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At the same time that black women engaged in the “politics of home” during the Depression (Ch. 1), this chapter shows that among the largely male-led political networks, a diversity of competing leaders created the possibility for powerful collaborations during the late 1930s. The chapter details the formation of political networks that have been overshadowed until now in histories of radical labor-civil rights organizing. In particular, the battle for the construction of the Ida B. Wells Homes, the first public housing project for African Americans in the city, not only energized the new protest politics of the late 1930s, but also helped develop a heterogenous group of organizations – including groups of black building trades workers, reformers in social work organizations, and politicians building the first black Democratic machine – that endured well beyond the Black Popular Front era of the late 1930s and late 1940s.

Black workers could not gain membership in construction unions, and therefore could not find employment in this growing sector of the local economy. Brooklyn CORE, along with a coalition of black ministers from Brooklyn, led a six-week protest campaign at the worksite of the Downstate Medical Center, a state funded construction project. Over 1,000 arrests made this the most significant Civil Rights protest sight in New York City during the long hot summer of 1963. However, threats of violence from people unaffiliated with CORE or the ministers brought a premature end to the campaign.

World War II has been seen as a watershed moment in black history. The wartime economic boom lifted black Americans out of the Depression and inspired the mass activism that became the seeds of the modern Civil Rights Movement. This chapter argues that the war was important for yet another reason – while it raised African Americans expectations for economic opportunity, the wartime boom and the growing federal government distributed significant opportunity unevenly throughout black Chicago. The chapter details the experiences of a wide variety of black workers – from former sharecroppers fleeing government-sponsored peonage in the South to black building trades workers to white-collar workers running the local office of the United States Employment Service in black Chicago. Their fates all improved, but in very different and unequal ways, indicating how the city would open in the postwar era, but in ways that would increase social differences among black Chicagoans.

Newark’s uprising set in motion a cycle of protest and persuasion that broke through some impasses. But the city’s decline and officials’ proclivity for reneging on agreements required strategies of the sort fixers like Gustav Heninburg provided. Heningburg joined with established and emerging black leaders, such as poet and black nationalist Amiri Baraka, to organize African Americans and Puerto Ricans, register voters, and elect the city’s first black mayor, Kenneth GIbson. He helmed the Greater Newark Urban Coalition (GNUC) through which corporate, union, and civil rights leaders urgently sought to relieve the urban crisis. Around Heningburg, people with conflicting ideologies briefly mobilized to advance black self-determination: the black cultural nationalism advocated by Baraka; a petit bourgeois conservatism favored by the Nixon administration; an understanding of the ghetto as an internal colony rooted in Marxist and Pan-African thought; and a radical black self-help ethos. Heningburg worked with corporations, public officials, and unions to achieve unprecedented integration agreements in the building trades and rebut federal efforts to dilute them. The support of his corporate allies waned as they sought to restore their influence. But Heningburg consistently advocated for black power in the form of parallel institutions, black capitalism, unionization, and electoral challenges.

This chapter analyzes the protests against employment discrimination that galvanized Newark’s civil rights movement and clarified the limits of liberal reforms against which subsequent activists would organize. In 1963, hearings led by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission exposed persistent job discrimination. The city’s black freedom movement seized upon already established, but now publicly affirmed examples, to contrast officials’ promises with the reality of racial discrimination. A newly formed civil rights group, the Newark Coordinating Committee, picketed the construction of a new school to highlight the lack of black workers in the building trades. These protests upended the hierarchy of Newark’s civil rights organizations. They also sparked internal debate about strategies among black activists and their allies that enlarged the movement’s scope, while the impasses they reached prompted greater movement involvement in private sector hiring. In the short-term, their efforts yielded few victories. But the gaps between antidiscrimination law and its enforcement compelled activists to look beyond confrontation at the job site to the other actors protecting the status quo. In the long run, early protests established a foundation for some of the most hard-won affirmative action plans of the 1970s.

This essay focuses on the later rather than the Famine-era migrants, on the American-born Irish, and on their impact on working-class America. Irish American workers were entrenched in workplaces and unions by the late nineteenth century, and their attitudes and actions had enormous consequences as the American working-class population was continually remade through later waves of migration. Too often their actions marginalized immigrants, the unskilled, women, and people of color, tendencies that left an enduring mark on the labor movement in the United States. They were architects of the conservative business unionism that came to dominate the labor movement and of the political machines that dominated many cities. But I also stress a tradition of progressive labor activism that helped lay the foundation for a new multiethnic movement in the course of the early twentieth century. This was especially true during the organizing drives in basic industry during World War I and in the unsuccessful efforts to organize an independent labor party in the wake of the war. We find important differences between the US and Australian cases in terms of the role of the Church, the character of Irish nationalism, the attitude toward independent labor politics, and elsewhere, but we risk misunderstanding Irish workers in both societies if we ignore the nuances in the narratives.

This chapter shifts focus to Cleveland’s far south-eastern corner to probe the origins of the Lee-Seville enclave, investigating several land development battles that materialized between and among black and white residents, as more upwardly mobile African American families moved to the vicinity after World War II. Despite being united in opposition to public housing, black homeowners fought to preserve vacant land for residential use, while whites attempted to hamper African American influx through zoning changes enabling industrial projects. The topics of black contractors and builders are covered, as well as the emergence by the late 1950s of white developers willing to build for African American clients, along with how African Americans successfully navigated white opposition to gain access to the quasi-suburban Lee-Harvard neighbourhood. The first black family’s move there in 1953 was effectively mediated by the city’s Community Relations Board and personally by the mayor himself – in contrast to Detroit and Chicago where city leaders deferred to white prejudice.