Atone time, Asa Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was a household name. As president ofthe all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), he was an embodimentof America’s multifaceted radical tradition, a leading spokesman for BlackAmerica, and a potent symbol of trade unionism and civil rights agitation fornearly half a century. But with the dissolution of the BSCP in the 1970s, theassaults waged against organized labor in the 1980s, and the overall silencingof labor history in U.S....
One of the oldest, strongest, and largest labor organizations in the U.S., the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had 4 million members in over 20,000 union locals during World War II. The AFL played a key role in wartime production and was a major actor in the contentious relationship between the state, organized labor, and the working class in the 1940s. The war years are pivotal in the history of American labor, but books on the AFL’s experiences are scant, with far more on the...
