(NewsNation) — “African Americans and Labor” is the 2025 Black History Month theme, dictated by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History to highlight the ways that work has intersected with “the collective experiences of Black people.”
Labor is a fraught topic, often evoking images of slavery, sharecropping and segregation, of unpaid labor that moves the country forward with no thanks.
ASALH defines work as all “free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary” positions.
Two years ago, a policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, Christian Collins, wrote, “Black labor is the cornerstone of U.S. global hegemony.” This year, he told NewsNation that’s as true as ever.
The United States’ current prestige, says Collins, is thanks to the “uncompensated and undercompensated” labor of Black communities throughout the nation’s history.
“It’s pretty easy to grow economic profit, especially for high value crops like cotton, like tobacco, if you’re not paying the workers who are maintaining those crops,” Collins said.
Major Black labor movements
Labor has been a catalyst for societal change and civil rights victories throughout United States history, from labor strikes to the organization of unions.
“When you think about some of the events that really changed the course of American history, it can’t be told without the role of the labor movement,” said Ryan Jones, director of History, Interpretation and Curatorial Services at the National Civil Rights Museum.
One of the most iconic public addresses of all time, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream,” was delivered during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The labor conditions in Memphis, Tennessee, got the reverend involved in the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike.
King would later be assassinated during his April 1968 trip to Memphis, just one week before then-President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 into law.
One century ago, another prominent labor organizer, A. Philip Randolph, established the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It was the first Black labor union to be recognized by the American Federation of Labor.
Randolph tied Black labor to the Civil Rights Movement by establishing that “the most effective weapon against racism is solidarity,” said Collins.
Randolph, who called for the 1941 March on Washington alongside Bayard Rustin, also fought for desegregation in the armed forces and fair working opportunities for African Americans. His efforts forced President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s hand, leading to the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee.
“The solidarity that he built in specific labor advocacy really laid the like help lay the early groundwork for how leaders after him would follow, like Martin Luther King, like Medgar Evers,” Collins said.
A lesser-known labor activist, Nannie Helen Burroughs, founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in 1909, giving Black women access to an education not led by white missionaries.
Dr. Danielle Phillips-Cunningham, an associate professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University, credits Burroughs’ tenacity and dedication to academia as a legitimizing factor for many Black women in the 20th century.
With a certification in domestic science from Burroughs’ school, women were able to leverage their employers for better working conditions and a living wage.
“Burroughs had this saying that really drove her curriculum,” Phillips-Cunningham explained. “She said, ‘We must idealize the real before we realize the ideal.'”
Snapshot: Current African American workforce
As of 2023, more than 21 million Black Americans were in the United States labor force, roughly 13% of the nation’s workers.
A 2023 Pew Research poll found that while workers’ experiences were varied, there were some major takeaways that shed light on the African American workplace experience.
Black workers were abundant in certain jobs, like postal service clerks (40.4%), nursing assistants (36.0%) and transit and intercity bus drivers (36.6%), Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 2022 shows.
In turn, they’re underrepresented in some agricultural and STEM fields, with earlier surveys pointing to barriers in those fields regarding discrimination and lack of mentors.
Pew data also found that Black Americans are the most likely to report being discriminated against — around 25% of respondents said their race or ethnicity makes it harder to succeed in the workplace.
Black workers also, in general, earn less than the average American worker among all education levels, BLS data revealed.
What’s next for Black workers in the US?
The next steps, and maybe the next frontier for Black labor movements, are on the horizon, multiple experts told NewsNation.
Collins pointed to artificial intelligence as the “next large struggle” for the Black labor force, telling NewsNation, “I feel that kind of the next large struggle for, especially the Black labor force in the country, is in these ongoing discussions around artificial intelligence and how it’ll impact the American workforce at large.”
Phillips-Cunningham warned that recent executive orders from the Trump administration could also be threatening labor progress.
She said the orders have “significantly rolled back and threatened” what “Black labor leaders fought for.”
Whether it’s tech innovations or political motivations, moving forward and making change requires an acknowledgment of the past, said Jones.
“It could be a difficult history to interpret and to comprehend, but it happened, you know? And so I think that we’ll be going backward if we don’t acknowledge those stories in the manner that they occurred,” Jones said.