By Fred Redmond, Secretary Treasurer AFL-CIO
In 1917, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen launched The Messenger, a pro-labor, anti-war magazine that connected racism to exploitation and demanded justice for Black workers. Two years later, the federal government responded with tactics of targeted censorship—surveillance, harassment and threats of prosecution—and branded a small Black labor magazine “the most dangerous” publication in the country simply for encouraging Black workers to organize.
More than a century later, two highly respected Black journalists—Don Lemon and Georgia Fort—are handcuffed and indicted for filming a protest inside a church. The tools have changed, but the oppressive government playbook has not.
That continuity matters as we mark 100 years since the launch of Negro History Week, founded in February 1926 by Carter G. Woodson. Negro History Week rejected the lie that Black people had no history worth teaching and no role worth remembering. It challenged an education system that erased Black achievement and a public narrative that treated Black people as a problem, not a people. What later became Black History Month grew from that project of memory and resistance. From its earliest days, Black history celebrations were about more than remembrance. They also were acts of resistance, challenging the ongoing use of law, fear and surveillance to silence Black workers and suppress the truth about power in this country.
That pairing matters: The birth of Negro History Week alongside the rise of an apparatus built to monitor and suppress Black labor dissent. The same government that denied Black people their history also treated them as a threat when they spoke collectively as workers. When Black workers asserted their right to organize and be heard, they faced not just employer retaliation, but state repression.
Randolph went on to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first major Black-led union, and was under constant federal surveillance. As Black workers organized in factories, on farms and in service jobs across the country, local police and FBI “Red Squads” and federal counterintelligence programs infiltrated meetings, built massive files, and worked to neutralize leaders who linked racial justice to workplace democracy.
That history provides a framework for understanding what happened in Minnesota this January, when Black journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested after covering a protest inside a church opposing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the area. The message was unmistakable: documenting dissent can itself be treated as a crime.
At the same time, major media outlets are shrinking their newsrooms and walking away from race coverage. The Washington Post recently laid off some 300 journalists, including race and ethnicity reporters. In late 2025, NBC News shuttered entire teams dedicated to covering Black, Latino and Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander stories. In Pittsburgh, the 240‑year‑old Post‑Gazette is being shut down by its owners, who responded to a court order requiring them to honor The NewsGuild‑CWA (TNG-CWA) journalists’ contract after years of striking. When powerful newsrooms dismantle the very beats created after 2020 to cover racism and inequality, they send a different version of the same message: some truths about power are no longer welcome.
The National Writers Union said the arrests “set a disastrous precedent for press freedom in the United States,” and the National Association of Black Journalists called on the government to “halt all retaliatory posture toward journalists.” SAG‑AFTRA has condemned the arrests of Fort and Lemon, a member, and unions like TNG‑CWA are warning that union‑busting, mass layoffs, and criminal charges against journalists are part of the same effort to make it dangerous for workers to tell the truth.
This Black History Month, the labor movement must be clear: the right to organize and the right to dissent stand or fall together. There is no freedom of association if workers cannot gather, speak and be heard. When Black journalists are criminalized for documenting protest, the real target is the possibility of multiracial worker power. If true worker power and economic dignity are to have a future, it will be because the labor movement continues to refuse that silence.
The AFL-CIO recognizes that the same tactics used to quash Black voices are used to suppress all our voices—on shop floors, in independent media, in the streets, on picket lines and in places of worship. We stand with our union brothers, sisters and siblings in insisting that the First Amendment is a right and a core worker protection, not a luxury.
A century ago, Woodson insisted that Black people had a history worth telling and Randolph told Black workers they deserved more than exploitation. The government tried to silence them. This Black History Month, the question remains the same: Will Black truth tellers be honored or handcuffed?
The labor movement’s answer must be clear. We stand with Black workers and Black journalists in their right to dissent, to document, and to demand a better future.
Fred Redmond, the highest-ranking African American labor official in history, is the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, representing 64 unions and nearly 15 million workers.
