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For almost two decades, August Meier and Elliott Rudwick have roamed the frontier of Afro-American history, blazing trails that others have followed. This book forges a solid link between race and class conflict in the twentieth century.---Ira Berlin, The Nation"This fact-filled study is essential to students of the labor and civil rights movements."---David Kusnet, The New Republic"A fascinating slice of history illustrating important race and class issues that are still with us."---Library Journal"By ignoring the conventional lines between labor and black history, Meier and Rudwick have found an unexplored middle ground---the net of relations between the black community and white economic institutions---that shaped the working life of blacks in Detroit's auto plants. This is a major achievement."---David Brody, Professor Emeritus of History, University of California, Davis". . . an important work . . . one of the first to apply the nitty-gritty of social and institutional history to 20th century African American and labor history." ---Eric Arnesen, University of Illinois at ChicagoBlack Detroit and the Rise of the UAW is essential reading for historians of labor and race in America, as well those interested in Detroit's importance as a crucible for American urban history.

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) was the first national trade union for African Americans. Standard BSCP histories focus on the men who built the union. Yet the union's Ladies' Auxiliary played an essential role in shaping public debates over black manhood and unionization, setting political agendas for the black community, and crafting effective strategies to win racial and economic justice. 

Melinda Chateauvert explores the history of the Ladies' Auxiliary and the wives, daughters, and sisters of Pullman porters who made up its membership and used the union to claim respectability and citizenship. As she shows, the Auxiliary actively educated other women and children about the labor movement, staged consumer protests, and organized local and national civil rights campaigns ranging from the 1941 March on Washington to school integration to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Chateauvert also sheds light on the plight of Pullman maids, who—relegated to the Auxiliary—found their problems as working women neglected in favor of the rhetoric of racial solidarity.

Brian Kelly's acclaimed look at the fault lines in the society of an Alabama city challenges the notion that white workers led the resistance to racial equality in the Jim Crow South. Kelly focuses on the forces that brought the black and white miners of Birmingham, Alabama, together during the hard-fought strikes of 1908 and 1920. He examines the systematic efforts by the region's powerful industrialists to create racial divisions as a means of splitting the workforce, preventing unionization, and keeping wages the lowest in the United States. He also details the role played by Birmingham's small but influential black middle class, whose espousal of industrial accommodation outraged black miners and revealed significant tensions within the African American community.

Widely praised upon publication and now considered a classic study, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights chronicles the southern industrial union movement from the Great Depression to the Cold War, a history that created the context for the sanitation workers' strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis in April 1968. Michael K. Honey documents the dramatic labor battles and sometimes heroic activities of workers and organizers that helped to set the stage for segregation's demise.

Winner of the Charles S. Sydnor Award, given by the Southern Historical Association, 1994.  Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize given by the Organization of American Historians, 1994.  Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Award for an outstanding book in American social history.