Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle, and: Race and Resistance: African Americans in the 21st Century (review)

The two books under consideration represent distinct yet parallel approaches to the study of race and class in America. Oral history is empowering to both individuals and communities. It strives to educe and record the experiences often ignored or excluded from conventional histories. In unlocking memories, it helps people more fully explore their identity, connect with their community, and better understand positionality and forms of resistance and political struggle. Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism and Freedom Struggle by Michael Honey is one of the best oral histories written since Michael Frisch's Portraits in Steel. The second approach, contained in Race and Resistance: African Americans in the 21^st Century, is a more openly critical, contentious and didactic analysis of racism by black radical scholars/activists whose mission is fundamental change in America.

Honey's oral history collection involves black workers in Memphis. At the heart of the old plantation economy and later the new South, the local economy was built on slavery and segregated labor and serves as a metaphor for economic development in other parts of the nation. Honey examines how black workers constructed their struggle against racism and segregation on a daily basis. Sometimes that struggle meant activism while at other times it meant accommodation in the face of systematic institutional racism and "workplace apartheid."

In the early chapters of Honey's book, he explores the struggle to overcome Jim Crow and a 20^th Century system of segregation that sullied black educational and cultural institutions, and curtailed and divided working-class blacks and whites. What this book conveys is a sense of the emotional and psychological burden of black workers in the face of denials of rights, violence, collusion, and a corrupt justice system. At the same time, we also see how black workers found solace and strength in religious and cultural institutions and other civic networks that advanced civil rights.

By mid-century, black workers transferred the lessons of associational life to organizing unions to improve working and economic conditions. This often involved overcoming collusion between employers and police, red-baiting, institutional racism and workplace segregation. Particularly compelling are the stories of the day-to-day struggles of black workers and how they "created a dissident black culture and discourse" that became the foundation of the Civil Rights movement.

What emerges is the development of a "civil rights unionism" that merged the struggle for civic, legal and labor rights into mass movement politics. The synergy permitted rapid changes in strategies and tactics that transcended political difference and geography. The book ends with memories of the Memphis sanitation strike where Martin Luther King was killed. Here the strike is understood as not just a labor dispute. Rather, the dispute and the famous "I am a Man" speech become an exposition of the continuous poverty and degradation of a black working class.

Honey's book is a testament to the struggles for dignity, respect and basic civil and labor rights. As an oral history, its strength lies in the editing and the fact that the analysis rarely infringes on the voices of the workers themselves. The book is essential reading for those interested in working-class and labor history and is easily adapted to Labor and American Studies courses.

The anthology Race and Resistance edited by Herb Boyd provides a montage of essays that are openly polemical, and at times, propagandistic. Some essays, as represented by Ron Daniels, Bill Fletcher, Paul Scott, and bell hooks provide a coherent study of racism and the complexity and tensions between categories...