This recent issue of the Labor: Studies in Working Class History features a terrific essay “Did Emmett Till Die in Vain? Organized Labor Says No!”: The United Packinghouse Workers and Civil Rights Unionism in the Mid-1950s by Matthew Nichter that brings new light to the Emmett Till story.
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News that hopeful immigrants continue to be transported across the border under the Biden administration at levels last reached in 2018 makes it clear that the early weeks of the new administration will not bring a policy sea-change. And it makes the essays in the new issue of Labor 18:1, which discuss elements of U.S.
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In his fascinating new book, Aaron Goings interrogates the legend of Billy Gohl (1873-1927), a union official accused of dozens of murders. He seeks to bring light to the accusations that have made Gohl a true-crime figure in local popular culture.
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This is our fourth entry for this week’s roundtable discussion on Michael Goldfield’s new book, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s. Goldfield examines the failure to organize the South in the period of the workers insurgency of the 1930s and 1940s.
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One of my favorite quotes from Mother Jones is “Sit Down and Read. Educate Yourself for the Coming Conflicts.” While she had a reputation as an agitator, much of her organizing stamina came from the soul-nourishing books she returned to again and again.
Read more →In 1918, the American labor organizer and socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for his anti-war activities opposing America’s involvement in World War One. In his closing defense, Debs said, “Your honor… I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
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One hundred years ago, revolutionary potential was exciting the sensibilities of radicals and counter-revolutionists across the country. In February 1919, the passions and potential of a workers movement was nowhere more powerfully demonstrated than in the Seattle General Strike. Anna Louise Strong was one of the prime chroniclers of the strike, and wrote one of the most memorable lines of the moment:
We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead
– NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!
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Ed: This is one of a series of conference notes from the recent LAWCHA conference. If you have reflections from one of the panels or plenaries, please send them along.
Talking for Justice! Maria Mareno and Restoring the Legacy of Migrant Women’s Activism-LAWCHA19
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Ed Sadlowski passed away yesterday. His life is a testament to the grit of the leftwing Midwestern union militants. His roots in unionism go back to the Southern Illinois coalfields and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations of the 1930s.
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Liz Faue’s new book, Rethinking the American Labor Movement, is our field’s newest attempt to reinterpret U.S. Labor History. I asked her a to tell us a little bit more about the arc of her interpretation.
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