Author: Ruth Needleman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801488580
Category : African American iron and steel workers
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
Thousands of African Americans poured into northwest Indiana in the 1920s dreaming of decent-paying jobs and a life without Klansmen, chain gangs, and cotton. Black Freedom Fighters in Steel: The Struggle for Democratic Unionism by Ruth Needleman adds a new dimension to the literature on race and labor. It tells the story of five men born in the South who migrated north for a chance to work the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in the steel mills. Individually they fought for equality and justice; collectively they helped construct economic and union democracy in postwar America. George Kimbley, the oldest, grew up in Kentucky across the street from the family who had owned his parents. He fought with a French regiment in World War I and then settled in Gary, Indiana, in 1920 to work in steel. He joined the Steelworkers Organizing Committee and became the first African American member of its full-time staff in 1938. The youngest, Jonathan Comer, picked cotton on his father's land in Alabama, stood up to racism in the military during World War II, and became the first African American to be president of a basic steel local union. This is a book about the integration of unions, as well as about five remarkable individuals. It focuses on the decisive role of African American leaders in building interracial unionism. One chapter deals with the African American struggle for representation, highlighting the importance of independent black organization within the union. Needleman also presents a conversation among two pioneering steelworkers and current African American union leaders about the racial politics of union activism.
Author: William Powell Jones
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252029790
Category : African American men
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
The lumber industry employed more African American men than any southern economic sector outside agriculture, yet those workers have been almost completely ignored by scholars. Drawing on a substantial number of oral history interviews as well as on manuscript sources, local newspapers, and government documents, The Tribe of Black Ulysses explores black men and women's changing relationship to industrial work in three sawmill communities (Elizabethtown, South Carolina, Chapman, Alabama, and Bogalusa, Louisiana). By restoring black lumber workers to the history of southern industrialization, William P. Jones reveals that industrial employment was not incompatible - as previous historians have assumed - with the racial segregation and political disfranchisement that defined African American life in the Jim Crow South. At the same time, he complicates an older tradition of southern sociology that viewed industrialization as socially disruptive and morally corrupting to African American social and cultural traditions rooted in agriculture. William P. Jones is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Barrett, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Nelson Lichtenstein.
Author: Fred Ho
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822342816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
A collection of writing on the historical alliances, cultural connections, and shared political strategies linking African Americans and Asian Americans.
Author: Jasmine Nichole Cobb
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479817228
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
"Picture Freedom provides a unique and nuanced interpretation of nineteenth-century African American life and culture. Focusing on visuality, print culture, and an examination of the parlor, Cobb has fashioned a book like none other, convincingly demonstrating how whites and blacks reimagined racial identity and belonging in the early republic."--Erica Armstrong Dunbar, author of A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City
Author: Gerald Horne
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095189
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
A leading African American Communist, lawyer William L. Patterson (1891–1980) was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the defeat of Jim Crowby virtue of his leadership of the Scottsboro campaign in the 1930s. In this watershed biography, historian Gerald Horne shows how Patterson helped to advance African American equality by fostering and leveraging international support for the movement. Horne highlights key moments in Patterson's global activism: his early education in the Soviet Union, his involvement with the Scottsboro trials and other high-profile civil rights cases of the 1930s to 1950s, his 1951 "We Charge Genocide" petition to the United Nations, and his later work with prisons and the Black Panther Party. Through Patterson's story, Horne examines how the Cold War affected the freedom movement, with civil rights leadership sometimes disavowing African American leftists in exchange for concessions from the U.S. government. He also probes the complex and often contradictory relationship between the Communist Party and the African American community, including the impact of the FBI's infiltration of the Communist Party. Drawing from government and FBI documents, newspapers, periodicals, archival and manuscript collections, and personal papers, Horne documents Patterson's effectiveness at carrying the freedom struggle into the global arena and provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century struggles for racial justice.
Author: Barbara Ransby
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469681358
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 711
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Book Description
One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903–1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives. A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the Black freedom struggle. Making her way in predominantly male circles while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists, Baker was a national officer and key figure in the NAACP, a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In this definitive biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker’s long and rich career, revealing her complexity, radical democratic worldview, and enduring influence on group-centered, grassroots activism. Beyond documenting an extraordinary life, Ransby paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide throughout the twentieth century.
Author: Robert W. Widell, Jr.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137340967
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426
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Book Description
Birmingham, Alabama looms large in the history of the twentieth-century black freedom struggle, but to date historians have mostly neglected the years after 1963. Here, author Robert Widell explores the evolution of Birmingham black activism into the 1970s, providing a valuable local perspective on the "long" black freedom struggle.
Author: Hosea Hudson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 154
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Book Description
Memoir by former sharecropper, steel worker and organizer of struggles a black man in the south.
Author: Robert Venditti
Publisher: DC Comics
ISBN: 1779506414
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
When a Kryptonian rocket crash-landed in 1930s Czechoslovakia, the Nazi war machine discovered the most powerful weapon on the planet: baby Kal-El. More than 50 years later, a new resistance has arisen... the Freedom Fighters! To crush Hitler's regime, the Human Bomb, Phantom Lady, Black Condor, and Doll Woman launch a guerrilla campaign to reignite the American spirit in the hope of bringing Uncle Sam back from the dead! Collects Freedom Fighters #1-12.
Author: Beth Tompkins Bates
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807837458
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
In the 1920s, Henry Ford hired thousands of African American men for his open-shop system of auto manufacturing. This move was a rejection of the notion that better jobs were for white men only. In The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford, Beth Tompkins Bates explains how black Detroiters, newly arrived from the South, seized the economic opportunities offered by Ford in the hope of gaining greater economic security. As these workers came to realize that Ford's anti-union "American Plan" did not allow them full access to the American Dream, their loyalty eroded, and they sought empowerment by pursuing a broad activist agenda. This, in turn, led them to play a pivotal role in the United Auto Workers' challenge to Ford's interests. In order to fully understand this complex shift, Bates traces allegiances among Detroit's African American community as reflected in its opposition to the Ku Klux Klan, challenges to unfair housing practices, and demands for increased and effective political participation. This groundbreaking history demonstrates how by World War II Henry Ford and his company had helped kindle the civil rights movement in Detroit without intending to do so.
