Strong in the struggle

Alternate Titles

• My life as a black labor activist

Description

"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. One man who refused to cooperate with the diabolical Committee was Lee Brown, as African American labor activist and a leader of an interracial union of waterfront workers in New Orleans. Brown 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."--Jacket.

Subjects

Genres

• Biography.

Series Statement

• Voices and visions