Nothing Less Than What We’ve Earned: Black Voices in the Labor Movement

By Maya R. RSS Thu, January 30, 2025

For centuries Black free labor was simply a guarantee. However, there was always an awareness that we were entitled to equity in the profits from the country we worked hard to create.

1850 ushered in the first attempt at a Black labor union, the very short-lived American League of Colored Laborers. Founded in New York, the group focused on educating the freedmen in artisan trades. Frederick Douglass, a founding member, believed this was the optimal direction for empowerment. A recently freed man could work a trade or craft for themselves instead of the menial service he was deemed worthy of doing. Unfortunately, the timing of its inauguration lined up with the tension growing within the country. The organization faded away as the drums of war sounded, and the American Civil War began. 

The first effort towards a national Black union was formed within the Reconstruction period. In July 1869, the National Labor Union invited Black delegates from Maryland and Pennsylvania to one of its annual congresses. Upon hearing them, they declared that separate unions would be encouraged. They were welcome to form under their umbrella and send delegates to future sessions. Some Marxist-leaning unions took sincere action on the NLU's decision, one even making space for a separate union hall. Very few other unions amongst them were ready to extend their hand. The mutual distrust between the Black and white workers proved difficult to overcome. Often they would be pitted against each other during strikes, stoking tensions that profited no one but the companies.

Isaac Myers, a Baltimore native and one of the delegates who spoke passionately at the NLU congress was dissatisfied with the efforts. He would form the Colored National Labor Union at the end of that same year. As more Black unions formed it would be easier to negotiate their leverage as workers alongside the other unions. It was harder standing with white union organizations when it came to politics. Many found it hard to separate their identities as laborers and as Americans with a distinct political desire. Upon its dissolution in 1872, the CNLU was able to represent Black workers within at least 21 states. Their legislative appeals to the United States to make necessary changes to better the lives of those in the South made little impact. Yet, the waves of the attempt would reverberate well into the coming century.

Ten years after the CNLU made its efforts to advocate for southern workers, a particularly fascinating event occurred. For Black women, the work of washing laundry was some of the most liberating work available. It provided the relative luxury of being able to do their work from home, unlike the other domestic positions that kept the women workers under the critical gaze of their employers. Still, these women were paid like peons, with the monthly wages for the average worker being $4. In the summer of 1881, a group of 20 women decided to organize. They called themselves the Washing Society of Atlanta. They decided to strike strategically ahead of a World’s Fair that would be occurring in the fall. Their demands were simply to set the standard that every 12 pounds of laundry would earn them a dollar. For weeks the women held out and as more workers joined them, the city eventually buckled. The concession was to require a washer to hold a $25 license in return for the autonomy they demanded. Other domestic workers would soon follow suit, pressuring their employers for fairer wages.

In time, the promises of Reconstruction faded, and the violence of Southern Jim Crow and Northern Black Codes grew stronger. Many of the hard-fought freedoms won for Black Americans were effectively overturned. However, the cultural memory never faded. More and more white workers came to understand their labor rights were intrinsically linked with those of Black workers. Still, struggles spurred on by the leaders of industry continued to keep all workers from being able to work together for shared dignity. In 1925 the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters became the first Black union to have a charter in the American Federation of Labor. It was led by A. Philip Randolph, who would later be an instrumental figure in the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s. With the groundwork set by Myers, the union found a great advantage in Randolph. He was well-educated and knew of the working dynamics of the North and South. Most importantly, he was not employed by the Pullman Company and thus could not be bullied with threats of losing his livelihood.

Randolph, of course, is better recognized as one of the key figures responsible for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The planning and organizing of the march existed for years before the event came to fruition. Randolph worked with fellow Socialist Party member Bayard Rustin to plan the massive event as early as 1941. Several planned marches would end up canceled. However, as the Civil Rights movement grew, the hunger for a large show of power could not go unanswered. 1963 marked the centennial anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The moment was ripe with symbolism. As multiple groups, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), saw fit to march on Washington, it was decided that now was the time to act. The historic event saw its intended response as the following year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law. Dr. Martin Luther King, the president of the SCLC at the time of the 1963 march, would often find his civil rights work enmeshed in the labor struggle. It would be his involvement in the Memphis sanitation workers' strike that he would give his final address. 

These stories, and countless others like them that have gone untold, speak to an indomitable courage inherent in the spirits of Black folk. There is an unmatched power in those who can see a point of leverage in a situation and utilize it for the collective good. Each act, then and now, is a passing of the baton. An offering for the next person to take a stand and come together; creating an unbreakable and infinite chain.

 

Want to know more about the history of Black American labor rights? Check out these books in our catalog:

 

Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (2023) by Blair Murphy Kelley

An award-winning historian illuminates the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America through a stunning narrative centered on her forebears. There have been countless books, articles, and televised reports in recent years about the almost mythic "white working class," a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor, and even the very existence, of entire groups of working people, including everyday Black workers. In this brilliant corrective, Black Folk, acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story. Spanning 200 years — from one of Kelley's earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the COVID-19 pandemic — Black Folk highlights the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Taking jobs white people didn't want and confined to segregated neighborhoods, Black workers found community in intimate spaces, from stoops on city streets to the backyards of washerwomen, where multiple generations labored from dawn to dusk, talking and laughing in a space free of white supervision and largely beyond white knowledge. As millions of Black people left the violence of the American South for the promise of a better life in the North and West, these networks of resistance and joy sustained early arrivals and newcomers alike. They laid the groundwork for organizing for better jobs, better pay, and equal rights. As her narrative moves from Georgia to Philadelphia, Florida to Chicago, Texas to Oakland, Kelley treats Black workers not just as laborers, members of a class, or activists, but as people whose daily experiences mattered — to themselves, to their communities, and to a nation that denied that basic fact. Through affecting portraits of her great-grandfather, a sharecropper named Solicitor, and her grandmother, Brunell, who worked for more than a decade as a domestic maid, Kelley captures, in intimate detail, how generation after generation of labor was required to improve, and at times maintain her family's status. Yet her family, like many others, was always animated by a vision of a better future. The church yards, factory floors, railcars, and postal sorting facilities where Black people worked were sites of possibility, and, as Kelley suggests, Amazon package processing centers, supermarkets, and nursing homes can be the same today. With the resurgence of labor activism in our own time, Black Folk presents a stirring history of our possible future.

Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (1999) by Michael K. Honey

The labor of Black workers has been crucial to economic development in the United States. Yet because of racism and segregation, their contribution remains largely unknown. Spanning the 1930s to the present, Black Workers Remember tells the hidden history of African American workers in their own words. It provides striking firsthand accounts of the experiences of Black southerners living under segregation in Memphis, Tennessee. Eloquent and personal, these oral histories comprise a unique primary source and provide a new way of understanding the Black labor experience during the industrial era. Together, the stories demonstrate how Black workers resisted racial apartheid in American industry and underscore the active role of Black working people in history.

Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America (2019) by Joe William Trotter

From the ongoing issues of poverty, health, housing, and employment to the recent upsurge of lethal police-community relations, the Black working class stands at the center of perceptions of social and racial conflict today. Journalists and public policy analysts often discuss the Black poor as "consumers" rather than "producers," as "takers" rather than "givers," and as "liabilities" instead of "assets." In his engrossing new history, Workers on Arrival, Joe William Trotter, Jr. refutes these perceptions by charting the Black working class's vast contributions to the making of America. Covering the last 400 years since Africans were first brought to Virginia in 1619, Trotter traces Black workers' complicated journey from the transatlantic slave trade through the American Century to the demise of the industrial order in the 21st century. At the center of this compelling, fast-paced narrative are the actual experiences of these African American men and women. A dynamic and vital history of remarkable contributions despite repeated setbacks, Workers on Arrival expands our understanding of America's economic and industrial growth, its cities, ideas, and institutions, and the real challenges confronting Black urban communities today.

Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (2015) by Premilla Nadasen

Premilla Nadasen recounts a little-known history of organizing among African American household workers in this powerful book. She uses the stories of a handful of women to illuminate the broader politics of labor, organizing, race, and gender in late 20th-century America. At the crossroads of the emerging Civil Rights Movement, a deindustrializing economy, a burgeoning women's movement, and increasing immigration, household worker activists, who were excluded from both labor rights and mainstream labor organizing, developed distinctive strategies for political mobilization and social change. We learn about their complicated relationship with their employers, who were a source of much of their anguish, but, also, potentially important allies. And equally important they articulated a profound challenge to unequal state policy. Household Workers Unite offers a window into this occupation from a perspective that is rarely seen. At a moment when the labor movement is in decline; as capital increasingly treats workers as interchangeable or dispensable; as the number of manufacturing jobs continues to dwindle and the number of service sector jobs expands; as workers in industrialized countries find themselves in a precarious situation and struggle hard to make ends meet without state support or protection — the lessons of domestic worker organizing recounted here might prove to be more important than just a correction of the historical record. The women in this book, as Nadasen demonstrates, were innovative labor organizers. As a history of poor women workers, it shatters countless myths and assumptions about the labor movement and proposes a very different vision.

A. Philip Randolph and the Labor Movement (1993) by Robert Cwiklik

This is a biography of the civil rights activist who organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which acted as a labor union for Pullman car porters, and crusaded for equal rights for Black people in the armed forces, military industries, and labor unions.

Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (2001) by Eric Arnesen

Decades before the rise of the modern Civil Rights Movement in the mid-1950s, Black railroaders forged their own brand of civil rights activism, organizing their own associations, challenging white trade unions, and pursuing legal redress through state and federal courts. In recapturing Black railroaders' voices, aspirations, and challenges, Eric Arnesen helps to recast the history of Black protest and American labor in the 20th century.

A Song for the Unsung: Bayard Rustin, the Man Behind the 1963 March on Washington (2022) by Carole Boston Weatherford

The author of Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom and the author of Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag combine their tremendous talents for a singular picture book biography of Bayard Rustin, the gay Black man behind the March on Washington of 1963.

I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters (2012) by Bayard Rustin

Published on the centennial of his birth, and in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington, here is Bayard Rustin’s life story told in his own words.

Memphis, Martin, and the Mountaintop: The Sanitation Strike of 1968 (2018) by Alice Faye Duncan

This historical fiction picture book presents the story of nine-year-old Lorraine Jackson, who in 1968 witnessed the Memphis sanitation strike — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s final stand for justice before his assassination — when her father, a sanitation worker, participated in the protest.

Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (2007) by Michael Honey

Memphis in 1968 was ruled by a paternalistic "plantation mentality" embodied in its good old-boy mayor, Henry Loeb. Wretched conditions, abusive white supervisors, poor education, and low wages locked most Black workers into poverty. Then two sanitation workers were chewed up like garbage in the back of a faulty truck, igniting a public employee strike that brought to a boil long-simmering issues of racial injustice.

 

Also, take a look at our HistoryMakers series of interviews of first-person accounts of labor rights:


Have a question for Free Library staff? Please submit it to our Ask a Librarian page and receive a response within two business days.

Leave this field empty

Add a Comment to Nothing Less Than What We’ve Earned: Black Voices in the Labor Movement

Email is kept private and will not be displayed publicly
Comment must be less than 3000 characters
This was a very interesting and informative read!
Ashabí Rich - Philadelphia
Thursday, January 30, 2025