Keona K. Ervin admits in the introduction of her newly released book, Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis that the work started out as a biography of labor organizer Ora Lee Malone. Once Ervin dug in, she realized that Malone was part of a continuum.
“Malone died at age 93, having lived a long life of engaged struggle that was less a departure from and more an extension of a black women workers’ dynamic labor organizing the Gateway City during the first half of the twentieth century,” Ervin said in the book.
She will discuss Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis, next Thursday at the Missouri History Museum. The talk is part of the robust companion programming for the exhibit #1 in Civil Rights: The African American Freedom Struggle in St. Louis.
Out of the biography of Malone, who is relatively unknown outside of those with in-depth knowledge of black history and the black presence in labor movement, came a comprehensive chronology of black women’s front line role in the movement for equal employment –and civil rights in general – and how their actions can be linked to movements for equity, rights and justice across the nation.
“Gateway to Equality” carries the reader from the labor strike led by Smith and Lewis in 1933 to the rent strike spearheaded by Jean King in the late 1960s.
Twenty years before Malone came to St. Louis from Arkansas as part of the last waves of the Great Migration, Carrie Smith and Cora Lee Lewis – described by Ervin as “black working-class radical women” – led a strike of two thousand black female industrial workers.
“They staged one of the most important episodes of labor militancy and economic justice struggle in St. Louis since the 1877 General Strike, when thousands of mostly white and male railroad workers shut down the city,” Ervin said.
The strike came two years before the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada.
In the book, readers will see names synonymous with Civil Rights – both locally and nationally – like Frankie Muse Freeman and Margret Bush Wilson. They will also learn that unsung heroes like Modestine Crute Thornton, Pearl Maddox, Myrtle Walker, Gessie Mae Myles and Annabelle Mayfield – who testified at a local Fair Employment Practices Commission hearing against several companies with practices that barred them from access to defense employment in 1944.
The book reads like a required textbook from a college-level history course, understandable since Ervin is an assistant professor of history at University of Missouri-Columbia. But the blunt, matter-of-fact tone details fascinating moments that should be required knowledge within the spectrum of St. Louis black history.Â
Missouri History Museum will host author Keona Ervin, author of Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis at 7 p.m. on Thursday, September 7 at the Missouri History Museum, 5700 Lindell Blvd., 63112. The book discussion is held in conjunction with the exhibit #1 in Civil Rights: The African American Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, which runs through April 2018. For more information, visit www.mohistory.org.
