When Nannie Helen Burroughs established the National Association of Wage Earners in the early 20th century, Black women and girls were facing unchecked racism and sexism in the workplace.
They were often relegated to low-paying jobs like sharecropping or domestic service, two occupations in which women suffered harassment, violence and even jail time for the smallest infractions, according to Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, author of “Nannie Helen Burroughs: A Tower of Strength in the Labor World.” Burroughs tried to register her organization as an official union under the American Federation of Labor, now known as the AFL-CIO, but its leaders turned her down.
So Burroughs led her own employment agency in Washington, D.C., where she made uniforms for domestic workers and held lectures on women’s rights and issues affecting Black workers across the nation. She had established her own school to educate female students in fields they were barred from, like stenography, and provide them credentials Burroughs hoped would make employers take them more seriously.
The work required great sacrifice. Unable to secure funding from white or Black men without compromising her vision, Burroughs sometimes had to hunt her own food and sell crops to provide for her students, said Phillips-Cunningham, a Rutgers University-New Brunswick professor in the department of labor studies and employment relations.
Burroughs is one of many Black labor leaders who have fought to secure better working conditions for people of color, trailblazing work that continues today, labor experts, including Phillips-Cunningham, say.
“You still see this tradition of Black people having to create their own spaces to advance labor rights,” she said.
This month, that work is being celebrated by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the advocacy organization founded by the father of Black History Month, scholar Carter G. Woodson. This February, the month’s theme is African American labor. Though it was chosen well before President Donald Trump was reelected, the theme has become particularly salient in light of Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and states’ restrictions on Black history lessons in schools, according to Karsonya Wise Whitehead, president of ASALH.
“This is an exceptional theme for this particular time, because it is making people think about these contributions, it’s making people think about who does America belong to, and it’s making people think about who built America,” Whitehead said.
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Labor and Civil Rights Movement intimately connected
As union membership peaked after the end of World War II, some progressive groups in the deeply segregated labor movement began organizing across racial lines, according to Emily Twarog, a professor of history and labor studies at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. But many unions, particularly those in industrial industries like steel, and auto workers still had breakaway factions of Black employees, she said.
“They have to fight really hard sometimes for equal recognition and not being segregated into the kind of crappiest jobs in the plants,” Twarog said.
These Black labor groups also quickly became instrumental in the broader Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
A. Philip Randolph, who waged a 12-year fight to get higher wages and shorter shifts for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was a key figure in the planning of the famous 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the United Auto Workers provided much of the funding for the event. But the economic demands of the march and its keynote speaker Martin Luther King Jr. are still not well known, even among labor activists, Twarog said.
“He’s a pivotal figure in civil rights history, but we don’t teach people that he was actually a major labor activist and was on his way to a picket line when he was assassinated,” she said, referencing the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike sparked by the deaths of two trash collectors.
“And I think it’s going to continue to get worse as the federal government tries to determine what can and cannot be taught in the classroom and when the states begin to alter textbooks and pick and choose what pieces of American history they want to teach,” she later added.
Legacy of the civil rights era carries on
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Twarog said, more job opportunities opened up for African Americans particularly in municipal jobs like the Postal Service and sanitation thanks in part to Title VII, which bars discrimination and employment on the basis of characteristics such as race and gender. She said this also led to a wave in organizing in the public sector, which helped further integrate unionizing efforts.
Women like Dorothy Lee Bolden also picked up the mantle of the work done by Burroughs, Phillips-Cunningham said. She said Bolden went house to house in Atlanta, gathering the support needed to form the National Domestic Workers Union in 1968, which quickly became a political powerhouse and served more than 10,000 people.
“Even the late Jimmy Carter said for any politician Black or white who wants to run, to have a shot at winning an election in the state of Georgia, they must talk to Dorothy Lee Bolden and members of the National Domestic Workers Union of America,” Phillips-Cunningham said.
Though the national organization no longer exists, Phillips-Cunningham said, the Georgia arm of Bolden’s group has remained influential in the campaigns of politicians such as two-time Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, Sen. Raphael Warnock and former President Barack Obama.
“Dorothy is no longer with us, but the legacies of her organizing have extended into today,” she said.
Progress made, ‘but there’s still a lot of work to do’
Today, Black workers such as Service Employees International Union President April Verrett and National Education Association President Becky Pringle have risen to the highest ranks of the movement, particularly after nationwide conversations jump-started by the 2020 racial justice protests, Phillips-Cunningham said. But many are still pushing for change from the margins, through dedicated centers and organizations that specifically research and advocate for legislation that addresses the issues that still plague Black workers today.
Black workers remain more likely to be union members than white, Asian and Hispanic workers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in January. But Black employees, especially women, still generally earn less than their white counterparts, and they are the most likely group to say they’ve experienced discrimination at work, according to Pew Research Center.
“So there have been some gains, but there’s still a lot of work to do concerning this very age-old and deeply rooted problem of racism and sexism,” Phillips-Cunningham said.
Twarog said federal agencies like the Department of Labor have also given out grants to increase the representation of women and people of color in different industries, but that funding may be at risk under the Trump administration. Meanwhile, labor unions like the Illinois chapter of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor groups in the U.S., have made strides by launching initiatives to increase representation of women and minority groups in specific trades like construction, she said.
“When there’s a mandate to broaden out who’s included, it works. It works really well,” Twarog said. “And it doesn’t mean that unqualified people are getting hired.”
Black labor leaders fighting ‘crisis’
Phillips-Cunningham said she is deeply troubled by the “crisis” caused by the Trump administration’s rollback of protections for workers of color and hobbling of federal regulatory commissions meant to protect workers’ rights. But she said she’s proud to see unions like the SEIU leading the effort to challenge these moves.
“Black labor organizers, thank goodness for them, because they are motivated. They are out there. They are organizing. They’re filing lawsuits. They are educating people about what is happening.”
