The African-American Working Class in the Jim Crow Era

Abstract

Before the 1960s, white historians of North American slavery justified the absence of slaves' perspectives from their accounts on the basis of a regrettable lack of sources. Planters and white politicians may have left behind diaries, newspaper essays, treatises, and record books, but their human property ostensibly had not. What sources did exist?fugitive slave testimonies and subsequently recorded interviews with scholars or government officials ? were presumed to be tainted either by the propaganda purposes to which they were put, the power dynamics between interviewer and interviewed, or unreliable memories. Such dismissals proved self-serving and premature. Beginning in the early 1960s, historians revolutionized our understanding of America's peculiar institution, utilizing both traditional and untapped sources, making slavery one of the most dynamic fields in American historical scholarship for several decades. The world of the southern slave community has been reconstituted, and the values, aspirations, and perspectives of the unfree have been placed at its center. Until recently, the same could not be said for their descendants in the nation's urban centers. From the 1950s to the 1980s, historians of the urban African American experience examined in great depth northern black communities and their occupational and class structures, the contours of residential ghettos, the evolution of Jim Crow and white racism, religious and fraternal life, and the political struggle of northern blacks for representation, inclusion, and equality. But the accounts of the struggles against exclusion and discrimination were dominated by the black elite?entrepreneurs, the clergy, lawyers, and other