In “Black Folk,” the history of the Black working class is a family story
In “Black Folk,” the history of the Black working class is a family story
When historian Blair LM Kelley began writing her latest book, “Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class,” she started with her own family.
“They came from folks who were agricultural workers and domestic workers and laundresses,” Kelley said. “And elevator operators. My mother wanted me to know that being an elevator operator was a really good job at one point.”
Kelley, who is a distinguished professor of Southern studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South, follows those Black workers through centuries of history — exploring how segregation and violence, as well as the civil rights and labor movements, shaped the unique experience of Black workers.
“The interests of a Black working class — of accessibility to decent working conditions and a living wage — so many of the things that are hard and difficult about making a living, we really feel first,” she said. “And we have to think in our policies and in our approach to our humanity, how do we do better?”
The following is an excerpt from “Black Folk,” looking at Kelley’s own working-class roots. To listen to Kelley’s conversation with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal, click the media player above.
My great-grandfather, Solicitor Duncan, was the Black working class, men who were the children of former slaves, sharecroppers who made land they did not own productive and yet struggled mightily to be treated fairly in the segregated South. My grandfather, John Dee Duncan, was the Black working class, skilled men who were denied the opportunity to do skilled labor in both the North and the South, not because of a deficit in ability but because of the color line. My grandmother, Brunell Raeford Duncan, was the Black working class, women who despite their hopes, education, and skills were consigned to household work. Like the majority of Black folk in the first generations after freedom, they were relegated to jobs that provided little pay and did not lead to much except more toil.
Solicitor’s, John Dee’s, and Brunell’s ancestors were brought to this country not as immigrants, but as slaves. They were forced by the men and women who held them in bondage to labor on land forcibly taken from the Indigenous people who had lived there for centuries. In order to sustain chattel slavery, a unique system of racial hierarchy was created in law and in practice. Black people became inextricably connected to intergenerational bondage. White indentured servants who arrived on the shores of colonial America had their time in bondage limited, if they faced any at all. Their freedom was the reward for their service; their color, as they saw it, became a promise of success.
In reality, in the years after the American Revolution, the profits from slavery made a small white elite extraordinarily wealthy but left most white workers poor and fundamentally unable to compete with the productivity of vast plantations on which the enslaved labored without pay. The Black enslaved were characterized as lazy and inferior workers, and the white poor as pathological. Indigenous people were removed, said to have vanished, part of an unknowable past. Dismissed as “white trash,” the working white poor were blamed for their place at the bottom of white society’s hierarchy and comforted only by the knowledge that at least Black people were consigned to a status below them. Even in the wake of Emancipation, a century after the nation’s founding, the systems of labor that replaced enslavement were rooted in dispossession, exclusion, and exploitation. The white working poor were still dismissed, and the Black working class were thought of as useful only for their compliance.
All the while, Black people were keen observers of the world around them, critiquing the wider society and its hierarchies. They understood the profound value of their labor even when they were thought of as just chattel and, later, as an emancipated people. In the first moments of freedom, they took advantage of their mobility, and sought out not only improved working conditions but stronger connections to their families, past and present. They built unions all their own, and, even if they had no choice but to take jobs similar to the ones they had done in bondage, they organized new neighborhoods and communities. They erected schools and churches. They taught their children to see America, as twisted as it was by the legacy of slavery and its aftermath, through their own eyes.
They did not believe that they were trash just because they were poor. They knew their worth, even as the world told them they had very little. They carried their knowledge, of themselves and their pasts and their abilities, to Southern cities, and then to the North and the West. They did their best to pass their legacies down. Though they lived in a nation tilted against them, Black people built and rebuilt vital spaces of resistance, grounded in the secrets that they knew about themselves, about their community, their dignity, and their survival. One of those secrets was joy in spite of sorrow: amid their endless labor, amid the violence, amid the hate, ordinary Black people managed not only to resist but to laugh and to make fun and to love. They insisted on it. Their insistence was political, as was their insistence on collectivity and faith.
My work as a historian has always begun with the stories of my ancestors. Black Folk is no different. It is both a personal journey, rooted in the stories of my family and other Black working-class families, and a history of Black labor in the United States from slavery to our present-day freedom, though with a focus on a critical era, after Southern Emancipation and into the early twentieth century, when the first generations of Black working people carved out a world for themselves. Although there had been free working-class Black people in the North and South before the Civil War, their numbers were relatively small; they, too, encountered new opportunities and obstacles after the war ended. Black Folk is also a human exploration of Black working people, one that seeks to recall and re-create the pathways they followed. Given that the majority of Black people are, or are descendants of, the Black working class, one book can never capture all of what Black working people have endured, or all the jobs they have done; the stories are too numerous, the labor too diverse. Instead, Black Folk attempts to capture the character of the lives of Black workers, seeing them not just as laborers, or members of a class, or activists, but as people whose daily experiences mattered—to themselves, to their communities, and to the nation at large, even as it denied their importance. This book introduces numerous individuals, the kinds of people who, in many prior histories, have been described only generally or presented as representative cases. Sometimes they aren’t even named. Black Folk names them, and tries to reclaim them in full.
Excerpted from “Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class” by Blair LM Kelley. Copyright (c) 2023 by Blair LM Kelley. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corp., a division of W. W. Norton & Co. Inc. All rights reserved.
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