Somewhere along the way, we forgot that the labor movement was foundational to building generational wealth and protecting our access to health care. And when I say we, I mean the labor movement rooted in the Black experience. There is a long, storied history of labor organizing in this country, most often accompanied by images of rugged white men in hard hats. Revolutionary socialist Chairman Fred Hampton said that to ensure that our labor movement thrives, we must build a rainbow coalition. But the truth is that Black workers are more likely to be union members (11.4%) than White (9.9%), Hispanic (9.7%), and Asian (8.7%) workers.

Labor and the labor movement have always been expansive, despite societal effort to divide and conquer, to foment hatred among immigrants, white ethnics, and Black folks. There has always been a rebellious spirit at the core of the American labor movement, and those at its fulcrum have always been Black people of all backgrounds and including women, queer, or all of the above. Harlemites representing labor have included women like Floria Pinkney, who organized Black garment workers and carried labor education into Harlem. Harlem Renaissance blues singer Gladys Bentley and dancer Mabel Hampton built economic and cultural spaces where Black queer folks could survive, organize, and breathe freely in a world that denied them both work and dignity.

We have always been at the forefront of making sure American workers are paid their fair share, even amid dehumanization, an expanding police state, and policies that tried to predetermine the destiny of our communities.  When Black folks went from being capital—from being enslaved—to fighting to create the conditions to live lives of dignity, it was a revolutionary transformation that has echoed through history.  We have followed in the footsteps of organizers like Baltimore trade unionist Isaac Myers. We have fought to be allowed into apprenticeships. We have suffered the wounds of violence. And through it all, Black women organizing kitchens and classrooms, queer Black folks building secure environments and mutual aid networks, and workers whose names history rarely records have carried this movement forward as surely as any man whose name made it into the textbooks.

When our country, our federal government, worked to expand worker protections and union growth after the New Deal, we still found that in corners of the labor force where we were over-represented—including agriculture and domestic labor—we were left in the cold. Those exclusions did not just harm Black workers. They disproportionately harmed Black women and queer Black people who were pushed into the most precarious forms of labor, expected to survive without protection, dignity, or security.

We pressed on through all of that, through every humiliation embedded in the fight toward equity, We made them hear us. Giants like A. Philip Randolph, former President of the National Brotherhood of Workers of America, made sure the federal government felt our push towards economic justice.

At the turn of the century, Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, otherwise known as the BSCP. In the post-Civil War era, the Pullman Palace Car Company was the largest employer of Black people in the country. Barred from working in other trades, Black people, as we always had, made something out of nothing, shining shoes, making beds, serving passengers who crossed the country. But like so many industries that employed Black workers, mistreatment and abuse were rampant.

In his brilliance as an organizer and labor leader, Randolph helped push the federal government toward Executive Order 8802, creating the runway for the Fair Employment Practices Committee. But the fight did not stop there. The fight continued, and most importantly, it came to Harlem.

Harlem became the battleground and the organizing heartbeat for Randolph and so many others. He and Chandler Owen, an early member of the Socialist Party of America, founded The Messenger, a Black leftist publication dedicated to informing our communities about the ins and outs of labor politics.

Imbued with elegance and a battle-tested organizing spirit rooted in socialism, Harlem was at the center of organizing, from tenants fighting evictions to the rise of leaders such as Afro-Caribbean civil rights activist Richard B. Moore, an advocate for unemployment relief.

The pathway of Black labor and Black organizing has always stopped and started like those stately Pullman cars of our past, again and again returning to Harlem as a place of vision and action. And as a State Assembly candidate for Harlem’s District 70, I would be remiss if I did not take the time to say thank you to the men, the women, and the queer pioneers.Thank you to the people whose courage did not always fit neatly into society’s boxes but whose work built the organizing playbooks we still use today to advocate and fight for what people need.

Thank you to the role models who made it possible for a kid like me, the child of a single mother and a Jamaican immigrant, to find a home in Harlem and hear  the call for equitable wages, adequate health care, and safe, dignified working conditions. I am calling us all to action, harking back to Harlem’s illustrious socialist and Black liberation past to help build its energized, organized future.

Conrad Blackburn is a public defender and union organizer running for State Assembly in District 70 in Harlem.

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