Donald K North Library: Black History Month 2025

The Three Labor Market Struggles Facing Black America
Center for Economic and Policy Research
Black America faces problems relating to (1) the number of jobs, (2) the quality of jobs, and (3) the types of jobs available to Black people.

Precarious Work, Health, and African-American Men: A Qualitative Study on Perceptions and Experiences
National Library of Medicine
This study was part of the formative exploratory phase of a 5-year community-based participatory research project to examine the biopsychosocial determinants of stress among low/no-income, African-American men. Through thematic analysis of 42 semi-structured interviews, 3 themes emerged: (a) occupational hazards and health, (b) internalization of neoliberal ideology, and (c) constraints of structural factors. Neoliberal economic policies cause material deprivation and exacerbate systemic injustices that disproportionately affect communities of color.

One in Four Black Workers Report Discrimination at Work
Gallup Center on Black Voices
Black Americans experience various mistreatments at much higher rates than other racial or ethnic groups do. And while racial discrimination in the workplace is illegal under federal law, about one in four Black employees report having been on the receiving end of discrimination at work in the past year alone.

Blacks in STEM jobs are especially concerned about diversity and discrimination in the workplace
Pew Research Center
Among STEM workers, blacks stand out for their concerns that there is too little attention paid to increasing racial and ethnic diversity at work, their high rates of experiencing workplace discrimination, and their beliefs that blacks are not usually met with fair treatment.

African Americans and the American Labor Movement
National Archives
Researchers can avail themselves of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, a multivolume documentary editing project.

The Freedom volumes were compiled from twenty-five National Archives record groups, including Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Record Group 105); Records of Civil War Special Agencies of the Treasury Department (RG 366); Records of the United States General Accounting Office (RG 217); the Records of the Adjutant General's Office, 1780's-1917 (RG 94); the Records of the Office of the Paymaster General (RG 99); and Records of District Courts of the United States (RG 21).

Strengthening America at Home: Black Workers in WWII
US Department of Labor
The Second Great Migration, beginning in 1940, saw the number of Black workers in the defense industry triple. More than 1 million Black workers migrated to the North and West, seeking industrial jobs from defense contractors where the average weekly wages were much higher.

African American Workers Built America
The Center for Law and Social Policy
African American labor was crucial in industry, agriculture, and service. Although the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), was established in 1884, it only started gathering consistent data on African American workers in 1972.

The Roots of the Black Working Class
National Humanities Center
This webinar will help educators master the basic history of the Black working class in America, strategies to include this rich history in classroom instruction, and ways to think about expanding students’ understandings of race and class.

 The Power of the Black Working Class
The Jacobin
Historian Keisha Blain spoke with Joe William Trotter Jr about the “golden age” of the black artisan, the Great Migration’s role in reshaping the black working class, the ways black workers helped construct American cities, the discrimination African-American laborers faced and, the composition of the contemporary black working class.

Black Workplace Pioneers
US Department of Labor
America’s workforce thrives on diversity. Throughout our history, the variety of skills, experiences and perspectives of this nation’s workers fueled innovation and growth. This month, we’re highlighting Black workplace pioneers who blazed trails that created opportunities and improved the lives of generations of Americans. 

Last Hired, First Fired: How the Great Depression Affected African Americans
History Channel
The Great Depression impacted African Americans for decades to come. It spurred the rise of African American activism, which laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

Black Workers Remember
The Prospect
Throughout the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, blacks as a group were barred from machine work within the industrial sector, and from white-collar clerical and service work. "Modernization" wore a white face.

Honoring Black History World War II Service to the Nation
US Army
For more than 200 years, African Americans have served courageously in every conflict in U.S. history. They endured individual and institutional racism, while fighting for social equalities and opportunity. During WWII, more than 2.5 million African American men registered for the draft, and African American women volunteered in large numbers.

What is code-switching? Why Black Americans say they can't be themselves at work
USA Today
Code-switching is frequently considered a required skill for Black Americans, whether it’s a motorist adopting a more deferential tone during a traffic stop or a new employee straightening her hair.

Top 5 Struggles Your Black Colleagues Have, but they never shared
Linkedin
In the journey to address racial injustice within corporate America, the path is neither straightforward nor easy. It's a landscape filled with subtle divides and unspoken truths, where black and white employees often navigate very different experiences. These differences extend beyond just personal interactions and infiltrate the very core of corporate culture and policy.

Subtle racial slights at work cause job dissatisfaction, burnout for Black employees
Rice University
Black employees face a host of subtle verbal, behavioral, and environmental slights related to their physical appearance, work ethic, integrity, and more, causing job dissatisfaction and burnout, according to a  study from Rice University.

The Marginalized - Working While Black Part 1 (Full Program)
Can TV

The Marginalized - Working While Black Part 2 (Full Program) 
Can TV

The Marginalized, examines the systems and beliefs that continue to deny Black people parity in the American workforce. Working While Black examines the historic drivers of inequity; the oft unspoken hierarchy known as the American caste system that 'castes' Black people as inferior to the ruling class. 

Valuing and Championing African American Workers Is Long Overdue
Center for Law and Social Policy
African American workers and their labor built the United States of America. From their foundational labor in agriculture and infrastructure under the compulsion of chattel slavery to their subsequent forging of American industry in the face of segregation, Black workers have generated immense wealth for the nation over the past few centuries.

Slavery in America
History Channel
Many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619, when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved Africans ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista. Enslaved Africans, however, had been present in regions such as Florida, nearly one century before.

Pre-Civil War African-American Slavery
Library of Congress
African Americans had been enslaved in what became the United States since early in the 17th century. Even so, by the time of the American Revolution and the eventual adoption of the new Constitution in 1787, slavery was a dying institution. As part of the compromises that allowed the Constitution to be written and adopted, the founders agreed to end the importation of slaves into the United States by 1808.

Exploiting black labor after the abolition of slavery
The Conversation
With the help of profiteering industrialists, white southerners found yet a new way to build wealth on the bound labor of black Americans: the convict lease system.

Working After Slavery
Searchable Museum
Establishing economic independence was crucial for newly freed African Americans during Reconstruction. But without land of their own or fair wages for their labor, they would remain under the power of white landowners. Blocked from attaining their goals, thousands of African Americans left the South in search of better opportunities.

A Brief History of Slavery in the United States
National Battlefield Trust
White bond servants paid their passage across the Atlantic through indentured labor, it did not solve the problem. Tensions between settlers and former indentured servants increased the pressure to find a new labor source.  Early in the seventeenth century, a Dutch ship loaded with African slaves introduced a solution—and yet paradoxically a new problem—to the New World. Slaves proved to be economical on large farms where labor-intensive cash crops, such as tobacco, sugar, and rice, could be grown.

How slavery became America’s first big business
Vox
Historian and author Edward E. Baptist explains how slavery helped the US go from a “colonial economy to the second biggest industrial power in the world.”

Historical Context: Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Throughout the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million captured men, women, and children were put on ships in Africa, and 10.7 million arrived in the Americas. The Atlantic Slave Trade was likely the costliest in human life of all long-distance global migrations.

The Making of African American Identity: Volume I, 1500-186
National Humanities Center
Collections of primary resources compatible with the Common Core State Standards — historical documents, literary texts, and works of art — thematically organized with notes and discussion questions.

A Nation Bound by Slavery
Searchable Museum
From as early as the colonial period, enslaved Black people figuratively and literally built the foundations of the nation, including the U.S. Capitol and the White House. Additionally, they built churches, universities, state houses, and profitable landscapes. Their labor provided a comfortable and even luxurious way of life for some Americans, even as freedom and citizenship were denied to Black people.

African Americans at Work
National Museum of African American History and Culture
From enslaved workers in the 19th century to agricultural, industrial, and professional workers in the 20th and 21st centuries, African Americans were a vital part of the American workforce. The photographs from the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture document African Americans at work from the 1860s to today.