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Cedric de Leon, "Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity" (U California Press, 2025)
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- [01:45]
Ryan Reynolds
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Tom Disena
welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Tom Disena from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. I'm joined today by my student, Sharal Simmons. Our guest today is Cedric de Leon, author of Freedom, Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Solidarity. In this book, de Leon explores the complex and often overlooked history of Black political organizing within the US labor movement. Rather than presenting a simple story of unity, he highlights the tensions, debates and internal conflicts within Black civil society that ultimately strengthen movements for interracial labor solidarity. The book traces key organizations, leaders and events from early socialist influences in Harlem to the rise of labor coalitions and the Memphis sanitation strike, demonstrating how Black workers and leaders actively shape strategies for liberation by focusing on both cooperation and disagreement. De Leon argues that black political agency is best understood through this dynamic interplay. Freedom Train ultimately reframes labor history by centering black voices and showing how their activism was crucial in pushing forward both civil rights and workers rights in America. Our guest, Cedric De Leon, is a professor of sociology and labor studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2018 to 2022, Deleon directed the UMass Amherst Labor center, the country's premier worker side graduate program in labor studies. He was the first person of color to do so. Before Cedric became an academic, he worked as a staff organizer and elected leader in the US labor movement. His research focuses on race, labor, social movements, and political sociology, and he has published several books examining labor history and organizing. He has written extensively about how social movements organize and how political identities are formed, particularly within black communities and labor struggles. His research combines historical analysis with sociological theory to better understand power, resistance and collective action. Cedric De Leon, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [03:54]
Cedric De Leon
Thanks for having me, Tom. Thanks, Shai.
- [03:57]
Tom Disena
So before we get into the substance of the book, I like to ask people, what brought you to this project or maybe even having read that description of your work, what brought you into. Into doing this kind of work in general?
- [04:10]
Cedric De Leon
Right. Well, I was a union organizer for many years before I became an academic. And just part of my training and doing that work was that it was absolutely vital to bring together multiracial coalitions. And. And so I took that experience and I would say that organizing ethic and theory into my administrative work as director of the labor center and thought that it would be more or less uncontroversial. And it was mostly uncontroversial. But there were some people in the broader labor center community, and that's thousands of people because there are a lot of folks who've gone through there. And the labor center is really connected to the nationwide labor movement. There were pockets of principled resistance to the notion that we need to be moving towards a vision of what I call intersectional solidarity, a vision that says that the struggle for economic justice as inseparable from the fight for racial justice and gender equity. And I was somewhat surprised, actually, by that pushback. And so what I wanted to do at that point was to look into, well, what have we as labor scholars written about the. This question? And I was surprised to find that so much of the literature with, with a few important exceptions, is really centered on the role of white workers and activists in either the Communist Party or The Congress of Industrial Organizations. And I started to ask myself, well, surely there were some black people involved. Who were they? What organizations did they establish and what did they achieve? And so that's really what brought me to the project. Both kind of my biography and experience as a rank and file and also staff organizer in the actual labor movement. And then the principal pushback that I got when I tried to advance this vision of intersectional solidarity in my position as director of the UMASS Amherst labor
- [06:55]
Tom Disena
center, and your work, and especially this book, I think this is. I think this is early on in the book you raise this issue. I've done a lot of reading, and I teach a course here at Oakland on social movements. And so, of course, we inevitably end up talking about the March on Washington. And I'm always very keen to make sure that they remember the full title of it, that it was For Jobs and Freedom. But it wasn't until I read your book that I learned how many of the participants in the march were brought there by the labor movement.
- [07:36]
Cedric De Leon
Yes, it was organized principally by the Negro American Labor Council, the president of which was a. Philip Randolph, who was also president of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, his deputy. And really the chief architect on the ground of the organizing strategy for the march was Bayard Rustin, who was an old cadre of the Young Communist League. And so many of the rank and file organizers of that protest were members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. This was. This was really an event that was. That was masterminded and, and. And organized on the ground by black workers and labor activists. You know, we know that, you know, part of the mythology that we. That we tell ourselves in the United States about that march is that, you know, Dr. King was the moving spirit behind that protest and that his I have a Dream speech, just by its sheer moral force, and of course, the people who followed him broke the back of Jim Crow in this country. But if you just peel back the curtain to inquire into, well, who organized this thing and who were the people who actually made the calls and so forth, you find actually that Dr. King was a really important coalition member. Right. But the Negro American Labor Council reached out to Dr. King in February of 1963. And of course, Dr. King had his plate full with lots of other things. He was really the leader of the black freedom movement in the South. And so he wasn't so much involved in the struggle to desegregate the formal labor market and American unions. That was not really his bag. Right. And so he did get back to Randolph a month later and said, yeah, sure, I'd be happy to help, but just that. Do you see what I mean? Just the timing and logistics of that. Anybody who's put together an event knows. Right. If you look at that exchange, there's one group of people who are organizing the event, and then there are partners, coalition folks who are joining in to lend their support and moral authority to the protest. All of it is vital. But the question that I try to explore here is who was the vanguard of the struggle to desegregate American unions? And for me, the answer is quite clear, and that is black labor.
- [10:34]
Tom Disena
Yeah. And again, it's just so fascinating because again, I've done a fair amount of reading and talked to people who have studied the march, and that's just a fact that doesn't get the attention. I think that your argument for it leads us to think it deserves.
- [10:53]
Cedric De Leon
Well, thank you. I'm glad you picked up on that.
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Tom Disena
Oh, absolutely. No, it was really eye opening. So let's turn to the book, and if you would, read the passage that we talked about before we brought you on. This is from the first chapter.
- [11:09]
Cedric De Leon
The energy that propelled the Freedom Train forward was the conflict and consensus among organizations within black civil society. This is what I mean by black politics. If a key task of this book is to demonstrate the agency of black people, then I should point out that the story I tell is slightly different from other accounts with the same goal. This is not only a story of unified collective struggle, but also one of messiness, internal division, intrigue, and betrayal. I want to suggest that such fractiousness does not diminish black agency. If anything, evidence of internal conflict enhances it. What appears in these pages suggests that black folk were invested enough in the cause of interracial labor solidarity to debate the correct course of action and sometimes form a united front. Both the consensus and conflict in black civil society add important details to the claim that black people were agents of their own liberation.
- [12:12]
Tom Disena
I'm going to pause for just a second, and I want to point out that it's my co producer today and my student Shai Simmons, who helped identify that that was an important passage for us to bring to our listeners today. So I want to thank her for that work. You can say, you're welcome. It's okay to talk sometimes. I'll let you know. So let's talk about that.
- [12:36]
Cedric De Leon
Right?
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Tom Disena
Because I think that is just such a beautifully put thing. And again, when I teach my students
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Cedric De Leon
about
- [12:44]
Tom Disena
social movements, we talk a lot about the fractiousness that is inherent to them. So you emphasize that black politics is not just about unity, but also about internal conflict and debate. So how do those disagreements actually strengthen movements for liberation rather than work against them?
- [13:01]
Cedric De Leon
Well, there's a number of ways that I write about that in the book. One is kind of more straightforward and one somewhat surprising. So the way that is more or less straightforward is that we have a group of people who vehemently disagree with one another and have disagreed with each other for some time, and who nevertheless, despite the disagreement, realize that there is a shared objective that is worth fighting for. And in this case, the objective is the desegregation of American unions. The sort of backdrop of political economy for this entire book is basically a crisis of unemployment or underemployment among the black working class. Because white unions essentially controlled the former labor market and were at the same time so incredibly racially exclusionary. Black people were essentially relegated to the very, very bottom of the labor market. Women were confined to roles similar to domestic labor on various fronts, and men were also in service roles, though in a different capacity. And so the result is that regardless of your politics, if you were a black working class person, you were effectively shut out of well paying jobs. And this was intensified all the more by the Great Depression. So that was the case even before the economic crisis. And then during the economic crisis, that situation just completely intensified. Right. And so, so black workers and activists, academics and other civil society actors met in 1935 to form the National Negro Council, then the NNC and, and, and that was, you know, it was a situation in which they basically gathered together and said this. This is a plight that affects all of us, and we need to come together and bring to bear all of our collective resources in order to tackle this issue so straightforward. I mean, this happens in other communities as well in other social movement spaces. What is not so typical is the fact that the struggles between the left and centrist faction within. Within black civil society actually led to tactical innovations. So we were talking about the march earlier, right? Well, the march comes out of the rift between a Philip Randolph, who was a centrist and who left the National Negro Congress because he believed that it had become overly influenced by communists and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Right. So he forms the March on Washington movement as a kind of alternative organization to pressure the state directly to intervene in the labor market and in the labor movement. And so we can't really understand how the march becomes this really important and triumphant kind of tactical move on the part of the black community, unless we understand that it actually comes out of a conflict within the black community. Right. So that's just one example. And I think that that's really borne out by, you know, in the experience of people who participate in social movements. Right. I mean, these are things that happen all the time. Conflicts happen all the time in social movement spaces. And sometimes out of those conflicts come a new synthesis, a new tactic, a new way of moving forward and achieving the goals that had been set before that group in the first place. And the black community is no different.
- [17:49]
Tom Disena
So in the second chapter, you turn your attention to how transnational influences shape black political thought and labor activism in the US Specifically, how West Indian radicals brought both anti colonial and anti colonial capitalist perspectives into Harlem organizing. Tell us a little bit about that.
- [18:10]
Cedric De Leon
Yes, well, just to back up a little bit, Right. The factions that emerge in this book come out of a single organization, and that is District Assembly 21 of the Socialist Party in Harlem. That's where it all begins. And many of those people were African Americans, like a Philip Randolph, for sure, who was an expat from Florida, but several others were folks from the Caribbean. So Cyril Briggs, for example, who is the leader of the African Blood Brotherhood, was. Was originally from Nevis and then migrated to Harlem, and he would go on to essentially lead the left faction out of the Socialist Party in Harlem. Wilfred Domingo is another, a really important figure also from the Caribbean and very much involved in the. In the. In the institutionalized labor movement, but also in the National Negro Congress. He was later deported for being a known leftist. But we really can't understand the development of either the black labor movement or the black movement, or of black civil society or the Harlem Renaissance for that matter, without understanding the central role of these Caribbean radicals, they were really part of the ferment, and not just part of it, but really some of the leading figures.
- [20:05]
Tom Disena
So as we move along, we get to the Congress and the march. A. Philip Randolph calls for a united front and new strategies in response to changing political conditions. What made this moment different from earlier attempts at black political unity?
- [20:26]
Cedric De Leon
So the main difference was that they placed the black worker at the center of the struggle. Right. The leading black led organizations in civil society at this time, as indeed they are today, were the NAACP and the National Urban League. And these were famously black middle class organizations. Right. They were professionals and business owners and clergy. And the membership and leadership of those organizations were hardly ever black working class people. And so what was different about the National Negro Congress, which was founded in 1935. The conversation that I was referring to earlier takes place at Howard University in 1935 is this really remarkable event because all they're talking about is the position of the black worker under conditions of just mounting inequality and backbreaking poverty during the Great Depression. And so the program is really about organizing tens of thousands of black workers into the industrial labor movement. It was really the first major black organization. To make that. And I'm talking about a national organization. Now, there were plenty of other black working class organizations in history, going back even to the days of slavery and to abolitionism. But. A national organization designed primarily to organize black workers into the labor movement was unprecedented at that time. And so that's really what distinguished it from other previous attempts at, at unifying, unifying black civil society.
- [22:43]
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- [23:05]
Cedric De Leon
of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.
- [23:11]
Tom Disena
See full terms@mintmobile.com so before we had brought you on, Shai and I had a discussion about what we wanted you to read aloud. And one of the pieces that we struggled with was sort of the centerpiece of your chapter four, a poem that was presented. And part of me didn't want you to have to read someone else's words. So that was why we ultimately selected something different. But we were moved by the poem. And so I want to talk a little bit about this. We're coming from a communication program here, so let's talk a little bit about how cultural artifacts like poetry and rhetoric functioned in mobilizing people compared with other kinds of political strategies.
- [24:07]
Cedric De Leon
Yes, well, again, the cultural element was vital, although sometimes muted and not analyzed quite as closely as we're about to do now. You're referring to the. The inaugural meeting of the National Negro labor council in the 1950s, which was the preeminent left black labor organization of that period. And. It's basically in a speech that introduces William R. Hood as president of the council. And so, yes, I mean, poems were used, but I would say that they were also like really important artists and intellectuals were really important members of these various coalitions that we read about in the book. So, for example, the National Negro Congress, which we were just talking about, there was a whole cultural arm of that, right? And which is really fascinating because even though the objective was to organize black workers into the industrial union movement, there was also an overarching strategy on top of that, which was to defeat fascism. Fascism at home, meaning Jim Crow at home, and fascism abroad, meaning German Nazism, Italian fascism and Japanese imperialism, all other forms of. Of imperialism. And the cultural folks within the National Negro Congress believed that we needed to open up a third front. And that is the front of culture. Right? And so you had these NNC cadres really thinking very deeply about how they could use the literature, sculpture, dance paintings and so forth that they were making
- [26:18]
Tom Disena
to
- [26:22]
Cedric De Leon
in a way that could help in the fight against fascism, which is really just. I mean, it's truly mind blowing, right? I mean, they really, the artists, the cultural element of black civil society were enrolled. They were all on board for this fight to desegregate American unions, but also to defeat fascism. And they were among the most principal hardcore badass activist that you could possibly think of. I mean, that's what comes to mind for me when I think about the artists who were part of this movement. Paul Robeson, of course, was like famous. I mean, he's not just the editor of Freedom, which is a super influential newspaper at that time, but of course he is an artist himself, as well as an athlete and a super principled, you know, political activists as well. And he, he swam in these waters. He was an ally of and member of many of the organizations that appear in this book.
- [27:28]
Tom Disena
You know, and it's interesting because in a lot of ways, that sort of that culture, labor, in some ways it serves as a divide, right? Like it's unusual for labor activists, I think, to think through problems of culture, they almost see them as somehow distinct from the traditional economic organizing that happens within the labor movement.
- [27:51]
Cedric De Leon
Yeah, that can be the case. And then there are also these moments in which it is just taken as granted that this is going to be part of the scene. And I think that the middle of the 20th century was one of those times. And of course, I mean, folk music is emerging in this period also as really a kind of tetpole feature of the wider US labor movement at the time as it was moving towards the left. But I take your point. I would say that there is a sector of the labor movement that is traditionally resistant to that kind of woo woo, folk labor anthem scene. So that is true for sure.
- [28:54]
Tom Disena
All right, so we are speaking to you from outside of Detroit, Michigan. I will sort of put this out. Wear this on my sleeve. Walter Reuther was something of a hero for my family. My grandfather was a UAW local president and cited chapter and verse about Walter Reuther to me often. So Walter Reuther plays a role in the fifth chapter of your book, challenging the idea that black Americans should be patient in their fight for civil rights. How does his critique speak to the tensions between allies in this coalitional interracial movement?
- [29:39]
Cedric De Leon
Wow, that is a wonderful question and a very complicated question. So Walter Reuther is obviously one of the leading figures of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, as the president of possibly its most powerful union, the United Auto Workers. And just by virtue of being in the cio, they were much more open than their brethren in the American Federation of Labor towards organizing black people. And indeed, they had no choice, because black people were disproportionately concentrated in the auto industry, especially in the bowels of those factories which doing the work that white workers would not do. And so, just by virtue of the kind of the part of the labor movement that Reuther was part of, he was already much more progressive than the leading figures of the American Federation of Labor. However, he was also part of what became the sort of institutional establishment of the CIO and was somewhat resistant to the appeals of the National Negro Labor Council to desegregate the UAW and in particular to open up elective leadership to black people. He denied that there was any attempt, intentional or unintentional, to keep black people out of leadership in the uaw. And so there is a sort of part of his biography which is not quite as heroic, but I will give him this, and that is that when the chips were down and the crisis was setting in, and A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin called upon him to lend his considerable support and to organize the UAW to be part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which in my mind is the largest labor protest in US History, at least up to that point. I will give him credit for the fact that he did not hesitate. He said yes, and he threw himself into that project, which is a damn sight better than what George Meaney did, who was the president of the AFL CIO who refused, categorically refused, to endorse the March on Washington for Jobs and freedom in 1963. And only after 250,000 people showed up did George Meany finally say that he would impose interracial discipline on his local and state affiliates in Mississippi and Alabama only after that, whereas Reuther was there from the beginning of that project. And so there is much to be said. And by the way, the Negro American Labor Council would not have invited any kind of racial conservative to speak as the keynote speaker of their annual meeting. No way. And the fact that Reuther was invited, that is something like that, means that you have credibility with black people and at a time when very, very few white labor leaders had credibility with the black working class.
- [33:37]
Tom Disena
Yeah. And as you say, nothing's pure. Right. I mean, all of these things are incredibly complicated. Reuther is just an example of that, where we're sort of being tugged in multiple directions at once. And like I said, my grandfather was a fan. I've had a chance to learn. And there are things that you can see the value in and then other things that you question about some of the things that. That Mr. Reuther did, certainly. All right, so we're going to get to the Memphis sanitation strike. Here you connect labor struggles with the broader civil rights movement. Why was this such a powerful example of interracial solidarity?
- [34:21]
Cedric De Leon
Well, the Memphis sanitation workers strike is this moment in which. What people called the Negro labor alliance reasserted itself after a period of disappointment in which the AFL cio, after doing what it did to pass the Civil Rights and Voting rights acts of 64 and 65, respectively. You know, the. You had this kind of this. This moment of disillusionment where, for example, in the aftermath of. Of so called. Well, I'm not going to call them so called race riots. I'm just going to call them black working class rebellions across the. Across the United States. You know, the AFL CIO really came out against the hiring of black workers to rebuild those cities, among many other kind of disappointing political moves on the part of the political establishment in Labor. But in 1968, that was not the case. In 1968, the Negro labor alliance came alive again, and this time in the Memphis Sanitation Workers strike, which was led by rank and file black workers, and they were represented formally by AFSCME, which is the Public Sector Union. And Dr. King was invited by the Negro American Labor Council to be part of that struggle. In fact, they sort of begged him to. To go and to lend his moral authority to the fight. And unfortunately, I think, look, I mean, in terms of just nuts and bolts organizing, it was a strong strike. I mean, all the black workers were out. And so this was not a matter of kind of like discipline among the rank and file. They did as much as they could. Do to pressure the mayor of Memphis to concede and desegregate the public sector in that city. But ultimately, unfortunately, it took the assassination of Dr. King for the federal government to step in and say, your opposition to this is no longer possible, and you need to. You need to sign this contract with the union. And so, you know, it's. And Dr. King gave his life for many things, but one of the things that his life gave to black working class people in this country was that that struggle launched an organizing drive across the public sector that lasted for years and years afterwards. And to this day, the public sector remains the most union dense part of the economy. Unions are disproportionately concentrated in the public sector these days. And it was because of the drive of the Memphis sanitation workers that we had that. And so I guess what I would say is that kind of like last full blush of interracial solidarity and the work of the Negro Labor alliance in 1968 essentially gave birth to the public sector labor movement. I mean, all of the workers who are in the union in Detroit and in Michigan and across the industrial Midwest across this country owe their membership and their livelihoods in part to the struggle in Memphis in 1968.
- [38:53]
Tom Disena
So this is also the part of the book where my co producer, Shai Simmons, has a question for you.
- [39:00]
Cedric De Leon
Throughout the book, you show that black workers were not just participants, but leaders in shaping labor movements. Why do you think this role has been historically overlooked? And. And what does recognizing it change about how we understand American labor history today? Wow. What a wonderful question. Holy smokes. Okay, well, I think that part of this is about mythology and sort of, like, accepted ideas about how things happened that are not critically challenged. And part of this is racial in character. Right? So if what we think we know about the labor movement is that the Communist party and the CIO were responsible for desegregating American unions and that the leading figures of those organizations were white folks like John L. Lewis, Philip Murray, and others. Walter Reuther. Then when we go to study those moments in labor history, we might go to the Walter Reuther Collection at the Reuther Library at Wayne State University, for example, to figure out, okay, well, what was going on? Who was Walter Reuther? What was his upbringing? What led him to the labor movement? What was his first contact with the workers at Ford, what have you, Right? And so it's almost a confirmation bias, because as in any social movement, there are stories that we tell each other about how things happened. And so I think that partly the Reason why the role of black workers has been overlooked is because of confirmation bias. We look for the answers in the places where we expect to find them. We don't go to the Schomburg center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. We go to certain collections at the Walter Reuther Library at Wade State University. Do you see what I mean? So that's one thing. But then also, I think there is a kind of insidious racial factor here because, of course, slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples and Jim Crow unionism is a moral stain not only on this country, but specifically on the ancestors of white people who live today. Right. And I think that foregrounding the role of white people in the labor movement who were at the front lines. And there is no doubt that they were on the front lines, by the way. Right. I mean, this is empirically true. Right. But focusing only on them, I think, permits a kind of revisionist history that rehabilitates the role of white workers and white labor leaders. In the sort of racial politics of the labor movement. Right. Because at least if we do that, then we can point to exceptions to the rule. Even if we think it is the larger rule that the labor movement was mainly exclusionary towards black people. We can say, yes, but John L. Lewis. Yes, but Walter Reuther. Right. And I think that it performs a kind of ideological, almost emotional function in the labor movement to say that there were racial progressives. Right. The result, however, even though that is empirically true, is that we sideline the very important role of black people in building the multiracial labor movement that we have today. Because I'll tell you this shy like, I went into the Schomburg, I went into the Walter Reuther Library, and I found scads and scads of data. I mean, anybody who wants to know about what black workers did in this moment can find it. It is readily available. All those organizations kept minutes. There are extensive records. The problem is nobody has bothered to look for them. And that is a problem.
- [43:42]
Tom Disena
Well said. I will also, again, one of the things I appreciated about your book as we sign off today is goes back to that effort at demythologizing. And it was in some ways very heartbreaking for me. But I had a young man who attended in a Philip Randolph Academy and had absolutely no idea who a Philip Randolph was and. And needed to learn that from me, which. Which I think is. Is troubling, right. That. That we're. We're still in this process where we don't recognize. We don't recognize the, the names like Bayard Rustin, na. Philip Randolph, and. And again, your. Your book here, I think, does a tremendous job in a service to all of us in sort of working to peel back some of those layers. So we thank you for it.
- [44:37]
Cedric De Leon
Thank you, Tom. I appreciate that. And thanks, Shai, for that question. That was it. That was the money question. Well, well spotted.
- [44:47]
Tom Disena
So I like to conclude our interviews by asking, what are you working on next?
- [44:53]
Cedric De Leon
Well, it's interesting, but I, you know, I really wanted this book to be in service of telling the story. And right now I am in the middle of a couple of projects to actually put my sociology hat on and theorize what happened. Right. And try to put it in terms that my colleagues can understand. But so that's really what I'm doing right now. I'm doing a kind of professional, academic set of projects to break down what I think happened in the fight to desegregate American unions.
- [45:37]
Tom Disena
Well, we'll look forward to that as well. And if he has a chance to send it by us, let us know. We'll be happy to have you on again.
- [45:43]
Cedric De Leon
All right, will do. Thank you so much.
- [45:46]
Tom Disena
So once again, my guest today has been Cedric De Leon, the author of Freedom, Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Solidarity. My name is Tom desena, and I've been joined today by my co host and co producer, Sherelle Simmons. And you are listening to the New Books Network.