The Black Worker

by Arnesen, Eric

• ISBN13: 9780252073809
• ISBN10: 0252073800
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-07-25
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

Long before the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s made a frontal assault on the reigning segregationist order, African American workers had to struggle against both their employers and fellow white workers. Because their efforts to secure their workplace rights pitted them against the broader structures of racial oppression, their activism constituted nothing less than a form of civil rights struggle. Uniting the latest scholarship on race, labour, and civil rights, The Black Worker aims to establish the richness of the African American working-class experience, and the indisputable role of black workers in shaping the politics and history of labour and race in the United States.To capture the complexity of African Americans' experiences in the workplace, this reader examines workers engaged in a wide array of jobs, including sharecropping, coal mining, domestic service, longshoring, automobile manufacturing, tobacco processing, railroading, prostitution, lumbering, and municipal employment. The essays' subjects include black migration, strikebreaking, black conservatism, gender, and the multiple forms of employment discrimination in the South and North. Other contributions deal explicitly with state policy and black workers during the transition from slavery to freedom, World Wars I and II, and the 1960s.The variety of challenges made by these workers, both quiet and overt, served as clear reminders to the supporters of white supremacy that, despite their best efforts through violence, fraud, and the law, as long as they insisted upon racial inequality, the "race question" would never be fully resolved.

Table of Contents

"Sweet dreams of freedom" : Freedwomen's reconstruction of life and labor in lowcountry South Carolina	p. 11
The quicksands of economic insecurity : African Americans, strikebreaking, and labor activism in the industrial era	p. 41
"Work that body" : African American women, work, and leisure in Atlanta and the New South	p. 72
Industrial sentinels confront the "rabid faction" : black elites, black workers, and the labor question in the Jim Crow South	p. 94
"We must live anyhow" : African American women and sex work in Chicago, 1880-1900	p. 122
The Great War, black workers, and the rise and fall of the NAACP in the South	p. 147
The organizing tradition among African American plantation workers in the Arkansas delta in the age of Jim Crow	p. 178
Mobilizing black Chicago : the brotherhood of sleeping car porters and community organizing, 1925-35	p. 195
Opportunities found and lost : labor, radicals, and the early civil rights movement	p. 222
"Simple truths of democracy" : African Americans and organized labor in the post-World War II South	p. 250
Managing discontent : the life and career of Leamon Hood, black public employee union activist	p. 271
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