Black History Month 2025

February of 2025 marks the 49th anniversary of the federal government’s formal proclamation recognizing Black History Month (BHM). As has been the custom since 1928 when Carter Woodson proclaimed a week in February as Black History Week, BHM 2025 comes with a theme.

This year it is African Americans and Labor.

African American history and American Labor history are intertwined.

Professor Imani Perry, currently of Harvard, wrote in 2022: “Black history is, among many things, also labor history. How could it not be? After all, the conditions of Black people in the United States were most dramatically shaped by the conditions of their work.” Professor Perry noted the toll that forced labor took on the bodies and the minds of Black Americans.  “This work put inhumane demands upon their bodies, while their intellects and aspirations were diminished and denied.”

America was in large part built by African American labor—some of it by enslaved labor, some by free labor, some by exploited labor that closely resembled slavery, some by imprisoned labor, some by union labor, and some of it by entrepreneurial labor.

It is fitting that February, the month that celebrates Black History as well as the birthday of Frederick Douglass, is also honoring African American Labor. An advocate for emancipation, voting rights for women, and for labor, Douglass urged Americans to engage in the struggle that included workers’ rights.

“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle.”  – Frederick Douglass

Martin Luther King Jr. continued the work of Frederick Douglass and was murdered in Memphis where he had joined over 1,300 Black sanitation workers who went on strike after two workers were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck.

The two were trying to shield themselves from inclement weather, as Black workers had to ride on the outside of the trucks while white workers drove and remained in the cabs. The striking workers demanded recognition of their union, higher pay, and better safety conditions.

Much of the labor that built this country was unpaid and unrequited slave labor. Below is a photocopy of a voucher paid to an American slave owner, James Clagett, for work, totaling five months and three days, done by his slave George in 1794 on what would become the White House.

After Emancipation in 1865 the vast lot of Black agricultural workers in the South saw little improvement. Most took to sharecropping, a system of tenant farming where workers lived on and worked white-owned land for roughly one-half of the crop they were able to harvest. Most sharecroppers were forced to buy seed and equipment from the landowners at prices that kept them impoverished and trapped by perpetual debt.

Southern landowners used race divisions to keep sharecroppers from uniting for better conditions and better pay for their work. But in 1935, despite ongoing threats of violence from landowners, police, and the KKK, more than 1500 sharecroppers of both races joined together to form the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU).

When landowners that year announced they would be lowering wages of cotton pickers to 40 cents per ton of picked cotton, down from 60 cents, members of the STFU went on strike at harvest time demanding $1 per ton. The landowners quickly agreed to 80 cents.

With a low tax base to sustain them, many of the Southern states turned to their prisons for cheap, almost free labor. If each state were a country, eight Southern states would follow El Salvador as having the highest incarceration rates in the world. Black people make up a disproportionate number of those incarcerated (12% of US population and 34% of prison population) and constitute a high percentage of prison labor.

Using Black prisoners as labor has a long history in the South.

The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery “except for the punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”.  After the Civil War, Southern states enacted a series of Black Codes that criminalized many mundane activities such as being on the streets at dark.

Black Codes and social inequities kept a dirt cheap Black prison labor source in full production. Recently, to the chagrin of civil rights’ advocates, Alabama earmarked $400 million of COVID funds for the construction of three new prison complexes.

So dependent were white landowners on low-cost Black labor in Mississippi that after the Great Flood of 1927, in which hundreds drowned and farms were ravaged, local police arrested thousands of Black men trying to flee to the North. They were held in pens until their employers could come and claim them.

It had been 62 years since Emancipation and not all that much had changed.

Professor Perry could have easily cited Addie Wyatt as one of those whose aspirations and intellect were initially denied.

Wyatt, who would go on to work with Martin Luther King and be recognized by Eleanor Roosevelt, sought employment as a typist at Armour and Company in 1941. She was hired but soon discovered that only white women were hired as typists in the front office. She and other African American women were sent to the canning department to can stew that was sold to the army.

Wyatt joined the United Packinghouse Workers of America in the early 1950’s. It was an integrated union that worked for pay equity for women and minorities. She became active in union work and helped win equal pay for equal work for workers at several companies. She worked with Martin Luther King and was recognized by Eleanor Roosevelt.

Along with labor issues, Ms. Wyatt worked to protect and expand voting rights. She fought for health care and childcare for American workers.

Read more about the life of Labor leader and trailblazer Addie Wyatt.

The work of African Americans has its footprint all across America and beyond. It extends beyond the agricultural and industrial to the educational, the ministry, the arts, media, sports, entertainment, the sciences, and as noted below, the political and government.

Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, worked successfully to avert a second Great Depression, taking office four months after the largest financial collapse since 1929. He was also successful in expanding health care for more than 40 million uninsured Americans.

Black History Month 2025 is a time to salute not only Black History, but to salute African American labor, a large historical segment of which was done under the most oppressive conditions, for its invaluable contribution to our country.