Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action, and the Construction Industry - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801474310 ISBN 13: 9780801474316

Publisher: ILR Press, 2010

Synopsis

Black Power at Work chronicles the history of direct action campaigns to open up the construction industry to black workers in the 1960s and 1970s. The book's case studies of local movements in Brooklyn, Newark, the Bay Area, Detroit, Chicago, and Seattle show how struggles against racism in the construction industry shaped the emergence of Black Power politics outside the U.S. South. In the process, "community control" of the construction industry―especially government War on Poverty and post-rebellion urban reconstruction projects― became central to community organizing for black economic self-determination and political autonomy.

The history of Black Power's community organizing tradition shines a light on more recent debates about job training and placement for unemployed, underemployed, and underrepresented workers. Politicians responded to Black Power protests at federal construction projects by creating modern affirmative action and minority set-aside programs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but these programs relied on "voluntary" compliance by contractors and unions, government enforcement was inadequate, and they were not connected to jobs programs. Forty years later, the struggle to have construction jobs serve as a pathway out of poverty for inner city residents remains an unfinished part of the struggle for racial justice and labor union reform in the United States.

About this title

About the Author

David Goldberg is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Wayne State University. Trevor Griffey is a PhD candidate in U.S. History at the University of Washington.

From the Back Cover

"Highly public, remunerative, and symbolic of breadwinning manhood, construction trade jobs have long held a special place in urban economies and big-city politics. The authors of Black Power at Work go to the heart of why such jobs were among the most hotly contested during the civil rights and black power decades of the 1960s and 1970s. The politics of black power come to life not in abstract manifestos but in the daily grind to win concrete economic opportunity for people and communities in the racially segregated postwar metropolis."--Robert Self, Brown University



" A richly detailed, multicity, and broadly scoped exploration of black male laborers' quests for construction jobs in the wake of interminable racism, Black Power at Work challenges us to rethink how laborers constructed and constrained liberation struggles, inner-city communities, and affirmative action policies in American during the 1960s and 1970s. This collection forcefully reshapes our understanding of labor politics and culture in the Black Power era and its continuing effects today."--Rhonda Y. Williams, author of the award-winning The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality



"This book's provocative chapters refute the myth of a sharp divide between civil rights and Black Power. The authors tell varied stories of mass jobs struggles involving working-class African Americans in the North and West that reached back to the early 1960s and into the 1970s. Black Power at Work expands the regional scope and temporal reach of civil rights scholarship while raising timely questions about the kinds of coalitions needed for economic justice to prevail in America."--Nancy MacLean, author of Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace



"Black Power activists did not only wear dashikis or berets but also wore overalls and hardhats. This original collection of essays opens the way for a reappraisal of Black Power politics from the perspective of the ordinary workers whose struggles for justice transformed the American workplace. The authors direct our attention to the everyday activism around dignity, representation, and economic empowerment in one of America's most important industries."--Thomas J. Sugrue, author of Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North

Edition details

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801474310
• ISBN 13: 9780801474316
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280
• Editor: Goldberg David, Griffey Trevor