BLACK FOLK

A study of Black workers from enslavement to the present.

Award-winning historian Kelley, director of the Center for the Study of the American South and author of Right To Ride, provides a powerful counter to the assumption that the term working class refers only to Whites. Rather, she argues convincingly, Black workers have been the nation’s “most active, most engaged, most informed, and most impassioned working class.” Rooted in her family’s stories—she is the descendent of enslaved people—Kelley’s history draws on census data and archival sources, as well, to offer vivid portraits of Blacks working as laundresses, porters, domestic workers, and postal carriers. She begins with Henry, her earliest identifiable ancestor in her maternal grandfather’s line, who was enslaved as a boy and picked cotton and became a blacksmith as an adult. In 1865, he was freed to make his way in the working world, and in 1867, he registered to vote. Although Blacks often were relegated to menial jobs, they established vibrant and supportive communities for their families and at work. Kelley recounts bold efforts to resist exploitation. In 1898, for example, laundress Callie House led the establishment of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, which called for reparations due to Blacks for unpaid work during slavery; although short-lived, it presaged future calls for reparations. In the 1920s, many Blacks joined the Great Migration from the South to the North, Midwest, and West. Women aspiring to office or factory jobs usually found only arduous, demeaning domestic work—at least until World War II opened more opportunities. Black men were in demand as porters. Overworked and underpaid by the racially segregated Pullman company, they established the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first all-Black railway union. The history of Black workers, Kelley asserts, is a continuing fight for “justice, fair pay, union representation, secure housing, and equal citizenship.”

A well-researched, engaging, corrective American history.