Black History Month: African Americans and Labor – Right To Non-Discriminatory Work Under DEI Attack

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

Are some delusional white supremacists deliberately attacking a Black person’s right to work and to vote, as some celebrate Black History Month (BHM) in 2025?

This year’s Black History Month theme is “African-Americans and Labor.” The theme was chosen by members of the 120-year-old Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. Each year, members choose an annual theme years in advance but each annual theme is only food for thought. Each annual BHM theme “is instructive” and aims to explore the past, present and future of social movements, racial ideologies, and Black aspirations, the association explained on its website.

President Donald Trump’s victory at the polls in November has now led to a recent federal DEI executive order. This means the right to work and the right to vote are both under attack for people of color, in other words. Clearly, the right to work and the right to vote are not new. Instead, they are age-old challenges that resemble the mythical Greek Medusa creature who had writhing monstrous snakes in her hair and used her head as a weapon. All of Medusa’s siblings were monsters by birth. They turned human beings who looked at them directly into a pillar of stone.

Gerrymandering, voter purges and intimidation, plus manipulation have performed a similar feat.

An estimated 89 million Americans, or about 36 percent of the country’s voting-eligible population, did not vote in the 2024 general election. According to a landmark March 2024 Brennan Center report, many states are trying to make it harder for Blacks to vote. At least 14 states passed 17 restrictive voting laws that make it harder to vote since Shelby County v. Holder freed states from federal review.

“It’s hard for people to vote when they literally feel attacked to vote,” said Rep. Steve Horsford, the incoming Congressional Black Caucus chair. “It’s not about the voters being a problem. It’s about the political system needing to adapt to where our country is and where we want it to go.”

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This means on one hand GOP leaders are making it harder for people of color to vote. On the other hand, Target, Amazon, Meta, Walmart, McDonald’s and others recently changed or ended their DEI programs after Trump placed employees in any federal diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility offices on leave, and said the administration plans to take further aim at diversity programs.

Employees in any federal diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility offices will be placed on paid administrative leave “effective immediately,” according to a post from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Trump has already cut high-profile military personnel and ended the use of DEI in hiring and federal contracting. Some major companies have taken similar measures as they face pressure from conservative critics and customers.

In a sense, the United States Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands turned Blacks into pillars of stone when it was founded on March 3, 1865, shortly after slavery ended. The bureau dreamed up Black Codes, laws that required newly freed slaves to sign labor contracts with white farmers on terms nearly indistinguishable from slavery.

Black codes varied from state to state but Mississippi and South Carolina Black Codes, for example, stated, “Every civil officer shall, and every person may, arrest and carry back to his or her legal employer any freedman, free negro, or mulatto who shall have quit the service of his or her employer before the expiration of his or her term of service without good cause … All freedmen, free negroes and mulattoes in this State, over the age of eighteen years…with no lawful employment or business … shall be deemed vagrants … All persons of color who make contracts for service or labor, shall be known as servants, and those with whom they contract, shall be known as masters.”

Instead of becoming pillars of stone, newly freed slaves solved the problem of working long hours for incredibly low wages as sharecroppers by leaving everything behind in their cramped sharecropper shacks. They voluntarily relocated. The Great Migration was a mass movement, in other words. Nearly five million southern Blacks relocated from the South, to the North and West from 1915-1960.

“During an 1880 investigation that the U.S. Senate launched to discover why large numbers of African-Americans were leaving the South, Henry Adams of Shreveport, one of the 153 people the Senate interviewed helped establish the Colored Men’s Protective Union to document instances of discrimination and racial violence against African-American communities,” the National Museum of African-American History and Culture noted on its website.

“His organization collected testimonies from 700 Louisianans and received nearly 100,000 signatures stating that African-Americans in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama wanted to leave the South.”

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The point is the Great Migration was a mass movement. Some Blacks walked. Others boarded buses. Others hopped on trains or fled in cars. About five million Blacks relocated from the South to the North and West from 1915-1960.

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Instead of urging millions of Blacks to become pillars of stone, Black civil rights leaders rolled up their sleeves and vigorously discussed integrating the military with President Harry S. Truman, who signed executive order 9981 on July 26, 1948.

Executive Order 9981 required “equal treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.” And the policy was to be “put into effect as rapidly as possible but with careful consideration to not affect military efficiency or morale,” the National Museum of African-American History and Culture noted on its website.

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