School Desegregation in the 21st Century Book

Straightforward, unpretentious reporting of events at
Harvard after some students, including this author, saw
the stark contrast between Harvard's burgeoning endowment
funds and its penny-pinching way with the hourly wages of
the people doing menial ("of or relating to servants")
work on campus. That student concern became the
Living Wage Campaign which worked several years to finally
see the lowest-paid workers getting about $11 an hour
instead of less than $7. Most of the text consists of
transcripts of conversations with the workers about their
work and their efforts to support their families decently.
As Studs Terkel says in his foreword, "The custodians of
Harvard now have faces and voices and they are eloquent,
natural-born storytellers." Much of the power of the book
is in the author's fine photographs (portraits) of workers
in their work settings, and of the campaign's sit-in, and
of Harvard's negotiating team as they considered the demands
for some step toward reasonable wages.