NPR reports:

Shirley Hopkins built careers for herself and countless other Black workers through a federal government job.

While working in the National Institutes of Health’s human resources office, she became known as the “recruitment lady.” It wasn’t spelled out in her job description, but she made it her personal mission to encourage more Black students in the Washington, D.C., area to apply for the federal agency’s internship and youth employment programs.

“When I was young, I was not able to find employment,” Hopkins says. “I was not going to have it the way it was when I was coming up. I was going to let them be a part of something and let them get a job and work and be responsible.”

The 81-year-old retiree, now living in Prince George’s County, Md., one of the wealthiest majority-Black counties in the country, remembers how proud her mother was when she secured her first federal job — caring for young cancer patients in NIH clinical trials as a nurse’s aide.

“She didn’t say it, but it was like, ‘You made it. You moved on up,’ ” Hopkins says about her mother, who earned money doing hairdressing inside her D.C. home and domestic work at other people’s houses. “Some of the people she used to work for, they worked for the federal government, and she knew how important it was.”

Working for the U.S. government also came with the kinds of benefits and job stability that have attracted many Black federal employees for generations.

Now, the Trump administration’s slashing of government jobs, ongoing hiring freeze and attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs are upending what has been a longstanding path into the middle class for many Black workers, including some Hopkins helped recruit. [Continue reading…]