A New Working Class: The Legacies of Public-Sector Employment in the Civil Rights Movement by Jane Berger (review)

Abstract

With the case of African Americans, Jane Berger reminds us in A New Working Class: The Legacies of Public-Sector Employment in the Civil Rights Movement that history may not necessarily repeat itself, but it can strike us as awfully familiar. While A New Working Class valiantly details attempts by Black public-sector workers and the unions they formed to struggle for racial and economic justice in Baltimore, the obstacles they faced and setbacks they suffered unfortunately fairly consistently represent stories that can be told virtually wherever large concentrations of Black public-sector workers can be found. Not to be cynical, but often, there is no happy ending to this recurring narrative—at least not by Hollywood standards. Speaking of Hollywood, while many Americans only know what they know of Baltimore from the highly-acclaimed HBO cable television series “The Wire,” which aired from 2002–2008, Berger goes back in time to when labor conditions precipitated the almost trite—if not stereotypical—depictions of “Inner City, USA” as projected upon the bleak and blank canvas of the city’s decaying landscape. In watching Baltimore through the para-realistic lens of such gritty, yet still fictional, cable television storytelling, one can be forgiven for losing sight of its nickname—“Charm City.” If anything, during the outbreak of World War II, numerous opportunistic Black laborers left economically dead-end jobs in the South for the prospects of improved pay and working conditions on federal jobs in northern metropolitan cities such as Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. As Berger notes early in her monograph, Baltimore was a site of prosperous boom times, boasting low levels of unemployment, expanding suburban neighborhoods, and increasing car registrations to match, all thanks to defense orders. Even better, these good times were open to white and Black workers to enjoy alike. While the concept seems relatively simple—move to a better environment and start fresh with a better job leading to a better existence—numerous Black,