Toward a Black Working-Class History of the Long 1980s

By redrawing the boundaries of the Black 1980s from 1977 through the pivotal year 1996, this article focuses on the fate of the Black working class in the late twentieth-century United States. Rather than telling a top-down story of Reaganism, this article seeks to raise new questions about the period, including the importance of the public sector to Black workers, the consequences of intraracial class stratification, and how the framing of the underclass hid the consequences of economic restructuring by blaming its victims. The article concludes with an instance of labor militancy that spoke directly to the importance of solidarity and multiracial organizing among the most vulnerable workers of color.