Rethinking Race and Class in African-American Struggles for Equality, 1885- 1941

Abstract

A MAJOR CONTRIBUTION OF THESE ESSAYS on African Americans' struggles for civil rights in Chicago is their sophisticated treatment of class in an African-American context. Ironically, it is the uniqueness of Chicago's turbulent history of labor strife and racial conflict that, to my mind, poses larger issues of the relationship between race and class within African-American leadership and movements. Known as Sweet home and, more caustically, Up South to generations of black migrants, and thus emblematic in its unfulfilled promise, Chicago offered African Americans opportunities for social advancement amidst ample proof of pervasive racism. The essays by Elizabeth Dale and Beth Tompkins Bates reinforce this image of Chicago as more. paradox than paradise for African Americans. Even as they portray that city as an ideal setting for the exploration of the northern phase of civil rights struggles, their essays offer insights on race and class that transcend region as they apply to the study of the history and origins of civil rights. While the essays in this forum, and my remarks on them, focus on AfricanAmerican history, I read them as not only transcending their particular location but also gesturing even more broadly toward other fields of inquiry. In their concern with elite oppositional strategies against overwhelming institutional and cultural forces of racism, they are also relevant for scholars of colonialism and ethnic studies. For scholars of the subaltern, the essays raise vital issues: the significance of elites; the need to address the complexity of race, gender, class, and sexuality within systems of domination and oppositional strategies alike; and how one understands resistance in its subtler, even compromised, aspects, when it must confront pervasive regimes of power backed by violence.1 The application of analytical contributions from related or analogous fields is not to be confused with a facile approach to comparative history. Rather, its utility reflects the extent to which the elites and peoples produced by slave societies, colonial systems, and