A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice by Jenny Carson

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice by Jenny Carson Eric Arnesen (bio) A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice. By Jenny Carson. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. xi, 289. $125.00 cloth; $28.00 paper) Over the past half century, historians of race and labor have produced a substantial body of scholarship on various occupations, unions, and race relations that collectively reveals the complexity of working-class race relations, traditions of Black activism, and labor movement practices. While fewer such studies have appeared in recent years, Jenny Carson's new book reminds us that this historiographical genre continues to have much to offer. Focusing on the greater New York City laundry industry, A Matter of Moral Justice brings to life the on-the-job conditions experienced by a largely female labor force and its struggles for dignity and economic advancement. It also explores just how profoundly unionization transformed life on the job for the better and, at the same time, underscores just how limited that transformation proved to be. [End Page 436] New York's early twentieth-century laundry industry relied on a heterogeneous labor force that became increasingly African American and female. Despite low wages, poor working conditions, and abusive treatment, unionization efforts were sporadic and unsuccessful. Only in the late 1930s and early 1940s did sustained trade unionism finally take off, the result of efforts of Black women shopfloor activists, women reformers, and various Communist and Socialist organizers. Under the banner of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACW) during the upsurge of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), laundry worker unionization brought significant improvements to workers' lives. But, Carson insists, those gains were limited—laundry work remained poorly paid, racial and gender inequality persisted in the workplace, and the disproportionately male and white union bureaucracy resisted sharing power with women or African Americans. Advances notwithstanding, Carson argues that the outcome proved "disappointing" (p. 8). At the heart of her story is the activism of Black workers like Charlotte Adelmond, a Trinidadian immigrant, and Dollie Robinson, a migrant from North Carolina, whose aspirations and struggles Carson carefully reconstructs. As leaders of the "democratic initiative," they tenaciously but only sometimes successfully challenged their employers and union leaders with an agenda centered on racial and, to a lesser extent, gender equality (p. 127). Her considerable attention to intra-union battles that pitted these Black women activists against ACW officials makes clear that the union prioritized the preservation of "white male privilege in all its forms" (p. 197). As important as the "democratic initiative" was, however, the degree of rank-and-file Black workers' participation in this oppositional culture remains unclear, as does the extent to which the civil rights unionism pursued by these activists extended beyond union affairs. The story Carson tells is an important one that highlights the obstacles to successful organization and the role played by grassroots activists in overcoming them. She effectively draws out the complexities of [End Page 437] a powerful CIO union which, while ostensibly committed to interracialism, often blocked the efforts of its Black women activists to overturn entrenched racial and gender hierarchies. Her restoration to the historical narrative of the previously little-known efforts of Adelmond and Robinson suggests that the ranks of Black grassroots activists is larger than historians generally realize and that their inclusion into the history of American labor genuinely enriches our understanding of race, civil rights, and protest in the first half of the twentieth century. Eric Arnesen ERIC ARNESEN is the Teamsters Professor of History at the George Washington University. He is currently completing a biography of A. Philip Randolph. Copyright © 2021 Kentucky Historical Society