In commenting on various historical episodes, t..v. pundits and other public commentators are fond of telling us that “you won’t find this story in the history books.”  Thus, declares columnist Cynthia Tucker, “Black Americans have been shortchanged by history.”  “Textbook writers and history teachers,” she charges, “gloss over Reconstruction and Jim Crow” and generally slight the African American experience.  But despite Tucker’s complaint, at least in college-level US history courses, the black experience is in fact a central component in both teaching and scholarship.  The theme of black workers, their role in the broader working class, and their relationship to the labor movement has been a particularly lively one among scholars over the past several decades.  My own book, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (University Press of Kentucky, 2007) is an effort to bring the fruits of this scholarly activity to the attention of a wider public. 

 Overviews

Eric Arnesen, ed., The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights since Emancipation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007).  A collection of essays reflecting recent scholarship in a wide range of occupational sectors.  Deals largely with the period before 1950.

David E. Bernstein, Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2001).  A “free market” approach to the relationship between black workers and the labor movement from a prominent legal scholar.  Very critical of organized labor’s historic stance vis-a-vis black workers.

Philip S. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973 (New York:  International Publishers, 1974).  A fact-filled compendium, written from an old-fashioned–and still challenging–Marxist perspective.

Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow:  Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (NY:  Basic Books, 1985).  A powerful and poignant overview of the distinctive problems and achievements of African American women workers.

Sterling D.  Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker:  The Negro and the Labor Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931; Atheneum reprint, 1972).  An older book that provides vivid accounts of black workers’ experiences in the early twentieth-century industrial economy.  Traditional social investigation at its best.

 The Nineteenth Century

Eric Foner, Reconstruction:  America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (NY:  Harper & Row, 1988; Perennial Classics edition, 2002).  The best one-volume history of Reconstruction.  Foner stresses the role of economic factors and labor relations in reshaping to political economy of the post-bellum South.  Supplement with Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom:  Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).

David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto:  Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana:  University  of Illinois Press, 1973).  An engaging account of African American life and labor; excellent for its discussion of black women’s experiences as domestic servants.

Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism:  Alabama Coal Miners, 1878-1921 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-21 (Urbana and Chicago:  University of Illinois Press, 2001).  These two books
depict a startling world of inter-racial labor activism in a key economic sector in the segregating South of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor:  The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (London, NY: Verso, 1996).  A brilliant analysis of the role that de facto re-enslavement of African Americans played in the development of the “New South.”

Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).  A fascinating account of a mythical–but perhaps not entirely mythical–black working-class folk hero and the music that celebrated him.

1900-1950

Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color:  Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2001).  An outstanding study that examines black workers’ employment and their struggle against discrimination in this key industry.

Beth Tomkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Melinda Chateauvert, Marching Together:  Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana and Chicago:  University of Illinois Press, 1998).  These books analyze the key role played by A. Philip Randolph and the men and women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in linking labor rights and civil rights.

Horace Cayton and George S. Mitchell, Black Workers and the New Unions (Chapel Hill: UNC, 1939).  One of the best books on the relationship of African American workers to the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in organizing mass production industries.  Contains vivid material drawn from the authors’ interviews with both rank-and-file workers and union activists in autos, steel, meatpacking, and other key sectors.  Robert Rodgers Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism:  Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2003) and August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York: Oxford, 1979) are other insightful accounts of the key roles played by African American workers in the labor upheaval of the New Deal-World War II era.

Greta de Jong, A Different Day:  African American Struggles for Justice in Rural Louisiana, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). One of the few major studies of agricultural and other rural workers struggling to achieve civil rights and economic justice. 

James R. Grossman, Land of Hope:  Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1989).  A pioneering work that emphasizes the working-class character of the mass movement of blacks into the industrial North in the 1910s and 1920s.  William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot:  Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (NY:  Atheneum, 1970) is an outstanding account of one of the most violent episodes in the often-turbulent course of the early Migration.

Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor:  Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904-54 (Urbana and Chicago:  University of Illinois Press, 1997) and Roger Horowitz, “Negro and White, Unite and Fight!”: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-90 (Urbana and Chicago:  University of Illinois Press, 1997) chronicle the critical role played by black workers in building the Packinghouse Workers union and in the union’s efforts to encourage civil rights generally.

Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White:  An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (Norton, 2005) focuses on the neglected racial implications and repercussions of innovative federal programs during the 1930s and 1940s, with special emphasis on their impact among black workers.

Merl E.  Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement:  The President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941-1946 (Baton Rouge:  LSU Press, 1991).  Stresses grass roots black activism in the workplace and in the community in the effort to secure this limited, but significant, breakthrough in federal policy.

Since World War II

John Hinshaw, Steel and Steelworkers:  Race and Class in Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh (Albany:  State University of New York Press, 2002) and Ruth Needleman, Black Freedom Fighters in Steel:  The Struggle for Democratic Unionism (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2003), These two books examine the complex relationship among the steel industry, the United Steelworkers of America, and African American workers.  Needleman’s book is particularly valuable for its inclusion of first-hand testimony from black workers and activists as they attempted to cope with the decline of this once-mighty industry.

Michael K. Honey, Going Gown Jericho Road : The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (New York: Norton, 2007).  A reminder that when he was murdered, Dr. King was in Memphis to support the city’s sanitation workers’ struggle for union recognition.  Honey makes a convincing case that in King’s radical vision, labor rights were a central component of the human rights for which he so eloquently spoke.

Timothy J. Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Timothy J. Minchin, The Color of Work:  The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).  Grass-roots studies of the struggles of black workers to use Title VII (workplace discrimination) of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to integrate two key southern industrial sectors.

Jerald E. Podair, The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Traces out the long-term political effects of the conflicts that erupted in 1968-69 when black activists and the New York City teachers’ union clashed over school governance.

Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit?:  Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2001).  Explores relationships among black militancy, union politics, and urban crisis in the Detroit of the 1960s and 1970s.