Feb 12 Hot Topics, Voices of Labor: The African American Journey
Diana Smith | Published on 1/20/2025
Honoring the work of African Americans — forced and voluntary, and the long
struggle for equality — will be the focus of the Feb. 12 Hot Topics lunch and panel, “Voices of Labor: The African American Journey,” hosted by the League of Women Voters of Orange County.
Doors open at 10:30 a.m. at the Winter Park Events Center for a buffet lunch. The discussion starts at 11:45 a.m. at 1050 W. Morse Blvd. in Winter Park and ends at 1 p.m. Tickets are $30 for League members, $37 non-members. Register at www.LWVOC.org/HotTopics
Work has been transformational and integral to the history of African Americans, their lives and their culture, according to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), which organizes the yearly themes for February’s Black History Month.
Spectrum News 13 Anchor Curtis McCloud will moderate the Hot Topics. Panelists include Tadar Muhammad, chief operating officer and first vice president of CareerSource Central Florida; Rhonda Reaves, a professor at FAMU’s School of Law who teaches employment law; Dr. Darryl Gordon, who manages UCF’s Office of the Vice Provost and Dean in the College of Undergraduate Studies, and Kimberly Rankin, human relations manager for the City of Orlando.
ASALH notes that 2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the creation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids by labor and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph. It was the first Black union to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. incorporated issues such as economic justice from Randolph’s movement into the Poor People’s Campaign, established in 1967. The 2025 theme of African Americans and Labor examines “the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people.”
Among the issues to be discussed:
How have work experiences shaped the lives of Black people?
What role do African Americans play in the local labor market and the effect on our community?
African Americans have made gains in their struggle for parity. But what challenges lie ahead?