Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History

Paul D. Moreno

LSU Press, 2008 - Business & Economics - 334 pages

In Black Americans and Organized Labor, Paul D. Moreno offers a bold reinterpretation of the role of race and racial discrimination in the American labor movement. Moreno applies insights of the law-and-economics movement to formulate a powerfully compelling labor-race theorem of elegant simplicity: White unionists found that race was a convenient basis on which to do what unions do -- control the labor supply. Not racism pure and simple but "the economics of discrimination" explains historic black absence and under-representation in unions.

Moreno's sweeping reexamination stretches from the antebellum period to the present, integrating principal figures such as Frederick Douglass and Samuel Gompers, Isaac Myers and Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph. He traces changing attitudes and practices during the simultaneous black migration to the North and consolidation of organized labor's power, through the confusing and conflicted post-World War II period, during the course of the civil rights movement, and into the era of affirmative action. Maneuvering across a wide span of time and a broad array of issues, Moreno brings remarkable clarity to the question of the importance of race in unions. He impressively weaves together labor, policy, and African American history into a cogent, persuasive revisionist study that cannot be ignored.

Contents

• Introduction: 1
• 1 Free Labor: 8
• 2 From Reconstruction to Jim Crow 18771895: 41
• 3 Blacks and Labor in the Progressive Era 19001920: 82
• 4 From Progressivism to the New Deal 19201935: 137
• 5 The New Deal and World War: 176
• 6 The Civil Rights Era 19501965: 220
• 7 The Affirmative Action Dilemma 1965Present: 259
• Conclusion: 285
• Divide and Conquer The Folklore of Socialism: 289
• Bibliographical Essay: 303
• Index: 327

Popular passages

Page 1 - the Caucasians are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by negroes, Chinamen, Japs, or any others.

Page 17 - James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p.

Page 15 - Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

Page 17 - Emancipation, even without deportation, would probably enhance the wages of white labor, and, very surely would not reduce them. Thus, the customary amount of labor would still have to be performed ; the freed people would surely not do more than their old proportion of it, and, very probably, for a time would do less, leaving an increased part to white laborers, bring their labor into greater demand, and consequently enhancing the wages of it.

About the author

Paul D. Moreno is the author of From Direct Action to Affirmative Action: Fair Employment Law and Policy in America, 1933--1972. He is Grewcock Professor of History at Hillsdale College in Michigan and, in 2005-6, a visiting fellow at Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History
• Author: Paul D. Moreno
• Publisher: LSU Press, 2008
• ISBN: 0807134252, 9780807134252
• Length: 334 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Labor; History / United States / 19th Century; History / United States / 20th Century; Political Science / Civil Rights; Political Science / Labor & Industrial Relations; Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations; Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies