posts categorized asLaborOnline

Cancelling Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

by on May 24, 2023

If you blinked, you might have missed the historical marker dedicated to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at the site of her childhood home in Concord, New Hampshire, on May 1, 2023. That’s because Republican lawmakers had it removed just two weeks after it was unveiled, arguing that Flynn did not deserve such recognition because she was “un-American.”

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Big Win for Victims of Racist Restrictive Covenants

by on May 12, 2023

On April 23, 2023, the Washington state legislature passed the Covenants Homeownership Act (CHA), pioneering legislation that will provide compensation to victims of the racist restrictive covenants that destroyed opportunities for generations of Black, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous families. Historians have been working in dozens of locations to document the extent and impact of racial restrictive covenants, finding them in thousands of neighborhoods and showing that they have a close connection to today’s disparate rates of homeownership and wealth.

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Supreme Court Justices who were Enslavers

by on April 25, 2023

The United States Supreme Court has served as the ultimate arbiter of legal disputes in the country. Until fairly recently, most Americans have either ignored it, or honored its authority.

Recently, the statue of Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the infamous Dred Scott decision, was removed from the grounds of the Maryland State House in 2017.

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Jane LaTour (1946-2023)

by on April 24, 2023

I first met Jane LaTour over forty years ago on a picket line in the northern New Jersey town of Hillside.

Jane was working as an organizer for District 65, and I was coordinating the J. P. Stevens boycott in New Jersey for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.

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