Episode 11: Robin D.G. Kelley

This eleventh episode of Black Work Talk was a joint effort with Dissent Magazine’s podcast, Belabored.  Belabored’s co-hosts, Michelle Chen and Sarah Jaffe, and Black Work Talk’s host, Steven Pitts were joined by historian Robin D.G. Kelley.  Robin’s book, Hammer and Hoe, details the organizing work in the Birmingham metropolitan area during the 1930s where key Black workers were Communist and worked with the Communist Party to improve the living conditions in Jim Crow Alabama.  Because of Robin’s knowledge of the region’s history, he was an excellent guest to have on the show given the worker organizing at the Amazon warehouse outside of Birmingham. Topics discussed included:the current organizing at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, ALthe relationship between Blacks and the Communist Party in the 1930sthe nature of racial capitalism strategies to build stronger ties between the Black community and the labor movement. Below is a link to an article by Robin Kelley summarizing key elements of his book, Hammer and How: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/alabama-hammer-and-hoe-robin-kelley-communist-party

Om Podcasten

Black Work Talk is a show that elevates the voices of Black labor, workers, leaders, activists, and intellectuals in discussions on the connections between race, labor, capitalism and culture in the struggle for progressive governing power. On season three of Black Work Talk, new hosts Bianca Cunningham and Jamala Rogers explore the impact of 2023’s strike wave in conversations with rank and file workers from unions that have fought or are still fighting for better, more equitable contracts in 2023; including the UAW, Teamsters, Writers Guild of America and more. Where did the energy for this wave of labor movements come from, what does it mean for black workers, and where does it go from here? They also open the conversation by calling in the 90% of American workers who have yet to organize in their workplace with an ongoing accessible and educational series on the process of organizing and filing to start a union from scratch.