This is his story. Before Martin Luther King Jr. began to preach from his pulpit in Montgomery, before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, and before Rosa Parks' famous bus ride, a man named Harry T. Moore toiled in Jim Crow Florida on behalf of the NAACP and the Progressive Voters’ League. For seventeen years, in an era of official indifference and outright hostility, the soft-spoken but resolute Moore traveled the back roads of the state on a mission to educate, evangelize, and organize. On Christmas night in 1951, in Mims, Florida, a bomb placed under his bed ended Harry Moore’s life. His wife, Harriette, died of her wounds a week later. Although Florida’s governor reopened the case in 1991, no one was ever convicted of this crime.            Using previously unavailable FBI files, Green introduces his readers to the good and the bad, the villainous and the virtuous, in Jim Crow Florida. In doing so, he offers a poignant and gripping memorial to the pioneering work of Harry T. Moore, one of the earliest martyrs of the modern civil rights movement.

    This sea of white faces left for posterity images such as Rosie the Riveter, obscuring the contributions that African American women made to the war effort. In Bitter Fruit, Maureen Honey corrects this distorted picture of women's roles in World War II by collecting photos, essays, fiction, and poetry by and about black women from the four leading African American periodicals of the war period: Negro Digest, The Crisis, Opportunity, and Negro Story.Mostly appearing for the first time since their original publication, the materials in Bitter Fruit feature black women operating technical machinery, working in army uniforms, entertaining audiences, and pursuing a college education. The articles praise the women's accomplishments as pioneers working toward racial equality; the fiction and poetry depict female characters in roles other than domestic servants and give voice to the bitterness arising from discrimination that many women felt. With these various images, Honey masterfully presents the roots of the postwar civil rights movement and the leading roles black women played in it.Containing works from eighty writers, this anthology includes forty African American women authors, most of whose work has not been published since the war. Of particular note are poems and short stories anthologized for the first time, including Ann Petry's first story, Octavia Wynbush's last work of fiction, and three poems by Harlem Renaissance writer Georgia Douglas Johnson. Uniting these various writers was their desire to write in the midst of a worldwide military conflict with dramatic potential for ending segregation and opening doors for women at home.Traditional anthologies of African American literature jump from the Harlem Renaissance to the 1960s with little or no reference to the decades between those periods. Bitter Fruit not only illuminates the literature of these decades but also presents an image of black women as community activists that undercuts gender stereotypes of the era. As Honey concludes in her introduction, "African American women found an empowered voice during the war, one that anticipates the fruit of their wartime effort to break silence, to challenge limits, and to change forever the terms of their lives."

    Yet because of racism and segregation, their contribution remains largely unknown. Spanning the 1930s to the present, Black Workers Remember tells the hidden history of African American workers in their own words. It provides striking firsthand accounts of the experiences of black southerners living under segregation in Memphis, Tennessee. Eloquent and personal, these oral histories comprise a unique primary source and provide a new way of understanding the black labor experience during the industrial era. Together, the stories demonstrate how black workers resisted racial apartheid in American industry and underscore the active role of black working people in history.The individual stories are arranged thematically in chapters on labor organizing, Jim Crow in the workplace, police brutality, white union racism, and civil rights struggles. Taken together, the stories ask us to rethink the conventional understanding of the civil rights movement as one led by young people and preachers in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, we see the freedom struggle as the product of generations of people, including workers who organized unions, resisted Jim Crow at work, and built up their families, churches, and communities. The collection also reveals the devastating impact that a globalizing capitalist economy has had on black communities and the importance of organizing the labor movement as an antidote to poverty. Michael Honey gathered these oral histories for more than fifteen years. He weaves them together here into a rich collection reflecting many tragic dimensions of America's racial history while drawing new attention to the role of workers and poor people in African American and American history.

    economy The book is a heroic attempt to organize the relevant facts about black economic involvement in the U.S. economy. Its major objective is the construction of a theoretical framework for explaining the mechanisms by which the black population of the United States reproduces itself as a black population. Who they are today and what survival strategies keep breath in their bodies are consequences of a set of historical forces which have generated them out of some primordial earth matter about three million years ago, propelled them through many and varied social-economic formations, and finally solidified their present defining characteristics as well as their physical location within the bowels of the most powerful capitalist nation that the world has ever known. Previous economic-theoretic works in this field have concentrated on a set of isolated data, mainly centering around black-white differences in various measures of economic performance or rewards. This book, on the other hand, develops a systematic framework for understanding black people as a distinct population in historical transition from primordial beginnings in Africa, through slave labor in North America, thence undergoing a sharecropping existence, and finally being transformed into a full-fledged wage-working population. The method exploits the rich and changing history of blacks as a people. At the same time, it emphasizes their survival activities which are peculiar to each historical epoch in their development. A major conclusion of the book is that black people have been locked in an historical embrace over the centuries, reproducingamong themselves to the exclusion of all other people, undergoing a set of transformations which brought them from slavery through sharecropping and thence into the American wage-working class. This perspective makes for a deeper understanding of the racial oppression which they have experienced. At the same time it provides insights into the progressive elimination of the racist malaise over time. The book ends with some interesting speculations about the future of blacks in the U.S. "There is no single source available which attempts to establish fundamental theoretical principles for approaching the new discipline of black political economy with the same skill and methodology presented here," said Manning Marable, author of How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (South End Press, 1983) "I think that the book is a tremendous advance over the entire body of literature currently availble on the subject."

    

    It is about the Church family, who came West seeking gold in 1861, stayed to raise cattle, watched the federal government take a large piece of its land for the weapons plant in 1951--and now is busily developing real estate in the booming suburbs next to the contaminated plant site. It is about the government and private corporations that produced the deadliest devices in history for thirty-seven years, concealed problems behind the wall of national security secrecy, and came close to a Chernobyl-scale disaster during a 1969 fire. It is about plant managers who cut corners to maintain weapons production, workers who saw themselves as loyal Cold War soldiers, and citizen activists who challenged the plant's very existence. And it is about a community that profited from thousands of jobs and contracts but now faces long-term environmental and health risks. Making a Real Killing examines the way Americans participated in building a nuclear weapons arsenal capable of destroying the human species. To read it is to learn some sobering lessons, including the fact that the democratic process lagged decades behind technological developments.As Americans reckon with the legacy of the Cold War, Making a Real Killing deserves a place at the center of our attention. Len Ackland's integrity and hard work remind us how crucial energetic journalism is for a successful democracy.--Patricia Nelson Limerick

    Examining the experiences of countries that have provided the main empirical base for recent theorizing, namely, Western Europe and South America, this book delineates a more complex and varied set of patterns. The volume explores democratization through a comparative analysis that examines the role of labor in relation to elite strategies in both contemporary and historical perspectives.

    They offer a close reading of contemporary perceptions of the strike and examine the organizational and political continuities and discontinuities it reveals. These essays demonstrate that Pullman played a pivotal role in defining the crisis of the 1890s, shaping a changing legal environment, spurring the development of a regulatory state, and fostering a new politics of progressive reform.