A Working People: A History of African American Workers Since Emancipation Steven A.Reich. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.

Abstract

A Working People: A History of African American Workers Since Emancipation Steven A. Reich. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013.In 1982, William H. Harris published The Harder We Run, a concise narrative of black workers since the end of slavery that has been used in scores of undergraduate labor and African American history courses. Steven Reich's A Working People is a worthy successor to Harris's outdated work. It is a didactic, accessible overview of African American workers since emancipation, which provides a solid base for general readers and suggestive research possibilities for those wishing to probe more deeply. A strong bibliographic essay and thirty-six pages of primary source documents bolster research efforts.Reich, an associate professor of history at James Madison University, is known for his work on the Great Migration, the six mi Ilion-person exodus from the South to the North undertaken by African Americans from 1910 to 1970. Although Reich pays attention to Southern workers, four of the book's six chapters deal more extensively with Northern workers. Reich's justification for this is familiar to scholars of black labor history: the lost promises of Reconstruction. Social and political decisions to forgo land redistribution, continued military occupation of the South, or a thorough political reorganization of the region produced what historian Eric Foner dubbed an unfinished revolution. As Reich shows, Southern African American workers-including longshoremen, laundresses, timber workers, and miners-struggled heroically at times, but terror, political disenfranchisement, and poverty were the salient features for postwar Southern black workers.Dreams of a more open society and the appeal of industrial labor lured legions of African Americans to the North, where they found work easier to obtain than justice. The North was no Promised Land of tolerance, and black families found themselves segregated by custom rather than by law. They were generally denied desirable jobs in favor of hard, dirty, dangerous, and undercompensated work. Even those jobs, however, were better than could be obtained in the South. Whenever job markets were glutted, as they were during the 1920s and during both world wars, African Americans trekked northward.In many respects, the modern civil rights movement was stimulated as much by northern as by southern racism. Reich documents the deplorable record of organized labor in advancing anything that resembled biracial solidarity. Reich is somewhat myopic in that he too closely identifies the pre-New Deal labor movement with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), most of whose affiliates excluded black workers altogether. …