Description: Recipient of the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award
Winner of the 2024 Philip Taft Labor History Book Award
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History
Named one of Smithsonian's Best Books of 2023
An award-winning historian illuminates the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America through a stunning narrative centered on her forebears.
Brief description: Blair LM Kelley is Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies and the director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson.
Review Quotes: Award-winning historian Kelley, director of the Center for the Study of the American South and author of Right To Ride, provides a powerful counter to the assumption that the term working class refers only to Whites. Rather, she argues convincingly, Black workers have been the nation's 'most active, most engaged, most informed, and most impassioned working class.' . . . A well-researched, engaging, corrective American history.-- "Kirkus Reviews"