Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class
Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class by Blair LM Kelley (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2023)
Blair LM Kelley, a Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies and winner of the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award, writes a fascinating and informative story of how Black workers, forced to work in the slave economy, charged forward following Emancipation into a cohesive, organized Black working class.
This is, at once, a personal and a wider story, chronicling the Black working class from Blair’s ancestor sharecroppers to the present, providing an excellent account of how Black people emerged from that horrific era, and through community, forged societies of self-help, improvement and progress, fighting wage and class exploitation.
Blair highlights the struggle and success of Black washerwomen, railroad workers, Pullman porters and postal employees in facing and overcoming racism in their jobs, while at the same time working with their peers to improve their lives.
Following Emancipation, the author’s great-grandfather, a preacher named Solicitor, became a sharecropper on the land owned by former slaveholders. He found that after a year’s hard labor planting and sowing crops, the landowner refused to pay him a fair value for his work and the crops he produced. Since negotiation, or even a mild objection to the unfair compensation could not be voiced, Solicitor and his family left, in the middle of the night, to seek better opportunities farther north.
The author’s grandfather, John Dee, a skilled carpenter, was denied the opportunity to work at that occupation as skilled work, and union membership, was reserved to White workers. At that time, and until the passage of the Civil Rights Act one hundred years later in 1964, many unions’ constitutions explicitly stated, as a qualification for membership, that only White people may be admitted.
Similarly, the maternal side of her family was barred from clerical, office and even factory jobs because of their race. In order to provide for their families, they performed housework and did the laundry for White women. Laundry work was onerous. Without the help of electric washing machines, the laundresses boiled water, made their own soap, and spent long hours doing the work that White women did not care to do. They successfully demanded that they take the laundry to their homes where they could work without close supervision and sexual harassment while at the same time being able to care for their own children. Their organizing took place in backyard settings, similar to the assembly lines of White workers, where they discussed common grievances and methods to remedy them.
Reminiscent of the early labor guilds a century before, the laundry ladies organized unions in Southern states, one having 3,000 members which, in 1881, set prices for their work, fining members who worked for less money and striking for fair pay. Other unions of washerwomen emerged, one in Kansas City obtaining a charter from the AFL, the first of its kind.
Blair emphasizes that in their move to locations outside the South, Black workers formed societies of self-help and support. In their churches, clubs and get-togethers, they encouraged each other and fought for greater respect, better working conditions and higher pay for their labor. She correctly stresses that their rights as workers were human rights.
Black workers’ fight against racism and labor exploitation continued following the Civil War. Blair presents the stories of generations of Black workers, starting with slaves who were skilled workers engaged in clearing the thickly wooded land once occupied by Native Americans. They used their African-earned knowledge of planting and raising a multitude of crops. That knowledge and their skill produced enormous wealth for White slaveholders while providing nothing for their insufferable work and intolerable and often violent working conditions. They moved to northern cities to escape and worked to build, with the help of their community, meaningful, progressive lives for their families and others.
Black workers, like Blair’s great grandfather, an expert blacksmith, were denied entry into the skilled trades as well as AFL craft unions. They were believed to be a threat to the jobs of White workers but were hired as strike-breakers to replace White workers who were engaged in work stoppages. Inevitably, of course, when the strike ended the Black workers were fired.
Sadly, unions did not follow the example of the Knights of Labor, the nation’s first major national union, in admitting Blacks. Its president, Terence Powderly, said in 1880, “the outside color of a candidate shall not debar him from admission, rather let the coloring of his mind and heart be the test.”
Before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall served on the U.S. Court of Appeals. In 1961, when he reported to his Court of Appeals chambers for the first time, he greeted his secretary who said to him “you must be the electrician. A light bulb burned out in the judge’s office.” Marshall replied “Madam, I am not the electrician. The electricians’ union would not have me as a member. I am only the judge.”
Blacks were also denied entry into the Railroad Brotherhood unions. They were employed as train firemen but not engineers. The usual promotion route was from fireman to engineer but that route was denied to Black firemen. It was inconceivable that a Black engineer could supervise a White fireman.
All-black unions were formed in response to this racism. Blair highlights the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first major union led by Blacks whose president was A. Philip Randolph, a civil rights leader. The porters were relatively well paid and educated, becoming role models in their communities, often posing for family portraits wearing their uniforms. Although their work was limited to catering to White passengers riding in sleeper-cars and occasionally suffering their abuse, they were proud men who, in their travels, spread the word of organization and motivated the many Black people they met to organize and fight for fair and equal treatment.
The denial of federal jobs to Blacks, including work with the U.S. Postal Service, was met with the creation of an all-Black postal workers union which organized voter registration drives in the South in the 1940’s and protested segregation. Blair also notes that the vital work done by “essential workers” during the Covid pandemic was performed, in large part, by Black workers, while many Whites worked at home and relied on Black delivery people to bring them vital resources such as food, medicine and other household goods.
Blair’s extremely well-researched personal and wider story highlights the fight against racism and economic exploitation. She details the workers’ tenacity in the face of racism through community organization and Black solidarity which led the momentum for better jobs, greater economic opportunity and equal rights.
Much of the literature today concerns the White working class. This excellent book places the emphasis on the origins and continued strength of the Black working class, supported by its history of mutual self-organization and community.
Reviewed by Steven Davis, a retired NLRB administrative law judge and member of the Executive Board of the New York Labor History Association.