WELCOME TO BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2025
The 2025 Black History Month theme is “African Americans and Labor“, touching on the invaluable contributions of African Americans in the workforce.
Brought to colonial America on slave ships in the 1600’s, African Americans slaves became a keystone of labor in the newly-formed United States.
Besides working as the bedrock of the agricultural south, African-American slaves (both men and women) were also responsible for building the entire southern rail system, a gift to the whole of the US economy.
Fighting for their freedom during the Civil War, African Americans went on to become farm laborers, landowners, salaried workers, and business owners. Having built the railroads, many blacks also found work as the iconic Pullman railroad porter at the turn of the century — a job later credited with the development of the black middle class in America.
A prominent figure in the Pullman Porter story was labor organizer A. Philip Randolph, who formed a workers union aimed at improving the lives of black railroad porters who worked for the Pullman railroad. It became the first movement for racial and economic justice, and a solid foundation for the one that Martin Luther King Jr. built his campaign upon in the 1960s. (NOTE: 2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters founded in 1925.)
Other unions that arose representing black workers included coal miners, dock workers, and more notably Chicago meatpackers which helped strengthen economic stability and workplace empowerment for black workers.
Although great strides had been made compared to slavery days, black Americans were still subject to age-old discrimination by whites when it came to economic advancement. This was especially evident when black business success overshadowed the surrounding population (with one extreme example being The Black Wall Street Massacre in 1921.).
During the Second World War, “separate but equal” segregated black military units served with distinction with many more African Americans helping in the war effort as nurses, engineers and truck drivers. Although President Harry S. Truman finally ordered all US military to desegregate by 1948, the ongoing fight for equal rights in the workplace had only just begun.
Following the war, racism resumed in force when a powerful young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. appeared on the scene. From his pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, he began championing labor unions, strikes and boycotts in an effort to gain equal access to jobs and economic development.
Proclaiming “civil rights are workers’ rights”, King was a national figure by 1964 when Congress passed The Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination nationwide on the basis of religion and race, especially when it came to job hiring, promoting, and firing.
Under the new law, segregation also ended in the nation’s schools — reflecting King’s other key issue — that education was THE powerful tool for social change and economic justice.
Today, the march for equality goes on, with powerful forces acting to reverse the King legacy in state legislatures to corporate boardrooms. The theme, “African Americans and Labor,” is meant to put the spotlight back on the history of black labor struggles, and the continuing fight for a living wage and better job opportunities for all.
UPDATE: The current administration’s new anti-DEI rules have suspended course instruction about the first Black US pilots, known as the Tuskegee Airmen, from being taught in its classrooms. The order also forbids the topic of women air force service pilots, or WASPS, from the curriculum.