Watch this event live on ESFL’s Facebook page or register here to join on Zoom. 

We are excited to combine a discussion of an important new labor history book with our monthly labor history reading group.  THE SOUTHERN KEY is a significant contribution to our analysis of the role of race, racism, and region in both the upheaval of the American labor movement in the years of the Great Depression and New Deal, and the containment and limitation of that upheaval in the post-World War II period.  The recent failed effort to unionize the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, has concentrated attention on the legacy of the complex history of the labor movement in the South.

Michael Goldfield is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and currently Research Fellow at the Fraser Center for Workplace Issues at Wayne State University. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States, and The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics.

Our format will include a conversation between Mike Goldfield and Mike Hanson, a leader in the Airline Pilots Association based in Atlanta; Cornelia Weiss, a labor attorney based in Washington, DC; and Sid Carlson White, scholar-activist, Yale University. We expect that their conversation will raise some key issues for all of us to engage.  We encourage you to purchase a copy of THE SOUTHERN KEY via Oxford University Press or from your local independent bookstore.  For those of you unable to get a copy of the book, here an article Mike wrote just this month which appeared in the Labor and Working Class History Association newsletter.