Lessons from 100 Years of Black Labor Activism:
Fighting Racial Authoritarianism and Building Cross-Movement Solidarity
Friday, November 7
12:30pm - 2:00pm
Free and open to all. Lunch will be served.
In-person-only:
CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies
25 West 43rd Street, 18th floor, New York, NY 10036 (map)
Please register to receive event info and reminders.
(slucuny.swoogo.com/7November2025/register)
The achievements of Black union activists in the U.S. labor movement over the last 100 years offer powerful lessons for anyone seeking to build a multiracial, democratic working-class movement today. Black labor leaders consistently challenged both white supremacy within unions and economic injustice and racial authoritarianism from employers and the government. Since the 1920s and the early organizing of A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Black labor activists have insisted that racial justice is core to class struggle. That Black leadership in the labor movement was deeply rooted both in working-class communities and other freedom struggles—most notably the Black Freedom / Civil Rights movement—played no small part in the gains made by working-class African Americans and Black-led unions.
Join us to learn from a panel discussion with Cedric de Leon, Professor of Sociology and Labor Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; author and activist Bill Fletcher Jr.; Tamara Lee, Associate Professor, Labor Studies and Employment Relations, Rutgers University; and moderated by Cameron Black, Assistant Professor, Labor Studies CUNY SLU. The speakers will discuss what today’s labor movement can learn from this history to strengthen its organizing tactics and build solidarity for a multiracial working-class democracy and how historically tensions between or within movements have helped to build a movement’s power and how we might imagine using tensions today to strengthen our movements.
