This is the fourth and final contribution to our symposium on Tom Alter’s new book, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas, published recently by University of Illinois Press. We started with Kyle Wilkison’s analysis of the book’s contribution and survey of previous literature.
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As a child, Gwen Trice caught sight of a ragged scar along her father’s shoulder – a mark from a long-ago logging accident. Lafayette “Lucky” Trice was a loving but imposing figure, and much of his early life was a mystery to his young daughter.
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In 2021, the radical publisher, Charles H. Kerr, published a “memoir” by the late Noel Ignatiev (1940-2019), Acceptable Men Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World. Rather than review the book, Labor OnLine decided instead to convene a conversation with four activist-scholars who could shed light on Noel’s experience at US Steel, and offer their own critique of his account of working life there.
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Jenny Carson profiles some of the dynamic early leaders of the New York laundry workers union uprising of the 1930s, and how their fight for a democratic union met resistance from a notable CIO union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. It is a window into her longer treatment in A Matter of Moral Justice, published by University of Illinois Press –editor
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Kaisha Esty’s marvelous essay “‘I Told Him to Let Me Alone, That He Hurt Me’: Black Women and Girls and the Battle Over Labor and Sexual Consent in Union-Occupied Territory” is available for free download from Duke University Press until May 31.
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Lisa Phillips spoke to Jenny Carson about her new book, A Matter of Moral Justice, on Black women laundry workers in New York. It was recently published by the University of Illinois Press.
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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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Jonathan Daniel Wells’ The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War exposes the role of Wall Street, powerful judges, politicians, lawyers and police officers in kidnapping African-Americans and sending them South to enslavement, showing the way that New York’s powerful kept slavery and the slave trade alive.
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Nat LaCour connected civil rights unionism to teachers’ struggle to build union democracy. A remembrance and evaluation.
The United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) defy assumptions about anti-union right-to-work Louisiana. As a small, mostly segregated Black local, in 1966, they held the first teachers strike in the South.
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Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird uses the events around John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry to weave a fictional tale incorporating some basic insights and arguments about the nature of race in America. It did its most impressive work in presenting the wide spectrum of diverse African American responses to slavery and, in the process, offering a better sense of their humanity.
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