The profound history and contributions of African American communities in the working life of the nation has been recorded extensively through the various prisms of history, sociology, literature, and biography. Below is a brief sampling of material available at the MacPháidín Library to get the Stonehill community invested in this year’s focus on the many aspects of “African Americans and Labor”, the theme for 2025 Black History Month.
Freedom's Crescent: the Civil War and the destruction of slavery in the lower Mississippi Valley
John C. Rodrigue. E185.2 .R63 2023
‘Africans were brought to the Americas to serve as a workforce, leading to the buildup of a complex exploitative system of slave labor. The daily disintegration of slavery in Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana is compellingly analyzed in Stonehill professor, John Rodrigue’s, award winning history of this region and the vital role it played in transforming the history of the United States’.
Workers on Arrival: black labor in the making of America.
Joe William Trotter, Jr. Online book. 2019
‘Professor Trotter methodically unfolds the history of African American labor exploitation and wealth creation on American soil. Black workers, critical to any discussion of the nation’s productivity, politics, and the future of work in today’s global economy, are too often presented as liabilities rather than assets, consumers rather than producers, and takers rather than givers. This study ranges over the last four hundred years to set the historical context straight’.
Forging a Laboring Race: The African American worker in the progressive imagination.
Paul R. D. Lawrie. Online book. 2016.
‘Historically typecast as a primitive race fit only for slave labor, the “Negro problem” posited at the start of the industrial revolution dealt with questions regarding race, emerging skills required by industrialization, and labor. Lawrie charts the history of race management to analyze how ideas of race, work, and the “fit” or “unfit” body informed the political economy of early twentieth-century industrial America’.
The Death of Reconstruction: race, labor, and politics in the post-Civil War North, 1865-1901.
Heather Cox Richardson. Online book. 2004.
‘Historians have overwhelmingly blamed the death of Reconstruction on persistent racism in the American South. Professor Richardson argues instead that class was also critical to that demise. Race, while inextricably linked with labor, was complicated by class struggles as support for Reconstruction weakened in the wake of calls for a redistribution of wealth’.
The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: the upper South.
Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland. E185.2 .F88 ser. 1, vol. 2 1993.
‘This study examines the emergence of free labor in the regions of the Upper South, describing the experiences of former slaves as military laborers, residents of federally sponsored “contraband camps,” wage laborers on farms and in towns, and, in some instances, as independent farmers and self-employed workers. It portrays the different, and often conflicting, understandings of freedom advanced by the many participants in the wartime evolution of free labor: former slaveholders, Union military authorities, Northern missionaries, and the freed people themselves’.
A. Philip Randolph: the religious journey of an African American labor leader.
Cynthia Taylor. Online book. 2006.
A. Philip Randolph: for jobs & freedom (DVD).
1st Floor Media Collection: E185.97.R27 A83 2000.
‘Once known as "the most dangerous black man in America," A. Philip Randolph was a radical labor leader and a pioneer of civil rights strategies. In this study, Professor Cynthia Taylor explores Randolph’s recognition and use of African American church protest and insurgency to unionize black workers and emerge as the preeminent labor leader of the times. 2025 marks the 100-year anniversary of the creation of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids by Randolph, the first Black union to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor’.
Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the art of black teaching.
Jarvis R. Givens. LC 2741.G48 2022.
'Founder of Black History Month, Carter G. Woodson's concept of “mis-education” hinged on America’s failure to present authentic Black history in schools and the egregious depiction of Blacks as menial, subordinate, sub-human. Harvard’s Professor Givens traces a tradition of “fugitive pedagogy”, best epitomized by Woodson ―a theory and practice of Black education in America where the enslaved learned to read in spite of widespread prohibitions, underlining the importance of black history for all aspects, including labor, in our contemporary moment'.
Merze Tate: the global Odyssey of a black woman scholar.
Barbara Dianne Savage. Online book. 2023.
‘This award-winning book is a biography of Merze Tate by Professor Barbara Savage. Against all odds, Tate was a trailblazing Black scholar and international affairs expert, who traveled the world. Born in rural Michigan during the Jim Crow era, her prodigious scholarly output and adventurous life story serve as a rousing challenge to cultural expectations about Black professionals and gender stereotypes’.
Coral Lives: literature, labor, and the making of America
Michele Currie Navakas. Online book.2023.
‘In this wide-ranging study, Michele Currie Navakas shows how coral became deeply entwined with the histories of slavery, wage labor, and women’s reproductive and domestic work. If coral seemed to some nineteenth-century American writers to be a metaphor for a truly just collective society, it also showed them, by analogy, that society can seem most robust precisely when it is in fact most unfree for the laborers sustaining it’.
A Matter of Moral Justice: Black women laundry workers and the fight for justice.
Jenny Carson. Online book.2021.
‘Jenny Carson examines the role of African American and radical women activists and their collisions with labor organizing and union politics in the 1930’s. Laundry work opened a door for African American women to enter industry. Carson tells the story of how substandard working conditions, racial and gender discrimination, and poor pay drove these women to help unionize the city’s laundry workers’.
A New Working Class: the legacies of public-sector employment in the civil rights movement. Jane Berger. Online book. 2021.
‘For decades, civil rights activists fought against employment discrimination and a greater role for African Americans in municipal decision-making. In this study, Professor Jane Berger traces the history of Black public-sector workers and their unions to fight for racial and economic justice in Baltimore. The ‘legacies’ analyze how American cultural and institutionalized assumptions about race limit Blacks’ opportunities; as well as contribute to the irony of local labor policy often maintaining racial hierarchies and muffling militancy among employees’.
America's Johannesburg: industrialization and racial transformation in Birmingham.
Bobby M. Wilson. Online book. 2019/ 2000.
‘An exploration of the connection between Alabama’s slaveholding past and modern-day Birmingham’s industrialization, Professor Bobby Wilson argues that Alabama’s path to industrialism differed significantly; no other industrial city depended as much on the exploitation of black labor so early in its urban development as Birmingham. Shifting combinations of power, most crucially in labor, shaped the smoldering core of this district that came into being only after the Civil War’.
Freedom's Dominion: a saga of white resistance to federal power. Jefferson Cowie. E184.A1 C675 2022
‘Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in History, Professor Jefferson Cowie focuses on Barbour County, Alabama to argue an alternate interpretation of ‘freedom”. In a county shaped by slave labor and settler colonialism, freedom was weaponized to fight against the civil rights of African Americans, overthrow Reconstruction, and generally question federal authority’.
Domestic Contradictions: race and gendered citizenship from Reconstruction to welfare reform Priya Kandaswamy. Online book. 2021.
‘In this feminist intersectional study, Professor Kandaswamy juxtaposes two pivotal moments in the growth of the American welfare system, arguing for the ability of state power to continue producing a class of low wage labor based on discriminatory racial and gender presuppositions’.
Reconsidering Southern Labor History: race, class, and power. Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt, eds. Online book. 2018.
‘The American Dream of reaching success through sheer sweat and determination rings false for countless members of the working classes. This edited volume shows that many of the difficulties facing workers today have deep roots in the history of labor exploitation in the South. Essays range widely from vagrancy laws in the early republic and labor activism during civil rights, to inmate labor at penitentiaries, pesticide exposure among farm workers, and foreign-owned auto factories in the rural South’.
From Here to Equality: reparations for Black American in the twenty-first century, 2nd ed.
William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen. E 185.89.R45 D37 2022.
‘A detailed assessment for economic reparations to descendants of slavery is based on the argument that racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans through history. Neither Reconstruction nor the New Deal nor the civil rights struggle led to an economically just and fair nation and systematic inequality persists in myriad forms including labor discrimination and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. A roadmap for effective reparations is also provided’.
