Celebrate Black History Month 2025

African Americans and Labor is the theme of Black History Month 2025. Black Americans have made significant contributions to the US.

How Black Americans Contributed to American Life

African American Workers Built America Black labor has been foundational to the growth of America and our economy. Enslaved people built the country’s early infrastructure and produced lucrative commodities such as cotton and tobacco. After emancipation, African American labor was crucial in industry, agriculture, and service. Yet the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which was established in 1884, only started gathering consistent data on African American workers in 1972. For nearly a century, African American workers did not appear even as data points let alone in meaningful policies or labor legislation.
Strengthening America at Home: Black Workers in WWII My work and the work of my colleagues at the Wage and Hour Division is to protect vulnerable workers from violations of some of their most fundamental workplace rights, like minimum wage, overtime and job-protected leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act. Every day, and especially as I reflect on Black History Month, I draw inspiration from the stories of leaders who helped to improve working conditions for Black workers. One such source of inspiration is the story of the Double V Campaign, which led to improved working conditions for Black workers at the Department of Defense.
5 Black Leaders that Shaped the Labor Movement Racial justice and economic justice are intrinsically intertwined. However, far too often in our nation’s history, those who benefit from the existing order have used race and class to divide us. These five Black leaders strengthened both the labor and civil rights movements by fighting discrimination in unions and building strong coalitions for the welfare of all.
Labor Speeches of MLK Jr The two most dynamic and cohesive liberal forces in the country are the labor movement and the Negro freedom movement. Together we can be architects of democracy. —Martin Luther King, Jr., at the AFL-CIO National Convention, Miami Beach, Florida, December 11, 1961 During the last year of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., put justice for poor and working-class people at the center of his agenda. He launched his Poor People’s Campaign, demanding that Congress shift the country’s spending from war to housing, health care, education, and jobs. He traveled the country in a whirlwind, scarcely sleeping, preaching the gospel of economic justice. Harking back to the nation’s history of slavery and segregation, he demanded affirmative programs to overcome generations of denial and neglect for people once enslaved. But he didn’t stop there. He sought an Economic Bill of Rights for Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and poorer whites, as well as for blacks. He sought to create a nonviolent army of poor people in jobless inner cities and barrios and in reservations and rural areas. He challenged the country to create an economy of full employment, or lacking that, a tax system that ensured a decent level of income for every American.

The Origins of Slavery

Respecting the many contributions of Black people and communities, the history of the labor of African Americans in the US is fraught with forced enslavement and exploitation. To learn more about the origins of slavery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture has an online exhibit Slavery and Freedom 1400-1877.

Introduction to Slavery and Freedom 1400-1877 Exhibition | National Museum of African American History and Culture

Slavery & Freedom Part 01: Slavery & the Making of the Atlantic World Chapter 1: Slavery and the Emerging Global Economy

Understanding Slavery And Freedom | National Museum of African American History and Culture

The South & Cotton

The enslavement of millions of people taken from African countries and the African Diaspora was central to the industrializing of the US through the planting, picking, and processing of cotton, which was then sent to industrial factories like the Willimantic Thread Company. These enslaved people were the main labor source for this backbreaking work.

Many Rivers to Cross: The Cotton Economy and Slavery | PBS

After the abolition of slavery starting with the 14th Amendment, many African Americans remained in southern states working on the same plantations forced into sharecropping relationships through the threat of being imprisoned for vagrancy or a low-level offense and forced to work under the convict leasing system. Most people couldn’t move north due to restrictive covenants restricting renting or working in other places.

The Forced Prison Labor that Made Companies Rich | Washington Week Recommends

The North & Work Stratification

As cotton production mechanizes, through the use of machines like the Mechanical Cotton Picker, most human labor is eliminated. As labor was eliminated, millions of Black people moved to Northern cities in the Great Migrations. Harlem was an urban destination for people from the Great Migration, where more than 6 million African Americans migrated from southern states to urban centers (including New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit) from 1916 to the 1930s. Harlem Renaissance Artist Jacob Lawrence’s 60-panel Great Migration painting series is about the Great Migration. Movement to northern cities meant more waged work with freedom from Jim Crow legal segregation and forced labor (sharecropping & convict leasing).

Visualizing the Great Migration Jacob Lawrence’s landmark 1941 series tells the story of the Great Migration—one of the largest demographic events of the twentieth century. This mass movement of black Americans from the rural South to urban centers in the North and West began during World War I. Those departing the South were attracted by job opportunities but were also fleeing the racial humiliations and state-sanctioned violence of the Jim Crow regime. All told, more than six million African Americans migrated from the South between 1910 and 1970. This map uses United States Census data to illustrate the groundswell of their movement to northern cities during this period.
Sharecropping: Slavery Rerouted Though slavery was abolished in 1865, sharecropping would keep most Black Southerners impoverished and immobile for decades to come.

Current Conditions of Black American Workers

As African Americans moved to urban industrial centers (e.g., New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit), urban life opened access to education, higher-paying work, and closeness to the community (challenging in the rural south). Advocacy in the civil rights movement, included fair work opportunities and working conditions.

The current conditions of Black American workers are infused with the history of slavery with lower average earnings for the same work and over, higher levels of unemployment, and higher experiences of workplace discrimination. Black and white wage gaps are expanding with rising wage inequality.  Research has shown that racial disparities are highly related to discrimination. For example, there is discrimination in the low-wage labor market. When similar Black and White candidates apply for the same jobs, White candidates are more often offered jobs, and moved up to higher jobs than they applied for, even with criminal histories. This discrimination even follows some of the least protected and lowest-wage work, such as temporary work.

Black workers’ views and experiences in the U.S. labor force stand out in key ways There are more than 21 million Black Americans in the U.S. labor force today. Their workforce experiences are varied but stand out from people of other races and ethnicities on several important measures: They are more likely to be employed in certain postal work, transit, health care and security fields; report experiencing more racial discrimination on the job; and place a higher value on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the workplace. For Labor Day, here are facts about Black workers’ labor force experiences and attitudes, drawn from federal data sources and recent Pew Research Center surveys.
Black-white wage gaps expand with rising wage inequality Income inequality and slow growth in the living standards of low- and moderate-income Americans have become defining features of today’s economy, and at their root is the near stagnation of hourly wage growth for the vast majority of American workers. Since 1979, wages have grown more slowly than productivity—a measure of the potential for wage growth—for everyone except the top 5 percent of workers, while wage growth for the top 1 percent has significantly exceeded the rate of productivity growth (Bivens and Mishel 2015). This means that the majority of workers have reaped few of the economic rewards they helped to produce over the last 36 years because a disproportionate share of the benefits have gone to those at the very top. While wage growth lagging behind productivity has affected workers from all demographic groups, wage growth for African American workers has been particularly slow. As a result, large pay disparities by race have remained unchanged or even expanded.
Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment Decades of racial progress have led some researchers and policymakers to doubt that discrimination remains an important cause of economic inequality. To study contemporary discrimination, we conducted a field experiment in the low-wage labor market of New York City, recruiting white, black, and Latino job applicants who were matched on demographic characteristics and interpersonal skills. These applicants were given equivalent résumés and sent to apply in tandem for hundreds of entry-level jobs. Our results show that black applicants were half as likely as equally qualified whites to receive a callback or job offer. In fact, black and Latino applicants with clean backgrounds fared no better than white applicants just released from prison. Additional qualitative evidence from our applicants’ experiences further illustrates the multiple points at which employment trajectories can be deflected by various forms of racial bias. These results point to the subtle yet systematic forms of discrimination that continue to shape employment opportunities for low-wage workers.