This claim was the central theme in the African American freedom movement. The civil rights movement built on the authority derived from making work visible and testifying to its strength and endurance. Cristina Beltrán has shown how the claim that “illegals” were “building America” was central to immigrant demonstrations in 2006 which called for reform in immigration laws (Beltrán 2009). Similarly, in women's history, women used claims based on their civic work (challenging the distinction between paid and unpaid) as the foundation for suffrage. Thus, Francis Willard, leader of the largest voluntary association of women in the nineteenth (p. 334) century, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, titled her book The Work and Workers of the Women's Christian Temperance Union(1972).
Free spaces reach beyond geographic communities through work and organizations associated with work. In the African American freedom struggle, for instance, groups like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and community groups such as women's auxiliaries described in the study by Melinda Chateauwert, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (1997), sustained free spaces for political education and oppositional culture for generations. Free spaces are also foundations for the next wave of democracy-building.