Keona K. Ervin. Gateway to Equality

Gateway to Equality is a major contribution to African American labor historiography. Keona K. Ervin joins an impressive cohort of historians, including Shannon King, Leah Platt Boustan, and Clarence Lang, whose recent publications explore African Americans’ multifaceted labor practices and the diverse ways in which black labor impacted urban labor markets, city landscapes, and the struggle toward race, gender, and class equality. At the same time, Gateway to Equality advances scholarship on urban African American women’s lives as laborers, city dwellers, union organizers, civic engagement leaders, and political activists. St. Louis black women political activists like Ora Lee Malone and others are front and center in this study, fusing the fight for racial and economic justice. One of the first major studies on St. Louis, Gateway to Equality deepens scholars’ interpretations of black women’s less familiar political genealogy within the city’s black freedom movement. Moreover, Ervin’s study places St. Louis in conversation with national histories and scholarly debates on New Deal liberalism and the modern-day civil rights movement.

Economic Justice · Gateway (web page) · Historiography · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies