Last Updated on May 30, 2025 by BVN
Alyssah Hall
Dr. Nosakhere Thomas has worked for the Inland Empire Black Workers Center (IEBWC) since it opened in 2021, when he accepted the positioned as associate director. In October 2022, Thomas was promoted to executive director. Thomas wears many hats and has also pastored for nearly 40 years.
As executive director of the IEBWC, Thomas focuses on building strategic partnerships, allying, finding and engaging partners who the center can work with on common goals, as well as finding strategic funding opportunities to support the organization’s work.
The IEBWC was created as a Black worker-centered coalition committed to achieving quality jobs, social and economic mobility, and policy change to ensure Black workers, their loved ones and their community succeed.
“We call it family-sustaining jobs or family-sustaining work because, oftentimes, people have to work multiple jobs because the job that they’re on is not sustaining,” Thomas said. “That’s a problem because you have healthcare issues, mental health issues, divided families and strain. Any number of things, you don’t have work life balance and so we’ve advocated for that,” Thomas advised.
According to Thomas, the IEBWC works to get people who have no employment or skill sets into jobs that will sustain their families. To do so, they must remove the “bachelor barrier” so people can get straight to work. The “bachelor barrier” or “paper ceiling” refers to many workers with in-demand experience and skills not being considered for higher-wage jobs due to not having their bachelors degree.
The IEBWC also advocates for circumstances and laws that create better work conditions for Black workers. Thomas asserted that when they advocate for Black workers, it impacts all workers.
Thomas’s altruistic journey began in childhood, raised by his single mother, Dorothy Thomas, who came to Los Angeles from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with three teenage children, while also pregnant with Thomas. Thomas recalled his mother working to take care of her family while dealing with microaggressions, discrimination and wage theft during the 1960s.
“Knowing her story and that journey kind of informed who I would become in terms of how I was wired and in terms of my personality,” Thomas said.
“I’ve developed a personality over time that was always siding with the underdog, the marginalized, the least, the last, the unlucky and the left out and that kind of became part of who I was.”
Dr. Nosakhere Thomas
“I’ve developed a personality over time that was always siding with the underdog, the marginalized, the least, the last, the unlucky and the left out and that kind of became part of who I was.”
Thomas began to fight for the disadvantaged and the bullied from the time he was in grade school to college where he lobbied and organized for fairness. He shared that he was very engaged in organizing protests around the murder of Tyisha Miller in 1998 and even went to jail as a result.
The Miller protest was in response to four Riverside police officers fatally shooting 19-year-old Miller who was unconscious with a gun on her lap. They broke the glass in her car to get to her and alleged Miller reached for her gun upon the break in. The officers proceeded to fire 23 shots, hitting her 12 times. Thomas said that protest is how he “cut his teeth into community service work” in a bigger way. From then on, he began to receive calls with requests to participate in demonstrations involving police shootings.
He credits his late mother, organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), The Black Panthers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, and Stokely Carmichael as figures who influence his role as a community leader.
Since 2019, workers, union organizers, faith leaders, educators and community builders have met to understand the Black job crisis in the Inland Empire. In 2020, the “Ain’t No Sunshine: The State Of Black Workers And Demands For A Brighter Future in The Inland Empire” report was released. The report focused on the economic health of Black workers in the IE and hoped to illuminate the disproportionate unemployment and poverty rates, and concentration of Black workers in low-paying jobs. The study gave rise to the IEBWC.
“It talked about some of the challenges that we experienced in the Inland Empire, high unemployment rates… and it was consistently twice that of our counterparts. Even in 2020, Black men were making 77% of that of white men. Black women were making 66 cents to the white man’s dollar,” Thomas said.
The IEBWC is part of the National Black Worker Center and SoCal Black Worker Hub which includes the Los Angeles Black Workers Center and the San Diego Black Workers Center. Currently in development are two other Black worker projects in the High Desert and in Long Beach.
Since opening, the IEBWC has helped people attain jobs and get training in math and financial literacy. They’ve also hosted listening and learning sessions on women’s and men’s health and even community game nights.
The IEBWC also engaged in policy change as well, one of their most proud pieces of legislation is SB 1340 , which is an act to amend Section 12993 of the Government Code, referring to discrimination. SB 1340 looked at discrimination on the job as not just a state matter for the civil rights department but also as a local issue, according to Thomas.
When the IEBWC first started, they offered a water industry apprenticeship program that would cover the cost of community college tuition and offered other benefits. However, many turned the opportunity down because they thought the offer was too good to be true.
“This is a kind of a generational trauma that has [bred] a kind of institutional suspicion…and so we literally had to walk slow and build trust …we’d have to drop names of other people and institutions, so that they would know we were connecting the Black community and not just some, predators,” Thomas explained.
Now, the IEBWC has established a credible track record in the community through social media that shows their involvement in the community and who they are partnered with. According to Thomas, this makes a huge difference.
