Now available: Professor Jenny Carson’s book, A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice

History Professor Jenny Carson’s book, A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice (external link)  is the first book-length examination of African American and radical women’s organizing in the power laundry industry in the twentieth century. Mining oral histories, union and legal records and newspaper accounts, Carson demonstrates how substandard working conditions, racial and gender discrimination, and poor pay drove the mostly women and people of color in the laundries to organize during the Great Depression. Following the union from its grassroots inception through to the post-war era when it became a bureaucratic organization run by white men, her book tells the story of how the women’s battle for racial justice, gender equality and economic dignity contributed to the dynamic civil rights unionism that was animating the post-war urban North a decade before Rosa Parks sparked an uprising that toppled Jim Crow. Described as “meticulous and engaging,” A Matter of Moral Justice locates the women’s civil rights unionism and collisions with labor organizing and union politics as direct forebearers of the Black Lives Matter and Fight for $15 movements.