Networks of resistance: floria pinkney and labor interracialism in interwar america

The life of Black labor activist Floria Pinkney exemplifies the powerful connections between labor unions, workers’ education, and the YWCA that set the stage for the long Civil Rights Movement. In the 1920s Pinkney attended three workers’ education colleges: Brookwood Labor College, the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, and the International People’s College in Denmark. Pinkney also became a prominent labor organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and worked in the New Deal’s Workers’ Education Project. The 1930s alliance between labor and civil rights generally marks the starting decade of the long Civil Rights Movement. But this alliance was fostered by an earlier left culture of social unionism and workers’ education. Pinkney’s journey through this world illustrates Black women’s propagation of this culture. Her life exposes how the expansive networks of labor and civil rights organizations empowered working-class Black women in the interwar period.