The Civil Rights Movement, From the Outside and the Inside

Yevette Richards. Maida Springer: Pan-Africanist and International Labor Leader. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. xv + 366 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8229-4139-2 (cl).

Debra L. Schultz. Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Foreword by Blanche Weisen Cook. xix + 221 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8147-9774-1 (cl).

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s looms large in the history of the postwar United States. The subject of numerous documentary and feature films, and of even more numerous scholarly monographs and volumes directed toward a broader reading public, this movement remains so compelling because of its charismatic leaders, remarkable accomplishments, and painful disappointments. The ambit of the civil rights movement also encompasses strands of many other contemporary social movements and life-changing experiences for numerous Americans. Maida Springer: Pan-Africanist and International Labor Leader and Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement both explore the outer reaches of this movement, expanding our view of it as it intertwined with other movements at home and abroad, and as it drew in participants from beyond its immediate purview. Yevette Richards follows the work of an African American woman with the labor movements of emerging African nations, while Debra L. Schultz traces the experiences of white Jewish women who "went South" to work in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Maida Springer came to her work with African labor unions and federations from the unique position of a young African American woman official within a union led overwhelmingly by older Jewish men. Coming from a politically active Garveyite family, Springer rapidly became involved in the dressmakers' local of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in New York City, a very active local that provided a valuable training ground in union politics. The local's manager, Charles Zimmerman, had been a central player in the factional politics that wracked the union in the 1920s, and remained close to David Dubinsky, the president who would lead the union for over three decades. From very early on, Zimmerman encouraged Springer to leave her dressmaking job and work for the union. Her effectiveness as educational director of a small local brought her to Dubinsky's attention, and when the American Federation of Labor (AFL) sought four delegates to send on a labor exchange trip to Great Britain, Dubinsky recommended Springer. It was during this trip in 1945 that Springer first met the African labor leaders with whom she would work for thirty years.

Springer enjoyed a long career in the labor movement, working alternately as a representative of the AFL and of the ILGWU with international labor federations and African unions, and as an ILGWU staff member. The chronology of Springer's life that Richards provides at the beginning of this biography reflects the difficulty of summarizing her life work. From 1943 to 1959, and again from 1965 to 1969, she worked in different positions for the ILGWU, for individual locals, joint boards and regional offices; in her years away from the ILGWU, she served as the AFL-CIO's International Affairs Office representative for Africa, and after her departure from her last ILGWU staff position in 1969, she served as the Midwest director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, working on voter education and registration, though her salary was still paid by the ILGWU. In her final paid job, she worked for the African American Labor Center, an international auxiliary of the AFL-CIO. This list of jobs, however, only reflects part of her very active life; over the thirty-three years that she worked for the ILGWU and the AFL-CIO, she also worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Council of Negro Women, participated in international trade union conferences and in independence celebrations of several African nations, and...