Week 9: Labor.
KEYWORDS: labor history; socialism; race
Primary Sources:
“African-American Laundry Women Go on Strike in Atlanta.” HERB: Resources for Teachers. Accessed December 2, 2019. https://herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/897.
“More than 140 Die as Flames Sweep Through Three Stories of Factory Building in Washington Place, New York Tribune, March 26, 1911, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1911-03-26/ed-1/seq-1/#words=STORIES+THROUGH+SWEEP+FLAMES+THREE
READ: James Wolfinger, “Philadelphia Transit Strike,” Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love. (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2007): 142-164.
Post: Post due by Friday October 21. In a post of at least 500 words, address all of the following questions and provide evidence from the sources to support your claims [in other words, you have to cite what you quote/paraphrase from correctly. Remember to cite the source and the page number. Here you will be citing from a newspaper, an internet source, and a chapter from a published book.]
First, Look back to Daina Berry & Kali Gross, “Augusta’s Clay, Migration and the Depression, 1915-1940.” In A Black Women’s History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2020), p. 138. Describe the achievements of Connie Smith as a labor organizer. Look at the New York Tribune account of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, and outline the labor conditions that led to the tragedy. How is the newspaper account a “primary source”? Then, read Wolfinger. Describe the context of the Philadelphia transit strike, outlining the argument on each side. Then, attempt to answer the question of George White “Is a man nuts for believing in Liberty?” What did “Liberty” mean to each side in the transit strike? THEN, take a look at the earlier strike accounts: how were the pay and condition issues of the Atlanta washerwoman connected to issues of the fight for liberty? One key argument of the 1619 Project is that minorities have done the most to fight for, and achieve, the commonplace American ideal of Liberty. How does the history of strikes bear that out?
