Dr. Alonzo Ward and African American Hybrid Labor Activism

Heartland History

Dr. Alonzo Ward is an assistant professor of history at Eastern Illinois University. He focuses on African American history in the Midwest during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as the general history of race and ethnicity in the United States. Specifically, he researches African American labor history in Illinois in conjunction with the larger labor movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We are talking to him about his recent article “‘A Revolution in Labor:’ African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era,” which was recently published in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.