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A radical reassessment of union-black-state relations in the U.S. from the nineteenth century to the present Paul D. Moreno offers a bold reinterpretation - truly a "new history" - of the role of race and racial discrimination in the American labor movement. Breaking with historians' deadlocked debate over the importance of race in labor organizations, Moreno applies insights of the law-and-economics movement to formulate a powerfully compelling labor-race theorem of elegant simplicity: White unionists found that race was a convenient basis on which to do what unions do - control the labor supply. Not racism pure and simple but "the economics of discrimination" explains historic black absence and under-representation in unions. Moreno's sweeping reexamination stretches from the antebellum period to the present, integrating relevant biographical details of principal figures such as Frederick Douglass and Samuel Gompers. Throughout, he focuses on the liberal-individualist philosophy that underlay the nineteenth-century principle of the right to work, a philosophy that the progressive or twentieth-century liberal view came to override but never fully eradicate. He traces changing attitudes and practices and exposes the impact made by federal and state employment policies, transformations in the southern economy, and the civil rights movement. Moreno brings remarkable clarity to the question of the importance of race in unions, impressively weaving together labor, policy, and African American history into a cogent, persuasive revisionist study that cannot be ignored.