AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Emeritus William Lucy s profound impact on the labor and civil rights movements is an instructive blueprint for today s union organizers, according to historians who gathered at AFSCME s 47th International Convention to discuss their forthcoming book about his life.
Lucy, who died in 2024, was AFSCME’s secretary-treasurer from 1972-2010, a co-founder of the Coalition for Black Trade Unionists (CBTU), and president of Public Services International (PSI).
Lucy was a visionary leader in organizing, civil rights, racial justice, civic life and global solidarity. He was a central figure in many fights that shaped AFSCME, the labor movement and the nation, according to current AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Elissa McBride.
McBride on Monday hosted a panel discussion with four of the contributors to Lucy’s forthcoming biography, Standing Together in Service: William Lucy, Civil Rights and the American Labor Movement. The book is due for release in 2027, but AFSCME members attending the Chicago Convention got a special preview on Monday.
“Mr. Lucy was all about building institutions,” said Marc Bayard, the editor of the Lucy biography. “He was always an organizer, and this ability to share these organizing lessons will mean a lot to both seasoned activists as well as new activists.”
Bayard is a senior adviser and chairperson of the International Comparative Labor Studies Research Fellows Program at Morehouse College and associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and director of its Black Worker Initiative.
Jeffrey Helgeson, chair of the Department of History at Texas State University, said Lucy’s union work in Chicago, Atlanta, Memphis, Detroit and Washington, D.C., shaped his view that urban areas had untapped potential for political power.
“He developed this real vision of American cities as power bases for the working class,” Helgeson said. “He never gave up on the urban working class as a power base in American politics.”
William Jones, professor and associate chair of the Department of History at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, credited Lucy with helping transform AFSCME from its roots as a civil service organization into a more militant union focused on worker rights.
“Mr. Lucy belonged to a cohort that recognized most people who were going into public service …. were blue-collar workers, many of whom didn’t even have the right to vote,” Jones said. “And they needed things like collective bargaining, and they sometimes needed to go on strike to represent their interests and stand up for the public service.”
Fran Ryan, the director of the Master of Labor and Employment Relations program at Rutgers University, grew up in Philadelphia reading Lucy’s commentary in AFSCME’s publication, The Public Employee.
“What Bill Lucy did through his pen was talk about things that ABC News wasn’t talking about,” Ryan said about Lucy’s focus on global human rights issues in South Africa, Central America, Northern Ireland and Palestine.
Ryan’s contribution to the book looks at the historical impacts of the partnership between Lucy and former AFSCME President Jerry McEntee.
