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Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. By Nancy MacLean. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Published by Harvard University Press for the Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2006. Pp. xiv, 454. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-01909-6.)
Nancy MacLean posits, "For varied reasons, beyond the ranks of labor historians, most progressive scholars lost whatever interest they once had in issues involving work and the labor movement" (pp. 341-42). Scholars of the civil rights era have typically focused on nonviolent direct-action protests and the political radicalism of the 1960s. As a result, the awe-inspiring confrontations against white supremacy across the South and the aggressive stances taken by leftist radicals and Black Power advocates across the nation gained scholarly and thus popular interest. Meanwhile, vital quests for employment justice have taken a backseat in much of the historical discourse regarding the civil rights movement. MacLean's Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace convincingly reinterprets the civil rights era of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s as a movement that positioned workplace equality as a seminal component in the fight to eradicate social and economic disparities across the United States.
Combining the intellectual precepts of labor, social, women's,...