1- https://doi.org/10.5406/23283335.115.2.3.05
“A Revolution in Labor”: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era
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Take Notes IN MARCH 1875, A CHICAGO TRIBUNE CORRESPONDENT reported that a miners’ strike in Brazil, Indiana, continued with conditions worsening and the “breach between labor and capital widen[ing].” The year-long labor dispute found the striking miners “dogged and sullen” and was taking a dreadful toll on the men and their families. Many of the town's merchants initially supported the strike, but they increasingly feared violence would ensue as the striking miners became more vigilant and defiant. One merchant stated that he had witnessed other strikes, but none of them had “men so determined not to yield,” and he believed it would be necessary to bring in the military to prevent an outbreak of violence. The Tribune correspondent predicted that a “revolution in labor” was imminent because the desperate mine operators were willing to hire Black workers to take the place of the striking miners. The mine operators were “confident that, if negro labor [was] adopted unanimously, it [would] completely and effectively crush strikes, which [had] become so frequent and arrogant of late as to make any dependence on white labor impracticable.” African American workers, according to the correspondent, were more dependable than white laborers, and they would not become “turbulent at trifles, and for many other reasons that are apparent.” As a result, some midwestern mine operators had already arranged to fill their mines with Black workers, and “others will follow suit.”1The newspaper correspondent's prediction about a “revolution in labor” was accurate—during the height of labor unrest in the late 1870s, Northern industrialists sought measures to undercut the burgeoning labor movement by importing African American workers from the South into their predominantly European American worksites. Industrialists were encouraged by two overarching factors: first, Black workers from the South traditionally earned lower wages than their Northern counterparts and would therefore cost less; and more importantly, due to racist exclusionary measures, as well as the relatively small African American population in the North, semi-skilled and skilled worksites were dominated by European American workers. Industrialists correctly assumed that the racism of their workers would cause an exceedingly vitriolic reaction to the idea of Black workers replacing them. In addition to the typical labor conflict issues, racialized violence would invariably ensue. Industrialists then found justification to utilize draconian measures on the strikers—enforced by local militia or police—to ensure that the replacement workers would be allowed to work in relative safety, and to ensure that industrialists continued to make profits.2This racial dynamic became increasingly prevalent throughout the Midwest as rapid industrialization and massive population growth created whole new categories of workers. European American workers braced themselves for the possibility of a chaotic economic transformation by frantically jockeying for occupational viability within the racial hierarchy. In the environment of an increasingly racialized labor movement, Black and other non-white workers, with few exceptions, were forced to the bottom of the economic ladder.Among midwestern states, Illinois was particularly distinct due, in part, to the massive growth of Chicago as a central industrial hub for the region. In comparison to adjacent midwestern states, Illinois was also unique because of its relatively small African American population. By 1890, the African American population in Illinois was only 57,028 (1.5 percent of the state population); in 1900, 85,078 (1.8 percent of the state population). The dearth of a substantial Black population, coupled with a significant rise in anti-Black sentiment throughout the state, helped to create the perception that African American workers were unable to perform technologically advanced labor. Thus, Black Illinoisans of the late nineteenth century were often forced out or excluded from more desirable occupations and, subsequently, forced to the periphery of the labor movement.This article explores the labor activism of Black Illinoisans during the tumultuous late nineteenth century in the context of this relatively new phenomenon—that is, the racialization of labor. Of course, historians generally acknowledge this period as the Second Industrial Revolution in the United States. Yet for African Americans, the period also signified a time in which their racial “character” was under severe scrutiny—not only in labor, but also in virtually every aspect of Black American life. Notions of white racial superiority invariably circumscribed Black people as inferior outsiders—undeserving of a place within mainstream American life. Thus, to most European Americans, it made perfect sense within the twisted logical framework of white supremacy to categorize labor based upon race.In the context of heightened anti-Black sentiment, Black Illinoisans were faced with a difficult decision: should they remain with the larger labor movement that increasingly viewed them as “inferior” workers? While the European American working class famously fought for labor issues such as unionization, safer working conditions, and the eight-hour workday, Black Illinoisans during the nineteenth century also supported these issues. Yet Black workers were forced into a hybrid labor activism—an activism where they fought for their rights not only as workers but also as workers who were gradually excluded from higher-skilled occupations based upon their race. In addition to the racialized occupational environment, Black workers were also forced into a battle for their civil rights during the late nineteenth century as they fought against the inimical rise in white supremacy throughout the United States.The concept of racializing labor was not entirely novel to Northern industries. As historian Jacqueline Jones explained, white Northerners had always expressed their apprehension over emancipating Black people from slavery in moralistic terms. As early as the eighteenth century, they claimed that free Black laborers had shown a lack of restraint in public—displaying “racial” behavior that European American city dwellers found galling. Various groups of African American workers came under attack by the early nineteenth century for advertising for services in a supposedly unseemly fashion. For European American workers, their goal was to maintain their advantageous position in the workplace, and any other socio-political aspect in which there was the perception of losing ground within the racial hierarchy. Thus, European American workers developed new forms of self-definition that would establish a sharper distinction between “white” and “Black” labor.3One of the earliest and staunchest proponents for disrupting the burgeoning labor movement through racialization was co-owner of the Chicago, Wilmington, and Vermillion Coal Company (CW&V) Alanson Sweet. He quickly developed a reputation for slashing wages and firing workers when he forced workers at the Michigan Central Railroad Company to take a pay cut during a dispute in 1862. Workers that protested were fired and replaced with African American workers from the South.4 Sweet believed that the reaction of his predominantly white workforce would be intensified with the importation of an all-Black strikebreaking unit that would likely lead to violence. When violence inevitably ensued, Sweet and his co-owners were then able to utilize state-sponsored protection to ensure the protection of both his imported workers and his property.5As a co-owner of the CW&V in Braidwood, Illinois, during an economic depression, once again, Sweet reduced workers’ wages. Predictably, the unionized miners refused any pay cuts and went on strike. After some convincing, the CW&V co-owners acquiesced to Sweet's ideas on importing African American men to disrupt the conflict. “With the mines filled with colored men,” he assured his fellow owners and stockholders, “it is believed that the Company will not be burdened with the expense of another strike for many years.”6 The CW&V co-owners may have been willing to agree to Sweet's concept due to their past failures. In an 1874 labor dispute with their workers, both recently arriving European immigrants and white workers were recruited as strikebreakers. Instead of being a disruptive force, the replacement miners met with the striking Braidwood miners, became informed of the ongoing labor dispute, and were subsequently convinced to leave. Significantly, the workers left relatively peaceably within days of their arrival.7The nation was in the throes of a massive railroad strike starting in July 1877. Wage cuts, and generally poor conditions and treatment touched off a nationwide strike that shut down most of the nation's railroads. The Chicago Times observed that the arrival of African American workers, combined with the news of the national railroad strike created an “anxious mood” among the Braidwood miners, and “it would take but very little to cause an outbreak in this place.” When the African American workers arrived in Braidwood, there were no friendly meetings. Instead, the striking Braidwood miners gave them an ultimatum: leave town “peaceably or forcibly.” Fearing trouble, some of the miners left town.8 However, when Sweet and the CW&V ownership alerted Illinois governor Shelby Cullom of the intimidation tactics, the state militia was brought in to restore the Black miners to their jobs. The next day, 1,250 Illinois state militia were called into Braidwood to quell the conflict, and if the strikers resisted, “the troops [would] make short work of them.” The CW&V owners understood that an escalation in violence could possibly lead to such measures—and these measures would ensure that the African American workers would be protected and allowed to work in the mines.9Convinced that order could be maintained, and the African American miners would be allowed to remain in the mine shafts, the state militia left Braidwood several weeks later. Although relative peace did prevail after the departure of the state militia, the strike continued another four months. The Braidwood strike of 1877 was the longest strike in United States’ history (to that date) and took an enormous toll on the lives of the strikers and their families. With winter approaching in November 1877, the weary miners finally gave in and ended the strike. The owner's desire to destroy the miners’ union was successful, and the company refused to hire the union leaders as well. Feeling victimized by the CW&V owners, many miners complained bitterly about working alongside the African American strikebreakers who they believed had done “all they possibly could to assist capital to crush labor.”10 For the CW&V owners, the reaction of the Braidwood miners to the importation of African Americans into the mines was the crucial element in their victory. If white and immigrant miners did not react violently, the owners would not have brought in the state militia to see that their mines and their replacement workers were protected.Race relations remained strained in the Braidwood mines during the immediate years after the strike. Nevertheless, African American miners remained in Braidwood and continued to work in the mines. At least half of the seven hundred miners in Braidwood were African American; by 1880, there were 703 Black men and their families living in the surrounding area (compared to 242 in 1870). Institutions such as the Colored Odd Fellows lodge and the First Baptist Church were established in 1878 to support the town's African American community. Reverend T. C. Fleming, who was one of the strikebreakers during the 1877 strike, was the pastor of the church.11 Despite establishing themselves as viable workers in the mines, and decent citizens in Braidwood, the small African American population continued to experience difficulties in town and the workplace.While the African American miners at Braidwood established a reputation for being viable workers and willing union men, their white counterparts insisted on following national racist trends in the workplace. Moses Gordon, an African American miner among those imported from Virginia, observed: “[African Americans] could no more get work here until the year 1877 than they could fly. . . . [I]t was the miners themselves who would come out on strike before they would allow the negro to earn his daily bread.” White workers increasingly drew the color line in the workplace and the major labor unions in the late nineteenth century. Significantly, Gordon also noted that CW&V owners fired African American workers that joined unions. Thus, the racialization of labor worked as a two-pronged attack against Black workers during the industrial era: As discriminatory policies against non-white citizens in the United States became the norm, and therefore accepted by the dominant racial group, employers increasingly utilized African Americans as strikebreakers in order to disrupt unionization. African American workers were either shunned from major labor unions by white union members who refused to allow them to join, or, as in the case in Braidwood, African American workers were threatened with termination. On the other hand, white workers—embracing the full social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century—and thus, completely accepting their collective place at the top of the racial hierarchy in American society—readily rejected African American workers from the most desirable occupations. As white workers wielded more bargaining power in the last decade of the nineteenth century, they insisted on the racialization of both the workplace and their labor unions. Gordon remarked on how this racist process in Braidwood would affect the working class: “Every nationality on the face of the globe can come here and go to work wherever there is work to be had, except for the colored man, and in nine cases out of ten the miners are to blame for it. A house divided against itself cannot stand. If the laboring class fights capital for their rights, they have enough to do without fighting against six millions [sic] of people that have got to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.”12Strikebreaking served as an occupational and economic weapon against the racialization of labor for men like Moses Gordon. As labor historian Eric Arnesen explained, strikebreaking was a viable form of working-class activism for African Americans as they sought to strengthen their economic position during the labor upheaval of post-Reconstruction America. The most important coal mining towns in Illinois followed the practice of racial exclusion. Strikebreaking not only allowed African American workers to gain entry into desirable industrial positions, but it also represented chances for low paid Southern African Americans to earn higher wages. Their decisions to become strikebreakers were often informed choices, rationalized by a complex and changing worldview that balanced their experiences as industrial workers, farmers, and African Americans. Indeed, these Black men were neither willing tools nor ignorant serfs—rather, they were poor and ambitious men who were often recruited by coal company agents, sometimes under false pretenses. During the nineteenth century, African Americans were never the only workers used as strikebreakers in Illinois or any other Northern state. Moreover, they were never the most used strikebreakers during the height of labor turbulence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, African Americans were usually the most visible strikebreakers because of American racism, and therefore, they were almost always the easiest targets for white working-class rage during the tumultuous labor disputes of this era.13As the Chicago Tribune correspondent predicted, other industrialists throughout the region adopted racialization as a weapon to squelch unionization among the working class. For example, in 1880, approximately one hundred African Americans were hired to replace striking coal miners in Rapids City, near Rock Island, Illinois. Tragedy struck immediately—one of the African American strikebreakers was shot and killed by a striking miner. That same year in Springfield, Illinois, mine owners resisted demands made by union officials and proceeded to import African American miners from Richmond, Virginia. The predominantly European American workforce was ordered to remove their tools from the mines and evacuate company houses. If any violence ensued, the mine operators, their property, and the African American workers, were all protected by local police officials. These drastic actions led to the demise of the union.14 In the summer of 1886, a strike for higher wages occurred in Vermillion County at Grape Creek. In this case, there was a small African American presence in the mines—yet they refused to strike with their European American coworkers. The African American miners belonged to the biracial Knights of Labor (KOL) union and refused to participate because it was “a white man's fight.” The Grape Creek operators brought in African American men from Tennessee and Kentucky under police protection. The conflict dragged out and defeated the strikers, as the mine operators brought in five to fifteen new African American workers each day.15 This pattern of racialization continued throughout Illinois during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to data compiled by economic historian Warren Whatley, Illinois industrialists utilized Black strikebreakers more than any state during this period. However, while Black strikebreaking increased substantially during this period—especially in high-profile conflicts—they remained a relatively small percentage of the nation's strikebreaking force.16While Northern industrialists continued to recruit Black workers from the South during the late nineteenth century, they virtually ignored Northern Black workers. This omission was particularly glaring in Illinois and other midwestern states due to the dearth of African Americans living in the region. Approximately 90 percent of the African American population remained in the South, and it was simply easier to find and recruit Black labor in the South. Another more compelling reason had to do with the collective attitudes of African Americans living in the North. While Southern Black workers were cajoled relatively easily due to precarious economic condition or general lack of knowledge of a particular labor conflict in the North, Northern African Americans simply had more exposure to Northern labor strife. Although the Black population of Illinois was quite small, they gained a reputation as ferocious labor agitators during the late nineteenth century. Like their European American working-class counterparts, they also battled for workers’ rights. To be sure, African American workers in Illinois were occasionally used as strikebreakers during the late nineteenth century—there would be a collective shift in their attitude toward the labor movement by the turn of the twentieth century as white working-class racism became more pronounced. Yet prior to the full implementation of white supremacist ideas about allegedly inferior and superior workers based upon race, Black Illinoisans were not only a part of the labor movement, in some cases they were at the vanguard of the movement.During the summer of 1877, while the Braidwood mine operators were importing African American workers into their labor fracas, more than 150 Black longshoremen from Illinois disputed recent wage cuts against the Mississippi Valley Transportation Company (MVTC). Like their Braidwood counterparts, they too were inspired by the “Great Railroad Strike” and organized their own all-Black union. In solidarity with the national movement, the workers arranged a general strike against all Illinois, employers due to the recent wage When the owners were of the strike, they hired strikebreakers. The next the striking longshoremen on the and their and that they leave the When they refused to the longshoremen them by a of in their The longshoremen then after the to ensure that none of the strikebreakers would only a few but it created quite a throughout The observed that the longshoremen may well have been within their rights to strike for higher but they no to prevent from working who willing . . . to work for the The noted that by the strikebreakers off the the Black longshoremen were a for which they be a significant in how the African American workers were in When African American workers for their rights, they were often as or workers. In Black labor activism was often viewed as chaotic and While strikebreaking was generally in white working-class when Black workers fought to their economic the they should be a that [would] last them for all time to the Braidwood which and supported striking miners during their African American workers were viewed with throughout and as workers throughout Illinois sought the same measures in unionization as other workers prior to the full of racialization in labor. As early as 1877, the Knights of Labor (KOL) established as many as seven in Illinois that African American men and into their For many Black workers, the was more than a labor the of leaders and as a than any other union in their the were able to the for African American After the national railroad strike in 1877, labor leaders recruited Black workers to the to racist to workers. goal of the labor leaders was also to the of Black workers during an 1878 African Americans the supported the and the city and with the white Chicago continued to into one of the nation's industrial the of the city was for African Americans. The battle for skilled labor in a environment, was often a losing for African American for from the South. African American men often to racist racist white and workers with the of racist to Black men out of viable As a result, Black workers in Chicago were left with occupational and often found themselves to with national of the racialization of labor was in Chicago by the last of the nineteenth century. By 1890, African Americans were as the to be laborers, workers, or to the During that decade they represented only percent of the population percent of all in the occupational for Black of or no higher than railroad or were also tools for the of such as or who were who or the of and dwellers more and the to their To ideas of racial and economic the their to an One noted that African American men of slavery . . . and became a of to the of the African American men, as a Chicago were the they are by and to were not always to ideas of racial if it in wages. A could a sense of and the of the of the South, which could lead to a was a relatively novel idea in the nineteenth Yet any that these men would allow these to into their in labor issues of the would be an Black in were the of hybrid labor activism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black over pay In 1875, they out of throughout the during and in some of At the out because their new to He informed the all-Black that they would be to at the an before their and they would no be allowed to left over by practice that allowed workers to their out in during the and workers of all and were toward labor unionization in the Yet European American workers to follow nationwide discriminatory in labor unions by Black workers from union Black often with their own of labor activism that all-Black unions or biracial unions. For example, after the of the five Black from the in Chicago, were to their of the that were to citizens of every and and were informed that it was against the to of their in the The the men a in the where the and their while on The by the left for another where they were and served without in Chicago were to find a labor union that would their in fighting for their labor and civil rights. The them with the of unionization that they In 1886, created the Colored local and more than four hundred Black and during a The Chicago Times the the Knights had on the Black the union the colored and gave the with This represented the entry of African Americans into organized labor in Chicago and was followed within two years by a Black the which organized after from the of the Black in Chicago little time in their reputation as labor In two hundred African American joined nine hundred white in of the of and in wages. The biracial an of substantial for The owners to a through the workers by importing African American replacement workers to replace the white The between the workers was and the Black were enough to the strikebreakers to A year during another Black labor conditions, and they also the to become more about their rights and the labor was not one African American predicted, by would for their working-class men and in Illinois for more biracial union during the late nineteenth century. an African American of the that more Black workers to the union to themselves as a within the labor than a within the the for laboring men and was an of wages. have been
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I wonder why They are so shortsighted As not to realize That every time They keep any worker, man or woman, White, yellow, or black, OUT of a UNION, They are forcing a worker To be a SCAB, To be used AGAINST THEM? --from Negro Worker These lines of verse, published in The Messenger in July 1919, make a point about strikes that is frequently disregarded in the hundreds of pages of fiction by social realists who addressed the major labor struggles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: [A]ny worker / man or woman, / White, yellow, or could be a strikebreaker. In the West, for example, railroad and mining company managers used workers from countries such as China, Italy, Greece, Japan, and Mexico to break strikes, fully aware that these immigrants would have no allegiance to the ethnic groups who had thrown down their tools in protest. Surprisingly, strikebreaking even crossed class lines as upper and middle class male college students also took on the role of strikebreaker to express their antagonism toward workers. (1) The variety of sources of strikebreakers is not fully reflected in the fictional response to the strike. In some of the most significant radical fiction of the early twentieth century, black workers--more than any other group--are curiously cast in the villainous role of scab. In the span of a few decades, these literary depictions ranged from collective racist stereotypes to sympathetic psychological portraits of the pressures faced by the African American laborer. Ample evidence of friction between whites and blacks can be found in some of the U.S. labor movement's key strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (2) The use of black troops offers the earliest examples. Black soldiers used against striking miners in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in 1892 and 1899, because African Americans were believed much less likely than white troops to fraternize with the strikers (Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation, 85). In addition, black troops guarded trains and railroad property during the Pullman Strike of 1894. Regarding African American civilians, the Knights of Labor and the newly developing American Federation of Labor (AFL) successfully attracted African American workers, and examples of interracial unity both in the workplace and during strikes can be found. But as the lines from Negro Worker also imply, some unions excluded black members. If blacks welcomed as members, they faced discriminatory policies under a second-class status. Blacks denied work on union projects despite membership, or they denied better jobs despite seniority. Unions failed to protect blacks from racial hostility, and blacks charged union leaders with ignoring their complaints of discrimination. The development of segregated locals was another sign of trouble. Before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass wrote in favor of labor unity between African American and white workers; however, when he realized that labor was doing little to lessen racial animosity, he came out in favor of blacks taking the jobs of strikers: Colored men can feel under no obligation to hold out in a 'strike' with the whites, as the latter have never recognized them (qtd. in Foner, Organized Labor, 7). As America's industrial revolution picked up steam, this issue came into greater prominence in most mass production industries in cities in the North. Racism fueled an African American labor force ready and willing to break strikes. One of the earliest and most significant fictional treatments of African American strikebreakers is found in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). The labor struggle in the canonical novel is based on the unsuccessful stockyard strike by thousands of packinghouse workers and mechanical tradesmen of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen in Chicago in 1904. African Americans had been used as strikebreakers in the meat packing industry at least as early as 1894, in response to a sympathy strike by packing and slaughterhouse workers who supported Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union during the Pullman Strike. …
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Up From Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History Eric Arnesen (bio) Over a quarter century ago, historian Herbert Gutman complained with good reason about the “absence of detailed knowledge of the ‘local world’ inhabited by white and Negro workers” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 1 The studies of black urban communities that were proliferating within African-American historiography had relegated black workers to the margins of community development led by black professionals and middle-class activists. Within labor history, an older tradition influenced by industrial relations scholarship emphasized institutional union structures and paid little attention to rank-and-file workers of any race. With the exception of a few studies, black workers remained largely outside the traditional narratives of labor history, entering the picture only as strikebreakers or as a “problem” that white labor had to confront. Writing in 1969, a year after Gutman, James Gross similarly complained that a quarter century’s scholarship on the subject merely “amounted to classifications of the racial practices of organized labor: laissez faire, equalitarian, discriminatory, or those unions excluding Negroes by constitutional provision or bylaws.” What was needed, Gross proposed, were explorations not of “attitudes toward the Negro workers . . . but the ideas and ideals of the Negro worker.” 2 In the ensuing decade, the first flowering of the new labor history revolutionized the study of the American working class, but through the early 1980s, its emphasis lay with skilled artisans, white industrial workers, and immigrant communities. With few exceptions, neither black workers nor race were the focus of attention, and the agenda proposed by Gutman and Gross remained unaddressed. 3 Since the late 1980s, labor historians themselves have grown increasingly critical of their field’s failure to address issues of race. Inspired in part by the writings of the former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) labor secretary-turned-academic, Herbert Hill, they charge that labor history has a serious “race problem.” Over the years, Hill has offered the strongest academic criticism of the American labor movement’s racial practices and, recently, of the new labor history for its treatment of race and racism. Hill has repeatedly denounced white trade unions as racist [End Page 146] vehicles for excluding black, Asian, and other minority workers. At the same time, he charged labor historians with denying the centrality of race because of their blind devotion to Marxist social theory. 4 Hill’s charges have struck a deep chord. The new labor history, Noel Ignatiev similarly argues, has treated racism as “peripheral to the main line of working-class formation and struggle.” Historians’ search for “the famous ‘usable past’” has led them to “denial, and denial [has] led to apologetics.” 5 If the late 1960s complaints of Gutman and Gross accurately reflected a paucity of scholarship, the same cannot be said of the 1990s charges. The characterizations of labor history’s encounter with race by such writers as Hill, Ignatiev, and David Roediger are, to say the least, overdrawn. There is no denying that the first generation of new labor historians did not put white labor’s racial practices and beliefs or minority workers’ perspectives and strategies at the top of its research agenda. Today, however, these issues are central topics in their own right. Since the mid 1980s, labor historians have begun to engage issues of race in significant ways. The past decade has witnessed a veritable outpouring of new scholarship on trade union racial practices, black and other minority workers’ experiences and activism, and on white working-class racial identity. Far from being the academic backwater it was in the late 1960s, the study of race and labor has become an academic growth industry. “Scholarship on race in American labor history steadily grows in quantity and quality,” concluded Joe Trotter, Jr. and Alan Dawley in a recent special issue of Labor History devoted to race and class. “Every month seems to bring added understanding of the intersections of race and class, racial segmentation of the labor market, and the impact of race on culture and community.” 6 What is striking is not only that the scholarship on race and labor is...
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- Jan 1, 2006
- Labor Studies Journal
Reviewed by: The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Workers in the Jim Crow South Brian Kelly The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Workers in the Jim Crow South. By William P. Jones . Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, A volume in The Working Class in American History Series. 2005. 232 pps. $45 hardback, $20 paper. Given the impressive range of recent scholarship on southern labor, the absence of a serious reconsideration of the region's lumber industry and its multiracial workforce has left an inexcusable void. At the turn of the century, sawmills and logging camps employed more workers than any other industry in the South, among whom African Americans comprised a substantial majority. William P. Jones's The Tribe of Black Ulysses fills that void as it makes a powerful case for the centrality of lumber in southern black working class culture. Jones chronicles the industry's complex interaction with local conditions in three discrete settings and illustrates the relationship between economic and technological evolution and changing race and labor relations. Though the book succeeds in situating lumber in a rapidly changing and racially polarized South, its aim is more ambitious. Jones asserts that black Southerners' experience in lumber directly refutes the "myth of Black Ulysses" that was articulated by sociologist Howard Odum in the 1920s. Odum's argument—that black Southerners were "essentially incompatible with modernity"—played a strong role in establishing the stereotypic image of the alienated working-class black man. This characterization lingers still among pundits who attribute persistent racial inequality to some timeless pathology of black working-class men. This study contradicts Odum's case and suggests that, far from being traumatized or disoriented by their experience in lumber, "African Americans retained the ability to negotiate and … even determine the direction of economic transformation in the early twentieth-century South." Jones offers a cursory sketch of developments in the industry prior to 1920, but the study focuses on the postwar, transitional period between its "Cut-Out-and-Get Out" phase, during which low capitalization and "unlimited" timber stands shaped an unstable industry, and the "conservation" phase that followed, when rapid depletion of timber stocks brought an end to "cream skimming" and a new arrangement between employers and workers allowed more stable communities to take root. It concludes in the late 1950s, when industrial decline threatened the hard-won gains that black workers had finally managed to win. Among the many strengths of the study is the author's ability to illustrate these changes and their impact on black working-class culture in discrete settings in Bogalusa, Louisiana; Chapman, Alabama; and Elizabethtown, North Carolina. [End Page 100] For the period under study, Jones finds that while lumber workers certainly faced hardship, on the whole black workers managed to assert their own interests. Bringing an impressive array of methodological approaches to bear in making his case, Jones is at his best in documenting the integrity of black community life and identifying the dynamic forces transforming black working-class culture in the early twentieth century. The evolution of musical tastes from barrelhouse blues, suited to the raucous ambience of the early logging camps, to commercially influenced swing more congruent with the stable community life of the "conservation" phase, is charted with analytical intelligence and originality. Attempts by Zora Neale Hurston and others to locate a pristine, authentically "black" culture were futile and misguided, Jones argues: the constant interaction between black and white, local, regional and national, folk, and commercial cultures in the New South meant that interchange and continual adaptation were the order of the day. The Tribe of Black Ulysses is not without its flaws. The author is anxious to assert black workers' agency, but an engagement with the substantial literature on welfare capitalism in and beyond the South would have helped frame the problem in a way that acknowledges both the scope for self-assertion and the limits to agency. Few scholars would dispute that where organization became viable, black workers often proved themselves the most capable, militant fighters in the South—a "natural constituency" for trade unionism. But their general predicament presented real obstacles as well, and the power that their employers and...
- Book Chapter
- 10.1017/cbo9781139839358.008
- Oct 1, 2014
“Persons are entitled to fair and equitable treatment.” Executive Order 10479 During the 1950s, the Esso Standard Oil refinery’s gangly smokestacks and labyrinthine pipes brought the Gulf Coast’s oil boom home to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The physical difference between the gritty metallic refining plant and Esso’s gleaming cube-shaped office building marked the distance between its white- and blue-collar workers. Esso separated its black and white workers less obviously, but no less completely. The office building, like others on the Gulf Coast, housed whites only. Within the refinery, work was also highly segregated. As in many industrial plants, African Americans were hired into an unskilled labor pool at the refinery, where they remained throughout their tenure. In contrast, white workers were hired into and progressed up lines of increasingly skilled and better-paying jobs. Job segregation like that practiced at Esso left African Americans vulnerable. The American economy boomed after World War II, buoyed by pent-up consumer demand and ambitious government spending on infrastructure and defense. But the war’s end flooded the labor market with demobilized soldiers, many of whom had greater seniority than recently hired black workers. Mechanization continued apace, turning the United States into a majority white-collar workforce and eliminating the low-skilled jobs into which African Americans were shunted. Even the most secure among African American workers, those with skills and unions, were knocked from their elite perch as federally funded highways facilitated deindustrialization of the northern urban centers in which they clustered and corporations sought cheaper labor and weaker unions down South.
- Research Article
- 10.1162/ajle_a_00013
- Sep 1, 2021
- American Journal of Law and Equality
HUMBLE PIE IS COLD COMFORT Comment on M. Sandel’s <i>The Tyranny of Merit</i>
- Book Chapter
- 10.1017/cbo9781139839358.004
- Oct 1, 2014
In 1941, George Benjamin became the first African American vice president of the Tobacco Workers International Union, an American Federation of Labor affiliate. For decades the Tobacco Workers had mostly ignored black workers. In 1930, only 100 of its 3,000 members nationwide were black. By the early 1940s, however, the union was scrambling to improve those numbers. The National Labor Relations Board had initially let unions define the group of workers they wanted to represent. Recently, however, it had required that the “bargaining units” have an economic justification, not merely a racial one, ending the Tobacco Workers’ practice of targeting a plant’s white workers only. Meanwhile, rival Congress of Industrial Organizations unions had steadily organized black workers at tobacco processing plants around Richmond, Virginia, getting a head start on winning their allegiance. Benjamin was a skilled and tested organizer, adept at operating within the constraints of Jim Crow. The Tobacco Workers’ new president wanted Benjamin to help the union organize “at least 90% of the colored workers” in Richmond. Unfortunately, it was “still in the minds of some of the people that our international don’t want the Negro,” Benjamin warned. Richmond’s Larus & Brother tobacco plant became the testing ground for the Tobacco Workers’ new strategy.
- Research Article
- 10.5406/23260947.10.1.02
- Apr 1, 2022
- Women, Gender, and Families of Color
Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls
- Research Article
- 100
- 10.1093/sw/44.4.311
- Jul 1, 1999
- Social Work
African American pioneer social workers of the Progressive Era (1898-1918) were at once concerned about the private troubles of individuals and the larger public issues that affected them. They also were acutely aware of their relationship to the community residents they served. There was very little physical, social, and economic distance between the workers and their clients. They lived in the same and by virtue of shared many of the same societal problems and issues of concern. Their work at the beginning of this century reflects contemporary community practice. For these African American pioneers, community practice had both a macro- and a micro-orientation. These individuals directed intervention designed to bring about planned change in organizations and communities - macropractice (Netting, Kettner, & McMurtry, 1993, p. 3) while developing, locating, linking with and managing community resources in a way that helped to improve individual social functioning - micropractice (Hardcastle, Wenocur, & Powers, 1997, p. 2). Progressive-Era African American social workers' community practice was essentially race which personalized problems to alleviate human suffering and concurrently organized and developed private organizations to change the system. The race and race women who engaged in the emerging social work profession were among the talented tenth, the educated elite of the African American community (DuBois, 1908). Self-help, pride, mutual aid, and social debt became part of the underpinning that guided their practice. These principles and values were neither exclusive nor sequential. Instead they were each part of the foundation on which social work and social welfare services were developed to meet the needs of the African American community. This article will briefly discuss these fundamental values as they were reflected in African American social work at the beginning of the century. The elements and dimensions that were a significant part of their practice repertoire are also discussed. As African Americans claimed their place among social work pioneers, the primacy of their mission to improve the collective social functioning of their racially segregated became clear. For these pioneers social work was both cause and function. Values and Principles Self-Help and Mutual Aid As noted the values and principles fundamental to African American social work practice were self-help, mutual aid, pride, and social debt. The focus on self-help and mutual aid became an institutionalized part of the African American community. Overwhelmingly excluded from full participation in the U.S. social system and at the same time receiving limited responses to individual and social problems from white social workers, African Americans developed a dogged determination to take care of their own. A review of the Proceedings of the National Conference on Charities and Corrections from 1874 through 1945 revealed only brief and infrequent expressions of concern about the many social problems and inadequate social conditions that were the lot of African Americans during the early decades of the 20th century (Lide, 1973). On the other hand, the Southern Workman, the literary organ published by Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute for Negroes and Indians (now Hampton University), was devoted entirely to improving the economic, social, and political conditions of African Americans. The journal's mission was to expose problems and to suggest and examine strategies for planned change. During the early part of the century, the journal provided a publishing outlet for many African American social work pioneers, artists, business men and women, and others. Like many others, Sarah Collins Fernandis, a settlement house leader and pioneer in the public health movement, relied heavily on the Southern Workman as a tool for communicating information about settlement work, interracial activities, health, housing, child care issues, and the need for African Americans to help each other. …
- Research Article
- 47
- 10.1097/00043764-200010000-00011
- Oct 1, 2000
- Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine
Very few data exist that describe the risk of injury in African American health care workers, who are highly represented in health care occupations. The present study examined the risk for work-related injury in African American hospital workers. Hospital Occupational Health Service medical records and a hospital human resource database were used to compare risk of injury between African American and white workers after adjusting for gender, age, physical demand of the job, and total hours worked. Risk of work-related injury was 2.3 times higher in African Americans. This difference was not explained by the other independent variables. Differences in injury reporting, intra-job workload, psychosocial factors, and organizational factors are all potential explanations for racial disparity in occupational injury. More research is needed to clarify these findings.
- Research Article
- 10.1215/15476715-3790496
- Apr 18, 2017
- Labor
<i>Working on the Dock of the Bay: Labor and Enterprise in an Antebellum Southern Port</i> by Michael D. Thompson
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