Labor Rights are Civil Rights: Black Workers & the Struggle for Democracy in the 20th-Century South

A special Juneteenth Dialogues Seminar
The history of work and laboring people in North Carolina has been entangled with ideas and social systems that placed Black workers in the most vulnerable and disadvantaged positions. How did racial ideologies and social practices shape the lives of our state’s Black workers and their struggle for equal rights and freedom from the era of enslaved labor to the era of the 20th-century Civil Rights movement? This seminar honors the legacy of Juneteenth commemorations with the insights of two historians whose work examines the complex intersection of labor, racism, and the quest for equality in modern North Carolina.
TOPICS & SPEAKERS
“All We Knowed was Work, and Hard Work”: Enslaved Workers and the Economic System in Pre-Civil War North Carolina
Antwain K. Hunter, Assistant Professor of History
Labor Rights are Civil Rights: Black Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the 20th-Century South
Robert Korstad, Professor of Public Policy and History Emeritus, Duke University
How Did Black Workers Build the Economy and Lead the Struggle for Human Rights in North Carolina?
A panel discussion with our speakers