attacking both organized labor and the white working class more generally for what he deems an unbroken record of racism, discrimination, and hypocrisy. Moreover, in a series of sweeping reviews and journal articles, Hill has included in his indictment a whole generation of (white) labor historians, who, he argues, have sought to preserve the myth of class-based progressivism by serving as apologists for white working class (and trade union) racism. Hill's work focuses on collective bargaining, union governance, and labor legislation, showing little interest in the psycho-social themes evident in much of the "wage of whiteness" literature. Nor is it linked in any explicit way to the work of the historians mentioned above. But in essays whose very titles reflect his harsh judgment of white workers and apologist historians (e.g., "Lichtenstein's Fictions: Meany, Reuther and the 1964 Civil Rights Act; "Myth-Making as Labor History: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America"), Hill in effect extends and concretizes the sometimes-abstract indictments found in the historians' work and brings them sharply into concrete 20^th century focus.

In the afterword to the second, otherwise unrevised, edition of Wages of Whiteness, Roediger disclaims any intent on his part to demonize white workers. Describing and analyzing white working-class racism, he declares, does not require the abandonment of class as a central factor in progressive politics; nor does a frank examination of the historical record preclude encouragement of more solidaristic and positive attitudes and behaviors. In a collection of essays, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (2002), Roediger holds out cautious hope for such developments. Critics, however, have argued that while Roediger may say that his work leaves room for both historical and contemporary alternatives to systematic and unrelenting racial victimization, its sweeping judgments, reliance on impressionistic evidence, and mechanistic conceptions of whiteness "risks," in the words of David Stowe, "dulling the historical imagination" and ignoring the very real distinctions and differences among workers reduced by Roediger and the others simply to the common category of being "white." In important respects, argues Peter Kolchin, Roediger's work, for all its heuristic value, simply renames in portentous fashion familiar themes and creates a trope that in the end flattens and banalizes America's rich, contentious, and diverse racial (and labor) history.
 

II. Black Agency. Critics of the New Labor History that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s charged that its practitioners marginalized race. In their efforts to restore agency to working people, the indictment went, historians such as David Montgomery, Herbert Gutman, and a host of their students elided the problem of race. So eager were they to advance labor history to a central position in the American narrative, and so impressed were they with the evidence that their studies of working-class communities, work sites, and activist organizations revealed ordinary workers articulating shrewd critiques of industrial capitalism and forging instruments of criticism and resistence, that they left blacks out of the picture or relegated them to the margins. They elided the responsibility that white workers-native-born and immigrant alike-shared in establishing and maintaining discrimination and segregation. This tendency is evidenced in a book edited by Michael Frisch and Daniel Walkowitz, Working-Class America (1983), a volume showcasing the work of the best and the brightest of the new labor historians. Not one of the 10 essays-each of them an important contribution-featured or, in most cases, even mentioned the African American component of the American working class. Thus, in 1989 when Nell Irvin Painter charged that "The new labor history has a race problem. . . .," the criticism struck home, especially since most of the practitioners of the New Labor History were personally deeply sympathetic in their personal and political lives to the struggles of African Americans.

But the so-called New Labor History was never a monolithic movement and in fact there has been since at least the late 1970s a steady stream of scholarship that has foregrounded the working-class character of black life in America and has focused on black agency and activism. Indeed, there is a whole mini-library of works, dating back to at least the mid-1980s exhibiting these themes. The Great Migration of the World War I era, for example, has produced excellent studies by James Grossman, Joe W. Trotter, Earl Lewis, and Peter Gottlieb, each of which advances two common themes: the central importance of working life; and the fierce determination of migrating blacks to reshape their lives and create their own instruments of accommodation and struggle. Historians of such diverse worksites as the loading docks, coal mines, commercial laundries, sawmills, packinghouses, iron and steel mills, cigarette factories, and domiciles of white elites have likewise stressed the centrality of work to African Americans and the degree to which black workers played active, and often central roles, in struggles for union. Not wanting on the one hand just to tick off a roster of names-the relevant works are cited in the bibliography handed out-or, on the other, to single out a "leader" of this "school" of interpretation, I would nonetheless point to the work of Eric Arnesen. His Waterfront Workers of New Orleans (1991) and especially his Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (2001) are eloquent accounts of black agency and activism, solidly grounded in archival research and shrewdly sensitive to the subtleties of racial discourse and behavior, among both white and black workers. Arnesen also has been a leading critic of both the Wages of Whiteness school and of Herbert Hill's categorical indictments of historical scholarship.

There are important, if sometimes only implicit differences in perspective among practitioners of these two schools. Although Roediger insists that his work should not be read as an indictment of white workers or as being pessimistic about possibilities of bi-racial activism, Wages of Whiteness historians-with Hill, again, occupying an exposed outrider position-have stressed the complicity of white workers in the victimization of blacks and recurrent disappointment that the liberationist rhetoric of the labor and socialist movements has so often been hollow and even hypocritical.

In contrast, Black Agency historians emphasize that throughout modern US history, black workers have actively and energetically sought inclusion in the labor movement, and with some success. In a 1993 essay, for example, Arnesen draws on his own research and that of others to portray a lengthy record of black union formation, either (and preferably, from their point of view) in conjunction with fellow workers, or in separate unions of their own creation. He observes that while some blacks got turned off unions and some worked as scabs, there was always a vocal and active contingent that embraced the goals of unionism and sought entry into it, and through that route, into American life more generally. That "The white labor movement did its share, and then some, to contribute to black oppression," Arenesen freely acknowledges. But what he finds "surprising is that exceptions to exclusion, albeit often qualified, managed to take root and in some cases to flourish." Far from monolithically exclusionary and repressive, in Arnesen's view "the labor movement itself, like [blacks'] workplaces, was the site of a struggle for access, inclusion, representation, and influence." Work by Daniel Letwin and Brian Kelly on the Alabama coal mines; Rick Halpern, Paul Street, and Roger Horowitz on the packinghouses; Stephen Norwood on timber workers; and, most recently, Robert Korstad on North Carolina tobacco workers provides post-1993 support for Arnesen's argument.

One particular aspect of the divergences in the two perspectives outlined above merits particular comment, the role of American Communists and their allies in the racial dynamics of the CIO-era labor movement. Hill and Bruce Nelson, whom I've included in the Wages of Whiteness school, are sharply critical of the performance of communists and their allies with respect to black workers in the building of industrial unions. Indeed, Hill in particular regards the work of "revisionist" historians whose work positively reassesses the work of the CP and its adherents in the union building project with particular suspicion. According to him, and to Nelson's detailed study of the racial record of an important local of the pro-Soviet West Coast Longshoremen's union, Communists readily "talked the talk" of racial justice but rarely did they "walk the walk." Rhetoric aside, Hill insists, Communists were no better than their "right wing" opponents when it came to the nitty-gritty of union work vis-a-vis blacks.

A number of scholars, clearly affiliated with the Black Agency perspective, register sharp disagreement. Robin Kelly's study of blacks and Communists in 1930s Alabama; Michael Honey's work on race and the CIO in Memphis; Korstad's important new book on Winston-Salem; and work by sociologists Maurice Zeitlin and Judith Stephan-Norris and political scientist Michael Goldfield clearly and positively assesses the racially progressive role of pro-Soviet elements in the CIO ambit.

This issue-the validity and historical significance of genuine bi- and interracial activism-is not just a matter of "he said, she said." There's a lot at stake. We all know that America has a long heritage of popular racism; we see it every day. Does America also have a viable heritage of effective inter-racial labor activism? Put another way: Does history have anything useful to tell us about the prospects of the current black-labor alliance? Is it the lifeline of progressive politics? Or a rope of sand?

III.  Public Policy.  The third tendency among historians that I would like to address does not dovetail neatly with the themes addressed so far. Public Policy and its relationship to the race-labor nexus, however, is of clear importance and has been the site of much intriguing and provocative work by historians, political scientists, and legal scholars of late. It's hard to identify one clear pattern of recent scholarship except to say that students of race and labor are certainly documenting the great importance of the role of the state, and particularly that of the federal government, in the working lives of African Americans. At the same time, however, some of the emerging literature on this subject powerfully reinforces the theme of black agency. Judson McLaury's overview of the relationship of the federal government to black workers, which brings the story through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, will provide a strong underpinning for ongoing work in this area.

Probably the broadest, and most contentious, of recent studies of this theme is David Bernstein's Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal (2001). Bernstein, a legal scholar, brings a free market analysis to bear on the subject of labor legislation, arguing that so-called "protective" or pro-labor enactments on local, state, and federal levels have historically benefitted white workers at the expense of blacks. Licensing laws restricted black entry into skilled trades and professions, ranging from plumbing to medicine. Anti-injunction and minimum wage legislation undercut blacks' chief advantages in a racially structured labor market, their willingness to accept low wages and to replace striking white workers. Federal railway labor legislation underwrote the racial exclusivism of the railroad brotherhoods, while the wage and labor policies of the New Deal in effect sanctioned union discrimination and disadvantaged low-wage black workers. While much of the material on which Bernstein bases his indictment of the labor movement and of liberal labor legislation is familiar to-indeed, in most cases has been produced by-historians sympathetic to labor activism, his approval of strike-breaking, his praise for injunction-granting judges, and his defense of business leaders' exploitation of blacks' low-wage expectations makes Only One Place of Redress a provocative read indeed.

Apart from this contentious book, most of the recent Public Policy literature has focused on the post-World War II period, with analysis of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and questions connected to affirmative action standing at the center. Several distinguished scholars have entered the lists. Thomas Sugrue, Paul Moreno, Hugh Davis Graham, and John D. Skrentny, for example, have examined the origins, impact, and unintended consequences of the post-1964 move toward racial preferences in hiring. Thus, Skrentny and Moreno focus on the legislative, judicial, and administrative processes by which the traditional civil rights goal of race-blind employment became transmogrified into controversial race-based programs, while Sugrue's suggestive essay stresses the limitations of "color-blind" solutions to inner-city black economic problems and the importance of local activism in the adoption of affirmative approaches to blue collar employment. Graham's recent Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America (2002) provocatively examines the curious and profoundly consequential intermeshing of affirmative action and immigration reform over the past four decades. Judith Stein, in Running Steel, Running America (1998) skillfully unpacks the complex, but profoundly important, enmeshment of trade policy, collective bargaining, and affirmative action in what was once a core American industry and a bastion of strength for the liberal wing of the Democratic party. Along with Kenneth Durr in Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980 (2003), Stein implicitly rejects the Wages of Whiteness perspective in her depiction of political and policymaking elites' ignorance of the impact of the consequences and implications of trade and racial policies. Thus, in the 1960s and 1970s foreign policy-generated trade policies virtually destroyed the US basic steel industry. Thus a declining blue collar labor force was left to face the consequences of bureaucratically engineered programs of racial preference that pitted black workers against white workers. The resulting conflict ripped apart the black-labor liberal political coalition at the grass roots level, with disastrous consequences for the Democratic party, white workers, and liberal liberals while providing few durable gains for African American workers.

Virtually all of this work on the Public Policy aspects of race and labor has featured the actions and attitudes of political, legal, and intellectual elites. Practically alone among students of post-1960s public policy as it relates to race and labor has been the impressive work of Timothy Minchin. In Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960-1980 (1999) and The Color of Work: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945-1980 (2001), this prolific young scholar has not only provided impressive case studies of the working out of Title VII in southern workplaces. In addition, he has discovered powerful currents of black agency in what sometimes seems primarily a bureaucratic and legalistic story. While acknowledging the importance of unintended results and the limitations of legal and bureaucratic methods of advancing workplace equity, Minchin nonetheless documents powerfully the positive role of federal legislation and other federal actions in ushering in a dramatically new workplace regime in the South. At the same time, his diligent research and his interviews with a wide range of southern workers on all sides of the struggles over the implementation of Title VII present a powerful picture of worker agency. Indeed, the oral history material especially evident in The Color of Work constitutes a case study in the ways in which judicial and administrative remedies were both stimulated and undergirded by the courage and determination of ordinary men and women.

Writes Luc Sante, "There is at present no way to engage racial matters from a completely race-blind perspective, in particular if one is white. The whole subject of race may be anthropologically fraudulent, but . . . it cannot be wished away in American society. . . ." Although he was writing about music, his observations apply to labor as well. Forty years ago, neither labor history nor black history figured prominently in the agendas of US historians. Today, both fields, and the connections between them, are vibrant scholarly venues.

Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (2001)

Eric Arnesen, "'Like Banquo's Ghost, It Will Not Down': The Race Question and the American Railroad Brotherhoods, 1880-1920," AHR (1994)

Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923 (1991)

David E. Bernstein, Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal (2001)

Michelle Brattain, The Politics of Whiteness: Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South (2001)

Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (1998)

Horace R. Cayton and George S. Mitchell, Black Workers and the New Unions (1939)

Kenneth D. Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980
(2003)

Philip Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973 (1974)

Dana Frank, "White Working-Class Women and the Race Question," ILWCH (1998)

Michael Frisch and Daniel Walkowitz, eds., Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society (1983)

Michael Goldfield, The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics (1997)

Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks' Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-1930 (1987)

Hugh Davis Graham, Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America (2002)

James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1989)

Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (Oxford, NY: OUP, 2003)

Elizabeth Haiken, "'The Lord Helps Those Who Help Themselves': Black Laundresses in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1917-1921," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 49: 1 (Spring 1990): 20-50

Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-1954 (1997)

William H. Harris, The Harder We Run: Black Workers since the Civil War (1982)

Michael Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (1993)

Michael Honey, "Martin Luther King, Jr., the Crisis of the Black Working Class, and the Memphis Sanitation Strike," Southern Labor in Transition, 1940-1995, ed. Zieger (1997)

Roger Horowitz, Negro and White, Unite and Fight!: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-1990 (1997)

Tera W. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (1997)

Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (1995)

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998)

Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985)

Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (1990)

Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921 (2001)

Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South (2003)

Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878-1921 (1998)

Earl Lewis, "At Work and at Home": Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1910-1945 (1984)

Alex Lichtenstein, "Racial Conflict and Racial Solidarity in the Alabama Coal Strike of 1894: New Evidence for the Gutman-Hill Debate," Labor History 36-1 (Winter 1995): 63-76

Henry M. McKiven, Jr., Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875-1920 (1995)

August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (1979)

Timothy J. Minchin, The Color of Work: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945-1980 (2001)

Timothy J. Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960-1980 (1999)

Paul Moreno, From Direct Action to Affirmative Action: Fair Employment Law and Policy in America, 1933-1972 (1997)

Ruth Needelman, Black Freedom Fighters in Steel: The Struggle for Democratic Unionism (2003)

Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (2001)

Stephen H. Norwood, "Bogolusa Burning: The War against Biracial Unionism in the Deep South, 1919," Journal of Southern History 63: 3 (August 1997): 591-628

David Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (2002)

David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (revised ed., 1999)

Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1971)

Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Cutlure in Nineteenth-Century America (1990)

John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America (1996)

Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (1931)

Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (1998)

Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America's Industrial Unions (2003)

Paul Street, "The 'Best Union Members': Class, Race, Culture, and Black Worker Militancy in Chicago's Stockyards during the 1930s," Journal of American Ethnic History 20: 1 (Fall 2000): 18-49

Thomas J. Sugrue, "Affirmative Action from Below: Civil Rights, the Building Trades, and the Politics of Racial Equality in the Urban North, 1945-1969," JAH 91: 1 (June 2004): 145-73

Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996)

Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (2001)

Joe William Trotter, Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (1985)

Joe William Trotter, Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-1932 (1990)

Charles W. Wesley, Negro Labor in the United States, 1850-1925 . . . (1927).
 
 

Eric Arnesen, "Following the Color Line of Labor: Black Workers and the Labor Movement before 1930," Radical History Review 55 (1993): 53-87

Eric Arnesen, "Up from Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History," Reviews in American History 26 (March 1998): 146-74

Eric Arnesen, "Whiteness and Historians' Imagination," International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001): 3-32, and Responses and Arnesen Reply, 33-92

Michael Goldfield, "Race and the CIO: The Possibilities for Racial Egalitarianism During the 1930s and 1940s," ILWCH 44 (Fall 1993): 1-32

Herbert Hill, "Race, Ethnicity and Organized Labor: The Opposition to Affirmative Action," New Politics 1:2 (New Series) (Winter 1987): 31-82, and the ensuing discussion in ibid., 1: 3 (New Series) (Summer 1987): 22-71

Herbert Hill, "Myth-Making as Labor History: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America," International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 2:2 (Winter 1988): 132-200

Herbert Hill, "The Problem of Race in American Labor History," Reviews in American History 24: 2 (June 1996): 189-208

Peter Kolchin, "Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America," JAH 89: 1 (June 2002): 154-73

Stanford M. Lyman, "The 'Chinese Question' and American Labor Historians," New Politics 7: 4 (Winter 2000): 113-48

Bruce Nelson, "Working-Class Agency and Racial Inequality," International Review of Social History 41 (1996): 407-20

Nell Irvin Painter, "The New Labor History and the Historical Moment," International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society (1989)

Gunther Peck, "White Slavery and Whiteness: A Transnational View of the Sources of Working-Class Radicalism and Racism," Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas (1: 2 (Summer 2004): 41-63
****
At this site, readers will find a paper titled "Race and Labor in Modern America," which covers some of the same themes as in this paper from a somewhat different perspective: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/rzieger/labher814.html

At this website, readers will find reviews of several of the important books cited in this paper:
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/rzieger/reviews.htm