By Ken Nash
District Council 37 Librarian

As Black History Month ends, many union members are seeking books and videos on the struggles of African-American workers to organize. The Rifkin Solidarity Library in Room 211 on the 2nd floor at DC 37 has the titles below and many more.

The classic overviews are Philip Foner’s “Black Workers: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present” (Temple, 1989) and “The Harder We Run: Black Workers Since the Civil War” by William Harris (Oxford, 1982).

A. Philip Randolph, the father of the 1963 March on Washington and longtime president of the Sleeping Car Porters union, is well represented with scholarly works such as Jervis Anderson’s.

But for an introduction, or for young readers and those who want a more pictorial treatment, the best are Sally Hanley’s work on Randolph or Patricia McKissack’s on the union (“A Long Hard Journey”).

The death of King

DC 37 and AFSCME members will especially appreciate Joan Beifuss’s book and video “At the River I Stand: Memphis, the 1968 Strike and Martin Luther King Jr.” (Carlson, 1989).

An interesting take on black labor organizing during the radical days of the 1960s is the book “Detroit, I Do Mind Dying,” which documents the infusion of the black power movement into the auto industry and the auto workers union.

With the 1990s came a new generation of research and writing on African-American labor history. Books focused more explicitly on the interplay between the labor and civil rights movements and the connection of race and class.

A new dimension in African-American labor history was opened up by Mike Honey in his award winning book, “Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers” (University of Illinois Press, 1992). Honey shows the links between the civil rights and labor movements. He also dispels the myth that the South could not be organized in the 1930s and 1940s by presenting example after example of successful campaigns to organize black workers despite the frequent hostility of white workers.
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Honey’s most recent book, “Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism and the Freedom Struggles” (Univ. of California Press, 1999), brings the history of the civil rights and labor struggles up to the recent past. His audio-cassette, “Links in the Chain,” shows through song the ties between the labor and civil rights movements.

In his “Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954-68” (ILR Press, 1994), Alan Draper explores the conflict within labor over supporting the civil rights movement and the substantial racism of the white working class, especially in the South.

David Roediger explores the development of racism among white workers in the 19th century in his “Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class” (Verso, 1991).

In his analysis, Roediger draws on W. E. B. Dubois for the concept of a “psychological wage.” In addition to economic wage differentials, he points out, white workers were given the bonus of believing in their inherent superiority over non-white workers.

The role of women
A. Philip Randolph is still a popular subject, with new books coming out all the time on the Sleeping Car Porters union and the man who blazed the trail toward linking the labor and civil rights movements.

“Marching Together: Women of the Sleeping Car Porters,” by Melinda Chateauvert (University of Illinois Press, 1998) highlights the leading role that wives, sisters and daughters played in forming the first national union for African-American trade unionists.

Dante James’s exceptional PBS video, “A. Philip Randolph: For Jobs and Freedom,” traces Randolph’s leadership from the early Harlem days through the union to the March on Washington in 1963.