60 years since the March on Washington

To build a better future for workers, we must recognize the racist and blood-stained history of U.S. labor and the shortcomings of the labor movement’s past.

From this place of understanding and healing, we can better push our movements for racial justice and workers’ rights foward. Labor movements are inextricably linked to climate justice, abolition, reproductive rights, immigration, housing and health care, and our political future in which all people have their basic needs met. The March Continues because it must, and we’re here to report on it.

The March Continues is a Prism project highlighting the legacy of the March on Washington and the inextricable relationship between labor and racial justice in the U.S. Prism looks at everything from prison labor, to Black women and their labor organizing in the South, to chattel slavery and its pervasive legacy and replacements.

Created by labor unionist A. Philip Randolph and activist Bayard Rustin, the March on Washington mobilized 250,000 people for Black Americans’ economic and civil rights. Black labor advocates, unions like the United Automobile Workers (UAW), organizers, civil rights groups like the NAACP and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Black activists, and workers understood that their call to action, their fight, and their efforts were stronger together as a united front, even if there were differences in politics and strategy on a more granular level.

Hear from labor organizers about the continued legacy of the march and how we keep moving forward.

The march Continues

‘There is slavery in the fields of North Carolina’

There is an unbroken line from the economic conditions developed to protect chattel slavery to the legal structures that allow for the abuse and exploitation of migrant farmworkers today

by Tina Vásquez

Movements of hope: Abolition and reparations in these times

Fighting racial capitalism and white supremacy is key to closing the “hope gap” between wanting and achieving reparations and abolition

by Trevor Smith and David Ragland

Workers continue the fight 60 years after the March on Washington

To build a better future for workers, we must recognize the racist and blood-stained history of U.S. labor and the shortcomings of the labor movement’s past

by Lara Witt

racial justice x workers’ rights

Former staff at LGBTQIA+ rights organization Lambda Legal complain of anti-Black bias

According to interviews and internal documents obtained by Prism, some Black and trans former workers said they faced retaliation and emotional harm after speaking up about discrimination

by Alexandra Martinez

Planned Parenthood Southeast workers dispute independent review that cleared leadership of misconduct

Save PPSE campaign alleges that independent investigation did not speak to any former or current workers

by Nicole Froio

A leading Black media organization is abandoning its workers—and its values

Headed into the holidays, union workers at PushBlack, one of the nation’s few Black-led nonprofit media organizations, laid off six of its workers

by PushBlack Workers United

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abolition x workers’ rights

Vermont Department of Corrections once claimed to support abolition and is now aggressively pursuing a new prison

The “pinkwashing” of prisons ramps up in Vermont, where local officials are pushing for the construction of a “gender-responsive” facility

by Sierra Dickey

New York prisons are still struggling to resume normal operations nearly a year after illegal officers’ strike

New York’s prison system didn’t collapse simply due to understaffing, but rather a longstanding culture of minimal accountability for officers

by Devin A. Giordano

Long prison sentences function as involuntary sterilization of incarcerated people

By keeping me imprisoned through the years when I might have become a parent, the prison system reproduces the eugenicist logic that once sought to keep so-called undesirable people from having children

by Mithrellas Curtis

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