Paul Frymer

Paul Frymer, Associate Professor of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz, will complete a book on the efforts by the U.S. government to racially integrate and diversify labor unions in the mid-twentieth century. Frymer acknowledges that the exponential increase in the numbers of African American union members between 1930 and 1980 was a significant civil rights accomplishment. But he argues that the federal government’s use of litigation to accomplish this goal played a major role in weakening the U.S. labor movement beginning in the 1960s, thereby paradoxically harming the very population it set out to empower.