Danielle Phillips-Cunningham (multicultural women’s and gender studies) recently was awarded the 2020 Reed Fink Award in Southern Labor History from Georgia State University.

Phillips-Cunningham will deliver a presentation at GSU on her project, “‘We Aren’t Aunt Jemima Women’: The History of Domestic Worker Organizing in Atlanta, Georgia.” The Reed Fink Award also will support her research of the Dorothy Bolden Collection at GSU’s Southern Labor History Archives.

Bolden established the National Domestic Workers’ Union of America in 1968. She also worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr., U.S. House Rep. John Lewis, Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young and U.S. President Jimmy Carter to organize working-class Black women into the largest voting bloc in Georgia’s history. Her legacy lives on through Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight organization, The National Domestic Workers Alliance and other organizations that challenge voter suppression today.

President Jimmy Carter signing a proclamation Ms. Bolden wrote that supported
her labor and voting rights campaign for domestic workers. Ms. Bolden is standing
to the far left of President Carter.

Credit: Georgia State University’s Southern Labor Archives, Dorothy Bolden Collection