Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party. By Paul Frymer. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. xvi, 202 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 978-0-691-13081-1. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-691-13465-9.)

Abstract

Paul Frymer's Black and Blue is an important book, precisely because it takes what should be so obvious to scholars and makes it appear as such. At least since the mid-1980s, scholars have debated the “rise and fall” of the labor-civil rights movement and its relationship to the power and authority of the Democratic party. Combining the methodologies of politics, the law, and history, Frymer's interdisciplinary work should help settle this long-running debate and contribute to new (and perhaps even more productive) avenues of inquiry. At the core of Black and Blue is the argument that post-World War II tensions between African American civil rights struggles, the labor movement, and the Democratic party were the products of institutional responses to the crisis of labor in the 1930s and to black demands for workplace equity that went largely ignored in the legislative arena until the 1960s. In 1935 Congress passed the Wagner Act, creating the National Labor Relations Board (nlrb), and in 1964 Congress created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (eeoc) a centerpiece of the landmark Civil Rights Act. As Frymer makes clear, each agency emerged with different institutional rules and conflicting mandates, which have since shaped American race and labor relations in profound ways. Congress empowered the nlrb to protect the rights of workers to organize unions and bargain collectively with employers, but the Wagner Act did not include provisions to protect minority workers from discrimination in the workplace or within unions. The eeoc's purpose became to take on discrimination in the workplace and within unions. The problem, however, was that Congress denied the agency the power and resources necessary to handle its tasks on its own, leading to an ever-expanding role for private lawyers and federal judges in adjudicating discrimination cases related to labor. As a result, the struggles for civil and labor rights have taken divergent paths. In Frymer's words, “U.S. national labor policy divided labor and race into separate forums, splitting the matters politically and legally, and leading to conflict instead of intersection” (p. 9).