Born in 1898, Layle Lane was a toddler when a vow to lynch her Congregational minister father forced the family to flee their Marrietta, Ga. home. A graduate of Howard University with a master's from Columbia, she became a high school social studies...

They made for an odd couple. Henry Linville, soft-spoken and almost courtly, with neither the temperament nor talent for personal confrontation. Not so his longtime and much younger sidekick Abraham Lefkowitz. “He was a fighter,” remembers Ruben...

Militancy lost its romance early in Fanny Simon’s life. Only a teenager, she found out that a strike doesn’t guarantee a happy ending. Her father lost his job and the family was uprooted when a strike by glove cutters was crushed.

He hated supervisors with a serious passion. To him, all the raises in the world wouldn't change the fact that teachers were forced to work in a system he called "a thinly veiled despotism."

It's your typical August day in Washington, D.C.: One of those patented pool-of-sweat afternoons when most people have peeled off as much clothing as good taste — or at least the law — allows. But here in his small Georgetown apartment, propped up in...

Like the others who gave up their nights and weekends for the collective bargaining campaign in 1961, June Temple was a dutiful foot soldier. She could live with the long exhausting hours and no pay — not even car fare. But for some there were worse...

In 1962, Al Shanker was after Sol Jaffe's job. The two had worked together closely in the Teachers Guild and the early UFT, with Shanker supporting Jaffe in his first bid to become the UFT's secretary. But now Jaffe had sided with the "militants" and...

It was the Depression and even the salesgirls at Macy's were required to stand 5-foot-5 and have a college degree. Rose Schuyler had the diploma, but not the reach.

Alice Marsh, the UFT's first legislative rep in Albany, was the only child of a working single mother who insisted she go on to high school while the rest of her elementary school graduating class went off to work.

In 1960, Si Beagle was one of the city's few supervisors to go out on strike, walking the picket line alone at Bronx's JHS 113. "I had no choice. How could I look in the mirror and rationalize it. Here Mr. Big Shot. Talks, talks, talks, but he ends...