[Across the political spectrum, Americans whitewash the working
class and exclude labor struggle from black history. Blair LM
Kelley’s Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class is a
necessary corrective — and provides lessons for struggle today]
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THE BLACK WORKING CLASS CAN NO LONGER BE IGNORED  
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Akil Vicks
September 10, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Across the political spectrum, Americans whitewash the working
class and exclude labor struggle from black history. Blair LM
Kelley’s Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class is a
necessary corrective — and provides lessons for struggle today _

A black picketer walks through an all-white train car in Chicago
during the United Packinghouse Workers of America strike of 1948. ,
Bettmann / Getty Images

 

Review of _Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class_ by
Blair LM Kelley (Norton, 2023).

Florida’s new history curriculum, generated in the wake of Governor
Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE Act” and approved earlier this summer,
will teach students that the institution of American slavery provided
some benefit to enslaved workers
[[link removed]] by
giving them valuable skills. While it’s true that newly freed
peoples entered the economy with skills learned on plantations, it is
also true that a violently enforced racial hierarchy demanded these
skills be put to use for the ultimate benefit of the white economic
elite. A rapacious industrial capitalist class awaited these new wage
laborers, ready to take full advantage. Freed black men and women
relied on interdependent networks of mutual aid, education, and labor
organizing to leverage their skills into decent jobs where possible.
The effort to do so, spanning a century and a half and still ongoing,
is the story of the black working class.

This history of black labor struggle is obscured in the dominant
account of the black American experience. Slavery is about corporeal
brutality, Reconstruction about statehouses, Redemption about burning
crosses, Jim Crow about water fountains, the civil rights movement
about firehoses — all of it true enough, but conspicuously none of
it about work. And yet work is always in the background, from the
fundamentally unfree labor compact called slavery to Martin Luther
King Jr’s final speech to striking sanitation workers in Memphis the
night before his assassination. It’s this suppressed labor history
that author Blair LM Kelley attempts to reclaim with care and
compassion in her new book _Black Folk: The Roots of the Black
Working Class_.

When we picture the working class, we typically conjure images of
white coal miners with their faces made black by the indiscriminate
application of coal dust. Or perhaps we think of industrial factory
skeletons in places like Michigan and Pennsylvania — and we imagine
that the workers who made a decent living in them were all white, even
though many were black. Everyone colludes in this whitewashing of the
working class. The conservative image of the working class is
presented as mostly white, mostly male, and in opposition to the
struggle for racial justice. Meanwhile, in liberal spaces the working
class is largely seen as mostly white, mostly male, and an unfortunate
collateral casualty of trade deals and technological advances.

Lurking just beneath the surface is the distinction between what we
consider legitimate work and what we see as labor fit only for the
least of us. After the Civil War, the vast majority of work available
to black people was either domestic or agricultural in nature
— labor that was and still is viewed as unskilled and beneath the
dignity of even the white working class. The idea that a factory
worker is a working-class person while a farm laborer is not is an
illusion. It has its origin in the history of the black working class,
even as it works to convince us that no such thing ever existed.

Conversations today about the value of labor in our increasingly
service-oriented economy are informed by a long history of devaluing
the work performed by formerly enslaved people and their
descendants. _Black Folk _takes particular care to describe working
lives of laundresses, maids, farmers and fieldhands, porters and mail
carriers — work that does not immediately come to mind when
imagining the halcyon industrial period of growth and the American
middle class but were no less vital to its construction. The history
that Kelley provides here should be at the front of anyone’s mind
when talking about the value of restaurant workers, Uber drivers,
delivery drivers, and Amazon warehouse workers. We are all living with
the legacy of the denial of the black working class.

Subterranean Solidarity

While campaigning for president in Salt Lake City, Governor DeSantis
responded to the criticism of his state school board’s new black
history curriculum by saying that what the textbooks are “probably
going to show is some of the folks that eventually parlayed being a
blacksmith into doing things later, later in life.”

One of the subjects of _Black Folk_ is Henry, an ancestor of
Kelley’s who was indeed an enslaved blacksmith, freed following the
Civil War. However, while the skills that Henry earned while held
hostage on the plantation were absolutely necessary to the agrarian
economy of his home in Elbert County, Georgia, white farmers,
businessmen, and lawmakers were not in any rush to pay him fairly for
his talents. As Kelley interweaves her account of her ancestor’s
life with the story of how the integrated Reconstruction government of
Georgia was hijacked and removed by a movement of indignant racists,
it becomes clear that Henry’s postslavery life was made tenable not
by the value his skills provided but through networks of black
solidarity.

As Kelley’s book demonstrates, these networks were born in the
backwoods of antebellum plantations as slaves sought community and
opportunities for religious worship hidden from the paranoid eyes of
their white slavers. They took a more visible form after slavery ended
with the formal institution of the black church. Black churches were
more than just places of rest and worship — they were centers of
political organization and mutual aid. They were the beneficiaries and
guardians of a tradition of interdependence and community that
provided a kind of cultural instinct for later generations of black
workers to rely on as they fought for their skills and labor to be
compensated. Much of _Black Folk_ is focused on the relationship
between these networks and the growth of black labor power.

Postslavery life was made tenable not by the value black workers’
skills provided but through networks of black solidarity.

Another story recounted in the book is that of black washerwomen
earning a meager living working for white households. It’s unlikely
that Florida’s school board is thinking of laundry as one of those
valuable skills imparted to black people in the course of their brutal
subjugation — but nevertheless, in the decades following
emancipation, washing clothes did take skill, hard work, and more
importantly was a task relegated to women and refused by many white
women, making it primarily a black women’s trade.

Black workers and women workers both earned less than their white and
male counterparts, and domestic work was compensated accordingly. Even
sixty years after slavery ended,_ Essence _magazine described a
scene where black women lined up in an open-air market to be hired
as domestic workers
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it “resembled a slave auction with the prospective buyers looking
over the workers like so many head of cattle; looking for the
strongest and sturdiest.”

In the postslavery South, black washerwomen began to organize networks
where they could share information about potential jobs and which
employers paid low wages or were abusive. As the level of organization
increased, Kelley shows, it allowed them to withhold their labor in
order to secure fair pay and decent treatment. In Atlanta they were
able to leverage the value of their labor
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a strike.

The response to this preunion black labor solidarity sounds eerily
familiar today, with white newspapers and politicians breathlessly
declaring that these black women “didn’t want to work anymore.”
The leaders of the Atlanta washerwomen’s strike were arrested and
jailed on specious fraud charges — that is, punished for their
insubordination and resistance to the established postslavery order.
(Currently, activists against Atlanta’s “Cop City” are being
punished in a similar manner
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raising bail funds to stop a police militarization project — a
contemporary version of the solidarity networks of old.)

Ultimately, while free black people did possess the skills and the
work ethic that allowed America to become an industrial and economic
superpower, that fact was never enough to outweigh the white ruling
class’s entitlement to the fruits of their labor.

The Collective Arc

Kelley structures _Black Folk_ around the personal stories of black
workers who lived through slavery, Reconstruction, and the industrial
revolution. These individual histories are presented not as singular
tales of personal fortitude, but as emblematic of a larger culture of
communal survival and collective labor struggle that buoyed the fight
for black liberation.

There is a version of black history that traces the advancement black
Americans through the lens of individual successes — the
professionals, politicians, businessmen, and other members of the
“talented tenth,” almost all men, who charted their own path to
the middle and upper classes. This version peddles the fiction of
black self-sufficiency. In truth there was never any such thing,
including for the breakout individuals; wherever a black person
secured a decent standard of living — whether as a doctor, a
postman, or a washerwoman — there have always been networks
dedicated to mutual aid and collective struggle. Black folks didn’t
survive the period following slavery through individual effort and the
skills benevolently taught at the end of the lash, but by relying on
each other and understanding the power of solidarity.

Labor struggle is seldom discussed when talking about black history
and the fight for equal rights. And yet it is a tradition that lives
on in the fight to unionize Amazon warehouses, win fair contracts for
UPS drivers, and fully fund public schools so they can adequately
support teachers, students, and working-class families. The tradition
lives on in the community networks that formed in response to both
the urban violence
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flowed from black poverty and the violence against black
people perpetrated by police
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It can still be found in the black church, but now also in secular
mutual aid organizations. It is a tradition that proves that class
struggle cannot be meaningfully separated from the story of racial
justice.

Kelley’s _Black Folk_ is a love letter to the long-overlooked
black working class. It’s also a call for everyone, regardless of
their race, to return to that tradition in the face of racial
oppression and economic exploitation today.

_AKIL VICKS works in clinical research and is a member of River Valley
Democratic Socialists of America. He writes about politics and culture
at onone.substack.com
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