Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party - Paperback

by Paul Frymer (Author)

In the 1930s, fewer than one in one hundred U.S. labor union members were African American. By 1980, the figure was more than one in five. Black and Blue explores the politics and history that led to this dramatic integration of organized labor. In the process, the book tells a broader story about how the Democratic Party unintentionally sowed the seeds of labor's decline.

The labor and civil rights movements are the cornerstones of the Democratic Party, but for much of the twentieth century these movements worked independently of one another. Paul Frymer argues that as Democrats passed separate legislation to promote labor rights and racial equality they split the issues of class and race into two sets of institutions, neither of which had enough authority to integrate the labor movement.

From this division, the courts became the leading enforcers of workplace civil rights, threatening unions with bankruptcy if they resisted integration. The courts' previously unappreciated power, however, was also a problem: in diversifying unions, judges and lawyers enfeebled them financially, thus democratizing through destruction. Sharply delineating the double-edged sword of state and legal power, Black and Blue chronicles an achievement that was as problematic as it was remarkable, and that demonstrates the deficiencies of race- and class-based understandings of labor, equality, and power in America.

Back Jacket

"This book will be the standard and basic book for generations to come. It will be and is the sine qua non for serious scholars in this area."--William Gould, former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board

"Institutional structures matter. Paul Frymer shows how misleading it is to see 'the national government' as an undifferentiated whole. Instead, its division into separate branches, cabinet departments, agencies, and commissions has profound consequences for the actualities of public policy. Frymer offers constant illumination of the consequences for labor unions and racial-justice advocates of this almost 'anarchic' organization, but the basic insights of the book apply even more broadly."--Sanford Levinson, author of Our Undemocratic Constitution

"A major book by an important scholar, Paul Frymer's carefully researched and elegantly constructed account of the struggle for racial equality in the American workplace clearly exposes the tensions and contradictions that attended this struggle. It will be widely read and have a substantial impact on the field."--Robert C. Lieberman, Columbia University, author of Shaping Race Policy

"Paul Frymer has written a fascinating, provocative, and original contribution to debates on the labor movement and race in the twentieth century. The book covers ground few scholars have dealt with, while also drawing synthetically and fruitfully on a rich literature."--Eric Arnesen, University of Illinois at Chicago

Author Biography

Paul Frymer is associate professor of politics and director of the Legal Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America (Princeton).