Kim Kelly, a labor journalist and author, had no idea “Fight to Win!: Heroes of American Labor,” a book on labor movements for young readers would publish during the early days of a chaotic second Donald Trump presidency. Set to release in May, the author of the critically acclaimed “Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor” doesn’t exactly expect any invitations to promote her book at the U.S. Department of Labor. And yet, as the Trump administration through DOGE upends the lives of thousands of federal and civil workers, Kelly’s book, which chronicles labor movements that empowered the nation’s diverse working class, is critical reading at this moment.
In conversation with The Emancipator, Kelly discusses why, during this pivotal period in history, it is important to empower children by encouraging curiosity and courage while teaching vital lessons about the power of agency and community.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Frankie Huang: How do you feel about publishing a book for children at this juncture in time, amid this anti-DEI panic manifesting in the form of book bans and censorship?
Kim Kelly: As soon as I started posting teasers about it online, I started getting the comments saying like “Oh, that’s going to get banned immediately. That’s not going to make it to Florida.” After seeing a lot of those comments, it did start to get to me. It’s not a nice thought that this book, that is very inclusive, [a] very diverse history book that goes through this broad working-class history that everyone should have access to might immediately [be] restricted or banned or challenged, just because its cover has a bunch of people with different skin tones and with different mobility devices.
I put this book together for all of the people that need it the most, like young people that are in places where it’s harder to find these stories and harder to find documentation of these labor struggles and strikes, and even just explanations of what a union is and what it means to build power collectively.
I feel so much more responsibility than when I first conceived of this book pre-Elon. I have to put a little extra effort in to make sure this book gets where it needs to go because this is exactly the type of history that’s being actively erased across the government, across so many schools. It feels a little heavy, but it’s exciting, too, because I like nothing more than a fight.
When you wrote this book, the presidential race was still between Joe Biden and Trump. If you knew that you’d publish at the beginning of the second Trump administration, do you think you would’ve done a few things differently?
Honestly, no. The political climate for workers, for poor people, for the people I’m in community with has always been bad in this country. We got a little bit of a reprieve during the Biden administration because we got a little bit of breathing room around labor. But even just in the broader scheme, this is not a country that has engaged with its own history in a truthful, or responsible way throughout the beginning since its founding myth.
So I wasn’t expecting to have to deal with this new Trump regime, but even if the most friendly, noncorporate Democrat in the world – if such a thing exists – somehow became president, you’re still not going to read about people like Maria Moreno or Dorothy Bolden or Joni Christian in a typical school book you’re going to find in a young reader’s section, let alone an adult section.
What’s your understanding of the way labor movements get taught in middle and high school?
At least from the outside, as someone who has talked to quite a few people that went through that system, and are now interested in labor, it doesn’t seem like something that is taught very rigorously, or really very much at all in most classrooms.
And if it is, it’s probably presented in this pro-business sort of way. I’ve seen, I think it was Virginia a few years ago. When Glenn Youngkin came in, they were making some changes to the state curriculum. I remember talking to some folks about it, and they had changed the curriculum to this more conservative-focused sort of bent. And I remember looking through it and seeing that the only thing about unions was just them in relation to capital, and them painting them essentially as a bad thing.
I wondered how prevalent this is and how widespread this is. I know that in West Virginia there was a concerted effort by coal industry interests to keep West Virginia’s radical rich labor history out of schools, to keep kids from learning about the mine workers and the Battle of Blair Mountain, and the real meaning of “rednecks.” To keep that history quiet and keep it away from the folks who benefit from it the most. Because if people know about that history, people know where they came from, they might start to question the status quo.
Labor history is dangerous if you are someone who benefits from people not being organized and not understanding the power they hold.
Your book explores a lot of big ideas like intersectionality and systemic racism. Will your target readers need teachers and parents to help explain these concepts, and would that complicate things?
When I was approaching this, I wanted to give kids credit for being curious and for being smart. When I was that age, I started reading books that were maybe a little too old for me. I just remember that if I came across a concept I didn’t understand or a word that I couldn’t place, I would just look it up.
And now that so many kids have access to the internet, to immediate knowledge at the tip of their fingers. … Part of becoming a good reader is figuring out how to sift through that information and figure out what makes the most sense, what seems right, what speaks to you, and that’s a much bigger process.
In this current environment, children are being shown winning in the context of President Trump or Elon Musk. How will these stories of fighting to win within the labor movement offer a counterpoint or enrich their understanding of resistance and of winning itself?
Yeah, I think the two examples you cited and just a lot of the general kind of cultural effluvia around the streamers and influencers, and the Mr. Beasts of the world makes success and winning look deeply individualistic.
Challenging that notion of what winning looks like is really needed, because building collective power and taking care of your neighbors and the “not me, us” sort of mentality is what we’ve seen in so many important social movements. It introduces the idea that it’s not just you trying to get ahead. It’s not just you trying to get a raise. It’s not just you trying to fix a problem at work. It’s you and your coworkers trying to make things better for everyone. I think encouraging kids to embrace that idea and make that mental shift is something that is really going to help make us a healthier society.
I think that horrible Horatio Alger [phrases] of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, you against the world, cowboy mythos that America and Americans have a really deeply unhealthy relationship with is making us worse.
I mean, if I had a kid, I would much rather they read about someone like Rosina Tucker, who was risking her own safety to deliver messages between union workers who were organizing and trying to hide from company guards and trying to fight for rights for Black Pullman [porter] workers than listening to how Mr. Beast made his next billion dollars. I would rather they learn about the people in this book, even the ones that didn’t succeed in their goals.
One of most important lessons of the labor movement, I think, is that even if you get knocked down and you don’t win this battle, it’s still part of the longer war and the conflict that you’re in, which is you and your coworkers and the people trying to build a better world and take what you deserve and gain the respect and dignity that you should have coming to you.
Labor history is dangerous if you are someone who benefits from people not being organized and not understanding the power they hold.
KIM KELLY
What are some immediate lessons that you think these young people can take away, on issues that are important to them, such as school shootings or bodily autonomy for transgender children? Do you think your book can teach them to mobilize and organize in their own way now?
Yeah, because so much of labor history has been about protest and about organizing collectively and about figuring out ways to reach out to people in your workspace, in your community, in your church, and gather them together and say, “Okay, here’s this problem. What are we going to do about it?”
Not only are you not alone in caring about this issue, you’re part of this bigger movement. And I think this is the exact right time to give them some concrete examples of other young people throughout history who have successfully changed their workplaces and made things better for themselves and their coworkers.
I remember when I went to my first job and I had a rough time. I was a dishwasher, and I did not get treated the way anybody would want their daughter to be treated in that role, but I felt like I was alone. I couldn’t do anything about it. I just ended up quitting. If I had read a book like this earlier on, I probably would’ve talked to my coworkers and we could have all done something about that bad boss. So it is a little personal, too, I think about little me and how much I wish I had known how powerful even one worker can be when they strike up a conversation with someone else and go, “Oh, I’ve been thinking about the exact same thing.”
I don’t want any kid to have to put up what we put up with. I want ’em to know how powerful they are.
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