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ISR Issue 56, November–December 2007


REVIEWS

Struggles of Black workers

The Black Worker:
Race, Labor, and Civil Rights Since Emancipation

Eric Arneson, ed.
University of Illinois Press, 2007
319 pages • $25

Review by SHARON SMITH

From its inception, the capitalist class in the United States has relied on a barbaric level of racism to enforce corporate rule. The system of chattel slavery did much more than provide cheap labor for Southern slaveholders: the blood and sweat of Black slaves also produced the cotton that enabled the rise of Northern industrial capital. The Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War finally ended slavery, but the barons of industry soon joined forces with former slaveholders to deliver the final, crushing blow to radical Reconstruction. By the start of the twentieth century, the triumph of white supremacy established Jim Crow segregation throughout the South. But neither segregation nor the ideology of white supremacy was unique to the South. Both were the central means by which capital used race to divide and conquer all those exploited and oppressed by its rule, North and South.

But the relationship between race and class has always been complex. Just as racism has historically divided workers, so too have class differences divided the Black population between its overwhelmingly working-class majority and middle-class minority. In addition, neither class nor racial consciousness has remained static, but has changed to reflect changing circumstances.

The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights Since Emancipation makes an important contribution to understanding these complexities. In his introduction, editor Eric Arnesen explains that labor historians have too often ignored “racial divisions and the experiences of nonwhite workers,” while African American history has focused primarily on “the black elite, whose experiences could be more easily reconstructed from the paper trail they conveniently left behind.” Until recent decades, both disciplines have overlooked the role of Black workers’ experiences and struggles in shaping history.

This volume of eleven essays is a self-conscious effort, as Arneson describes, to “restor[e] race to the heart of labor history, class to the center of black history, and the humanity and agency of working-class men and women to both.” This book succeeds remarkably on every front. Indeed, Black working-class women play a refreshingly prominent role in this telling of history. And thanks to the efforts of these historians and others like them, the role of struggle is finally returning to its rightful place as the motor of history.

The authors assume that the reader is already familiar with key turning points of labor and civil rights struggle, including the battle for Reconstruction, the Depression-era strike wave that built industrial unions, and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s that finally defeated Jim Crow. But such mass movements do not emerge overnight. They are always preceded by small struggles—often involving class conflict—that percolate for a long period of time, beginning to change the balance of forces before mass struggle breaks open.

Most often, class differences among African Americans have led to profoundly different strategies for battling racism. Broadly speaking, the Black middle class has sought to accommodate to the expressed needs of capitalism, while Black workers have used whatever means they have to resist. During the heyday of Jim Crow, most of the Black middle class reinforced the degrading insults of white supremacists—deriding African American workers as “uncivilized” for lack of loyalty to their employers and for seeking the joy of music and dance clubs—while embracing the virtues of loyalty and hard work in a life of service to capital. The Black middle class countered Jim Crow calls for racially segregated trains by proposing trains segregated by class—which would allow “refined” Blacks to travel with their class counterparts and leave the (Black and white) “dregs” behind.

To be sure, the lines of class demarcation are not always easily identified. But even when Black working- and middle-class forces have aligned in their immediate aims, their class interests have remained in conflict. For example, many African-American workers willingly served as strikebreakers during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, bolstering Black middle-class hostility to unions in that era. But workers’ motives for strikebreaking were in protest against a racist union movement that excluded them from membership, while the middle class’s hostility to unions was a product of its allegiance to the aims of capital.

Gradually, the Black middle-class’ opposition to unions subsided as the Progressive Era unfolded, evidenced by the growing support of preachers and community leaders for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, led by A. Philip Randolph, during the 1920s and early 1930s. This shift in attitude was owed initially to pressure from Black workers themselves, who gained support among African-American women’s clubs across the country.

Black workers’ key role in the class struggles of the Depression era, in turn, prepared the Black working class to mobilize in force for the civil rights movement two decades later. Both working- and middle-class African Americans shared an urgency to struggle to finally end racial segregation. Once again, however, their goals differed according to class. Black workers’ aims often extended farther than winning formal political equality—which still left the vast majority of the Black population oppressed and impoverished.

Conflicting class interests emerged openly after the post-civil rights era. In 1977, the Black middle class rallied behind Atlanta’s Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, as he crushed a strike of mainly Black sanitation workers. He claimed the “white-led” union movement was attempting to undermine the gains of the civil rights movement. “I see myself as only the first domino in [labor’s] Southern domino theory,” Jackson stated. “If organized labor makes the move on black political leadership, I think it’s going to have severe consequences for labor Southwide.”

Every reader will gain new insights from reading The Black Worker. And the stories of these courageous anti-racist, working-class fighters will remain with you long after you have finished reading.

Sharon Smith is the author of Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States.

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