Tales from the Reuther Library

Dr. Justine Modica discusses the Worthy Wages movement centered in Seattle from the 1980s through the 2000s. Affiliated with SEIU, daycare directors and childcare workers in childcare centers and home-based daycares joined together to raise public awareness of the underfunding of daycare and lobby for increased state childcare subsidies, hoping to increase the wages and retention of skilled workers in a lowly-paid but critical field.

Modica is a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in History at Cornell University. She authored the article, “Worthy Wages in the Emerald City: Worker- and Director-Led Childcare Movements in Seattle, 1984–2006,” and is writing a book examining how the government, employers, and families have shaped childcare as wage labor.

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Dr. Lori Flores discusses food systems in the US and Northeast region specifically, illuminating how the nation has developed a growing appetite for both Latinx food and Latinx food laborers, who are often underpaid and under-nourished as they help grow, process, transport, prepare, and serve food across the country. Flores is an associate professor of history at Stony Brook University and author of Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to COVID-19..

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Dr. Harris Dousemetzis shares the extraordinary impact of U.S. President Jimmy Carter on gay rights in the 1970s and early 1980s, from instituting policies to prevent anti-gay discrimination of most federal employees to facilitating IRS nonprofit status for gay rights organizations and community centers, enabling them to receive federal funding for educational materials and health clinics, among other things. While Carter’s actions were unprecedented and pivotal, Dousemetzis also describes how they created a strong backlash among Evangelicals opposed to gay rights.

Dr. Dousemetzis is a lecturer at the University of Sunderland and a tutor at Durham University, UK, and author of The Carter Presidency and Gay Rights: The Revolution that Dared Not Speak Its Name.

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Reuther Library audiovisual archivist Mary Wallace has worn many hats over the past 27 years, from student page in the Reading Room to interim director and chief weather-spotter and safety monitor. As she prepares to retire in January 2025, Wallace reflects on the changes she’s seen at the Reuther and in the field, shares a few of her favorite collections and reference requests, and retells some of the more entertaining stories of life at the Reuther.

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Dr. Felicia George explains how number lotteries in the city’s Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods in the 20th century, although illegal and rife with exploitation, also raised some Black Detroiters out of poverty and created an important social support in a community stressed by racial discrimination and job insecurity.

Dr. George is an adjunct professor of anthropology at Wayne State University and the author of When Detroit Played the Numbers: Gambling’s History and Cultural Impact on the Motor City.

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Dr. Jesse Chanin describes how the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) gained power and influence in a region hostile to unions from the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s by building trust in the community with transparent and democratic decision-making and a focus on racial and economic justice to improve the lives of the New Orleans community. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, however, politicians and charter school advocates fired 7,500 educators in New Orleans, dismantling the city’s public education system and decimating the union.

Dr. Chanin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Coalition for Compassionate Schools and the author of Building Power, Breaking Power: The United Teachers of New Orleans, 1965-2008.

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Dr. Jay Cephas considers two Depression-era murals in Detroit and their contrasting messaging about workers, labor, and power. Diego Rivera’s famed Detroit Industry murals, commissioned by Edsel Ford for the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1932, champions industrial and technological progress and the factory workers who fueled it. In contrast, Walter Speck and Barbara Wilson’s 1937 untitled mural, which originally hung in the UAW Local 174 union hall and now hangs behind the reference desk at the Reuther Library, champions the progress those industrial workers made laboring for their own welfare via union action.

Dr. Cephas is Assistant Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. His essay “Detroit Industry and ‘The Mural’: Representing Labor and Reappropriating Care in the Museum and in the Union Hall,” was published in the 2023 volume, Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common.

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Dr. Say Burgin explains that contrary to the common belief that white activists were purged from the Black freedom movement in the mid-1960 and 1970s, Black-led organizations in Detroit – including the Northern Student Movement, the City-Wide Citizens Action Committee, and the League of Revolutionary Workers—called on white activists to organize within their own white networks to support Black self-determination in education, policing, employment, and labor unions. Burgin is an assistant professor of history at Dickinson College and author of Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit.

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Dr. Max Fraser shares the often overlooked story of the “hillbilly highway,” the route nearly eight million poor, rural, white Americans took in the 20th century from economically depressed areas in the Southeastern and Southern United States toward higher paying factory jobs in the Upper South and Midwest. He explains how the social advancement and marginalization they experienced transformed American culture, the labor movement, and today’s political landscape.

Dr. Fraser is an assistant professor of History at the University of Miami. His book Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class received an Honorable Mention for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.

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Rachel Shteir shares how Betty Friedan’s early experience as a labor reporter for the Federated Press informed her later work as a famed women’s rights activist, author of The Feminine Mystique, and co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Although Friedan’s activism shaped the American women’s movement in the latter half of the 20th century, Shteir also notes that her pugilistic attitude ignored or antagonized would-be allies, including non-white women and lesbians. Shteir is head of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism in the Theatre School at DePaul University and is the author of Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter, a finalist in the biography category for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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