Every Black History Month, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History selects a theme for the year that aims to highlight a specific aspect of the Black experience and promote further learning about its historical significance. The theme for 2025, African Americans and Labor, "focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people" (from asalh.org). Dig deep into this year's theme by reading a title from our recommended list of books that center the history of African Americans and labor.
Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America by Joe William Trotter
"Covering the last four hundred years since Africans were first brought to Virginia in 1619, Trotter traces the complicated journey of black workers from the transatlantic slave trade to the demise of the industrial order in the twenty-first century."-from the publisher
Find a copy of Workers on Arrival.
Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph by Andrew E. Kersten and Clarence Lang
"This collection of essays gathers, for the very first time, many genres of perspectives on Randolph. The contributors represent the diverse ways that historians have approached the importance of his long and complex career in the main political, social, and cultural currents of twentieth-century African American specifically, and twentieth-century U.S. history overall."-from the publisher
Find a copy of Reframing Randolph.
Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street by Victor Luckerson
"A multigenerational saga of a family and a community in Tulsa’s Greenwood district, known as “Black Wall Street,” that in one century survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, urban renewal, and gentrification."-from the publisher
Find a copy of Built from the Fire.
Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class by Blair LM Kelley
"An award-winning historian illuminates the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America through a stunning narrative centered on her forebears."-from the publisher
Find a copy of Black Folk.
Of Blood and Sweat: Black Lives and the Making of White Power and Wealth by Clyde W. Ford
"In this, provocative, timely, and painstakingly researched book, the award-winning author of Think Black tells the story of how Black labor helped to create and sustain the wealth of the white one percent throughout American history."-from the publisher
Find a copy of Of Blood and Sweat.
Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal by Eric K. Washington
"Examining the deeply intertwined subjects of class, labor, and African American history, Washington chronicles Williams’s life, showing how the enterprising son of freed slaves successfully navigated the segregated world of the northern metropolis, and in so doing ultimately achieved financial and social influence."-from the publisher
Find a copy of of Boss of the Grips.