STRUCTURAL IMPERATIVES BEHIND RACIAL CHANGE IN BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

Abstract

While it is agreed that capital made use of race to restructure for more profitable production, there have been few attempts to incorporate race within the general framework of historical materialist inquiry and class politics. This paper discusses the social construction of race in Birmingham, Alabama for the industrial, Fordist, and post‐Fordist phases of U.S. capitalist development. No other industrial city in America would rely upon black labor so early in its industrial development as Birmingham, providing the opportunity to examine the social construction of race from an early stage of industrial capitalism. While southern periodizations of capitalist development correspond in some ways to those of the regulationists, they also diverge in other important ways, precisely because the southern road to capitalism was different, defining the path for the entry of blacks into capital‐labor relations.