Black Americans and organized labor

by Paul D. Moreno

"Paul D. Moreno offers a hold reinterpretation - truly a "new history"--Of the role of race and racial discrimination in the American labor movement. Breaking with historians' deadlocked debate over the importance of race in labor organization, Moreno applies insights of the law-and-economics movement to formulate a powerfully compelling labor-race theorem of elegant simplicity: White unionists found that race was a convenient basis on which to do what unions do - control the labor supply. Not racism pure and simple but "the economics of discrimination" explains historic black absence and under-representation in unions." "Moreno's sweeping reexamination stretches from the antebellum period to the present, integrating relevant biographical details of principal figures such as Frederick Douglass and Samuel Gompers, Isaac Myers and Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. Du Bois and A. Philip Randolph. Throughout, he focuses on the liberal-individualist philosophy that underlay the nineteenth-ce