Celebrating Black History in the workforce across the Mahoning Valley

The Mahoning Valley is full of rich history and some of it includes African Americans in the workforce that helped to lay the foundations of cities like Youngstown.
"Among the African Americans who came here for the building boom after the civil war, there's two names in particular, Plimpton Ross Berry and William Stewart and they're both very skilled brick masons," Bill Lawson, the executive director of the Mahoning Valley Historical Society said.
Berry operated his own construction company and even built the old Rayen school on Wick Avenue.
"He and other African Americans were founding members of Bricklayers Local 8, which is a trade union that started here in Youngstown that still exists today," Lawson said.
Lawson said African Americans also voted overwhelmingly at the plants to be apart of the United Steel Workers Union and that this helped propel the valley forward.
"For African Americans and other minorities, it was an opportunity because the unions brought seniority into the picture in terms of being able to move up to better pay and more skilled jobs," Lawson said. "You began to see changes as far as job rules, basically the companies controlled the hiring part, that's where you started to see human resource departments grow up," he said.
The impact of that is still being felt today.
"African Americans benefitted very much from that and were a key part of labor and skilled labor and in some cases management here in the Mahoning Valley," Lawson said.
Lawson adds, it was a pioneering effort that African Americans were there for from the beginning.