Black labor leaders project : oral history, circa 1980s.

Biographical Note

Joseph Wilson was a professor in the Africana Studies Department and was Director of the Afro-American Labor Archives at Rutgers University. In the early 1980s, he began collecting audio interviews with Black labor leaders to address a lack of resources on Black workers in the United States. A video portion of the project was initiated in 1984, called the Afro-American Labor Leadership Oral/Video History Series. The video phase of the project was primarily sponsored by New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and recorded at their facilities. Varying additional support was provided by the New Jersey Historical Commission, Rutgers University Research Council and Minority Faculty Committee, and Columbia University's Oral History Research Office. Ultimately, video recordings were deposited with the Schomburg Center, while audio recordings went to Columbia University

Scope and Contents

The collection documents the experiences of Black workers through interviews with leaders from public and private sector trade unions. Topics covered include union organizing and politics, radicalism, and the relationship of labor to the civil rights movement. There is audio for all interviews and transcripts for Bill Lucy and Cleveland Robinson The collections narrators are: Hilliard Ellis, Carole Graves, James Jackson, Bill Lucy, Lillian Roberts, Cleveland Robinson, and Constance Woodruff

Subjects

• African American labor leaders--Interviews.
• Interviews.
• Labor unions--Officials and employees--United States.
• Oral histories (literary works)