Freedom Train: Steven Pitts in Conversation with Cedric de Leon

Today's episode features an interview by Steven Pitts, the former host and creator of our longest running podcast, Black Work Talk. He sat down with Professor of Sociology and Labor at University of Massachusetts - Amherst, Cedric de Leon, to discuss Cedric’s forthcoming book contracted with University of California Press, Freedom Train. In the book, Cedric centers the monumental contributions of Black workers to desegregating the labor movement and connecting the struggles of organized labor to those of civil society before and during the civil rights era. It excavates the era’s intra-movement conflicts as well as the way that labor leaders and rank and file workers were critical not just in organizing their workplaces but in galvanizing the government to act on crucial pieces of policy, from desegregating the defense industry under the auspices of the New Deal to creating pressure for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s. You can find an excerpt of the interview already available in print on Convergence's website. Find more about Cedric's work here. To support this show and others like, consider joining a Patreon subscriber: Patreon.com/convergencemag