Labor Activism and Civil Rights in the 1930s at the Kluge Center

[Here's an announcement of a lecture, "'We Must Learn to Think in Terms of Collective Action': Industrial Democracy and the Civil Rights Establishment of the 1930s," at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress.]

On Tuesday, August 2, 2011, from 12:00 noon - 1 p.m., Library of Congress Kluge Fellow Toure F. Reed will examine the influence of labor activism on the civil rights agendas of the NAACP and National Urban League as he challenges presumptions about the ideological orientations of these two important civil rights organizations.

Mainstream civil rights activists of the 1930s and 1940s began to perceive racial discrimination as an outgrowth of class exploitation as they were pushed to the left by New Deal labor law and working-class political movements. Afro-American activists during the Depression and Second World War thus frequently identified black participation in the American union movement as a key component to the quest for racial equality.

Location: Room LJ 119, Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St., S.E., Washington, D.C.  Free and open to the public. scholarly@loc.gov, (202) 707-3302.