Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class

Historian Kelley (Right to Ride) delivers a poignant and celebratory chronicle of Black labor movements in America. Alongside more well-known stories, such as the unionization of Pullman porters, Kelley also sheds new light on Black women’s contributions to labor struggles. In the late 19th- and early 20th-century South, Black laundresses, recognizing white employers’ dependence on their skilled work, cooperated to control their working conditions and time through jointly planned holidays, labor strikes, and an insistence on collection service rather than in-home service. When Black women joined the Great Migration north in the early 20th century, informal labor restrictions pushed them into domestic work, which made them especially vulnerable during the Great Depression. With 90% of Black women working in positions ineligible for Social Security, minimum wage, and other benefits, “New Deal regulations gave racial bias the force of law,” according to Kelley, who posits that these women were architects of the organizational structures, such as informal childcare networks and fund-raising systems for family reunions, that laid the groundwork for the civil rights movements of the 1950s and ’60s. Full of persuasive insights into Black working-class life and the legacy of communal care spearheaded by Black women, this is a powerful reimagining of the history of labor in the U.S. (June)