Coda: "To Continue the Work of Our Foreparents"

As a labor organizer and scholar of African American and Latinx history, watching the presidential returns on the evening of November 8, 2016, in Florida was painful. Decades of freedom struggles by immigrants, women, and LGBTQI+ individuals seemed to evaporate as the man who garnered votes by vilifying each of these groups closed in on victory. For most of my adult life, I have worked in coalitions to create a world where people would be free from the oppression that devastated my community when I was growing up in the 1970s. Donald J. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” was never just a slogan to me and my Chicano peers. It seemed a rejection of the sacrifices our ancestors had made that allowed us to gain access to the rights that middle-class Anglo Americans took for granted. Many of my students at the University of Florida, particularly first-generation immigrants from the Caribbean or Latin America and children of working-class parents, were shocked and saddened as well. Chinese, Mexican, and African American youths had heard Trump insult their communities as he stumped for votes in his campaign rallies. After the election, some of my students transformed their dismay into action by traveling to Washington, D.C., to protest at the 2017 Women’s March or to see if it was possible to create dialogues with MAGA supporters at the Trump inauguration.   

In this epilogue I offer my thoughts on the years since the presidential election of 2016. Admittedly, this is a subjective analysis. I have been a university-based historian for more than two decades, and I am also the president of an AFL-CIO union in Florida that is fighting for its life as Governor Ron DeSantis tries to eliminate us. While this essay has an unmistakable point of view, I can offer the reader a perspective not available in most historical accounts of our time. My identity as an organizer for workers’ rights in the South links me with some of the campaigns, activists, and events featured throughout Who Built America? As an academic, I am bound by rules of my craft to present evidence-based arguments. Three decades in the archives and on picket lines have taught me to see U.S. history as a contest between “the few and the many,” to borrow language invoked in the tumultuous early years of the republic. While “the few” often used government and powerful institutions such as courts and corporations to impose their will on the populace, “the many” relied on coalition building, mass protests, and various forms of solidarity to advance their interests. In Florida and across the nation, these conflicts continue unabated; they are rooted as much in the dynamics of our history as they are in the present moment.

Floridians were uniquely situated to understand the 2016 election. Although residents elected Democratic governors as recently as the 1990s, in the past twenty years state politics turned decidedly conservative, and Florida has become the epicenter of the resurgence of authoritarianism in the United States. Lucas Benitez, a cofounder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a farm labor coalition, characterized the increase in immigrant arrests and aggressive behavior of police officers toward working-class immigrants in South Florida as akin “to the U.S. Army occupying Iraq.” The United States has long been an outlier among republics in restricting the right to vote, “[b]ut no state disenfranchises more of its citizens than Florida,” according to a study sponsored by the Brennan Center for Justice in 2016. Florida has been cited as one of the states with the highest number of convictions for governmental corruption cases in the nation. A fair amount of this malfeasance was connected to corporate domination of the state’s politicians and questionable real estate development in south Florida that helped trigger the Great Recession in 2007–9. The same gated communities in Florida’s most affluent neighborhoods that helped underwrite Donald Trump’s presidential run delivered the state’s governorship in 2018 to Trump’s Ivy League doppelgänger, Ron DeSantis. Governor DeSantis pursued an agenda of privatizing public education, passing anti-union measures, and censoring how African American history is taught in schools in order to eliminate dissent and political competition. Decades after the failure of the CIO’s Operation Dixie to organize workers in Florida and surrounding states, the Deep South remains fertile ground for the emergence of reactionary and anti-union political leaders.

In retrospect, the ascent of Donald J. Trump to the White House was not surprising. Trump’s political opposition was disorganized while Trump’s right-wing supporters were extremely well funded and well organized. Politics had become a spectator sport for too many supporters of the Democratic Party. Organizations that had once emphasized direct action to achieve gains increasingly looked to the Supreme Court or media campaigns, social and traditional, to preserve the 1965 Voting Rights Act, maintain collective bargaining rights, and protect the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. These achievements had been won through years of community organizing and mass action, not legal briefs, focus groups, or social media clicks. Another important factor in the rise of the Trump movement was the failure of Democrats to understand the power of white nationalism to mobilize aggrieved working-class constituencies that have been harmed by the neoliberal and pro-corporate politics championed by the leadership of the Democratic Party since the 1980s.

President Trump provided no substantial alternative to conservative politics as usual. Immediately after he was elected, Trump adroitly moved to serve capital by appointing a cabinet of advisers that the Pew Research Center called “one of the most business-heavy in U.S. history.” His administration quickly issued a series of executive orders that prioritized corporate interests over environmental concerns and Indigenous rights, restricted immigration, and heightened Islamophobia. He ordered the building of a fortified wall along the border with Mexico, hired additional U.S. Border Patrol agents, and increased the detention of immigrants and refugees, a growing number of whom were being driven to migrate by the global climate crisis. In June 2017, the U.S. detention program introduced a new policy of discouraging family immigration by separating children from their parents[  and not allowing them to contact one another while imprisoned. Children as young as two years old were taken from their parents and scattered across the country in refugee shelters or with foster families, with no system in place that would allow them to reunite with their parents. Another federal executive order issued in January 2017 claimed to protect the nation from terrorists by dramatically reducing the number of refugees allowed into the United States and banning the entrance into the country of citizens from seven largely Muslim nations. The Muslim travel ban policy stoked anti-Islamic fears and hate crimes against Muslims at the same time as the president’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—known as the Iran nuclear deal—heightened political tensions in the Middle East. In a show of support for the oil industry, the Trump administration used executive orders to revive the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline despite years of opposition and mass protests by Native Americans and environmentalists. The pipeline violated treaty rights of the Standing Rock Sioux, and if built could endanger cultural resources and contaminate water sources for millions living in its path. The traumatic results of these executive orders combined with Trump’s confrontational rhetoric deepened social fissures and spurred activists across the political spectrum.

Between 2016 and 2020, millions of Americans mobilized against President Trump’s policies. Timed to coincide with Trump’s presidential inauguration, the January 21, 2017, Women’s March drew hundreds of thousands of protesters to Washington, D.C. Between three and five million women and their allies demonstrated in more than seven hundred sister marches in cities across the United States and around the globe. Headlined by honorary co-chairs–including longtime labor and civil rights activists Dolores Huerta, Harry Belafonte, and Angela Davis–the largest single-day protest in U.S. history advocated for a broad range of issues including: women’s reproductive freedom, Medicare for all, anti-racism, LGBTQI+ equality, and environmental justice. Eight days later, in response to Trump’s executive order restricting Muslim travelers, thousands gathered in cities and airports across the country to protest the new policy. Later that summer, prominent actresses in Hollywood borrowed from Bronx-born activist Tarana Burke and spread the #MeToo movement against sexual exploitation in Hollywood and in support of gender equity for all.

The protesters faced right-wing activists emboldened by Trump’s election, many of whom were proponents of the “great replacement theory,” which viewed all immigrants, Jewish communities, and people of color as hostile invaders seeking to take over the nation from its rightful heirs, the supposedl  Christian white majority. Promoters of the theory energetically spread it in state legislatures, police departments, and through a series of often violent demonstrations. Organizers of a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, for example, combined a defense of Confederate monuments, white supremacy, antisemitism, and calls for “law and order,” that all hearkened back to the era of legal segregation while linking rhetorical appeals to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. The rally became violent and resulted in the death of Heather Heyer, an antiracist counterdemonstrator. Richard Spencer, a lead organizer of the rally, rose to prominence in the months leading up to the Charlottesville confrontation by resuscitating Nazi doctrines of ethnic cleansing, white victimhood, and conspiracy theories about “illegal” immigrants.

Later that autumn, when Spencer brought his Unite the Right rally to the University of Florida, area residents were prepared. Weeks in advance of Spencer’s October appearance in the state, a coalition of labor, civil rights, anti-fascist, and feminist activists from Gainesville, Florida, joined with UF students, staff, and faculty to organize teach-ins about the Holocaust and neo-Nazism as well as workshops on nonviolent civil disobedience. Faculty and graduate student unions at UF used their collective bargaining contracts to protect campus members who energetically spoke out against bigotry in the weeks leading up to Spencer’s visit.  Drawing from the lessons of history, especially the final, tragic years of the Weimar Republic in Germany in the early 1930s and the rise of Nazism, students and residents disregarded calls by many officials to ignore Spencer and to surrender the city for a day to tiki-torch-waving protofascist marchers. When he arrived in Gainesville on October 19, a clearly rattled Spencer encountered a mobilized community of thousands of people who contested his every move. As a result of weeks of grassroots alliance building, participatory democracy, and the determined presence of anti-fascist activists, the presumed thousands of Unite the Right people who had planned to march through Gainesville neighborhoods shouting “Jews will not replace us!” decided to stay away. Shortly after this debacle, Spencer canceled his collegiate tour.

The Gainesville victory did not prevent Trump's rhetoric from continuing to provoke violent attacks against Jews and immigrants, nor did it slow the rise of extreme firebrand conservative politicians. On October 27, 2017, a white nationalist gunman used an automatic weapon to kill eleven and injure another six worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, while in 2019, a similarly motivated and armed attacker killed twenty-three and injured another twenty-two people in a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, largely patronized by Latinx people. In 2018, Republican politicians including congressional representatives Lauren Boebert (Colorado), Marjorie Greene (Georgia), and Paul Gosar (Arizona) grabbed media attention by using white supremacist, anti-immigrant, and violent rhetoric against political opponents during their reelection campaigns.

In 2018, a grassroots coalition formed in Florida to combat voter suppression. The Dream Defenders, an organization created after the 2012 murder of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, joined with the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, and faith-based groups in a statewide petition drive to place an amendment on the 2018 Florida ballot to restore the voting rights of formerly convicted felons. By arguing in favor of allowing nonviolent felons to register to vote, the “Say YES to Second Chances,” campaign tackled a mode of voter suppression with tentacles reaching back to the anti-Black and anti-immigrant histories of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age in the South.  In the wake of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2015, Donald Trump’s election the following year, and Florida’s increasingly reactionary tilt in politics, the “Say YES to Second Chances” ballot initiative was accorded very little chance of success.

Coordinated under the umbrella of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, canvassers from Pensacola in the north of the state to Miami in the south gathered signatures in support of the felony voting rights restoration petition at college football games, county fairs, quinceañeras, senior centers, and many other places. In traditionally conservative North Florida, Second Chances alliance petition gatherers included formerly incarcerated individuals as well as student and working-class organizations like the Alachua County Labor Coalition. Canvassers ventured far outside their comfort zones to hold conversations about citizenship, crime, and voting across lines of political party, ideology, and zip code. Former Obama campaigners, Tea Party supporters, and independent voters found common ground around the idea that individuals convicted of nonviolent felonies who had served their sentences deserved to have their voting rights restored. Second Chances eventually gathered more than one million signatures and successfully placed the voter restoration rights measure on the statewide ballot. Approximately 65 percent of voters who went to the polls in Florida in 2018 supported Amendment 4, the Voting Rights Restoration for Felons Initiative. Florida was not alone in agitating for expanded voting rights; former felons, parolees, or persons on probation won the right to vote in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, and Colorado, victories made possible by a surge in voting rights activism by organizations such as Fair Fight Action, Rock the Vote, and When We All Vote.

Building on the grassroots success of Second Chances, a citizens’ referendum campaign to raise the minimum wage in Florida to $15 an hour was initiated two years later. But how did the measure’s canvassers hope to succeed in a right-to-work state when the federal government itself had not raised the federal minimum wage from $7.25 since 2009?  Once again, organizers went door to door, building alliances across political differences and creating consensus around the idea that workers deserved a raise. When Amendment 2 was overwhelmingly passed by voters in 2020, Florida joined eleven other states and Washington, D.C., in adopting a $15-an-hour minimum wage. Celebrating the victory, Florida fast-food worker Terrence Wise reflected, “If we can get it in the Deep South, you know, down there in Florida, it's bringing all workers closer to fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage on a national level.” These successful drives demonstrated the efficacy of face-to-face organizing and coalition building in a time of increasing polarization.

At the same time however, employers’ associations, reactionary think tanks, and pro-business politicians used their majorities in Republican-dominated state legislatures across the country to continue to promote voter suppression, anti-labor laws, and preemption ordinances designed to check democracy at the county and regional levels. For example, the Florida legislature flouted the will of the state’s electorate and undermined the effectiveness of Amendment 4 by successfully passing new measures that continue  to make it difficult for former prisoners to regain their voting rights. Simply put, after two and a half centuries, the U.S. ruling class still knows how to protect its interests. These conflicts over voting rights illuminate the necessity of nurturing linkages between local community organizing, statewide electoral politics, and social movements that transcend state and even national boundaries. Local activists countered public passivity and political cynicism by revitalizing skills in coalition building, mutual aid, and movement recruiting. These tools challenged the entrenched power of the status quo and provided a counterweight to the power of affluent think tanks like the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the corporate and financial interests these institutions serve.

Late in 2019, news media reported a rise in the number of cases in China of an atypical pneumonia-like illness that became identified as novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). Within weeks the virus began to spread throughout the world. Although many federal and state authorities tried to downplay the seriousness of the virus, by late March the total number of cases in the United States exceeded 100,000, constituting a national emergency. School systems and workplaces rapidly shifted to remote teaching and working, as hospitals became overwhelmed by the number of patients needing respirators, and vulnerable health-care workers, hampered by a lack of personal protective equipment, struggled with the expanding caseload of very sick patients. The illness initially hit cities the hardest, with an average of over 730 people dying each day in New York City during the first two weeks of April 2020, more than could be processed by the city’s morgue and funeral homes, leading to the deployment of refrigerated truck trailers as “mobile” morgues.

Across the country, the pandemic highlighted economic and social disparities: mortality rates were highest among African American and Latinx persons, as well as those who were living in neighborhoods with high poverty rates; some of the lowest paid health-care workers, many of them people of color, were asked to continue reporting to work as essential service providers. Many other workers lost their jobs as traditional face-to-face businesses, especially in the service sector, shut down, while professional and office workers were often able to shift to remote work from home. Many workers—in meat and poultry processing plants, warehouses, transit systems, and grocery stores—were required to report to work, where they faced a high risk of contracting the disease. According to a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, strenuous work in crowded conditions in the meatpacking industry left those workers as much as seventy times more likely than the general population to contract COVID-19. A worker at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York, told a reporter, “It’s frightening, but you have to put on a smile and you go to work because you need the income.”

Despite being hospitalized with the virus in October 2020, President Trump continued to dismiss face masks as unnecessary, ridiculed other precautionary measures as alarmist, promoted several unscientific cures, and dubbed the illness “the China virus,” thus heightening racial antagonisms and contributing to violent attacks against Asian Americans across the country. The virus sparked a libertarian defiance of calls by public health officials for lockdowns and social distancing, a growing distrust of science and medical experts in favor of social media–fueled misinformation, and heightened skepticism about vaccinations and preventative public health measures. In a society already experiencing a shocking decline in national life expectancy (due in part to drug overdoses and suicides), the more than one million U.S. deaths inflicted by COVID-19 deepened class and racial divisions. But the health-care crisis also generated new momentum in support of universal health care, or a “Medicare for All” option for the nation, as well as recognition of the need for a more effective economic safety net. Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act,  which provided a range of emergency federal funding including: aid to states to prevent people from losing Medicaid, stimulus payments to individuals, a Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses and corporations, suspension of repayment of federal student loans, and a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures for those who could not make their mortgage or rent payments. Federal support for the rapid development and deployment of a vaccine against COVID-19 resulted in an effective vaccine in less than a year, which slowly turned the corner on new infections, both nationally and internationally.

In the midst of this grave health-care crisis, millions of people took to the streets in the spring of 2020 to challenge the nation’s drift toward fascism in the days after the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, and the February murder of Ahmaud Arbery by vigilantes in Georgia. Since the founding of Black Lives Matter in 2013 in the aftermath of the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer in Florida, activists in BLM-allied groups had taken an intersectional approach to their organizing. They worked to build awareness of the connections between systemic racism, neoliberalism, and poverty, while also building coalitions tackling issues including anti-trans violence, LGBTQI+ equality, immigration rights, and an end to U.S. imperialism. “We’ve never been just about ending police violence,” Los Angeles-area BLM organizer Melina Abdullah noted in 2020, “but about disrupting state-sanctioned violence against Black people . . . One of the big priorities with the COVID-19 pandemic was really this history and legacy of medical racism.” Responding to criticisms that BLM’s approach to securing racial justice was too narrowly focused, historian Barbara Ransby has noted, “The leading voices of this movement have insisted that if we liberate the Black poor, or if the Black poor liberate themselves, we will uplift everybody else who’s been kept down . . . [A]ny serious analysis of racial capitalism must recognize that to seek liberation for Black people is also to destabilize inequality in the United States at large, and to create new possibilities for all who live here.”

Motivated by a resurgent Black Lives Matter democracy movement in the United States, activists in Lagos, Mexico City, Guangzhou, and many other places rallied, went on strike, shut down traffic, penned visionary social media posts, and picketed at embassies, city halls, and police stations. During a Black Lives Matter march in London, eighteen-year-old Paige Adjarhore told reporters, “This is our respect to people in America who are suffering right now. We’re too far away to go there and help them, but this is us showing that we support them. We’re with you and we feel your pain.” South African journalist Lynsey Chutel observed, “There is a George Floyd in every country.” Activists in Abuja, Nigeria, drew inspiration and support from BLM to demand “the dissolution of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a police unit that has in recent years been publicly criticized for extortion of citizens, kidnappings, extrajudicial killings and illegal arrests.”

BLM activists in the United States stirred the world by standing up to armed white- supremacist counterdemonstrators as well as police forces deployed by the federal government to crush the movement. Echoing the international labor movement spurred by the Chicago Haymarket Strike of 1886 and by Third World solidarity campaigns of the 1960s and ’70s, BLM organizers drew creative strength from diverse efforts to protest militarism, corruption, and economic injustice in their respective countries. In Colombia, journalist Ana Luisa González noted, “This message of this movement—Las Vidas Negras Importan—of Black Lives Matter, were young Afro-Colombians who wanted to speak out against police brutality and structural racism.” Brazilian organizers echoed their counterparts in other nations who used the demonstrations to link injustices in the United States with struggles for justice in their own countries. “Black people are dying from gunshots, from hunger and now from Covid,” BLM activist Simone Nascimento stated. “As long as there’s racism, there’s no democracy, and fighting for democracy is fighting against the Jair Bolsonaro government.” Bolsonaro is a right-wing former military officer elected Brazil’s president in 2019.

This working-class internationalism was driven by the realization that twenty-first-century economic, environmental, and social problems cannot be resolved one country at a time. Global crises must be addressed by people’s solidarity networks that draw lessons from earlier insurgencies, such as the transnational movement to end South Africa's forty-year racist apartheid regime. The blossoming of BLM into a worldwide movement reflected a broad understanding that democracy required the building of cooperative bridges across the fortified walls and borders that repressive governments erect to stifle dissent and to insulate themselves from immigration and any and all “foreign” influences. 

The Black Lives Matter Movement’s emphasis on intersectional and internationalist approaches to social problems helped to inspire a revival of direct-action unionism and new labor organizing in the United States. The West Coast–based International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union shut down ports from Washington State to Southern California to protest the police murder of George Floyd. “There’s no good thing about today,” Gabriel Prawl, former president of the Seattle longshore union argued. “W e’re talking about someone's life that was taken. This is the first step in moving toward building a force that cares about the world and can change the world.” Across the country, bus drivers, teachers, communication workers, letter carriers, and other unionists (with the notable exception of police union members) organized wildcat strikes, teach-ins, and informational pickets to educate fellow members and the broader public on the intersections of anti-labor, anti-LGBTQI+, anti-immigrant, and anti-Black politics. In June 2020, hundreds of New York Times employees organized a “sickout” after their paper published an editorial demanding an “overwhelming show of force” against BLM activists. Union bus drivers in Minneapolis collectively refused to transport riot police called out to suppress local Black Lives Matter marchers after one officer recorded a social media video bragging, “We’re the bone crushers, and we’re going to kick some n-----s’ asses.”

A new sense of possibility enabled by popular insurgencies, tighter labor markets, and anger against corporate profiteering and disregard for worker safety during the COVID-19 crisis created new openings to challenge the status quo. Casey Moore, a barista and organizer at a Buffalo Starbucks that successfully unionized in 2021, observed, “So many people who work at Starbucks were out on the streets for the Black Lives Matter uprising . . . I think so many people have seen collective action happening outside the workplace and are saying, ‘Hey, we can do that inside the workplace too.’” Reflecting that “the liberation of Black People comes through organized workers pushing back against the system,” Victor Bouzi, a member of International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees Local 695 in Hollywood, stated that BLM activism as well as anti-capitalist hip-hop artists such as Immortal Technique inspired him to demand that his union go beyond collective bargaining to support  broader working-class struggles for justice. “Hey Jeff Bezos, I’m going to let you know something today: we are just getting started,” former Amazon worker Chris Smalls vowed at a Washington, D.C., rally where he discussed an audacious campaign to unionize the Amazon JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island. “Give a good reason why we don’t deserve a thirty dollar minimum wage when this man makes four thousand dollars a second.”

Historian Donna Murch has called this radical turn “intersectional unionism,” and it hearkens back to an oft-forgotten era of labor when organizations like the IWW and the Partido Liberal Mexicano embraced ideas of socialism and anti-racism in contrast to the nativism and parochialism of mainstream craft unions like those that constituted the bulk of the American Federation of Labor before and after World War I. Murch notes that “this new labor movement skews black, brown, and female. It is steeped in the social justice unionism that has been growing since the early 1970s. Black feminist concepts such as intersectionality and prison abolition have influenced a younger generation of labor organizers; they have repudiated the Cold War’s narrow bread-and-butter unionism, which benefited the most elite workers, who were overwhelmingly white and male.” Younger activists in particular (those born roughly between 1997 and 2012) bring a more intersectional approach to the workplace. As Elise Joshi, of the activist organization Gen-Z for Change, explains, "It's obvious to Gen Z how all of the issues are connected, and how in order to combat one issue, we must address them all."

A dramatic upsurge of strike activity prior to the pandemic in 2020 helped to fuel this wave of labor organizing. In 2018, 485,200 workers went on strike, up from 25,300 workers the year before. Many of these strikers were teachers and other education workers;  statewide teacher strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona in 2018 extended through 2019 with protests and strike activity in districts in Kentucky, North Carolina, Colorado, Georgia, Virginia, and California. These job actions by education workers, who were striking specifically against neoliberal policies of public school privatization and defunding of public institutions, became known as the “Red for Ed” movement. Special education teacher Bethany Myers expressed the frustration of her fellow Oakland, California, public school educators who overwhelmingly voted in support of striking on February 21, 2019. In common with many other school districts in the United States, public officials had diverted tens of millions of dollars away from Oakland’s classrooms in favor of charter schools. Myers observed, “It does seem like the district is broke on purpose.” Less funding meant larger classes: “A teacher is like a pie,” Myers said. “Do you want your kid to get one thirtieth of a pie? Or one twenty-fifth of a pie? The larger the group, the less you are able to give.” Borrowing tactics from the Chicago Teachers Union, which had waged a successful struggle in 2012 linking striking teachers’ working conditions with their students learning conditions, members of the Oakland Education Association reached out directly to parents, churches, and civic organizations months before their strike vote to explain that their goals included achieving smaller class sizes, more resources for special education, and the hiring of more counselors for students. While the district’s eighty-six schools remained open during the Oakland walkout, most families kept their children at home in solidarity with the teachers. This resulted in a near-total victory for the striking teachers.

The 2020 presidential election pitted the incumbent, Donald Trump, against the Democratic Party nominee, Joe Biden. Biden had been a long-serving and fairly mainstream senator from Delaware when he was selected by Barack Obama as his vice presidential running mate in 2008 and again in 2012. Biden had withstood a major challenge in the party primary from several other candidates, most notably Senator Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist and independently aligned politician from Vermont, who had used his strong base among progressive young voters to similarly challenge Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic Party nomination. In the 2020 election, Biden garnered seven million more votes nationally than Trump, which more than doubled Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory in the popular vote against Trump in the 2016 election (in which she lost to Trump in the Electoral College). Biden’s supporters increased his margin of victory over Trump and ensured success in the Electoral College by narrowly “flipping” battleground states like Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. In Arizona, volunteer union members from Los Angeles and supporters from as far away as New Jersey and New York phone-banked, stuffed envelopes, sent postcards, and even went door to door to help Biden eke out a narrow majority of 0.3 percent in that state. Latinx votes in the other battleground states proved pivotal to Biden’s victory. It was estimated that members of the Latina-led Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas knocked on more than a half a million doors on behalf of Biden. The global pandemic, then in full force, posed an immense challenge to the fall 2020 election process, especially during the spring and summer primary season. Several states revised voting procedures to facilitate early voting and mail-in ballots to create safer voting conditions as well as to expand polling access. One result of this increased accessibility was that 20 million more votes were cast in the 2020 presidential election than in 2016. Despite the numerous new systems put into place and unfounded pre-election fears of election fraud raised by Trump and his supporters, there was no credible evidence of election dysfunction, vote rigging, or miscounting.

Reprising a racist and false claim that he had also made right after the 2016 elections, Trump nonetheless alleged that hundreds of thousands of “illegal immigrants” had voted for his opponent. Trump alleged widespread voting fraud and demanded, without success, that Republican officials in Georgia and Arizona overturn their state’s certified election results. In a bid to stage what is known in Latin America as an autogolpe (a self-coup), Trump called on his followers to gather in Washington, D.C., on January 5 and 6, 2021, to demand that Vice President Mike Pence and the Congress reject the Electoral College outcome and declare Trump the winner. In the weeks leading up to the January 6 rally, participants on several reactionary social media platforms called for an armed show of force in Washington in support of Trump and his false claims. On January 6, thousands of Trump supporters gathered for speeches and a rally just south of the White House. In his speech at the rally, Trump declared that he would never concede to Biden and repeatedly called upon the crowd to fight for him, as the crowd chanted “Storm the Capitol.” At least eight thousand protesters, including members of right-wing paramilitary groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, marched to the U.S. Capitol Building, stormed the security barriers, and attacked the police officers on duty there. Congress was in the process of voting to formally accept the electoral votes state by state when it was forced to adjourn and evacuate as the crowd broke in and rampaged through the building. Video footage and images from inside the Capitol spread via television and social media, and Americans watched in horror as rioters with Confederate flags paraded in the corridors and occupied the Senate and House chambers, seized control of representatives’ offices, violently attacked Capitol police officers, and threatened bodily harm to many public officials, including not only Democratic lawmakers but also Vice President Pence. After four hours in recess, during which additional police and National Guard troops finally were able to forcibly clear the Capitol building of protesters, Congress was able to reconvene and certify Biden’s Electoral College victory.

January 6 proved the closest the country had ever come to a successful plot to overturn the results of a democratic election. Democrats had, in fact, taken control of not only the presidency in the 2020 election but also both houses of Congress, though their margin in the House was razor thin and they were effectively tied with Republicans in terms of the number of senators. Trump’s efforts to lead a coup led to his second formal impeachment by the House of Representatives (the first impeachment had come over Trump’s efforts in July 2019 to pressure Ukraine’s president to help him dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his family, who, Trump correctly assumed, would be his opponent in the 2020 election). Both formal impeachments of Trump failed, however, to secure the necessary votes in the U.S. Senate to convict him of wrongdoing. The U.S. Justice Department launched full-scale investigations and then filed formal legal charges against almost one thousand individuals who helped plan or actually participated in the storming of the Capitol. As of summer 2023, four hundred of those charged, including the putative leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys paramilitary organization, have been convicted of federal crimes and sentenced to prison.

The failed impeachment votes did not stop Democrats in the House from launching their own parallel and detailed investigation of what happened at the Capitol on January 6 and what role Trump and other Republican leaders had played in various stages of the attempted coup. Examining witnesses under oath and seeking independent corroboration, the January 6 joint committee (which included not only Democratic representatives but also two Republicans) issued a damning report in late December 2022, detailing the complicity of Republican Party officials, right-wing donors, paramilitary groups, activists, and lawyers in planning and executing a complex plot to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election, using lies and wild accusations to convince the majority of Republican voters that Joe Biden had “stolen” the election from Donald Trump. Trump vowed that he would never accept the results of the 2020 election, even as he has been investigated by local, state, and federal legal authorities for his role in the plot. On August 1, 2023, after an eight-month investigation by a special prosecutor appointed by the Justice Department, the federal government charged Trump himself with four felony counts related to the events of January 6: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights (a charge based on the 1870 Enforcement Acts, passed during Reconstruction to enable the federal government to intervene when states failed to protect African American voting rights). Only weeks later, a grand jury in Georgia charged Trump and eighteen co-conspirators with criminally interfering in that state’s election. The fate of the nation’s democratic institutions and norms hangs in the balance as the country faces a reprise of the Biden-Trump presidential campaign and election in 2024.

As the Democratic Party’s nominee for the presidency, candidate Joe Biden had vowed, “I intend to be the most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American history.” As a longtime U.S. senator, Biden was undoubtedly aware that this would be perhaps the most difficult of his campaign promises to keep. As a result of the power of U.S. capitalist institutions, U.S. labor law is fundamentally pro-employer and anti-worker; organizing a union in the United States is extremely difficult.  As of 2023, President Biden has been unable to achieve significant labor law reforms that would give U.S. laboring people rights to organize that are equal to their counterparts in western Europe.

But workers, first by the thousands and then by the tens of thousands, did not wait for the federal government to undertake labor actions. As the pandemic began to ease in late 2021 and 2022, employees began organizing unions in their workplaces and existing unions launched a wave of major strikes at companies as diverse as Kaiser Permanente, John Deere, Kellogg’s, and Warrior Met Coal in Alabama. Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker captured this renaissance of worker self-activity in its documentation of 265 work stoppages in 2021 that resulted in approximately 3,270,000 strike days. Cornell’s researchers found that the surge of labor activity peaked in the fall, a period the labor movement dubbed “Striketober,” and that nonunion workers had organized strikes despite lacking formal union recognition. According to statistics from the National Labor Relations Board, the momentum continued into 2022, with union representation petitions increasing by 58 percent over the previous year, while unfair labor practice charges increased by 16 percent.

In 2022, forty-eight thousand academic workers in the University of California system went out on strike in the largest labor action of its kind in the history of U.S. higher education. In common with other academic workers in the United States, graduate students in the UC system perform much of the research and teaching in their respective institutions. However, they are unable to pay their basic living expenses on salaries of approximately $23,000 a year in one of the most expensive states in the country. The strike underscored the steady reductions in state funding for higher education that have occurred throughout the nation as well as in California, where tuition for college students was once free. Ximena Anleu Gil, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis explained why she went on strike: “It is really hard to focus on my responsibilities as a student researcher and teaching assistant when month after month I’m trying to figure out how to make ends meet. The current system is not sustainable. We’re presenting to the UC a very reasonable way to help lift workers out of a very dire situation and we’re just disappointed that they are still not taking this issue seriously. We want to go back to our students, we want to go back to our research.” Labor studies scholar Rebecca Given argues that “higher education workers across the country will look to [the UC strike] as an example both of what you can win with collective action and a new set of standards and a new minimum where workers demand a living wage,” she said. “You can’t set up a university that depends on workers who don’t make a living wage.”

After just a year of official organizing by the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), an independent labor union, workers at Amazon’s JFK8 fulfillment center voted to form a union, becoming the first unionized Amazon workers recognized by the National Labor Relations Board. This historic 2022 union election triumph in New York relied on innovative workplace- and community-based organizing. Immigrant workers at the facility played a key role in these organizing strategies, which highlights a venerable truth: the health of the labor movement has always depended on the leadership and contributions of new immigrants, whether they are citizens or noncitizens. People from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and other places bring traditions of mutual aid, deliberative dialogue, and activism that have reenergized U.S. political culture from the earliest days of the republic. Brima Sylla, an immigrant from Liberia, became a key organizer for the Amazon Labor Union effort in Staten Island. In the wake of ALU’s success, the fifty-five-year-old activist discussed his organizing approach inside Amazon: “I’ve never been part of a union, but I do have a lot of experience with organization because I’m the general secretary of ACASI, the African Community Alliance of Staten Island. And I’ve got skills, not just with social media, but also with languages—I speak French, Arabic, English, and three African languages. So that made it a lot easier for me to communicate with immigrant workers inside the building. And there are a lot of us here at Amazon—Senegalese, Nigerians, Liberians, Ghanaians, Algerians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Pakistanis, Albanians, Polish, Filipinos, Malaysians, and a lot of Latinos.” Sylla used his multilingual and social media skills to create an “African votes 4 ALU” WhatsApp group along with WhatsApp chats for Caribbean, Latino, and Asian workers at Amazon. These social media networks enhanced the ability of union members to come to each other’s defense at work as well as to dispel misinformation promoted by management about the organizing campaign.

Beto Sanchez, a union organizer with Starbucks Workers United in Memphis, Tennessee, described organizing as “deeply embedded in Latino culture.” Latina women in California, where Latinos make up approximately 60 percent of the workforce in the fast-food industry, led the successful effort in 2022 to pass the state’s groundbreaking Fast Food Accountability and Standards Recovery Act (AB 257), which improved wages and working conditions for fast-food workers.  Despite facing opposition from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other powerful employers’ associations, fast-food workers like Angelica Hernandez refused to quit. She became especially active in the coalition to support AB 257 after she learned that her son would be joining her as a worker at McDonald's. "I didn't want to see him suffer and be degraded like I have," she recalled. “As Latinos,” Hernandez continued,  “sometimes they see us as if we don't know how to defend ourselves," she added. “But it’s not just fast-food workers that are standing up and fighting. It's also the carpenters, the farmworkers . . . We’re all raising our voices as a Latino community.”

From 2016 to 2022, the organizing wave culminating in Black Lives Matter and the revival of the labor movement has constituted one of the most remarkable social movement building periods in U.S. history. The obstacles to creating democracy in workplaces, legislatures, and civil society were daunting. State violence, laws punishing dissent, and the global pandemic were barriers that ordinary Americans surmounted to sustain assemblies, picket lines, barricades, tent cities, and other forms of free association during this era.  The successes earned by people in the insurgencies in these years can be attributed to their willingness to listen carefully to others, their openness to forming new alliances, and their ability to draw upon the lessons of movement history to inform their work. In addition, the courage of Native Americans, African Americans, and Latinx protesters in the face of federal troops, private militias, and other armed constabularies inspired people all across the world to think anew about links between racial, gender, and environmental justice issues.

The working-class-led uprisings of 2020–22 helped stop the nation from veering further toward fascism by embracing solidarity, workplace democracy, and internationalism. In an echo of the Great Depression of the 1930s, mass actions and sustained protest helped push Biden’s Treasury Department and other agencies to create programs to benefit workers, small businesses, and family farmers during the COVID-19 crisis. This was in sharp contrast to the Great Recession of 2007–9, when the lion’s share of federal relief went to banks and large financial institutions. While the benefits of most COVID-19 relief programs were skewed more towards the “haves” than the “have nots,” the amount of aid that eventually made it to local communities helped to sustain millions of Americans during the crisis. The people’s organizing surge between 2020 and 2022 proves that the Industrial Workers of the World’s maxim, “Direct action gets the goods,” is truer than ever.

This renaissance of working-class self-activity faces formidable challenges in a nation whose institutions and main levers of power continue to be dominated by the wealthiest citizens.  Seventy-one percent of Americans approve of unions (up from 64 percent before the pandemic), and yet the percentage of workers covered by union contracts continues to decline, dropping into the single digits in the private sector. Public sector unionism is the last major bastion of union power in the United States. Despite such popular support for unions, bosses that suppress employee organizing through intimidation, retaliation, and delay face almost no legal consequences for doing so. To cite just one of many examples, baristas in over 260 Starbucks restaurants voted in favor of unionization, and by the time of this writing, not a single store has secured let alone ratified a union contract. While the National Labor Relations Board opened investigations of alleged illegal harassment of union activists at Starbucks, the U.S. Supreme Court appears poised once again to render a series of decisions that will substantially reduce the ability of workers to engage in collective action. But workers remain undaunted nonetheless. After she and her fellow Starbucks baristas had successfully organized a union in New Orleans, Serena Sojic-Borne gained confidence in the efficacy of collective action.  “So the main lesson for me from this union drive,” Sojic-Borne concluded, “has been that we shouldn't be afraid to fight, we shouldn't be afraid to unionize. We shouldn't be afraid to strike. When we do it together, when we do it with our co-workers, when we show solidarity with each other, we can win gains and we can minimize what the boss can do to us.”

The Reverend William Barber personifies the return to grassroots organizing that broadly characterizes U.S. society in recent years. Rev. Barber has encouraged a return to the key economic insights of the civil rights movement by helping create a new version of the Poor People’s Campaign (which he co-chairs), originally founded in 1968 by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In his later speeches, King demanded that poverty should be addressed with solutions such as slavery reparations, the return of stolen land to Native Americans, collective bargaining, and massive aid to poor whites in Appalachia and other regions.

The new Poor People’s Campaign convened in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2022 for the Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington.  Delegates from every state in the union traveled by bus to testify at the assembly about the impacts of global climate change, mass incarceration, endless war, and other social problems on their communities. The voices of Native Americans and working-class people were foregrounded so that both oppression and liberation were discussed in the first person. Politicians were not invited to speak. Delegates from Native American reservations, border towns, and Rust Belt cities emphasized that it is necessary for the poorest people in society to be legitimate agents of change—or else change is impossible. Tens of thousands of union members participated along with faith-based groups, voting rights organizations, LGBTQI+ activists, socialists, and others. Event co-chair Rev. Liz Theoharis spoke of the role of storytelling in helping people learn about each other’s struggles, so that they no longer needed to internalize guilt about their suffering but rather could unite to forge solutions to defeat poverty. Barber addressed the challenges facing the working-class movement and urged participants to gear up for those ahead: “Because we don’t have sufficient federal protections,” he asserted, “we still have actors in state legislatures in forty-nine states trying to, and in many ways succeeding in, suppressing the vote, blocking living wages, police reform, health care, education funding, and many more. So, we are not gathered here to commemorate something that happened once upon a time. We are here today to continue the work of our foreparents who fought to expand democracy and make ‘liberty and justice for all’ a reality.”

—Gainesville, Florida, May 24, 2023