Philip S. Foner (1910–1994) was a prolific people's historian, whose many works include Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981, The Black Panthers Speak, Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings, and The Letters of Joe Hill, all published in new editions by Haymarket Books.
Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. He is the author of Hammer and Hoe, Race Rebels, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, among other titles. His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.
Publication date: January 2, 2018
Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1981 is historian Philip Foner's classic, radical history of Black workers' contribution to the American labor movement. Here, we present an excerpt from scholar Robin D. G. Kelley's foreword to the Haymarket edition.
"...the train of developments that connects changes in social conditions to a changed consciousness is not simple. People, including ordinary people, harbor somewhere in their memories the building blocks of different and contradictory interpretations of what it is that is happening to them, of who should be blamed, and what can be done about it..."
