100 Books Like Workers on Arrival

This was a book I first read nearly fifty years ago after my childhood friend Nate Harrington taught me to read while we were in prison together at 18 and 19 years old. As part of our commitment to helping each other return to our communities as an asset and not a liability, the men in prison taught each other political education classes, which included reading key texts like Malcolm X’s autobiography.

This book gave me an indication that I could do something different with my life. That moment occurred when it was revealed that Malcolm was known as “Detroit Red” on the streets of New York City–but when he went to prison and found a true education, he also embraced a new identity and new way of life. He died as Malcolm. His journey indicated that I could make a transition, too. It also helped me recognize that If… show more.

Forman’s book is a must-read to learn why the War on Crime was not merely the work of one party or one racial group in society. Indeed, a number of people of color, including black mayors and black chiefs of police, strongly supported tough-on-crime measures.

The book raises the question of what it will take to reverse the trends of mass incarceration, given these realities.

This is the autobiography of one of the men hanged for the bombing at Chicago’s Haymarket that took place during the strikes for the eight-hour day that started on May 1, 1886.

He was born in Texas and, after fighting for the Confederacy as a teenager, switched sides and became an activist for the Radical Republicans who defended the rights of the freed people. When Reconstruction ended and Jim Crow was being built, Parsons was driven out of the South and went to Chicago. He came to see the exploitation of workers in the North as a new form of slavery – and the police as a key instrument in the hands of employers to maintain that new wage slavery.

In this work, written just days before he was executed, Parsons developed an early critique of the police and the entire modern system of law, which he saw as inextricably… show more.

Taibbi lays bare the overlapping problems of poverty, policing, mass incarceration, the Democratic Party, and modern protest politics by tracing the life, murder, and movement surrounding Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a police officer on the streets of New York in 2014.

Whatever you think of Taibbi, this book has one of the clearest explanations I have ever read of how a logical and well-meaning idea can become its opposite. “Broken windows theory” began as the idea that keeping cities clean and their residents free from harassment can make people feel safer and more invested in where they live.

In the abstract, this makes sense. But in the context of the massive attacks on the working class, and the black part of the working class in particular, the application of this theory by New York politicians and police officials led to the widespread “social rape” of young… show more.

Weaving in her own ancestral history, Kelley knits an extraordinary journey of the Black working class from slavery to our contemporary world—from Georgia to Philadelphia, Florida to Chicago, Texas to Oakland, we engage generations of mostly unheralded workers whose radical genius shaped our labor history and forged nourishing and joyful lives out-of-view of most white accounts of the working class.

Kelley’s prose celebrates and brings to the surface the hidden lives that improved our contemporary world. 

I knew about the history of enslaved people and the institution of slavery in the Americas. Still, until I read Jones’ book, I did not appreciate how slavery affected African-American women’s lives in so many different ways, even after the institution itself formally ended. 

I also gained a new understanding of their bravery, ingenuity, persistence, and contributions to their communities and American society more generally.  Jones tells their stories with empathy and great wisdom, shattering stereotypes and insisting that we pay attention to these women and their lives.

Anytime I am ever asked about a book on my top list, Du Bois’s book is a staple. Is it over 700 pages? Yes. Was it written over 100 years ago? Almost! Still, Du Bois’ arguments are evergreen.

Written with accessible and some might argue biting language, Du Bois gets to the heart of what the Civil War was really fought over, not slavery, but labor. Before one can get free, you have to know why you were enslaved.

The wealth gap between Blacks and Whites in the U.S. is enormous! Whites have 10 times the wealth as Blacks. The disparity is not because Whites are smarter or have worked harder. This book does a masterful job of clearly explaining one of the reasons behind the wide wealth gap. 

Most people are aware of the fact that 246 years of slavery was a successful government policy that intentionally enriched Whites while simultaneously impoverishing Blacks. But most people are not aware that a new system with the same dual objectives, followed the abolition of slavery in 1865. This book tells the story of Black Codes, Vagrancy Laws, and convict leasing that occurred for 60 years after the passage of the 13th Amendment, emancipating Black enslaved people. These government supported policies replaced slavery as the new program to subsidize White wealth creation at the expense of millions of Blacks. 

Douglas Blackman… show more.

As someone who has written about women in the underground economy in the 1850s, I appreciated having this additional perspective on Black working women in the 1920s who were variously numbers runners, psychics, and sex workers.

These jobs gave women an opportunity to make money at a time when so many options were cut off for them. I especially enjoyed reading about Stephanie St. Claire, who held a huge influence in Harlem in the numbers runners game and defied the authorities and mafia gang leaders while making a lot of money at her work. Her story is phenomenal, and Harris does it great justice.

When I studied with James Alan McPherson at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop over twenty years ago, he played stand-up records from the 1970s and asked students to read ancient drama translated from Latin.

He was teaching us how comedy works, and he had a long gaze. His collection Elbow Room is similarly expansive. The past bubbles into the present abruptly, as in the story “A Loaf of Bread,” where “older people began grabbing, as if the secret lusts of a lifetime had suddenly seized command of their arms and eyes.”