Search Results

This chapter studies the extent to which the Freedmen Bureau's effort to reinstate plantation labor for former slaves in the mid-1860s was associated with changes in the valuation of black labor. Despite similarities in coercion and the organization of labor, the valuation of wage labor under the bureau was linked to human capital investments and statistical discrimination in ways that were fundamentally different from the valuations observed in appraisals, purchases, and hires within the antebellum slave market. This shift in the logic of valuation produced uncertainty among bureau agents, employers, and former bondsmen and women themselves as to how black workers would be compensated within the emerging free labor market of the American South.

This chapter describes the development of black labor activism from World War I to the Great Depression. Given that the city's diverse manufacturing sector was filled with whites and white immigrant groups, black workers, reformers, and labor leaders cautiously looked to the labor movement for new and better job opportunities. For instance, the New Negro labor activists, such as Frank Crosswaith, denounced racism among the city's white unionists but also encouraged interracial working-class unity in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). This groundswell of Harlem labor activism reflected black workers' and black leaders' efforts to create an antiracist labor activism rooted in the black community, and resulted in coalitions being built across ideological lines and the chasm between Old and New Negroes being lessened.

This chapter attempts to resymbolize apartheid and examines the history of South Africa under the narration of black unfree labor. It explains the negative impact of colonization on the black majority in South Africa, and proposes possible courses of action should the unfree black labor be freed from the brutal chains of exploitation. The chapter also analyzes the works of Sampie Terreblanche to trace the historical developments of racialized capital in South Africa and reviews Ernst Cassirer's understanding of the way in which a telos is always implied in any positing of history.

This chapter provides insight into the status of labor from which the foundation of consumerism emanated. The halcyon days that were seen in the business sphere failed to materialize into a comparable experience for the bulk of the black laboring class during the 1920s. The end of war brought a series of negative experiences and ones all too familiar to the black worker in America. Demobilization of the armed forces and the servicemen's return into the labor force produced a glut of workers. With the Chicago Urban League reporting that unemployment had reached serious proportions, this decade beginning with such gloomy prospects of continuous postwar recession and with unemployment rampant, its conclusion inauspiciously produced a similar scenario in place. The recognized features of economic depression in the 1930s then easily came as no surprise to the African American worker in and outside of industry.

This chapter details the complex cost of working online while Black, young, and Christian, and the multiple strategies creatives employ to navigate economic and social challenges to their digital Black labor. Twitter and Instagram posts provide a glimpse into the average work week of digital Black Christians. These day-in-the-life ethnographies of rapper and vlogger Beleaf Melanin and singer, producer, and A&R rep Natalie Lauren Sims demonstrate the kind of complexities they face and how they address them in a way that preserves their notion of their intrinsic self-worth in a digital marketplace that undervalues black labor.

This chapter describes 1963 as a pivotal year for civil rights activism, and posits that the NAPE especially was deeply involved, fusing black labor and civic protest traditions. At their 1963 convention in New York City, President Ashby Smith called for convention delegates, including the women's auxiliary, to mobilize in order to secure passage of the Civil Rights Bill. Times had changed, according to Paul Tennassee. Acting Postmaster General Sidney Bishop was the convention's keynote speaker, and, in Tennassee's words, “Virtually, the entire speech was on civil rights as it affected African Americans.” A more significant address, however, was given by former Alliance president James B. Cobb, now a postal official. Despite his management status, Cobb summed up his union's key tenets as a combination of black racial solidarity and working-class advocacy.

This introductory chapter sets out the focus of the book, namely black labor migration to Guatemala in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with particular attention paid to the experiences of black immigrants and their relations with Guatemalans and other Latin Americans. Studies of Caribbean coast laborers are scarce to nonexistent, but where these workers are represented in the historical record, they tend to be depicted as passive pawns of their employers and victims of state repression during the repressive dictatorship of President Estrada Cabrera. This book advances a revisionist interpretation, arguing that workers of African descent have played an important role in Guatemala's history since the 1880s when liberal elites first revamped the republic's economic development and modernization plan. In revisiting and rewriting the history of black workers in Guatemala, this book concentrates on the Guatemalan departments of Izabal and Zacapa, where two Caribbean coast African diaspora communities developed with multiple black identities, including black Americans, black West Indians of various national identities, and Garifuna, or “black Caribs,” as they were once known. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Black women in recent cohorts aged between 50 and 72 years have lower employment than similar white women, despite having had higher employment when they were middle-aged and younger. Earlier cohorts of older black women also worked more than their white counterparts. Although it is not surprising that white women’s employment should catch up to that of black women given trends in increasing female labor force participation, it is surprising that it should surpass that of black women. This chapter discusses factors that contribute to this differential change over time. Changes in education, marital status, home-ownership, welfare, wealth, and cognition cannot explain this trend, whereas changes in occupation, industry, health, and gross motor functioning may explain some of the trend.

In the age of lynching and American expansionism, the Carnegie Corporation expressed a franchise to govern through the expansion of influence-harvesting. By influence-harvesting, I am referring to the processes by which cultural leadership was exercised and how central organizing practices of scientific management of labor came to be understood as social crises. Such knowledge projects typically obscured the workings of violence. As the Carnegie Corporation was designing black education for “underdeveloped peoples” in the United States and in colonized Africa, this franchise to govern reflected the corporation’s determination to entrench a global “racial development scheme.” This section offers an account of how Afrikaner Nationalism is a variant of white nationalism.

This chapter argues that labor unions do not necessarily serve as obstacles to employment and economic advancement for the black community. As a matter of fact, while there have indeed been cases of prejudice against blacks in some labor unions, many organized labor movements—particularly the socialist unions—place the blacks on equal footing with the rest of their memberships. Some organizations, such as the ILGWU, even go so far as to extend education, empowerment—and even leadership roles—to their black members. Furthermore, the chapter emphasizes that joining labor unions is generally advantageous for the working class, and that the existence of racial prejudice in some unions should not discourage black labor organizing in its entirety.

This chapter reviews Frederick Upham Adams' Conquest of the Tropics, a triumphalist account of the United Fruit Company (UFC), where he commended the pioneers of the company for bringing order and progress to Central America. Embedded in this imperial narrative was recognition of the company's black labor force. Although UFC boasted of wages higher than “ever before offered” in the region, it had proven “almost impossible to tempt the average native of Central America to work, and many of them are physically incapable of sustained manual labor.” As a result, UFC, like the U.S. government's canal construction in Panama, had come to rely on British West Indians.

This chapter discusses the institution of slavery in Kentucky in terms of white farmers’ need for black labor to produce a surplus of goods for the marketplace. Here we are introduced to Isaac Murphy's mother, America Murphy, and his father, Jerry Skillman—both slaves. We catch a glimpse of America's life as the property of David Tanner, a farmer in Clark County, Kentucky. We learn about the experiences of African American women and the kinds of agency they were able to claim within the context of slavery. The chapter also discusses the institution of marriage among those considered human chattel and the consequences of bearing children who were the property of their parents’ owners and were often sold or traded. The chapter concludes with a foreshadowing of the Civil War's aims and Kentucky's role in its unfolding.

This introductory essay uses Thaddeus Stevens's comments on the Fourteenth Amendment to set the stage for essays that consider the relationship between citizenship and freedom after emancipation, providing a succinct and up-to-date summary of Reconstruction historiography. One important trend has been the continuous shortcomings of the comparative study of emancipation, an approach that situates the US experience in a global context. Thomas Holt employs this method in the opening chapter just as he has done in his broader scholarship; he follows a trend initiated by W. E. B. Du Bois in his magisterial work, Black Reconstruction. Much of the scholarship between World War II and Eric Foner's 1988 study responded, in various ways, to the former dominance of the Dunning School. Since Foner, Steven Hahn has emphasized the continuities of black political mobilization, while other scholars have stressed the limitations placed on the agency of freedpeople and poor whites by their class position. This collection of research essays does not necessarily speak to a single shared theme but showcases a series of innovative approaches to some of the central problems of Reconstruction.

As both armies made extensive use of black laborers to prepare for the coming battle, Northerners learned that the Confederates were effectively using black labor to hold off the Army of the Potomac. Although the Army of the Potomac outnumbered the Confederates, General Robert E. Lee felt secure enough behind his strengthened fortifications to use most of his army to strike at the detachment of the Army of the Potomac that was north of the Chickahominy River. As Mc-Clellan became convinced that he could no longer maintain a position north of the Chickahominy River, the Union commander completely surrendered the initiative to Lee.

This chapter addresses the use of racist violence by whites in the Missouri Ozarks between 1894 and 1930 to control and expel blacks, to establish and maintain sundown towns, and to satisfy and regulate the need for cheap black labor in the larger cities. Building on an extensive secondary literature, it expands this story in three ways. First, it addresses the often studied most violent years from 1894 to 1906 and the years of consolidation over the next quarter century. Second, the chapter places this story into a larger geographical context by addressing the impact of this violence in the border areas of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Finally, it considers the implications of its findings for the historiography of racist violence and border studies.

Exaggerated rumors of a black insurrectionary movement afoot on rice plantations in lowcountry Georgia caused great alarm among whites, spurring quasi-military mobilization under the leadership of prominent former Confederates. Upon close examination, the rumors proved mostly unfounded: at the root of disturbances was a confrontation between black laborers and planters over the terms of labor in the rice fields. This essay examines the role of the national press in circulating sensationalized accounts of the issues at stake during Reconstruction, and concludes that in their attempts to defuse tensions, federal officials encouraged a conflation of labor and race militancy that would ultimately lead to northern disaffection with Reconstruction.

Emotionally fluctuating between an overwhelming sense of loss and her new-found grace in the hands of God, Stewart contemplates the power of coming to terms with liberatory morality and finds in it the strength to fully devote herself to racial justice. She implores others to find strength in their humanity, mortality, and faith.