Celebrate Black History Month: Home

From the ongoing issues of poverty, health, housing, and employment to the recent upsurge of lethal police-community relations, the black working class stands at the center of perceptions of social and racial conflict today. Journalists and public policy analysts often discuss the black poor as “consumers” rather than “producers,” as “takers” rather than “givers,” and as “liabilities” instead of “assets.” In his engrossing history, Workers on Arrival, Joe William Trotter, Jr., refutes these perceptions by charting the black working class’s vast contributions to the making of America.

In the 1910s and 1920s, Black musicians organized more than fifty locals within the American Federation of Musicians (AFM). Leta Miller follows the AFM's Black locals from their origins and successes in the 1920s through Depression-era challenges and the postwar dismantling of segregated AFM organizations. As Miller shows, the decision by whites to organize along racial lines was hidden behind factors like genre-based audition requirements and varying approaches to musical creation. Like any union, Black AFM locals sought to ensure employment and competitive wages for members with always-evolving approaches and solutions to problems.

The construction of the Panama Canal is typically viewed as a marvel of American ingenuity. What is less visible, and less understood, is the project’s dependence on the labor of Black migrant women. The Silver Women shifts the focus of this monumental endeavor to the West Indian women who travelled to Panama, inviting readers to place women’s intimate lives, choices, grief, and ambition at the center of the economic and geopolitical transformation created by the construction of the Panama Canal and U.S. imperial expansion. Joan Flores-Villalobos argues that Black West Indian women made the canal construction possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. West Indian women built a provisioning economy that fed, housed, and cared for the segregated Black West Indian labor force, in effect subsidizing the construction effort and the racial calculus that separated pay in silver for Black workers and gold for white Americans.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Black girls and women faced a harsh career landscape. Domestic labor and sharecropping—which were the least regulated and lowest paying occupations for women in the US economy—were the few available ways for Black women and girls to make a living in Jane Crow America. In response to these circumstances, Nannie Helen Burroughs, the pioneering Black American educator and civil rights leader, established the National Training School for Women and Girls (NTS) in Washington, DC. Nannie Helen Burroughs tells the story of the powerful labor movement that resulted from Burroughs's work at the NTS and in the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. The NTS proved to be a revolutionary labor and educational initiative that redefined household employment as a profession where social justice for the Black community could be achieved. The NTS was integral to a Black clubwomen's labor movement that paved the way for a broader transformation of the economic landscape for Black women and girls.

n award-winning historian illuminates the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America through a stunning narrative centered on her forebears. There have been countless books, articles, and televised reports in recent years about the almost mythic "white working class," a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor, and even the very existence, of entire groups of working people, including everyday Black workers. In this brilliant corrective, Black Folk, acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story. Spanning two hundred years--from one of Kelley's earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the Covid-19 pandemic--Black Folk highlights the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking jobs white people didn't want and confined to segregated neighborhoods, Black workers found community in intimate spaces, from stoops on city streets to the backyards of washerwomen, where multiple generations labored from dawn to dusk, talking and laughing in a space free of white supervision and largely beyond white knowledge. As millions of Black people left the violence of the American South for the promise of a better life in the North and West, these networks of resistance and joy sustained early arrivals and newcomers alike and laid the groundwork for organizing for better jobs, better pay, and equal rights.

In this work, the author, a historian examines the economical, political and cultural forces that have beaten, built, and broken America's Black workforce for centuries since Emancipation. From the abolition of slavery through the civil rights movement and Great Recession, African Americans have been singularly disadvantaged members of the workforce, repeatedly denied access to the opportunities all Americans are to be afforded under the Constitution. They have faced a unique set of obstacles and prejudices on their way to becoming a productive and indispensable portion of the American workforce. 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 History Series 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 in the present day.

Premilla Nadasen recounts in this powerful book a little-known history of organizing among African American household workers. She uses the stories of a handful of women to illuminate the broader politics of labor, organizing, race, and gender in late 20th-century America. At the crossroads of the emerging civil rights movement, a deindustrializing economy, a burgeoning women's movement, and increasing immigration, household worker activists, who were excluded from both labor rights and mainstream labor organizing, developed distinctive strategies for political mobilization and social change. We learn about their complicated relationship with their employers, who were a source of much of their anguish, but, also, potentially important allies. And equally important they articulated a profound challenge to unequal state policy. Household Workers Unite offers a window into this occupation from a perspective that is rarely seen.

An unprecedented and timely collection of Dr. King's speeches on labor rights and economic justice. People forget that Dr. King was every bit as committed to economic justice as he was to ending racial segregation. He fought throughout his life to connect the labor and civil rights movements, envisioning them as twin pillars for social reform. As we struggle with massive unemployment, a staggering racial wealth gap, and the near collapse of a financial system that puts profits before people, King's prophetic writings and speeches underscore his relevance for today. They help us imagine King anew: as a human rights leader whose commitment to unions and an end to poverty was a crucial part of his civil rights agenda.

Growing up, Cin Fabré didn't know anything about the stock market. But she learned how to hustle from her immigrant parents, saving money so that one day she could escape her abusive father and poverty in the Bronx. Through a tip from a friend, Cin pushed her way into brokerage firm VTR Capital--an offshoot of Stratton Oakmont, the company where the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, had reigned. She was shocked to find an army of young, mostly Black and Brown, workers with no real prospects for promotion sitting at phones doing the drudge work of finding investment leads for white male brokers. But she felt the pull of profit and knew she would do whatever she had to do to be successful. Pulling back the curtain on the inequities she and so many others faced, Wolf Hustle reveals how Cin worked grueling hours, ascending from cold caller to stockbroker to become the only Black woman to do so at her firm. She also discloses the excesses she took part in on 1990s Wall Street--the strip clubs, the Hamptons parties, the Gucci shopping sprees--while reveling in the thrill of making money. From landing clients worth hundreds of millions to gaining, losing, then gaining back fortunes in seconds, Cin examines her years spent trading frantically and hustling successfully, grappling with what it takes to build a rich life, and, ultimately, beating Wall Street at its own game.