Strong in the Struggle: My Life as a Black Labor Activist

by Lee Brown, Robert L. Allen, Julianne Malveaux (Foreword by)

Overview

In the 1950s the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee launched a ruthless smear campaign and outright attack against hundreds of labor leaders, teachers, leftists, Communists, civil servants, filmmakers, civil rights activists, and many others it accused of conspiring to overthrow the government. On the basis of little or no evidence individuals were dragged before HUAC and harassed and threatened. Many lost their jobs or were jailed if they did not cooperate with a Committee that flagrantly trampled the right of freedom of speech and condemned individuals for association with progressive causes.

One man who stood tall and refused to cooperate with the diabolical Committee was Lee Brown, an African American labor activist and a leader of an interracial union of waterfront workers in New Orleans. For his courageous act Brown soon lost his freedom but not his dignity. He was tried and unjustly convicted of violating the Taft-Hartley Act that prohibited Communist Party members from also serving as the leaders of labor unions. Brown spent more than two years in federal prison but his militancy and commitment to the struggle for workers' rights and civil rights remained undiminished.

Strong in the Struggle tells the powerful story of the political awakening of Brown as a youth from the rural South, his life from childhood among poor black farmers, his encounters with the Jim Crow system of racial segregation and racial violence, his discovery of the changes that could be won when working people organized into unions, his rise to leadership and his time of imprisonment, and his continuing advocacy of the ideals of racial equality and socialism.

Told in his own words, it is an engaging story that follows him as a young man from Louisiana to Texas as a shipyard worker, to Arizona as a railroad worker, to Los Angeles and Hollywood where he worked in restaurants and as a bit-part actor during World War II, to the docks of New Orleans and the great hotels of San Francisco as the Civil Rights an

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780847691913
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	01/16/2001
Series:	Voices & Visions
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.28(w) x 9.22(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

Lee Brown is presently retired and living in San Francisco, where he continues to be active in struggles for housing, jobs, health care, and senior citizens' issues.

Robert L. Allen, a sociologist and historian, teaches African American and ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is senior editor of The Black Scholar journal, and author of several books on the African American experience.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Foreword Chapter 2 Introduction Chapter 3 Prologue: February 15, 1957 Chapter 4 Childhood Chapter 5 On My Own Chapter 6 Working in Los Angeles Chapter 7 Black Workers on the New Oleans Waterfront Chapter 8 New Orleans and Local 207 Chapter 9 Organizer at Work Chapter 10 Fighting Southern Injustice Chapter 11 On the Road for the Union Chapter 12 Andrew Steve Nelson's Trial Chapter 13 The Government Comes After Me Chapter 14 The Trial of Lee Brown

Editorial Reviews

Indispensable for anyone trying to understand the realities of life in the United States. This is a very moving account of a militant African-American man in the 20th century. It illuminates the defeats and victories of the labor movement, North and South, with clear honesty.

Herbert Aptheker

Fully represents the history of African American workers and activists in the twentieth century, the transformation of our presence from a rural to an urban one, and the impact the industrial revolution, the trade union movement, World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement have had on the way we live and we work. This book is especially important because we have so few worker biographies, so few life stories of 'the people' that Lee Brown has always been ready to represent. It is important to see history from this prism, to view our nation’s evolution through the life of a man whose voice, strong and authentic, is amplified through this powerful, absorbing and detail-rich autobiography.

Julianne Malveaux

A stirring account.

Dispatcher

Lee Brown’s compelling story urges us to imagine a radically different history of the twentieth century United States, a history forged by a persistent and courageous defense of workers’ rights and by an indefatigable advocacy of racial equality. In his powerful and unpretentious way, Brown shows us a life whose meaning resides in an unrelenting faith in the ability of working people to fight for a better world. As veteran, witness, and chronicler, he addresses new generations of activists—those who speak out today against global capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and homophobia—and offer them a firm place on his shoulders.

Angela Y. Davis