Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle

The labor of black workers has been crucial to economic development in the United States. Yet because of racism and segregation, their contribution remains largely unknown. Spanning the 1930s to the present, Black Workers Remember tells the hidden history of African American workers in their own words. It provides striking firsthand accounts of the experiences of black southerners living under segregation in Memphis, Tennessee. Eloquent and personal, these oral histories comprise a unique primary source and provide a new way of understanding the black labor experience during the industrial era. Together, the stories demonstrate how black workers resisted racial apartheid in American industry and underscore the active role of black working people in history. The individual stories are arranged thematically in chapters on labor organizing, Jim Crow in the workplace, police brutality, white union racism, and civil rights struggles. Taken together, the stories ask us to rethink the conventional understanding of the civil rights movement as one led by young people and preachers in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, we see the freedom struggle as the product of generations of people, including workers who organized unions, resisted Jim Crow at work, and built up their families, churches, and communities. The collection also reveals the devastating impact that a globalizing capitalist economy has had on black communities and the importance of organizing the labor movement as an antidote to poverty. Michael Honey gathered these oral histories for more than fifteen years. He weaves them together here into a rich collection reflecting many tragic dimensions of America's racial history while drawing new attention to the role of workers and poor people in African American and American history.

Table of Contents:
Synopsis and Acknowledgments Preface: Black History as Labor History Introduction: The Power of Remembering  1 Segregation, Racial Violence, and Black Workers  Fannie Henderson Witnesses Southern Lynch Law  William Glover Recounts His Frame-up by the Memphis Police  Longshore Leader Thomas Watkins Escapes Assassination  2 From Country to City: Jim Crow at Work  Hillie and Laura Pride Move to Memphis  Matthew Davis Describes Heavy Industrial Work George Holloway Remembers the Crump Era  Clarence Coe Recalls the Pressures of White Supremacy  3 Making a Way Out of No Way: Black Women Factory Workers  Irene Branch Does Double Duty as a Domestic and Factory Worker  Evelyn Bates Reflects on Her Lifetime of Factory Work  Susie Wade Tells How She Built a Life around Work Rebecca McKinley Remembers the Strike at Memphis Furniture Company Interlude: Not What We Seem  4 Freedom Struggles at the Point of Production  Clarence Coe Fights for Equality  Lonnie Roland and other Black Workers Implement the Brown Decision on the Factory Floor George Holloway's Struggle against White Worker Racism  5 Organizing and Surviving in the Cold War  Leroy Clark Follows the Pragmatic Road to Survival in the Jim Crow South  Leroy Boyd Battles White Supremacy in the Era of the Red Scare  Interlude: Arts of Resistance  6 Civil Rights Unionism  Leroy Boyd Tells How Black Workers Used the Movement for Civil Rights to Revive Local I9 Factory Worker Matthew Davis Becomes a Community Leader  Edward Lindsey Recalls Black Union Politics  Alzada and Leroy Clark Fight for Unionism and Civil Rights Alzada Clark Organizes Black Women Workers in Mississippi  7 "I Am a Man": Unionism and the Black Working Poor  Taylor Rogers Relives the Memphis Sanitation Strike fames Robinson Describes the Worst job He Ever Had  Leroy Boyd and Clarence Coe Recall a Strike and the Death of Martin Luther King William Lucy Reflects on the Strikes Meaning and Outcome  8 The Fate of the Black Working Class: The Global Economy, Racism, and Union Organizing  Confronting Deindustrialization Ida Leachman Tells How Her Union Continues to Organize Low-Wage Workers  George Holloway and Clarence Coe Reflect on the Importance of Unions and the Struggle  against Racism  Epilogue: Scars of Memory  References and Notes  Index  Illustrations

About the Author :
Michael Keith Honey is Harry Bridges Chair of Labor Studies and Professor of African-American, Ethnic and Labor Studies, and American History at the University of Washington, Tacoma. He is the author of the prize-winning Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (1993).

Review :
"Honey's subjects tell their stories with remarkable eloquence. But Honey is much more than a medium through whom others speak; his is also an active and eloquent voice in this work."--Bruce Nelson, "Mississippi Quarterly