Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ayers, Oliver

Titel

The 1935 Labour Dispute at the Amsterdam News and the Challenges Posed by the Rise of Unionism in Depression-Era Harlem

Ist Teil von

• Journal of American studies, 2014-08, Vol.48 (3), p.797-818

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2014

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The eleven-week dispute at the Amsterdam News in Harlem was the first time in US history that black workers were successful in a labour dispute with black management. Some contemporaries argued that the event represented a triumph for the class-inspired activism of the left, an interpretation in line with the historiography of the long civil rights movement. This article argues that the dispute actually demonstrated the challenges inherent in pursuing labour-based protest strategies. Success was achieved by a concentrated group of workers who used their collective power and propitious geographical and social standing to harness the support of a cross-section of leadership groups. This moment of apparent unity concealed enduring divides over interracial activism, not only between nationalist groups and the radical left but also within mainstream groups like the NAACP. Temporary success could be achieved when workers like the Amsterdam News staff managed to bridge these divides. Supporters, however, proved unable to avoid the subsequent dismissal of union instigators by the newspaper's new owners. More broadly, the problems of coordinating activism to target the different groups who controlled black employment continued to bedevil subsequent protests during the transformative era of the New Deal.