3468 - Race and Labor and the 50th Anniversary of the Memphis Strike

Session Submission Type: Paper Session 100min

Description

In February 1968, 1,300 black Memphis sanitation workers struck for safer jobs, better pay, and union recognition, carrying signs that said "I am a man". Rev. Martin Luther King visited Memphis repeatedly to support the strike, and on one of those visits, on April 4, 1968, he was assassinated. Despite vicious union-busting by the city government, the workers went on to win the strike. Fifty years later, race and racism remain divisive issues among US workers, especially in the US South, where racial divisions have undermined recent organizing drives. Though migration has reconfigured the racial-ethnic mix of the country, the color line described by Dubois remains strong, as the Black Lives Matter movement and the election of Donald Trump have spotlighted. Papers in this session examine race and labor through contemporary and historical case studies of unions, a worker center, and a revolutionary worker organization.

Sub Unit

• Section on Labor and Labor Movements / Race and Labor and the 50th Anniversary of the Memphis Strike

Session Organizer

• Chris Tilly, University of California-Los Angeles

Presider

• Dorian Warren, Center for Community Change, Roosevelt Institute, and Economic Security Project

Individual Presentations

• Carnal Framings: Race, Class and Citizenship in a Multi-racial Worker Center - Sebastien Chauvin, University of Lausanne

• Class, Race, and the Capitalist Crisis: From Reform to Revolution - Walda Katz-Fishman, Howard University; Jerome Scott, League of Revolutionaries for a New America; Ralph Christopher Gomes, Howard University

• The Struggle Within: Labor Leaders’ Strategies for Incorporating Racial Justice in American Unions - Amelia Fortunato, City University of New York-The Graduate Center

Discussant

• Charles Payne, Rutgers University-Newark