A woman prays during the Feb. 5, 2023, Mass for Black History Month at Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian Church in Washington, D.C. OSV NEWS PHOTO/MIHOKO OWADA, CATHOLIC STANDARD
Black History Month 2025: African Americans and labor
BY F. VERONICA WILHITE, OFFICE OF BLACK CATHOLIC MINISTRY
The 2025 Black History Month theme, “African Americans and Labor,” connotes the historical significance of work or labor to the history of African Americans. It brings to mind the images and realities of the history of a people who have struggled from the shackles of enslavement and unpaid labor through the socio-economic disparities of a segregated hostile environment of unfair labor practices. A race of people upon whose labors the wealth of slave owners ran plantations, producing cotton, cane, and tobacco. A race of people who were dehumanized for the justification of the greed of those very slavers. This is the dark side of the history of a people who have struggled persistently to overcome the barriers of inequality at work of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary, military and civilian.
Work is the pivotal concept around which Black history and culture is focused. Whether in the fields of the rural South, the factories of the North, domestic service, military or public service or those social and political activists along with community groups and social or labor organizations. After the Civil War in which many fought, Black people became sharecroppers, landowners and wage earners (skilled and unskilled) as the country transitioned from an agriculturally-based economy to an industrial one.
Unfortunately, wage discrepancies and unfair discriminatory labor practices forced Blacks from all occupations to organize seeking better working conditions and fair compensation, but this was not an easy road because Blacks were not allowed in many instances to join unions despite the unions’ vow to allow them to do so. Integration even in the AFL-CIO was not effective until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which set a legal basis for Black people to demand membership and equal treatment “under the law.”
Black leaders, male and female, seeking human rights for Black people in the U.S., emerged throughout our history, especially after the abolishment of slavery. Women’s rights were always a large part of the “work agenda” as Black women were always a large part of the workforce.
In 1905 Mary McLeod Bethune, an advocate for Black and women’s rights founded a school for Black girls, (Bethune-Cookman College) in Florida. She became the first woman president of the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools and was later appointed director of African American Affairs by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Addie Wyatt who was the first Black woman to hold a senior office in an American labor union at the local international level and joined ranks of union work and leadership to advocate for job security, women’s rights, and wage increases.
Bayard Rustin, who grew up with visitors such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Mary McLeod Bethune in his home, saw the interconnection between global struggles for racial. Economic and social justice. He was a member of the executive council of the AFL-CIO and a founder of their A. Phillip Randolph Institute who fought against racism and discrimination in the labor movement.
The year 2025 also marks the 100-year anniversary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids. This first Black union to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor was founded by civil rights activist and labor organizer, A. Philip Randolph who became involved in the movement for Black economic and social freedom in Harlem after graduating from Bethune-Cookman college. He also helped lead the fight to end racial and economic justice and to end discrimination in the defense industry and the military, which paved the way for the Fair Employment Practices Commission and the desegregation of the armed services.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., incorporated issues outlined by Randolph’s march on Washington movement into the Poor People’s Campaign, which he set up in 1967. For Dr. King, it was a priority for Black people to be considered full citizens. This theme, “African Americans and Labor,” encourages recognition of the relationship between Black people’s work and their workplaces in Black history throughout the U.S., Africa, and the diaspora. Just as religion, social justice movements, and education, are subjects of interest so is the examination of African Americans’ labor and labor struggles an integral part of the Black past, present, and future.
F. Veronica Wilhite is the director of the Office of Black Catholic Ministry.
Originally printed in the February 2025 issue of The Western Kentucky Catholic.
