Search Results

This chapter examines how landless workers survived in an economy whose defining characteristics were scarcity and uncertainty. Unskilled and unorganized, rural free laborers faced a desperate struggle for survival; they were buffeted by seasonal and cyclical unemployment, and their nonwage economic activities were constricted by a legal system that was designed to maintain slaveholders' authority. The prospects for single women and free African Americans were particularly dim in a labor market that restricted their opportunities in favor of white men, thus limiting their options and relegating them to the margins of the rural economy. In the end, these workers were often left with the mere gleanings of freedom.

This chapter highlights the long history of the African presence in Guatemala and provides a context for understanding relations between black migrant laborers and Guatemalan nationals on the Caribbean coast. It begins with an overview of Spanish attitudes toward blacks and mulattoes in the colonial period, before moving on to discuss how Guatemalan politics and economic priorities in the national period created a need for foreign involvement in railroad development, as well as foreign laborers to build the railroads. Subsequent sections of the chapter discuss how black laborers from Jamaica and the United States were recruited, as well as the tradition of labor radicalism that some Southern black workers brought to Guatemala with them.

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the less-familiar aspects of informal black women's work during the first three decades of the twentieth century—the labor patterns and economic activities of those that were part of the city's profitable yet illegal sexual economy, gambling enterprise, and supernatural consulting business. In doing so the chapter also tackles the problems of documenting informal labor and maps out a multidisciplinary approach for piecing together the oft-neglected lives of informal black female laborers. Finally, the chapter sets the scope of this study within New York City and describes the city's informal labor sector in order to set the social and economic backdrop within which these workers operate.

This chapter presents the editorial “Who Will Own the Soil of the South in the Future,” published in both the Christian Recorder and the Globe. Here, Fortune set forth a position on landownership that he would further develop in Black and White. Heavily influenced by the ideas of Henry George and other agrarian radicals, Fortune believed that there needed to be a fundamental change in the ownership of land. In this editorial, he demonstrated his frustration with the monopoly of landownership and his belief that land was the common property of the people and should be available to those who cultivate the soil. Although he did not call for the complete abolition of private property in land, as he would in Black and White, one can see the germination of Fortune's idea more than a year before the publication of his larger study.

This chapter presents “A New Party” and “But It Will Be!”—editorials written while finishing Black and White—where Fortune demonstrates his growing belief that the conditions of workers, black and white, were the same and, consequently, so was their cause. He called for workers “of the South, the North and the West” to create “a solid front to the masterful forces which press them down.” “Opposition to this unification,” he argued, “is suicidal.” Equally important, Fortune attempted to demonstrate that the same economic forces that were shaping the lives of white workers, here and abroad, were also affecting the lives of the African Americans. Because of this, according to Fortune, blacks should have an equal place in the struggle for economic justice. These are themes that he would further develop in the latter half of Black and White.

This chapter explores black women's multilayered roles within New York's sex commerce, moving beyond widely accepted historical interpretations that position black sex laborers primarily as street solicitors. Identifying black women as madam-prostitutes, casual prostitutes, and sex-house proprietors and entrepreneurs, this chapter addresses the difficulties of documenting sex work within black communities, the broad socioeconomic conditions and personal circumstances outlining black women's entrance into the urban sexual economy, and the occupational benefits of indoor prostitution. In an attempt to avoid or limit their presence on New York streets, black sex workers—when the opportunity arose—sold and performed sexual services in furnished rooms and hotels, in their own homes, in massage parlors and nightclubs, and in other legitimate and illegitimate commercial businesses. Furthermore, indoor and residential sexual labor was significant to sex laborers' working and personal lives.

Following the First World War, relations among workers on the Caribbean coast of Guatemala entered a new phase, in which Latin American and black laborers mobilized separately and pursued distinctly different strategies to secure better conditions. This was due in part to the shifting composition of the coastal workforce, which increasingly encompassed a greater number of Latin American laborers and fewer newly arriving migrants. But it was also due to the ways in which Guatemalan labor politics of the post-World War I period drew on regional and international labor movements to foster militancy, anti-imperialism, and nationalism, encouraging the mobilization of Latin American workers at the same time that it pitted them against black migrants and their North American employers. This chapter explores the mobilization of Latin American workers in the early 1920s, when a revolution overturned the status quo and opened a space for labor militancy that was realized in major strikes of railroad and dockworkers, the latter of which threatened to upset the regime for a second time.

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.

The presence of the Army of the Potomac's Harrison's Landing continued to be a means of liberation for Virginia slaves. The use of black laborers increased to strengthen the Union's position keep the army supplied. This conclusion argues that Mc-Clellan's campaign did not simply undermine the master-slave relationship on the Peninsula, but it helped to cause the destruction of the institution of slavery itself.

This chapter considers the significance of the history of black migrant laborers in Guatemala and their place in the coastal workforce. For the freedmen who started immigrating as early as 1853, travel to Guatemala represented an escape from the white racist-controlled Jim Crow U.S. South and the French and British colonial Caribbean. Labor recruiters spread the word that Guatemala was “the next Booming Country,” where “White and Colored Laborers” could work for the railroad, save enough money to buy land, and become rich off of the turn-of-the-century frenzy for cultivating and selling bananas on the international market. For some, immigration to Guatemala provided an opportunity to purchase property and pursue entrepreneurial ambitions that would have been hard to achieve in the economically depressed and politically repressive regions the immigrants came from. But the effect of immigration on the history of Guatemala was even more profound, as migrant and Latin American laborers' militancy, though largely unsuccessful, paved the way for the struggles of later workers and permanently transformed the culture of Caribbean Guatemala.

This chapter shows how, within the workplaces of Birmingham, people identified with each other on the basis of their position within the system of production and their race. Skilled workers, most of whom were white, established a sharp line between themselves and unskilled workers, most of whom were black. They extended the distinctions of the workplace into the community and reinforced them. Away from work white skilled workers sought to build lives in accord with the status conferred by their work and their race. They lived in homes the unskilled, particularly unskilled blacks, could not afford and socialized with each other and the local middle class in institutions they helped build. Inextricably linked to this process of self-definition was the humiliation of those excluded from the aristocracy of labor and race. The lives of black laborers when they left work were full of reminders of their subordination in all areas of life.

This chapter considers the place of pearls and pearl fisheries in the context of Iberian crisis of the seventeenth century. As arbitristas, or experts, proposed all sorts of solutions intended to address Iberia’s financial and political woes, this zeitgeist of improvement shaped plans for, and reflections on, pearl fishing around the globe. These pearl-fishing proposals drew on a mixture of custom and innovation. As observers of pearl diving in the Caribbean continued to report horrific suffering alongside remarkably autonomous practices by enslaved workers, the Spanish crown supported proposals for Pacific coast fisheries that relied on diverse skilled crew as well as new diving technologies designed to render enslaved workers unnecessary. The chapter focuses on the Cardona Company voyages to California, which included black laborers as well as levantisco, or Levantine, divers and elaborate diving suits. The chapter also considers how the vexing yet appealing complexity of pearls and pearl-fishing settlements were reflected in a 1680 account of Sri Lankan pearl fishing written by Portuguese author João de Ribeiro and in the 1681 Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias (the reissue of the body of laws) governing the Spanish Indies.

This chapter focuses on the ubiquitousness of cotton in American history and culture. It describes the popularity of cotton at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; the continued power of cotton to energize and motivate even after the Civil War; how the blues began with black laborers working together picking cotton; and cotton’s continued power in drama and literature even after the decline of agriculture as a way of life.