Introduction Public-Sector Workers and the Battle over Cities Following the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody in Baltimore in 2015, city residents took to the streets in large numbers to protest police brutality and press the claim that Black Lives Matter. "We''re in a state of emergency," Tawanda Jones passionately declared at one demonstration. Two years earlier, Jones herself had lost a brother, who died following a struggle with police officers who were never prosecuted. She had been holding weekly rallies ever since to call attention to her brother''s case and the larger issue of police brutality, and she joined the Gray protests as well. Jones was not the only person in Baltimore to mourn Gray''s loss without having known him personally. "Most of us are not here because we knew Freddie Gray; most of us are here because we knew a lot Freddie Grays. Too many," grieved William "Billy" Murphy, a prominent local attorney who was representing the Gray family and who was speaking at Freddie''s funeral. Elijah Cummings, who represented Baltimore in the U.

S. Senate, spoke at the funeral as well. And he also called attention to the issue of who knew--and did not know--Gray and other Black Baltimoreans like him. "When I look at all the cameras, I wonder: did you recognize Freddie when he was alive? Did you see him? Did you see him? Did you see him?" Jones made a similar point, but even more trenchantly: "We are not the enemy." Jones''s comment that Black Baltimore was not the enemy was most immediately a rebuke of the Baltimore Police Department, which had been the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department because of brutality cases even before Gray''s death. Her remark also, however, communicated a powerful critique of a reality in Baltimore that was not caused solely by the behavior of the police.

The city certainly served as an example of the devastating consequences of the nation''s racially biased carceral state. But more generative of Baltimore''s pressing problems was the tremendous race- and class-based economic gap that sharply divided the city. The journalists who descended on Baltimore following Gray''s death could hardly fail to notice the glaring disparities between the city''s commercially redeveloped downtown area and the hypersegregated, overpoliced, low-income African American neighborhoods such as Sandtown-Winchester, where Gray had lived. Hugging Baltimore''s harbor were glistening skyscrapers and office buildings that were home to such investment and wealth management firms as Legg Mason and T. Rowe Price and such transnational professional services corporations as PricewaterhouseCoopers, companies that were thriving in the nation''s postindustrial economy. Luxury condominium complexes and upscale hotels also bordered the harbor and provided many of the patrons for nearby boutiques, high-end restaurants, Major League stadiums, and waterfront tourist attractions. But not too far away from downtown in the city''s poorest neighborhoods there existed another Baltimore, one that looked familiar to the fans of HBO''s drama series The Wire . There, the boards that sealed the door and window openings of two- and three-story row houses identified the many properties that were vacant or abandoned and reflected the reality that the neighborhood had seen better days.

Corner convenience and liquor stores were fairly easy to come by, as were pawn shops, but a trip to the grocery store required of many a bus ticket, taxi ride, or very long walk. And while residents certainly took pride in their neighborhoods, achievements, and potential, grim statistics painted a portrait of the consequences of decades of neglect. In Sandtown-Winchester, children were more likely to go to jail than to college, and half lived in poverty. The infant mortality rate surpassed that in some developing countries, and life expectancy was more than a decade less than the American average--despite the presence of two internationally renowned hospitals in the city. In addition, the unemployment rate spoke volumes about two pressing problems that were the source of much economic hardship in the city. At 21.5 percent, almost four times the national average, this rate signaled the urgent need for new employment opportunities in the city. Simultaneously, it reflected the alarming fact that most residents already had at least one job but were still struggling to get by.

And while waterfront condominiums and the city''s poorest neighborhoods represented the two extremes between which most Baltimore residents lived, it was hard to imagine how such discrepancies existed without concluding that many local and national policy makers did in fact consider Black Baltimoreans the enemy. There was a time some sixty years earlier when a different future for Baltimore had seemed possible, when the city''s Black and low-income residents were not seen as ubiquitously as the enemy. During the 1960s, the federal government passed sweeping civil rights legislation and launched a War on Poverty. For decades, civil rights activists in Baltimore had been fighting white supremacy in the Jim Crow city, and among their top priorities were better employment opportunities for Black workers, increased political influence in the local government, and access to the quality of government services and public provisions available to whites. The activists saw in the War on Poverty, and the jobs it created in the municipal government, a means to achieve some of their goals. They leveraged the power of the Black electorate, which was increasing in importance as the city experienced white flight and pressured predominantly white and reluctant elected officials to open new antipoverty jobs and other positions in existing municipal departments to Black workers. The efforts met with considerable success. By 1970, half of the city government''s workers were African American, a figure that had risen dramatically in just six years.

In turn, a vocal contingent of the city''s new Black employees--such as Parren Mitchell, the director of the city''s Community Action Agency, and Pearl Cole Brackett, who led Baltimore''s community schools program--used their positions within the government to pursue the goals of civil rights activists. And though the federal government''s commitment to fighting poverty quickly proved lackluster, the dedication of those who had become municipal antipoverty warriors did not. They attacked the racial and economic status quo in the city, fought to have low-income residents represented on the oversight bodies of municipal agencies, and used their new influence to attempt to shape urban planning. The efforts put them at odds with local business interests who had long called the shots in municipal governance and who favored trickle-down commercial revitalization projects to solve the city''s problems rather than the redistributive approach preferred by antipoverty workers. As they sought a voice for low-wage city residents in municipal decision-making, African American municipal employees also advocated on their own behalf as workers. Government jobs by no means guaranteed a living wage, so municipal employees--from sanitation workers to teachers--joined unions and demanded that the city consider their views when determining the terms of their employment. As historian Lane Windham argues about the nation''s "new working class" of the era, which included large numbers of public- and private-sector service providers and many people of color and women, commitments to civil rights campaigns hardly precluded workers from embracing collective forms of activism. African Americans played leading roles in public-sector unionization efforts in Baltimore.

Raymond Clarke, the president of the city''s largest local of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), helped lead the fight for recognition for his union and fought to improve the wages and working conditions of many of the municipal government''s lowest-paid employees. Dennis Crosby pursued similar goals for his members as the president of the Baltimore Teachers Union. Unionization campaigns in Baltimore, which mirrored efforts under way in other cities, helped to turn public-sector unions into some of the fastest-growing and most dynamic participants in the American labor movement. And public-sector unions became influential advocates for both government workers and the many important public services they provided. Although industrial unions were in decline at the time, and historian Jefferson Cowie''s focus on their predominantly white and male members has led him to dub the 1970s "the last days of the working class," those in the new working class, which included Baltimore''s public-sector workers, were just getting started. This book traces efforts by Black women and men in Baltimore to fight racial and economic injustice in their city and to play a role in charting their city''s future. I focus in particular on African American public-sector workers and their unions. During the 1960s and 1970s, the unionized public sector became a critical source of employment for African Americans that gave rise to the city''s Black middle class and also to the relative economic security enjoyed by many with pink- and blue-collar government jobs.

During a period in urban history remembered primarily for deindustrialization and joblessness, civil rights and Black labor leaders had built an influential and union-protected job niche for African Americans that provided a refuge in the storm. Black women outpaced Black men in entering the public sector, and my focus on government employment enables me to emphasize the important role played by gender in African American urban history. At the same time that manufacturing job losses were creating the debilitating problem of structural unemployment among Black men, the job p.