By Nicole LeBlanc

The writer, a resident of Silver Spring, is a disability policy and advocacy consultant.

As we enter Year 1 of the Biden administration and Year 2 of this nightmarish pandemic, it is now more important than ever that we pass meaningful reform that focuses on moving away from segregated settings to a world where paying livable wages and ending benefit cliffs is part of the new normal for all people with disabilities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a bright light on the dangers of segregation and discriminatory employment practices like paying subminimum wage. In addition, it has highlighted the need to ensure that essential workers like direct support providers, retail and so forth, are paid decent wages for the work they do.

Many people with disabilities who are at high risk of catching or dying from COVID often work in jobs deemed essential. The practice of paying workers with disabilities subminimum wage based on their productivity has been around since the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act under Section 14C. Many people of color compare 14C subminimum wage to slavery. 14C is one clear example of the systemic ableism that exists in our society. 14C subminimum was does not promote self-determination or support people with developmental disabilities in becoming self-supporting.

Lastly, segregated employment is system-centered not person-centered.

As we look toward the next 30 years of the American with Disabilities Act we need to raise expectations for all adults with disabilities and their families on the value of real jobs for real pay. The time is now for the Era of Low Expectation Syndrome to come to an end.

We must move to a world of high expectations and presuming competence and employability. Disability service system transformation can be exciting and scary at the same time, but its worth it.

Right now, the COVID-19 pandemic has given us the perfect opportunity to redesign our society and systems to be more inclusive of the rights and wants of people with disabilities. There are numerous bills in Congress that can support people with disabilities in achieving the American Dream of Competitive Integrated Employment often known as Real Jobs for Real Pay.

One bill of importance is the Raise the Wage Act that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour and end the practice of paying subminimum wage over five years. Another big bill is the Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment Act that if passed would provide money to states to support them in moving away from outdated models that pay people with disabilities subminimum wage in sheltered workshops and other segregated settings.

In order for this to be successful it is vital that states invest in infrastructure to support disability provider agencies to develop person-centered employment programs that help get people with developmental disabilities jobs and careers in the community at minimum wage or higher.

One big piece of this is paying livable wages to direct support professionals and job coaches who play a major role in our success living and working in the community. People with disabilities, especially those who self-direct their services need staff stability in order to be successful living and working in the community.

In addition, we also need to create effective training programs on successful job coaching as part of our transformation to Real Jobs for Real Pay. Other major reforms we must focus on is overhauling the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and other public benefit programs to eliminate work disincentives that keep people with disabilities trapped in poverty.

As the minimum wage rises across the nation we are going to see more and more people with disabilities falling off the cash cliff. In other words, for a non-blind worker with a disability who works 25 to 30 hours a week at $15 an hour you will hit the SGA, or substantial gainful activity, earning caps of $1,310 much faster than someone who is blind. For the blind community, the SGA earnings limit is $2,190 for 2021.

An easy way to solve this problem includes eliminating all earnings limits and just treat SSI and SSDI as universal basic income. As a society we must face the reality that the economic cost of living with a disability is much higher compared to those without disabilities. A second solution would be to raise the SGA limit to the same level as the blind community and adopt the $1 for $2 benefit offset above SGA.

In the SSI program your income goes down $1 for every $2 you earn. Using the $1 for $2 offset in the SSDI program would allow people with disabilities to earn more money and not worry about falling off the benefits cliff so fast. This is especially important for people with disabilities who live on their own in cities and states with very high cost of living.

Getting rid of benefit cliffs will also go along ways toward reducing the stress and anxiety that comes with working part time with a disability as we move away from segregated work settings that pay people with developmental disabilities subminimum wage. In addition, many people with disabilities face barriers to achieving full-time employment ranging from stamina issues to attitudinal barriers like ableism in the business world.

In the area of work incentives we must expand what counts as an impairment-related work expense (IRWE). One area that is due to an overhaul is what counts as an IRWE in the area of transportation.

Currently you can only count taxis as an IRWE if you live someplace where there is no transit. If you live in a place where there is public transit you are expected to use it unless you get something from your doctor that says you are unable to use regular public transit and need Metro Access-also known as paratransit. Paratransit is often the only thing you can deduct as an IRWE.

In the last 10 years transit options have evolved to include Uber and Lyft ridesharing, and it is past time that our public benefit system allow taking Uber or Lyft to work as an IRWE regardless of what other options are available in our community. I say this because it is far too common for people to work in places that you can get to by car in as little as a 30- to 35-minute ride from home. However, when it comes to taking public transit or paratransit, the commute to and from work can often be 1 to 2.5 hours longer than it needs to be.

Many people with disabilities cant tolerate long commutes, especially for those of us with autism and other disabilities who get car sick or nauseous from being in vehicles in the backseat for long periods of time. Other work incentive reforms we need to expand on are deductions for medical and dental services not covered by insurance like someone with autism and anxiety being able to deduct things such as massage, acupuncture, dental care cost, alternative medicine, and the cost of independent direct support staff used during both work and nonwork hours.

I say this because many adults with autism without intellectual disability do not qualify for Medicaid home-community-based services and having access to job coaching and home support is vital to our success in the community. For young adults the student earned income exclusion should be expanded to age 29 from 22 so that more people with disabilities can attend college and training programs that may help them achieve greater economic stability outside of the traditional jobs typically done by people with disabilities like food, filth, flower and filing.

The silver lining of COVID-19 pandemic is that it provides us with a great once-in-a-lifetime chance to make the social safety net for the disability community truly person-centered by ending systemic barriers that prevent us from achieving true community inclusion and self-sufficiency without the stress of benefit cliffs.

The era where being disabled is like a full-time job must end. As allies and advocates we must fight harder now more than ever to make the lives of the disability community easier. In the long term, COVID-19 is going to create a larger population of people with disabilities and chronic health conditions due to the effects of long-haul COVID.

In my opinion, the impact of this pandemic virus feels similar to days of the polio epidemic era. It is my hope that we can use the lessons from this nightmarish pandemic to create a world more accommodating and accepting of disability as a society.

As the old saying goes, It shouldnt have to happen to you for it to matter to you. If we all live long enough, we will all join the Disability Club. Climate change and disability are not partisan issues nor should they be.

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Opinion: The Time for Disability Employment Reform Is Now Maryland Matters - Josh Kurtz

SYRACUSE Sequoia Kemp stood at the crossroads of health inequality, her mind on a painful past.

Beside her:the second-oldest public housing project in the U.S. Just above: one of New York states most prestigious teaching hospitals.

She took in the glimmering glass and sterile white facades of SUNY Upstate Medical University that tower over the blood-red bricks of the tenement buildings, home to mostly poor and Black people here in this Rust Belt city of not quite 150,000.

The two worlds a shining beacon of American medicines bright future and stark reminder of the nations racially unjust present are literally separated by an elevated highway that carved through the citys heart decades ago.

Today, the Interstate 81 viaduct is a mass of rusting steel, chipping green paint and crumbling concrete. It is a relic of the 1950s-era urban planning that displaced and economically ravaged generations of Black and brown Americans in favor of white flight to the suburbs.

Divided We Fall: The healthcare inequities in Syracuse, New York

From childbirth to COVID-19 treatment and vaccination access, Black communities in Syracuse and across the nation face inequality.

Robert Bell, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

And it is an impossible-to-ignore symbol, many here say, of the divisions and inequalities that put the health and lives of people of color in dire jeopardy.

On this late spring afternoon, traffic buzzed as a Black girl skipped nearby along the project's sidewalk with a cloth doll,playing amid the acrid smell of exhaust and swirling dust fromconstruction work. A rush of memories had gripped Kemp, a 26-year-old Black woman, of a surgery she had as a teenager to remove ovarian cysts.

She remembered the month of searing abdominal pain as doctors delayed the procedure. She remembered her mother's pleas to expedite the surgery to ease her daughter's agony.

Sequoia Kemp, a certified doula, stands next to her sister and client while holding her new niece in the hospital.Contributed photo from Sequoia Kemp.

But mostly, Kemp struggled with the thought that racism marred the surgery. The unanswered questions have plagued her for years:

Would doctors have listened to a white woman and acted sooner?

Is a Black mother powerless to protect her child from medical harm?

Will I ever be able to have children of my own?

Theres just so many stories like mine and so much trauma, and so much healing our community has to do, Kemp said. And Im going to do whatever I can to be part of that.

Those stories of Black women emotionally and physically scarred during childbirth inspired her to become a doula to prevent it from happening to others. She has seen countless times how the health care system treats people of color differently. She carries with her the strikingtruth that Black women are three times as likely to die in childbirth than white women.

On this day, she wears a T-shirt that reads:Birth Work is My Resistance.

Kemp is not alonein her fight on the front lines of health justice, in this city beset by festering wounds of racial segregation and stunninginequality. There are agents of change on both sides of the divide, here in the heart of the city and high on the hill inside the halls of medical healing.

The struggle to find basic care: Sickle cell children are living longer than ever, but as adults they face challenges to get basic care

But the stakes are crystal clear. They are written on the faces of the expectant mothers Kemp helps, etched in the well-being of her own body, evident in the everyday discrimination that targets the people she loves.

It's a fight for the lives of women. For friends and her family. For herself.

The first thing most of my clients say, Kemp said, is I dont want to die.

In Syracuse and across the country, a new generation of activists and medical professionals many of them forged by their own health-related trauma are leading the charge to end the systemic inequalities that ensure Black, Latino and Native Americanlives are less healthythan white lives.

Here, they are the people pushing plans to tear down Syracuses highway system and seeking reparation. The roads' racially biased placement killed the American dreamof their ancestors, who fled the Jim Crow-era South only to find a Northern city being segregated by its own brand of discrimination.

Justice In My Town - Health Care Crisis 1

Deka Dancil, president of Urban Jobs Task Force, leads a I-81 march in downtown Syracuse.

They are also the medical students who are exposing untold and ongoing harm caused by attempts to justify American slavery with theories that Africans race was inferior to whites.

And they are the scholars unraveling the legacy of slave-owning doctors claiming Africans comparatively weak bodies benefited from grueling slave labor.

They are behind a growing movement to reject the racial inferiority theories, which remain in the bedrock of modern medicine despite being disproven and have fueled the mistreatment of generations of Black Americans.

Inequality in education: I dont think you are ready: Boys of color fell further behind at school amid COVID-19

July 16, 2021 in Syracuse. Pioneer Homes, the second-oldest housing project in the country is on the edge of Upstate Medical and Syracuse University.Robert Bell/Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

This movement is part of a much broader struggle to improve the quality of life for those excluded from the American social contract. When it comes to keeping people of color healthy and healing them when they are not endless factors play a role, from the environment to access to care centers, from insurance plans to steady incomes, from nutritious meals to medical mistrust built on centuries of trauma.

The health-justice movement aims to end racist housing policies that place more Black children near toxic fumes and exhaust, contributing to them having asthma-related death rates eight times higher than whites.

It requires eliminating food deserts and medical distrust linked to Blacks being twice as likely to die of diabetes than whites. And removing unjust economic policies and practices linked to Black people being 30% more likely to die from heart disease than whites.

The endeavor also targets the medical deserts and low-wage jobs linked to Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans put at twice the risk of dying from COVID-19 than whites.

Children play and pose for the camera at playground close to I-81 in Pioneer Homes on July 16.Robert Bell/Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

Racism is not just the discrimination against one group based on the color of their skin, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in April, declaring racism a national public health threat.

Rather, it is the structural barriers that impact racial and ethnic groups differently to influence where a person lives, where they work, where their children play, and where they worship and gather in community, she added.

Undergirding it all is the tectonic push for truth in medicine, as revelations surrounding complex clinical algorithms used to make race corrections to treatments suggested millions of Americans were mistreated for decades.

COVID and race: CDC declares racism a 'serious public health threat' as COVID-19 puts a spotlight on disparities

USA TODAY Network journalists assembled a complex assessment of these intertwined issuesby interviewing Americans from across the country, revealing the lives devastated by health inequality, as well as their fight for better treatment. They also analyzed health data and federal records detailing the misuse of race in medicine to shed light on the massive systemic reforms needed to end disparity in health and health care.

The outcome of the heated debate among health care leaders over race-based corrections in particular could save lives and prove crucial to building trust with people of color.

More and more medical groups are realizing that race corrections are both on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of evidence-based medicine, said Dr. David Jones, a Harvard University professor. I hope people of color would look at this and say doctors are really trying to look at this and figure out what is going on.

In Syracuse, which hassome of the poorest neighborhoods in the country, tales of unmet health needs, unsafe housing conditions and unequal access to health care unfold daily.

Deka Dancil grew up Black in extreme poverty, eating cheese slices and drinking hot sauce for days at a time when her familys food stamps ran out. She spent her teen years sleeping on couches at homes of friends and relatives and worked her way through high school as a janitor at Upstate Medical University.

Deka Dancil, of Syracuse, grew up in extreme poverty. She eventually graduated from Syracuse University and became president of the Urban Jobs Task Force.Robert Bell/Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

I would have never believed, or had the audacity to think, that if there was something I needed that I would be important enough for the top specialists at Upstate to care for me, said Dancil, 28, and now president of the Urban Jobs Task Force.

As a Medicaid patient, she added, her care was always funneled to the federally qualified health center, which lacked the expertise and resources available at Upstate.

Lily Sanders, a 67-year-old Black mother of three, grandmother of 11, and great-grandmother of four,has taken pride in working low-wage jobs at Syracuse-area nursing homes. But she's remained unable to afford health insurance premiums and deductibles most her life.

Instead, she has prayed to stay healthy and out of the emergency room, while living among the boarded-up Victorian homes and gang violence that have blighted the city for decades.

Its very scary. Ive been blessed with good health, and every day youre hoping that you dont need anything, Sanders said.

She described herself as one of the millions of working-poor Americans, earning above the Medicaid threshold but unable to afford health insurance costs. She has often turned to the Poverello Health Clinic, a free health center in Syracuse, for minor care while forgoing most dental treatment.

It affects people of color because they came from a place of zero from slavery, she said. You try to get something, but the system doesnt allow you to get anything…You just cant get a toeholdand you just never get up.

The preventable suffering is clear for Rachel Johnson, a 25-year-old community advocate, gently urging a Black man with diabetes to visit doctors and eat healthy. His diet consists mostly of offerings at the corner store advertising beer and cigarettes, rather than fruits and vegetables available at grocery stores in less poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

There is long-standing intergenerational trauma that is baked into people of color, said Johnson, director of health services at Syracuse Community Connections. Some of the bigger issues of mistrust in health care are connected to some of those historical factors.

Disparities in the US: COVID deaths third after heart disease and cancer in US last year; people of color hit hardest, CDC reports confirm

This is national. Its not just one local entity, or just one city … it is across the board, she added.

The I-81 viaduct separates Upstate Medical University, one of the best medical colleges in New York state, from the Pioneer Homes housing projects in Syracuse, New York.Robert Bell/Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

In Syracuse, the health inequity crisis has also manifested in the stunted lives of at least 675 children poisoned by lead paint in 2017 alone, many of them living in the citys aging housing stock still filled with lead-based paints that were banned in 1978.

Then there is simply the fact kids in Syracuse with asthma are more than twice as likely to end up in the emergency room than peers in surrounding suburbs, including cases linked to traffic-related air pollution from living in the highway systems shadow.

But life on this side of I-81 has helped prompt a push for change on the other side, where three Black women studying at Upstate Medical to become doctors have turned their personal clashes with discrimination into a collective attempt to achieve health justice in their town.

Eight-year-old IsabelleThenor-Louis saw racism unfold one evening through the window of her own home.

Her father had pulled his car into their driveway in the wealthy, and mostly white, Long Island neighborhood where they lived.A police car stopped on the street with its engine idling as the Black man, a doctor, slowly walked towards that house that officers wrongly assumed he couldnt afford.

Under the glare of racial profiling, Isabelle's dad entered the front door. He embraced his family, and a few tense moments crept past before the police sped away.

Isabelle Thenor-Louis is a student at Upstate Medical University working to become a hybrid physician-journalist.Robert Bell/Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

It left the first of many scars in a rising American familys struggle against racism.

Today, a 26-year-old Thenor-Louis recalled such episodes including a patient mistaking her father for a janitor as sparks that ignited her path to medical school.

Its one of those things that snowballed as youre growing up and you start to realize, OK, Im not really seen as someone of value, she said. As a Black woman, I saw it was really important to be part of the solution.

Her realization expanded recently after she complained of health and skin issues common among Black women during medical visits, only to be dismissed by white doctors. When she visits doctors now, she wears a sweatshirt emblazoned with the insignia of her alma mater, Brown University, to combat racial bias, implicit or explicit.

Its unfortunate that I feel like I have to put on all these physical qualifiers to show I have value and should be treated equally, Thenor-Louis said. Its almost like preparing to go to battle.

Today, she is working towards becoming a hybrid physician-journalist in the mold of CNNs Sanjay Gupta, hoping to improve the health of people of color while sharing their stories to the world to effect change.

Entering the medical field: Medical school applications surge as COVID-19 inspires Black and Latino students to become doctors

Yet her trials at getting this far underscored the challenges behind the shortage of doctors of color, which span a range of economic and social barriers to medical school.

While the number of medical school spots has increased by 27% since 1981 overall, just 13.7% of the medical student population is from Black, Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native communities. Thats despite these underrepresented groups composing 35% of the U.S. population. Meanwhile, just 3% of doctors nationally are Black women.

And while research shows people of color are healthier when treated by doctors of color, advocates have long stumbled in closing the diversity gap. An effort stalled by the burden of more than $200,000 in medical school debt on average and racially segregated educational opportunity.

The pandemics uneven toll in communities of color, however, may turn the tide. The suffering contributed to an 18% surge in medical school applications for the fall, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Further, many of the aspiring doctors are people of color inspired to remedy the health inequalities laid bare by the coronavirus, as scholarship programs, educational outreach and free tuition initiatives seek to remove barriers to medical school.

The importance of closing the divide between the ranks of doctors of color and an increasingly diverse nation of patients struck close to home for Samantha Williams, another Black medical student at Upstate.

Born and raised in Syracuse, Williams moved to the suburbs as a teen with her mother, a widow, and two siblings. Her only ticket to studying medicine: a scholarship promoting medical school diversity.

She's faced many microaggressions as a Black woman in a predominantly white environment, she said.

Recently a campus safety alert had Upstate Medical students smartphones buzzing, warning of a stabbing in the public housing projects near campus. Williams overheard a classmate sarcastically declare, Classic Syracuse.

Its hard sometimes seeing people of privilege making statements like that, she said.

During another class, Williams found herself the only student raising her hand when a professor asked if theyve known a victim of gun violence, drawing snide looks from classmates.

The incidents were among many reasons Williams worked with Thenor-Louis and their classmate, Angelina Ellis, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, to organize the Health Justice at Upstate conference in January.

The virtual event drew hundreds of attendees and focused on connecting medical students, doctors and Syracuse community leaders to pursue local projects to reduce health inequity.

I have the greatest hopes that people understand the communities theyre treating, Williams said.

In Syracuse, young students and community outreach workers are leading the charge for systemic change. And in some ways, the history of doctors misusing race in American medicine began unraveling in a Harvard lecture hall.

There, medical students began questioning methods used to adjust treatments based on a patients race. Several of the students turned to David Jones, a Harvard professor specializing in race, technology and the culture of medicine, to find answers.

The resulting medical paper, Hidden in Plain Sight,published in August in New England Journal of Medicine, would raise questions about flaws in race-based medicine that some experts say were harming people of color.

From left, Isabelle Thenor-Louis, Samantha Williams and Angelina Ellis, all medical students at Upstate Medical University, are promoting medical school diversity.Robert Bell/Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

Theres such a pervasive assumption in U.S. society and U.S. medicine that Black and non-Black people are different; I dont think anyone stopped to look twice, Jones said.

Its often the people who are new to a profession who are going to be alert to something that members of the status quo cant see, he added, praising medical students for opening the racial justice floodgates in health care.

Black medical leaders: Coronavirus magnifies racial inequities, with deadly consequences

The groups probe of medical race corrections detailed how complex health-related math equations and risk calculators contributed to unequal care for whites and people of color.

Due to the algorithms, many Black men and women may have received delayed or lesser care for kidney, heart and lung diseases, the research suggests, and women of color potentially received less-aggressive cancer screening.

Some Black and Hispanic women may have been improperly advised against pursuing vaginal birth after a cesarean delivery, exposing them to a serious operation while robbing them of a personal choice more widely offered to white women.

And race-adjusted treatments may have perpetuated health disparities, rather than resolving them, by directing more medical resources to whites than people of color, according to the research.

In other words, using faulty and biased health data potentially engrained the negative effects of racism and discrimination into the medical system.

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In a Rust Belt city split by inequality, people are battling for healthcare justice. The fight for change is a fight for their lives. - Online Athens

Workers at Amazons Bessemer warehouse could get the greenlight to hold a second union vote in the coming weeks, setting up another showdown between one of the worlds most valuable companies and its embattled employees.

In early August, the Atlanta regional office for the National Labor Relations Board said Amazon violated labor laws by interfering in Aprils union vote. Workers wanted to have more control over the companys fast paced environment and change the highly controlled environment where output and even breaks are timed.

Alongside its findings, the federal agency recommended holding another vote, a decision that now rests with the NLRBs regional office in Atlanta.

In coming to its decision, the NLRB said the evidence against the Jeff Bezos-founded company demonstrated that the employers conduct interfered with the laboratory conditions necessary to conduct a fair election.

Amazon said in a statement that the vote should stand.

Our employees had a chance to be heard during a noisy time when all types of voices were weighing into the national debate, said the statement. And at the end of the day, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of a direct connection with their managers and the company.

Having the vote overturned is a big step toward a potentially big win for Amazons employees and could become an impetus for improved workers rights across the country and in the South, according to Daniel Cornfield, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and editor of the Work and Occupations academic journal.

This decision is an important victory and extends to workers beyond the South, said Cornfield, who added that the new pro-union administration in the White House likely affected the decision. Certainly, the actions of the president, as well as national politicians, and the NLRB can send a message to workers everywhere who are trying to unionize that they have the right to do so and that the employer must allow them to do so.

Despite raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour, Amazon has been the target of multiple unionization efforts. Amazon employees in Staten Island, New York, also recently lost a disputed unionization vote. The NLRB found that Amazon interfered in that May vote but has not made similar recommendations to hold another.

In response to Amazon, which is the one of the worlds largest private employers and has never lost a union vote in the U.S., the International Brotherhood of Teamsters voted in June to create a division that solely focuses on Amazon.

Unions in decline

In the past 60 years, union membership in the South and in the rest of the country has declined by about two-thirds, but while union membership is still relatively strong in some northern states, the continued erosion has left unions in the South on the brink. Since 1964, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping records, union membership nationally fell from just under 30% of all workers in 1964 to just over 10.8% last year, the lowest since records began.

In the South, around 15% of workers were unionized in 1964, falling to just over 5% today.

Because of that gradual slide and general anti-union sentiment, major manufacturers have increasingly identified the South as a place to do business often having the deal sweetened by lucrative fiscal incentives such as tax breaks, hard cash, and even free land.

Those enticements have brought in billions of dollars in investment to the South, ever since Nissan began pumping out vehicles in Smyrna, Tennessee, at the start of the 1980s. The plant heralded the start of a major foreign and domestic automobile manufacturing hub that today is present in nearly every Southern state.

Today, GMC has a presence in Texas, Kentucky and Tennessee. Ford has two plants in Kentucky, while Toyota has manufacturing plants in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Kentucky. The list of major automobile manufacturers goes on, with Honda, Mazda, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Volkswagen, Volvo, BMW, and Daimler all operating in the South.

But very few have a union.

Some of the plants have attempted unionization over the years, but most havent even tried. Even the successful ones have been held up by years of court challenges. The Mercedes plant in Vance, Alabama, has a union, but it required a federal appeals court to uphold the results.

But for every successful union, there are several failures.

Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga failed in their efforts back in 2014 and again in 2019 despite having executive backing, while strong words from former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley kept a union from forming at Boeing the same year. The NLRB accused Boeing of moving part of its manufacturing hub to the South in retaliation for past union strikes at its Seattle manufacturing hub.

That complaint was later dropped.

Among the biggest perks, however, are the low-cost workers, lack of regulations and a region where anti-union sentiment has been embedded in the psyche of workers and businesses since the end of slavery. But these companies have brought tens of thousands of well-paying jobs that typically pay above the area median, helping working class families in impoverished regions build wealth. While the costs involved in attracting major companies to do business in the South have often been high, the rewards are numerous.

Black and White

Unionizing in the South has a thorny history that, like so many other things Southern, can trace its complexities through slavery, race and politics.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, white dock workers in New Orleans, for example, competed with formerly enslaved men, who because of destitution and repression were still considered cheap labor, according to the book, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, class and politics 1863 1923.

The new competition evoked a racist reaction from white workers, who called for the deportation of their Black counterparts back to Africa. When Black workers formed a union in 1872 and attempted to integrate the white union, they were ridiculed.

We were scoffed at, said Black union president R.T. Matthews at the time, and rebuked by white men who work along shore, telling us constantly that the negroes broke the wages down, and it caused all to suffer.

The citys elite pounced on that racial division, using Black dock workers when white workers went on strike, and vice versa. The situation caused hostility and undermined union efforts for decades, noted the book.

That hostility echoed across the South and the roadblocks to Southern unions continued.

Not long after the end of World War II, the Congress of Industrial Organizations launched Operation Dixie, an attempt to increase union membership in the South. It was believed that raising wage levels among workers in the South would consolidate the huge wage gains won by unions in the North. The move was in part an attempt by Democrats to transform the conservative politics of the region.

Operation Dixie fell flat in part because of the Jim Crow laws at the time. Just like the dock workers of New Orleans 70 years before, racial divisions persisted, preventing white and Black workers from unionizing.

Southern unionization was dealt a further blow by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which made it harder for unions to strike and is still in force today. The act was passed in the aftermath of the major strike wave of 1945 and 1946. Over those years, five million people went on strike, and included the biggest strike in U.S. labor history. Not long after that, the United States entered into the second Red Scare, a period of anti-communist sentiment that, among other things, tied unions with long-feared prospect of communism. Lasting a decade starting in 1947, the Red Scare saw laws passed that prohibited members of the Communist Party in America from holding office in unions and other labor organizations.

Today, the tactics used by corporations to deter unionization are vastly different. The NLRB official noted that among the tactics Amazon used to interfere with the Alabama union vote was pressing the U.S. Postal Service to install a vote card collection box near the warehouse entrance. The box was then covered in an Amazon-branded tent with cameras pointed at it. The NLRB said the setup gave the impression to workers that they were being monitored.

While Amazons workers in Bessemer will likely have another chance to be the first U.S.-based union within the company, it will still be a formidable task.

Large corporations can marshal tremendous legal resources to intimidate and scare workers, said Cornfield, who also said that the recent decision against Amazon shows how large corporations routinely act against employees. The important thing to think about with Amazon being charged with intimidating workers is very important for two reasons.

Its a very visible act which demonstrates to the American public that large corporations do act illegally to prevent workers from unionizing. And the other being that the public learn that large corporations do have tremendous capacity to dissuade workers from unionizing in legal ways. That educates the public and workers everywhere that perhaps the whole system of union campaign conduct is weighted in favor of the employer, especially these humongous companies that have tremendous resources to deter people.

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Alabama's Amazon union fight and the South's long, often racist, history with labor organizing - Reckon South

The January 6th rioters at the U.S. Capitol attempted to overturn the November election and restore Donald Trump to power. This collection of everyday Republican Party activists were members of white supremacist organizations such as the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers. The mob included off-duty police and military members, small business owners, and a grab-bag of conspiracy theorists associated with Q-anon and anti-vaccination groups and religious fundamentalists.

Angry that the majority of U.S. voters ended the dysfunctional rule of the Trump administration, they sought to help him frog-march the U.S. toward fascism.

Trump fueled this attempted coup with a ravenous appeal for violence at the Capitol leading up to the January 6th formal recording of the Electoral College votes. Evidence also shows that his loyalist Roger Stone likely coordinated with participants in the violence at the Capitol.

That days events were triggered by Trumps relentless campaign against the legitimacy of the November election, a predictable tactic in coup attempts. In his book Washington Bullets, author Vijay Prashad shows how the script works: coup plotters denounce the election and rile up their supporters to promote violence, provoking a military response to install the strong man to restore order. Media reports show that U.S. military officials feared that Trump aimed for this outcome and fought to limit military involvement toward this end.

That is how close we came to the installation of a fascist regime in this country.

Right-wing culture of conspiracy and trending fascism

The terroristic events of Jan. 6th were fueled by a culture of conspiracy that dominates the Republican Party. Republican Party boss Donald Trump didnt invent this culture of conspiracy, but he did exploit and transform it into a daily, relentless mantra. The original conspiracy theory deployed frequently by Republican Party activists, donors, and media personalities typically centered on Black control of the Democratic Party and its use of guilt and radicalism to undermine white supremacy. Conspiracy-style politics infused with racial hatred made Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, and Ann Coulter rich in the 1990s. This conspiracy theory has been at the heart of GOP attacks on affirmative action, school desegregation, and voting rights since the 1970s.

Donald Trump has always been a promoter of racial conspiracy and racist policy. He launched his campaign for president with manufactured racist claims about Obamas phony birth certificate but was too afraid of actually competing with Obama in 2012. His 2016 campaign demonstrated his effective ability to trumpet racist and sexist politics to his mass base, which made him a perfect fit for the Republican Party nomination.

He propelled these once-marginal claims into the daily reality of tens of millions of Americans, fashioning a new and dangerous political terrain.

In his book, How Fascism Works, Yale philosopher Jason Stanley argues that the systematic linkage of victimhood rooted in racial theories and xenophobia, the methodical attacks on intellectuals and scientific thought, the aggressive appeal to law and order and to the hierarchical power of the strong man and his party, and the relentless denial of truth and evidence to construct a mythology of racial supremacy are among the essential ideological-cultural features of a fascist party and regime.

Over the four years of his disastrous term, Trump soft-pedaled, even promoted right-wing militias, neo-Confederates, alt-right hipsters, and other assorted neo-fascist elements on the fringes of his party. He blended the Nixonian Southern strategy that appealed to suburban whites in coded language with frequent denunciations of political correctness as a violation of white peoples right to free hate speech. He frequently resorted to open appeals to racism (other forms of hatred) and pushed it to the center of his partys ideology with claims that immigrants from Latin America are criminals, that China deliberately spread COVID, that anti-racist protesters deserve to be shot or beaten, women leaders are detestable, that queer and trans people should be stigmatized, that doctors and scientists are part of a deep state conspiracy to undermine his presidency, and so on.

Much of Trumps two campaigns and his presidency were predicated on hatreds of racial minorities, foreigners, the poor, religious minorities, and their occasional allies a strategy that reflected and drew on fear. The neoliberal stage of capital, characterized by a deepening of exploitation to save capitalism from repeated crisis, has produced much anxiety for the 99%. But the incompetent billionaire offered no solutions to the rule of monopoly capital. Instead, he exploited the vulnerability of his Euro-American base under these conditions and tapped into their generations-long belief in their cultural and political superiority in the U.S. social landscape. He fed his narrowing base racist tropes, xenophobic lies, anti-Black stereotypes, and above all new permission to believe in conspiracy theories that elevated their own victimization at the hands of these others.

He deployed his campaign of conspiracy against all U.S. social institutions. Republican Party politicians and media personalities have frequently targeted the lame stream media, elite college professors, public schools, and activist judges for their wrath against imagined offenses. Trump borrowed this style and elevated it to a culture of conspiracy, hate, and retaliation. Even today Trump followers can be found lobbing threats of violence at public health officials who insist on necessary measures against the pandemic, professors who talk about critical race theory, or media personalities that frequently expose Trumps lies.

Racial cult of death

The culture of conspiracy translated into a cult of a willingness to die for Trump, as many on the far-right pledged during the pandemic and the 2020 election campaign. They believed his claim that the pandemic was a hoax and would vanish quickly, and even as 611,000 people in the U.S. have died, continue to call for resistance to scientific measures to protect their own health. Some insisted that freedom is more important than safety, though they are unable to answer who would be left to vote for Trump if they all expired from the illness.

A willingness to suffer for the sake of billionaire, racist politics is explored in a recent book by Heather McGhee titled The Sum of US. In it, she explores numerous historical examples where Euro-Americans follow this orientation to white supremacist thinking and action. She shows how whites appear willing to cause their own suffering, a diminishment of resources they have access to, if they become convinced that non-white people, foreigners, or religious others will also benefit.

New examples of this mentality in Florida, Texas, and Tennessee are only the most recent disturbing examples. In those states, Republican Partycontrolled governments have threatened to gut funding for public schools and universities if they teach historical concepts like racial slavery as a foundational feature of the U.S. or if they attempt to implement public health measures to protect student, families, teachers, and staff from COVID infection. In other words, supporters of Republican Party policy are willing to suffer from ignorance about their own history, exposure to a deadly infectious disease, and a further defunded public education system in exchange for owning the libtards.

Trumps love for the militias, the conspirators, the Neo-Confederates, their violence, the hateful language, and the relentless attacks on institutions that didnt share his objectives overlays his abuse of power and the law. The crimes for which he was first impeached only to be protected by a Republican-dominated Senate that openly indicated its refusal to conduct a fair trial were a scratch on the surface. Graft, financial corruption, abuse of campaign laws, abuse of corruption laws designed to separate government activities and campaigns, tax evasion, and systematic mismanagement of federal resources were rampant in the Trump administration.

Ways forward

The monopoly sections of the capitalist class, relieved to have apparently sidelined Trump at least temporarily without much more than a deadly riot at the Capitol, are struggling to reassert full control. They seem content to allow federal law enforcement to round-up rioters, hoping this move will restore sagging support for their racist system of mass incarceration. They are not interested in relinquishing white supremacy, even if it must be in its subtler forms, or class rule.

In the wake of the coup attempt, spokespersons for those sections of the capitalist class, including Joe Biden himself, have tried to elevate more reasonable voices within the Republican Party. The objective is twofold. First, they want to repair politics-as-usual to restore legitimacy to a political system disfigured by Trumpism and the pandemic, and nearly supplanted by the 2020 #BlackLivesMatter uprisings. Second, they despise the idea of discarding the Republican Party as a whole, as it would mean a default elevation of the left, labor, socialist, and communist forces and a further tilting away from the dominant neoliberal, racist-class policy of the past two generations.

Neoliberalism is a class policy of monopoly capital created in reaction to the civil rights/labor movement struggles of roughly 1930 to 1970 that dismantled Jim Crow, established the New Deal, built the U.S. labor movement, sided (sometimes) with the anti-colonial movements, and generally checked the absolute dominance of the corporations and white supremacist culture of the U.S. Neoliberalism is a set of anti-government, anti-public resources policies rooted in white supremacy (especially anti-Black hatred) that aimed to re-establish the ability of monopoly capital to accumulate based on working-class segmentation and super-exploitation. Privatization, debt-capital, global dominance of finance capital, destruction of civil rights victories (affirmative action, school desegregation, voting rights), racist mass incarceration, and frequent war and intervention was the price paid.

Studies of this period of history reveal some disturbing contradictory trends. Unionization rates collapsed after neoliberalism was launched, resulting in stagnating wages, exploding mass incarceration rates, and sky-rocketing poverty in Black and Brown communities. While public resources were systematically gutted to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, social mobility and access to social goods diminished, sharpening social inequality. While corporate profits, shareholder dividends, and CEO pay ballooned, overall growth rates in capitalist countries shriveled. Simply put, the declining ability of capitalism to grow required new forms of extreme exploitation. These could be implemented only through battering the labor movement, fueling racist hatreds, and intensifying imperialism.

The socialist moment, the eruption of a disparate politics that is at least antithetical to the neoliberal agenda and at best a demand for working-class power and leadership of the country, emerged after yet another economic collapse in 20078. It has coincided with nearly continuous anti-racist uprisings from 2013 to the present, a massive democratic campaign to defeat Trumpian fascism, a deadly pandemic for which the ruling class has had few solutions, and more frequent and intense effects of capitalism-caused climate change.

The socialist moment its movements and campaigns have extracted some concessions from monopoly capital through the Democratic Party. Nationwide movements for a minimum wage increase, for voting rights, for workers rights, for public investments, for wealth taxes, etc., seem winnable, and even some Democrats appear to support many of these demands.

Growing the socialist moment into a permanent social force is necessary. More and more people need to understand why capitalism is doing to them what it is doing. They need to be organized in labor unions, democratic organizations, and working-class or socialist-oriented political parties. We need to train ourselves to understand the social forces arrayed against us, to learn effective anti-racist struggle, to fight for community and social closeness with all of our working-class family. We need to elevate democratic resistance to male supremacy and sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Yes, we can make permanent Trumps defeat and build the movement to defeat monopoly capital.

Images: Jan. 6 riot, Blink Ofanaye (CC BY-NC 2.0); Unite the Right rally, Evan Nesterak (CC BY 2.0); Voting rights rally, SEIU (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

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Jan. 6th fascism, monopoly capital, and working-class power - Communist Party USA

AFTER MORE than six months in office, the Biden administration seems inclined to adopt the utopian vision of democracy promotion as a guiding principle of U.S. global strategy. This doctrine, or, if you prefer, persuasion, holds that America should, as far as possible, bend the world in accordance with the preferences of the United States and its largely European allies. Fortunately, President Joe Biden is a man of experience and pragmatic instinct. Whatever his impulses, he so far has been careful not to burn Americas bridges and, to the contrary, has taken steps to improve ties with key European allies, to restart dialogue with Russia, and to reduce somewhat the intensity of confrontation with China. Such tactical flexibility, however, does not change the fundamental direction of U.S. foreign policy, which at times is almost Orwellian in its tendency to emulate concepts of the former Soviet Union. It was a core belief of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky that the USSR, for its own security, could not tolerate the existence of the so-called capitalist environment. They assumed that capitalists would never accept coexistence with the new communist state and therefore rejected the status quo as an unrealistic option. Today, alongside the European Union, the United States has adopted the position that its mission is to promote democracy worldwide. Leaders in Washington regularly argue that if they fail to take up this mission, authoritarian governments will exploit American restraint and join forcesnot just to undermine American power, but to destroy democracy itself, depriving the United States of its cherished freedoms.

It is remarkable that this concept has become a key tenet of American foreign policy without any serious debate in Congress, in the media, or within the foreign policy community. At the heart of this approach is the presupposition that democracy is inherently superior to other forms of government, both morally and in terms of its ability to deliver prosperity and security. Democracy promotion is assumed to be a longstanding part of the U.S. foreign policy tradition rather than a radical departure from it. The Biden administration talks as though the world at largeapart from evil tyrantswill welcome its push for democracy and accept the self-evident righteousness of America and the European Union, rather than put up powerful resistance that may damage American security interests, American freedoms, and the American way of life.

YET DEMOCRACY does not have a stellar record throughout history. The best that can be said of it, as Winston Churchill once observed, is that under most circumstances it remains superior to all other tested forms of government. But for that to be true, democracy must be truly liberal, based on law, and include credible protections for minority rights. Such safeguards often are not taken. From its very conception, democracy has been marred by the original sin of slavery. Ancient Athens, the earliest known democracy, not only tolerated slavery, but was in fact founded on it. Citizens and slaves formed two sides of the Athenian political system. As historian Paulin Ismard writes, slavery was the price to be paid for direct democracy. Slaves allowed citizens to step away from work and to directly participate in government, attending assembly meetings and holding public office.

In the United States, the Founding Fathers similarly tolerated slavery, making its implicit incorporation in the U.S. Constitution. The constitutional concept of relations between the states presupposed the existence of slavery, and it required a civil war to bring about Abraham Lincolns emancipation of slaves in 1863. The Russian Empire remarkablyand without any bloodshedabolished serfdom altogether in 1861, unlike in the United States where slavery was, for the sake of political expediency, permitted to exist in some Union states until the end of the Civil War. Even thereafter, American democracy continued to deprive women and African Americans of the right to vote for several more decades. It is not self-evident that a democracy that limits political rights to a minority of white men is inherently so superior to a benevolent authoritarian state that possesses some elementary rule of law and embraces the concept of equal protection for its subjects. Contemporary examples include Russia under Alexander II, whose legal reforms introduced for the first time in Russia the concept of equality before the law, or Germany under Otto von Bismarck, who established the first modern welfare state by offering health insurance and social security to the working class. Closer to our own time, the enlightened authoritarianism of Singapores Lee Kuan Yew lifted millions out of poverty and maintained harmony in a multi-ethnic country.

UNTIL THE end of the Cold War, democracy promotion was not a constituent element of the U.S. foreign policy traditionthe term democracy does not even appear in the U.S. Constitution. The United States did not wage war to spread democracy, even in its own sphere of influence in the Americas. The NATO alliance, at its very inception in 1949, was directed squarely against the Soviet geopolitical threat and willingly embraced authoritarian members such as Portugal under Antnio de Oliveira Salazar, whom many considered fascist. Other American allies of the early Cold War period included South Korea and Taiwanneither of them a democracy at that time. Why did the United States ensure the protection of these non-democracies? It was to protect them from takeover by U.S. adversaries. In the process, this policy allowed American allies to have the freedom of choice, democratic or otherwise. After World War II, America positioned itself as the true leader of the free worldallowing nations with different interests, systems of government, and traditions to determine their own destiny.

The democracy promotion credo is, by contrast, quite different. It goes far beyond the protection of the international status quo and advocates an openly revisionist policy, one that is designed not simply to contain other top non-democratic nations but to change their systems of government. When it comes to major powers, profound transformations of this nature usually arise through internal change or outright military defeat; economic and diplomatic pressures alone typically do not accomplish that muchunless, of course, as in the case of Japan before Pearl Harbor, they trigger a war with clear winners and losers. The Biden administration does not talk about regime change, but its words and actions contribute to a suspicion in Beijing and Moscow alike that regime change would be precisely the result of yielding to American pressure. At a time when the United States is deeply polarizednot only over its foreign policy priorities, but over its fundamental valuespursuing such an ambitious, setback-prone foreign policy while simultaneously undertaking a transformational domestic agenda is reckless.

Most importantly, democracy promotion is unnecessary (at least on geopolitical grounds) because there is little evidence that China and Russia, when left to their own devices, would be eager to form a global authoritarian alliance. Neither power shows much inclination to view geopolitics or geoeconomics primarily through the prism of a presumed great democracy-autocracy divide. China seems perfectly willing to establish close economic ties with the European Union and, for that matter, even the United States. Chinese objectives appear quite traditionalgaining influence, developing friends and clients, without being particularly concerned one way or the other about their standard of liberty. Unlike the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, China isnt championing an international network of communist movements. When it comes to bullying neighbors, particularly in the South China Sea and beyond, Beijing makes little distinction between relatively democratic countries like the Philippines and autocratic ones like Vietnam. Despite the common challenge they face from the United States, Beijing and Moscow remain reluctant to conclude a formal political or military alliance. Their actual military cooperation goes little beyond largely symbolic military maneuvers and limited exchanges of military information. Both countries emphasize that they are aligned against the United States and, to some extent, the European Union, but they have not formed any meaningful alliance. China, for instance, did not recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea and even became the number one trading partner of Russian adversary Ukraine. Russia is likewise rarely reluctant to sell advanced military hardware to Chinas rival, India. It therefore remains a fundamental American interest not to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that pushes China and Russia closer together.

EVEN IN the relatively stable U.S. political systemwhere institutional safeguards have usually functioned under the most difficult circumstances, from Watergate to the Trump-Biden transitionit is widely agreed that foreign meddling is unacceptable. Why then do U.S. officials and politicians expect that China and Russia, without similar democratic legitimacy and without legal safeguards to protect their elites in case of defeat, are prepared to accept foreign interference in their fundamental internal arrangements? China and Russia are hardly natural allies, but this fact does not mean that the creation of an assertive alliance of democracies would not push a reluctant Xi and Putin together. The perception of an imminent common threat might force both leaders to conclude that whatever their differences in tactics, political cultures, and long-term interests, in the short run at least, they must work together to oppose the danger of democratic hegemony. If Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin reach this conclusion, it will be increasingly difficult for them to speak to the United States with different voiceseven on issues where it would be perfectly logical in terms of their substantive interests to do so.

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Dangerous Illusions - The National Interest

The boardinghouse that Harriet Jacobs ran in the 1870s is now an apartment building at Mount Auburn and Story streets. (Photo: History Cambridge)

Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, lived in Cambridge in the 1870s. As historians have documented (including during a recent History Cambridge History Caf presentation), the boardinghouses she ran provided a home for Harvard students and faculty, as well as a sense of community for her daughter Louisa and friends.

Less known: Harriet Jacobs connection with one of the earliest female computers who worked at the Harvard College Observatory.

Jacobs used pseudonyms for the main characters in Incidents, the book she wrote based on her own life. She wrote affectionately about Mary Bruce, the baby she cared for after escaping slavery and reaching New York in 1842. Focused on reuniting her own family and fearful about maintaining her freedom, Jacobs still recognized that ere six months had passed, I found that the gentle deportment of Mrs. Bruce and the smiles of her lovely babe were thawing my chilled heart.

In real life, the baby was Imogen Willis. Her parents were then-superstar author Nathaniel Parker Willis and his first wife, Mary Stace. Mary Stace, whom Jacobs called a true and sympathizing friend, died in childbirth when Imogen was 3.

Fast-forward two decades. Imogen married a physician named William Eddy in 1865; they had a daughter in 1868. She may have envisioned a conventional life as a wife and mother, but circumstances dictated otherwise.

The 1873 Cambridge City Directory lists Mrs. I.W. Eddy (without her husband) living at 127 Mount Auburn St. the boardinghouse of Harriet Jacobs.

Keeping house

Harriet Jacobs boardinghouses offered a comfortable refuge to their residents. They also provided security for Jacobs. Like most Americans, she experienced transition and tumult during the 1860s. At the start of the decade, she left employment with the Willises; by then, Willis was remarried and had four more children. She published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in 1861 after many years of attempts and near-misses. During the Civil War, she gained renown as an educator and relief agent helping freed people in the Union-occupied town of Alexandria, Virginia. After the war, she tried to open a school and orphans home for Black children in Savannah, Georgia, supported in part by financial contributions from Massachusetts, but racist sentiment proved too toxic to succeed.

Jacobs had lived in Boston in the 1840s and visited the area often, so she returned to a place where she had friends. In 1869, she laid out her own welcome mat after years of living in other peoples homes and boardinghouses. The 1870 Census identifies her as keeping house. Among the initial residents in her first house on Trowbridge Street were the Willises. A Willis son attended Harvard (Class of 1870), and his mother, sisters and brother moved to Cambridge, too.

The movement of the stars

Imogen Willis Eddys husband deserted his family. He worked as a physician in Nebraska and on two steamship lines out of New York City. She identified herself as a widow, which she officially was when he died in 1879 in Pennsylvania. Perhaps he sent money to her over the years; her will also listed a piece of property and life insurance trust that may have provided income. Her few surviving letters do not indicate poverty, but they do reflect that she felt pinched.

In 1889, at age 47, she applied for a job as an assistant at the Harvard College Observatory, the unusual employment opportunity described in The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, by Dava Sobel. Observatory director Edward Pickering hired women to scrutinize the glass-plate images captured from the telescopes. From photographs (7,883 in 1890, with more added every year), the women determined the location, changes over time, relative brightness and other properties of thousands of stars. The job required math skills, patience and tremendous attention to detail. Not incidentally, female assistants earned 25 cents an hour, a wage few men with similar skills would accept.

Shortly after starting work, Eddy wrote to her brother, I should like very much to have you see some of my work on paper it sounds rather dry & stupid, but I am much interested in it. I never liked arithmetic but the higher mathematics and the problems solved by them, of the movements of the stars are quite another thing. I always read and studied everything I could find about astronomy and now I am daily learning more & more of the practical part of it.

Eddy did not make it into Glass Universe. When I contacted the author, however, she graciously introduced me to Maria McEachern in the John G. Wolbach Library and Lindsay Smith Zrull in the Anatomical Plate Collection at Harvard and the Smithsonian Institutions Center for Astrophysics. They are compiling often far-flung bits of information about the roughly 220 women who worked at the observatory from 1875 to 1975. Mrs. I.W. Eddy was one of the computers about whom they knew relatively little, and they were excited to learn about her backstory and connection to Harriet Jacobs.

Marked individuality

Harriet Jacobs and her daughter Louisa left Cambridge for Washington, D.C., in 1877. Although they were not in Cambridge when Eddy worked for the observatory, the Willis and Jacobs families stayed in contact. Over the years, they helped each other out in Washington and Massachusetts. In 1889, Bailey Willis wrote family members about Jacobs declining health: She is very lame and I presume she is slowly losing ground. She lived until 1897, age 82, when she was eulogized by prominent minister Francis Grimk as a woman of marked individuality.

Imogen Eddys daughter died in 1901, after a sad and lingering illness. (Her death certificate listed dementia as cause of death at age 32.) Eddy had siblings and their families to visit, but she lived in what sounded like a lonely rooming house on Acacia Street. Her work at the observatory gave her purpose until she died in a freak elevator accident in 1904, age 62. The headline on her obituary identified her as a Woman Astronomer.

Harriet Jacobs and Imogen Willis Eddy are buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

About Harriet Jacobs and Imogen Willis Eddy:

About the early women working at the Harvard College Observatory:

A special thanks to Maria McEachern and Lindsay Smith Zrull for providing useful links and background about Imogen Willis Eddys work at the HCO.

History Cambridge started in 1905 as the Cambridge Historical Society. Today we have a new name, a new look and a whole new mission.

We engage with our city to explore how the past influences the present to shape a better future. We strive to be the most relevant and responsive historical voice in Cambridge. We do that by recognizing that every person in our city knows something about Cambridges history, and their knowledge matters. We support people in sharing history with each other and weaving their knowledge together by offering them the floor, the mic, the platform. We shed light where historical perspectives are needed. We listen to our community. We live by the ideal that history belongs to everyone.

Our theme for 2021 is How Does Cambridge Mend? Make history with us at cambridgehistory.org.

Paula Tarnapol Whitacre is a writer and public historian in Alexandria, Virginia, where Harriet Jacobs lived during the Civil War. Whitacre described what Jacobs and abolitionist Julia Wilbur accomplished in Alexandria in A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time (Potomac Books, 2017), the first full-length biography of Wilbur. She is researching the intersecting lives of Jacobs and the family of Nathaniel Parker Willis. Her website, Discovering Lives, is at paulawhitacre.com.

Feature image: Harriet Jacobs formal 1894 portrait by Gilbert Studios via Wikipedia

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'Incidents' author Harriet Jacobs crossed paths with Imogen Eddy, an early Harvard astronomer - Cambridge Day

Anyone who has guiltily caught themselves wondering if pandemics are a bit like natural periodic fires is not alone. The devastation caused by human-driven climate change and the novel coronavirus together have revived outworn and discriminatory ideas about population. In November of 2020, The New Scientist reported readers suggesting that in the face of environmental crisis (including the incursions into wilderness increasing our vulnerability to zoonotic diseases), we should collectively be addressing the elephant in the room in other words, we must face the uncomfortable truth that there are simply too many of us: we are using up more resources than the planet can safely supply and paying the price for it; nature, in its tooth-and-claw indifference to individual suffering, is restoring the balance by killing a good number of us off. Given how tempting it is to bury our own culpability in speculations about natures greater wisdom, we cannot remind ourselves too often that one of the highest risk factors for severe illness and death from COVID-19 is poverty.

The idea that we can solve our problems by lowering our numbers resurrects a debate that began more than two centuries ago. In An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Thomas Malthus challenged the utopianism of Enlightenment thinkers such as William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet by arguing that population growth, which increases exponentially, will always outrun food supply until eventually it is checked by disease, famine, war, and other calamities. Widespread suffering among the poor, he insisted, was therefore not only inevitable but necessary. Moreover, public measures designed to alleviate such suffering only interfered with the natural corrections to population growth that ensured overall prosperity. In his revised 1803 editions of the work, he added that the indigent should be instructed to marry late to avoid overbreeding; if they ignored such advice then they should be blamed for their own misery. (This was incidentally an attitude mocked 74 years earlier by Jonathan Swift in his satirical proposal that the excessively fertile Irish poor should sell their children to the English as food.)

Aside from recent science-based projections that the human population is likely to fall over the course of the next century, what popular neo-Malthusianism chiefly ignores is global inequality. It is overconsumption in wealthy countries and carbon-greedy industry whose profits are reaped by multinational corporations not raw population density that leaves the biggest footprint and drives increasing interspecies contact. And yet for every YouTube video showing how the emissions linked to the voracious consumerism and wasteful habits of global northerners vastly outpace those of more densely populated regions in the Global South, there is comment after comment insisting that we are too many and that eventually nature will simply take her own course.

Malthusian ideas originated in an era of industrial revolution and empire building that seeded the problems of global inequality we now face. The modern analysis of how wealth is produced and distributed began, of course, with Adam Smith who is often erroneously described as the father of modern capitalism. However, that dubious honor belongs more properly to his younger contemporary, Malthus, who was himself a major influence on Charles Darwin.

Malthuss premise that any societys flourishing depends upon the natural, regular culling of its weakest members did not become a lasting principle of political economy, but it took root nevertheless in evolutionary science where it became the key to Darwins theory of natural selection namely, organisms whose traits give them an advantage in an environment will pass those traits down to their descendants, while organisms without such advantage will die before they reproduce. In a spirit even closer to Malthus, Darwins fellow evolutionist Herbert Spencer subsequently coined the phrase survival of the fittest, a cornerstone principle of laissez-faire capitalism, to explain how human societies grow and change. At the intersection of Malthusian economics and evolutionary theory, an essentially competitive human nature explains and justifies everything from jealous and acquisitive behavior to technological progress and unavoidable social inequality.

In Victorian Britain, such ideas were countered by those who railed against industrys exploitation of the poor and who described the tentacular reach of market capitalism across the earth and into the unhappy lives of the millions who suffered so that the few could profit. Charles Dickenss depictions of characters morally disfigured by the greed and cruelty characteristic of mid-century urban life are a good example of such protest. The social problem novels of Charlotte Bront, Elizabeth Gaskell, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Kingsley provide others.

But a very different kind of writing, revolutionary rather than reformist, and boldly turning away from social realism to the older genre of utopian romance, tackled these problems in another way. William Morris author, artist, textile designer, bookmaker, environmentalist, and socialist organizer believed that the creation and enjoyment of pre-industrial arts and crafts could undo the assumptions about natural inequality that were baked into capitalism. Influenced by both Karl Marx and John Ruskin, he demanded that works of art should actually embody the equality and freedom that had disappeared in an age witnessing the rise of mass production and excessive consumption on the one hand and widespread poverty and drudgery on the other. In News from Nowhere his novel-length description of an egalitarian, anti-consumerist society he aimed at nothing less than rewiring his readers minds and hearts.

News from Nowhere imagines a world two centuries into the future in which the miseries of the 19th century are all but forgotten. A few relics usually old books preserved by eccentric antiquarians draw a picture of that past. They tell a story of crippling poverty, brutal conditions for industrial labor including low wages, long workdays, urban pollution, poor public health, and a vast and unbridgeable wealth gap. Most of the lucky inhabitants of Morriss future London, however, simply take for granted the delights of what has become an entirely pastoral lifestyle. They have leisure to enjoy natures beauties, while contentedly engaging in just the right amount of healthy cooperative work outdoors or laboring happily over exquisitely decorated, hand-made objects which they give away freely to those who need them. They also enjoy remarkable longevity thanks to good food and an abundance of clean air and water. William Guest, the narrating visitor from the 19th century (and a thinly veiled stand-in for Morris himself), is the pivot between these worlds. While it seems at first like an impossible fantasy of return to an idealized medieval England, the story is less interested in depicting either the past or the future than in helping readers to recognize and reject the toxic Malthusianism of the Victorian present.

Admittedly, there are no direct references to population theory or even to Darwinism in the story. But the fact that there is no scarcity in Nowhere, and no scarcity because there is no greed, is a clue that Morris wrote the novel as a challenge to Malthusian evolutionism. For Morris, societies do not evolve out of deep evolutionary time, improving as they gradually eliminate their weaker constituents and sustained by the natural inequalities among their members. Nor are human beings fundamentally and naturally in competition with one another. Rather, he concurred with Marx, what we call human nature is simply the sum of the various circumstances that human beings themselves help to create and that in turn shape their lives or what Marx called the ensemble of social relations in the present.

News from Nowhere departs from an earlier tradition in utopian socialism represented in the schemes of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen. Their utopian designs were based in a science of human nature to which they believed a planned community needed to be responsive if it was to produce social harmony and equality. The denizens of Nowhere, on the other hand, are good because they are the descendants of socialist revolutionaries. The whole reason they care about the happiness of their fellows, are sensitive to the skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells, have no interest in accumulating wealth, and put great value on the beauty of the objects they carefully craft is that they and their ancestors have built a new world free of the slavery and corrupting wealth gap of the commercial system. For Morris, as for Marx, that system was one of alienation where human beings have lost not only their sensuous relationship to the products of their own labor but the very capacity to shape their own lives and their relationships with others. The unalienated Nowhereans have replaced what their historian describes contemptuously as the competitive spur to exertion with an instinct for beauty and an impulse to share all that they enjoy.

The goal of the novel is to pass this along to its audience who must learn to read in a new way. For as one might expect, News from Nowhere is a little thin on plot: aside from a lengthy account of the revolutionary founding of Nowhere, the story consists mostly of a conflict-free journey up the Thames with a group of elegant and morally flawless Nowhereans. Yet it is the very lack of struggle and conflict that for Morris makes the story artistic in the true sense something that can be produced, shared, and enjoyed in a world endeavoring to rid itself of class discrimination and suffering. He believed that such art, because it was unalienated, could actively undo the devastating psychological effects of capitalism and thereby help human beings transform the oppressive conditions under which they lived.

Guest arrives in Nowhere in the year 2102. Scramble the digits and he would have landed instead in 2021 where of course in the real world his vision remains as utopian as ever, and where we can add to the alienation of wage labor and enormous social inequality the uncertain future of work in developed countries, the many ways that technology-hungry nations remain vectors of harm for poorer ones, globally uneven access to the COVID vaccine, and wide-scale climate-change injustice. What Morris reminds us, just as he reminded his 19th-century audience, is that these terrible inequities are neither natural nor inexorable. Imagining a perfect world in which we are transformed by art might seem trivial in the teeth of the massive problems we face. But In contrast to dystopian fantasies of population reduction, Morriss utopia suggests that through the shared appreciation of well-made things we may learn to relinquish the pleasures that bind us to others suffering.

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William Morris, Utopian Socialism, and the Value of Art over Numbers - lareviewofbooks

On February 25, 2016, 22-year-old Shawna Lynn Jones died from a blow to the head by a falling boulder while fighting the Mulholland Fire in Malibu, California. She was part of Malibu 13-3, a 12-person crew of inmates who work as firefighters under supervision of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the U.S. Forest Service. A Los Angeles Times article about her death stated that Jones was the first woman and just the third conservation camp inmate to die since the program began in 1943. Just is quite the word to use in such a sentence, considering the cruelty of the system that led to Joness death. In her new book Breathing Fire, writer Jaime Lowe offers a vivid picture of the injustices that affected Jones and her fellow firefighters.

Expanding on a 2017 feature she wrote for The New York Times Magazine, Lowe examines the fallout from Joness death and tells the story of the thousands of women inmates who help fight Californias wildfires every year. Male inmates have been firefighting since 1946, and women were given the option to do so in the 1980s. Public officials considered this a matter of fairness, Lowe writes, and in fact incarcerated women also tend to see the firefighting work program as a desirable alternative to the inhumane conditions of prison. The compounds that house inmate firefighters, called conservation camps,have better food and living conditions than the states prisons, and they offer participants the chance to earn credits that go toward shortening their sentences. In the book, Lowe describes getting to know many incarcerated firefighters who tell her the work has changed their lives for the better or that theyre hoping to get jobs in firefighting or forestry when theyre out.

But Lowe makes a clear distinction between professional firefighting in the free world and the carceral systems employment of inmates as firefighters. All the women I spoke with could see the benefits of the firefighting program, but most bristled at the idea that they had volunteered, Lowe writes, citing the litany of reasons an inmate would consider such a dangerous job more desirable than the conditions in prison, which include sexual assault, neglect for the sick or mentally ill, and poor nutrition. Volunteer is a relative term for the incarcerated.

And for all the comparative perks, offering wildland firefighting as an alternative prison experience is certainly not a much more humane way to treat prisoners. Inmate firefighters are paid a salary of just five dollars a day, which includes the 24-hour periods when they are on call for fires, plus one dollar per hour when actively firefighting. They work on the ground as hand crews, hiking in to clear vegetation early on in the fire and mopping up by stomping out embers at the end. Basically, the hand crews are the ones in the trenches, a camp commander named Keith Radey tells Lowe, and theyre mostly made up of inmate crews. Depending on the year, inmates might make up as much as 30 percent of Californias wildland firefighter crews. And while program spokespeople emphasize that inmates are considered just as capable as professional firefighters, they never train with live fire. Many of the women recount how scared they were to see a real fire for the first timewhile fighting it. In a striking scene, as a particularly erratic fire barrels toward one inmate crew, their foremen tell them that theyre seeing action that most free world firefighters never see.

Lowe spends a couple of chapters tracing the history of the fire program back to the ugly roots of Californias carceral system and slavery practices. The countrys first female firefighter, for example, was a Black woman named Molly Williams who worked as a servant for the man who had once enslaved her. The man was part of a volunteer firefighter corps, and Williams sometimes stepped in for crew members during fires. Historians often frame Williamss 19th-century heroism as entirely voluntary, despite the questionable power dynamics of her situation. In the 1900s, inmate labor drove the westward expansion of Los Angeles and the construction of the Pacific Coast Highway. More recently, women and people of color have been particularly affected by the war on drugs and three-strikes laws (still in effect in California) that give repeat offenders sentences of 25 years to life; the number of incarcerated women in the U.S. increased more than 750 percent between 1980 and 2019.

As the inmate population in California has grown, the number of incarcerated firefighters has too, doubling from the 1960s to today. And officials have never been coy about the reason; many have lauded conservation camps as cost-effective solutions to prison overcrowding and fire management. Because its so much less expensive than hiring more firefighters at a fair wage, the California prison systems forestry program saves taxpayers about $100 million a year, and has saved the state $1.2 billion since its inception. In 2014, the office of Californias Attorney General (then led by Kamala Harris) argued against reducing the number of inmates in state prisons because it would severely impact fire camp participation in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.

Whether or not the women have had a positive experience at the conservation camps, most of their stories amply illustrate that the U.S. carceral system is not built for justice or protecting inmates. Even the women who love the program so much that they want to become firefighters when they get out of prison will likely be barred from many of those jobsor at least required to jump through lots of hoops to applybecause of their felony convictions. In 2017, Lowe met a woman at a conservation camp named Alisha, who told her that she was already taking classes in hopes of getting a job on an engine when shes out. In 2020, when Lowe told Alisha about a new law that makes it slightly easier for former inmates to get firefighting jobs, Alisha said, Oh god, thats so dope. I wish I was out. By that time, shed been given a life sentence after an attempted robbery, because it was her third offense.

Lowe, who began reporting this book in 2016, excels at detailing the injustices that make up these womens lives. She spends much of the book following a handful of womens stories from childhood to arrest to conservation camp. It seems wise to devote so much space to this level of personal narrative; in recent years Californias women inmate firefighters have seen no shortage of press coverage, much of which treats the program as a novelty or discusses it in broad, statistical strokes. Breathing Fire brings nuance to the lived experiences of the women inmates who are helping the state face an increasingly grim future of wildfire, and to Jones, the first of them to die on the job. But it never losessight of the central truth: they should never have been asked to do this in the first place.

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The Incarcerated Women Risking Their Lives to Fight Wildfires - Outside