...This chapter recounts the successful effort by a multi-racial group of 19,000 men and women at the Newport News shipyard to form a union with the steelworkers union in 1978, and a brutal strike in 1979 in which the workers fought for a union contract. The civil and women’s rights movements clearly...

... wages in the hope of one day purchasing their freedom. It also narrates the arrival of war in their part of Newport News, Virginia, and the way in which planters in the region began leaving the area first. This opened up room for enslaved people like the Whitehursts to flee to Union lines beginning...