UE News features, interviews, and book and film reviews about Black History.
Since the birth of UE Local 150, the North Carolina Public Service Workers Union, in 1998, one of its central goals has been the repeal of North Carolina General Statute 95-98, which outlaws collective bargaining and union contracts for all state and local public employees. Local 150 delegates and leaders often tell other UE members that this law is a “Jim Crow law.” For Black History Month 2014, the UE NEWS asks, “What is Jim Crow?”
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Since the founding of the United States, working people have had to fight to win, and to keep, the right to vote. And through American history, rich and powerful people, often calling themselves "conservatives", have tried to maintain their privileges by depriving other Americans of the right to vote.
Dave Roediger is a labor historian who, over the past 20 years and with other scholars, has plowed new ground in an area of social and historical inquiry that is sometimes called race studies or "whiteness" studies. Roediger's roots are in a small German-American working class community in Southern Illinois.
Robin D. G. Kelley, age 48, has over the past two decades become one of the most respected historians of African American life, politics and culture. At the center of all his work is a focus on labor, and on the ways people have struggled not only to survive, but to make a better world.
Some were murdered. Many were brutalized, many more jailed. Young and old braved police dogs, water cannons and batons, the jeers and stones of mobs, the bullets of snipers. But despite the odds, thousands of Americans, black and white, tore down the oppressive system of racial segregation that had dominated the South for decades.
This timeline was originally published as a companion piece to the UE News Feature "People In Struggle Changed History: The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s"
UE becomes the first American union to seek no-discrimination provisions in all contracts.
UE launches national campaign for laws against poll taxes and lynching.