Jesse Chanin, postdoctoral fellow and research facilitator at Tulane University, would like a word. Delving into local and state archives, conducting over fifty interviews, and interrogating the forces that “eviscerated” New Orleans public schools, Chanin provides an excellent history of the people who made the system work, anchored its communities, and never failed to advocate for its students. Building Power, Breaking Power: The United Teachers of New Orleans, 1965-2008 (UNC Press, 2024) makes important contributions to the fields of labor history, education history, Southern history, African American history, and urban histories of neoliberalism.
Telling the full story of the largest teachers’ union in Louisiana and one of the strongest in the South, Chanin provides an important bridge between civil rights unionism and social movement unionism in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Her attention to UTNO’s “bargaining for the common good,” in which unions organized with communities to fight simultaneously for racial and economic justice, corrects any misguided attempts to undervalue teachers’ unions in the South, Black women’s activism in the labor movement, and Black-led institution building in the post-civil rights era. Chanin offers a nuanced analysis of how elite powerbrokers infused with anti-labor, anti-democratic, and anti-Black animus gained momentum through an education reform movement in the 1990s and targeted public institutions in the lead-up to the storm.
A core theme of Building Power is the entrenched conflict between labor and capital, and under state deregulation, capital’s “creative destruction,” or in this case, privatization, of a public school system. Private management, high-stakes testing, colorblind policies, consumer-choice vouchers, merit-based pay, and crucially no unions—key elements of the “neoliberal education reform agenda,” as Chanin frames it—undermined UTNO’s ability to fight for an equitable redistribution of public resources. Still, UTNO held off privatization for decades, even notching significant wins through collective bargaining agreements, community-backed strikes, and worker-led institutions. Katrina, however, destroyed this tenuously negotiated stalemate.
Chanin resists wading too deeply into the aftermath. Instead, Building Power is just that, a history of Black-led, interracial institution building in the decades prior to the storm, one that seems to have been publicly forgotten, politically maligned, or, like so much else after the deluge, simply erased. The book begins in 1965 when the American Federation of Teachers Local 527 launched its first campaign for collective bargaining. Founded originally in 1937 by Black educators (a rich history in its own right), Local 527 launched the first teacher’s strike in the South in 1966, a three-day action backed by the national AFT. In 1969, the local struck again, holding a nine-day picket line that galvanized teachers, students, parents, and the community. After the district entered a faculty desegregation plan in the early 1970s, Local 527 merged with a majority-white local to form UTNO, then pressured the school board with interracial mobilization and finally won its collective bargaining agreement in 1974.