A Matter of Moral Justice

Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice

Jenny Carson

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780252085895, 9780252043901
• eBook ISBN: 9780252052804
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A long-overlooked group of workers and their battle for rights and dignity

Like thousands of African American women, Charlotte Adelmond and Dollie Robinson worked in New York's power laundry industry in the 1930s. Jenny Carson tells the story of how substandard working conditions, racial and gender discrimination, and poor pay drove them to help unionize the city's laundry workers. Laundry work opened a door for African American women to enter industry, and their numbers allowed women like Adelmond and Robinson to join the vanguard of a successful unionization effort. But an affiliation with the powerful Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) transformed the union from a radical, community-based institution into a bureaucratic organization led by men. It also launched a difficult battle to secure economic and social justice for the mostly women and people of color in the plants. As Carson shows, this local struggle highlighted how race and gender shaped worker conditions, labor organizing, and union politics across the country in the twentieth century.

Meticulous and engaging, A Matter of Moral Justice examines the role of African American and radical women activists and their collisions with labor organizing and union politics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “We Win a Place in Industry”: Black Women and the Birth of the Power Laundry Industry
• Chapter 2. A Miniature Hell: Working in a Power Laundry
• Chapter 3. The 1912 Uprising of New York City’s Laundry Workers
• Chapter 4. The Rise and Fall of Local 284: Black Women Laundry Workers’ Activism in the Era of the Great Migration
• Chapter 5. “It Was Up to All of Us to Fight”: Communist Laundry Organizing during the Great Depression
• Chapter 6. “Aristocrats of the Movement”: The Uprising of Brooklyn’s Laundry Workers
• Chapter 7. “It Was Like the Salvation”: New York City’s Laundry Workers Join the CIO
• Chapter 8. The “Democratic Initiative”: Fighting for Control of the Laundry Workers Joint Board
• Chapter 9. “Putting Democracy into Action”: The Laundry Workers’ Double V Campaign
• Chapter 10. “Everybody’s Libber”: The Laundry Workers’ Postwar Civil Rights Unionism
• Chapter 11. “We’re Just Not Ready Yet”: The Ousting of Charlotte Adelmond and Dollie Robinson from the Laundry Workers Joint Board
• Epilogue: Building a Democratic Initiative in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover