Black Workers for Justice: a history of southern labor and Black liberation during the new nadir

"Black Workers for Justice (BWFJ) is a Black-led workers' organization based in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, that emerged from the struggles of Black Southern workers in the post-civil rights era. Challenging narratives that portray the 1980s as a period of conservative dominance and movement decline, Ajamu A. Dillahunt-Holloway argues that Black Southern workers developed new forms of grassroots resistance rooted in workplace democracy, racial justice, and internal accountability. By making the workplace a central arena of democratic struggle, BWFJ confronted racial capitalism, neoliberal restructuring, and the weakening of labor protections while rejecting any separation between civil rights and workers' rights. Situating BWFJ within a longer tradition of Black radicalism stretching back to the 1930s, Black Workers for Justice reinterprets the post-civil rights era through the lens of Black labor organizing and shows that the late twentieth century was a period of social movement innovation rather than political retreat.