This well-written and thoughtful historical synthesis begins with an endearing vignette. It is August 1963, in Washington, DC, and the author has spent most of the day with 100,000 other civil rights supporters listening to inspiring speeches and music. Late in the day, Robert Zieger decides to leave before the last speaker is introduced. At the time, it made sense: he had parked quite a distance away and he had to pick up his wife from her job. As a result, however, Zieger missed arguably the most significant speech in twentieth-century American history. In part, this book is a reflection upon that moment, not the untimely departure, but the social, economic, and political forces that combined to stage a march on Washington “for jobs and freedom.”

Zieger makes two basic assumptions and develops two predominant themes in this book. His first assumption is that it is appropriate “to focus on the experiences of African Americans and to consider other racial and ethnic groups in terms of their relationship to black workers” (p. 2). The second assumption is that labor unions are “legitimate” institutions of “a free democratic society” (p. 2). These feed into two themes: the battles of black workers to attain full citizenship rights, and the struggles of the labor movement to live up to its “egalitarian ideology” (p. 2). These assumptions and themes frame his argument that unions have promoted and fostered “workplace equity and civic engagement” (p. 6) and that African American and white workers have played critical roles both outside and within the labor movement to propel the “expansion of the suffrage, expansion of education opportunities, and at least since the 1930s, every important initiative in civil rights” (p. 7). Thus, Zieger challenges some historians such as Paul Moreno who see unions as a means to inhibit the free market and to perpetuate racial privilege by establishing white job trusts. He also challenges historians such as Bruce Nelson and David Roediger who have sharply criticized labor organizations that failed to deliver on the promise of racial egalitarianism. Rather, “in the end,” Zieger writes, unions played a “more edifying role than either free-market or collective-action critics posit” (p. 6).

To demonstrate his point, Zieger fashions a long narrative arc from Reconstruction to the present. At each turn, he emphasizes the racial and class conflicts at the very core of American politics and society and the often ambiguous and disappointing relationship between black workers and organized labor. Zieger recounts the economic setbacks, as freedmen and freedwomen became tenant farmers and sharecroppers. At the end of the nineteenth century, urban workers fared a little better, but discrimination by employers and by white workers and their unions limited blacks' post—Civil War advances. Still, there were moments when whites and blacks united. In turn-of-the-century New Orleans, for instance, white and black longshoremen built an alliance—albeit a “tenuous and fragile” one (p. 41)—that did advance the interests of both groups.

Zieger acknowledges that until the 1930s these interracial collaborations were the exception to the rule. Before the Great Depression and the New Deal, the black working class in the North “faced powerful currents of prejudice and hostility on the part of both employers and fellow workers” (p. 52). Life was still better there than in the South, which had a “reputation as the pathological exception to the national narrative of prosperity and progress” (p. 51). Labor unions were far too frequently part of these problems and rarely part of the solution. Slowly, however, organized labor began to realize the “steep price” it paid “for its intolerance” (p. 69). The advances made through interracial organizing by the United Mine Workers of America and the Industrial Workers of the World demonstrated the potential of an interracial labor movement. To create such a social force, however, labor unions would have to win over a wary black working class, which would have to decide where their loyalty had the most advantage: with employers or with unions. As Zieger puts it: “which side, in both the long run and the short, was more likely to erase the color line that kept blacks out of the best jobs and relegated them to low wages and uncertain employment?” (p. 83).

By the 1930s, despite the fits and starts of interracial labor organizing, African American workers increasingly chose unions over employers. Zieger explains that this related to the growth of federal intervention in the economy and society, which began during the First World War. Additionally, the labor movement itself—or at least important parts of it—actively recruited blacks. Zieger's analysis of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and its member unions as well as the American Federation of Labor is evenhanded and insightful. Yet, the optimism that the post—World War II period might bring a halcyon age of racial cooperation was misplaced. Federal agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and programs such as affirmative action proved divisive. Similarly several strikes of national importance such as the Ocean-Hill Brownsville strike (1968) and the Atlanta sanitation strike (1977) revealed nearly insurmountable obstacles to interracial cooperation. But, when the situation seemed at its most desperate in the 1980s, the labor movement “which had for decades regarded race and gender issues as distractions in its efforts to advance the interests of its core white male constituency,” Zieger writes, “now increasingly identified itself as a champion of interracial solidarity and cultural diversity” (p. 209). In this convergence of civil rights and labor rights within the last 20 years, Zieger finds hope as well as the political and social agenda for the twenty-first century.

For Jobs and Freedom is essential reading not just for historians but also for all scholars, their students, and social activists interested in the intersection of race, class, and politics. The book reflects the state of the art, and he nicely intertwines the complicated history of the labor and civil rights movements. In other words, he shows clearly why A. Philip Randolph labeled his demonstration a march for jobs and freedom. Furthermore, at a time when so much seems to be going so poorly, Zieger's book reminds us that there is hope in history.