It has been twenty years since Robert Korstad published his landmark history of tobacco worker unionism in the 1940s Piedmont South. But the book has never been more timely. Rereading his Civil Rights Unionism during the summer of 2022 proved a revelatory experience. It is not just that Korstad’s history of African-American efforts to build a trade union in the Jim Crow South is so epic in scope, so intimate in its reconstruction of the hopes and fears of a now forgotten set of heroic men and women, so moving in its tale of freedom lost, won, and lost again.

More important, it is a wonderful companion to the labor headlines of our own twenty-first-century day. Almost every time I finished a chapter, I’d check my Twitter feed to see if there were new developments at Starbucks, Amazon, REI, or Apple. And when there were, I invariably found that Civil Rights Unionism shed some new light on the obstacles and opportunities that workers face when they challenge entrenched power.

There is obviously a world of difference between the unionizing impulse stirring among the sometimes young, multicultural, gender-bending baristas now making trouble at coffee houses around the country and the African-American women who stemmed tobacco eighty years ago in in Winston-Salem. You can’t read Korstad’s book without understanding the difference. But his exploration of race and class power, of authority, subordination, rebellion, and repression also speaks powerfully and persuasively to the young radicals seeking to make a new world in our day.