This book joins discussions and debates about the future of the city, the nation, and American democracy. It counters widespread notions about poor and working-class blacks as primarily consumers, takers, and liabilities in our current urban political economy. It does so by restoring the broader historical context of African Americans as workers, producers, and assets in the development of the American economy, institutions, and politics. Drawing upon nearly a century of innovative research on the subject, this book documents the movement of urban black workers from the periphery of the African American working class during the first three hundred years to its center during the twentieth century. It calls attention not only to the ongoing coercive dimensions of this process, but also to the equally important ways that people of African descent gradually forged transnational liberation movements to free themselves from both local and global forms of inequality. As such, this study examines the lives and labor of black workers within the larger context of urban capitalist development, community formation, and politics from the transatlantic slave trade to recent times. The excerpt below is drawn from the book’s concluding epilogue. It reflects on the larger meaning of four centuries of black labor and working-class history. The selection not only gives attention to the reconfiguration of the black working class during the late 20th and early 21st century, but also ruminates on the possibilities of building a new, more vibrant, and more inclusive labor movement to address the challenges of racial, class, gender, and sexual inequality in our own times. — Joe William Trotter Jr.
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Until the mid-20th century, the vast majority of black men, women, and to some extent children added to the wealth, culture, and politics of the nation as general laborers, household, and domestic service workers. This portrait of the black working class, enslaved and later free, changed dramatically during the 20th century, when the Modern Black Freedom Movement toppled the White Supremacist order; expanded the scope of American democracy; and created a new equal opportunity regime. Men and women from a variety of ethnic and racial groups soon invoked the language and strategies of the African American freedom struggle to broaden their own access to the benefits or “perquisites” of American citizenship. But the late 20th century decline of the manufacturing sector and the intensification of grassroots white resistance to affirmative action programs reinforced the color line in the emerging postindustrial economy. At the turn of the new millennium, according to economist Doug Henwood, the largest single category of work for white men was salaried managers and administrators; for black men, truck driving; for white women, secretary; and for black women, nurses aides and orderlies. [1]
Thus, as the 21st century got underway, most poor and working-class blacks and their children occupied the bottom rungs of the evolving global capitalist workforce. As historian and activist Clarence Lang notes, during the closing years of the 20th century, “the strong winds of neoliberalism” continued to sweep the nation politically to the right and established the foundation for a steady push against the gains of the earlier mid-century social welfare state. Specifically, the new liberalism included the increasing “transition from industrial production to an economy driven by financial capital; market deregulation and austerity; privatization; antiunion policies; [and] the erosion of working conditions and pay in order to generate greater productivity and higher corporate profits.” [ii]
Based upon these profound changes in recent US and African American life, the notion of a “New Jim Crow” system gained increasing currency during the first and second decades of the 21st century. Fueled by the “mass incarceration” of young black men and women, the new Jim Crow reinstitutes the old white supremacist order under the legal rubric of “felon.” Specifically, as legal scholar Michelle Alexander puts it, “Once you are labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, denial of the vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are perfectly legal.” [iii] Blood in the Water, historian Heather Ann Thompson’s Pulitizer-Prize winning book on the Attica prison revolt of 1971, makes the same point. While significant prison reforms followed the violent state suppression of the Attica prison takeover (including better visitation procedures and the establishment of an Inmate Liaison Committee to voice the grievances of prisoners), the rapid spread of a more hostile and punitive system of incarceration largely cancelled out the benefits of reform for the prisoners. In late 20th century New York and elsewhere, public officials were determined to “rein in ‘those’ black and brown people who had been so vocally challenging authority and pushing the civil rights envelope.”
Mirroring as well as setting the tone for other states, New York’s predominantly African American and Latino/a prison population mushroomed from 12,500 in 1971 to nearly 73,000 as the new century got underway. Sentenced due to criminalization of a host of heretofore minor or noncriminal acts, particularly involving the possession and use of drugs, these inmates were assigned to work in prison industries for the benefit of the state. During the final two years of the 1990s alone, New York State’s Division of Correctional Industries (Corcraft) produced $70 million in income using disfranchised prison labor, reminiscent to some extent of the post-emancipation years of the 19th century. [iv]
Black working people are by no means occupying the bottom rungs of today’s evolving transnational economy quietly. Labor organizing remains one strategy for improving working conditions. As manufacturing and other jobs dissipated, the balance of power within the labor movement shifted from the old blue collar industrial, construction, and transport unions to new service and public sector unions, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and the American Postal Workers Union. These all cover occupations employing large numbers of African Americans. In 2007, thirteen local domestic workers’ organizations formed the National Domestic Workers Alliance and launched a spirited campaign to establish national and “global standards for household labor.” [v]
Many labor activist, white and black, see African Americans as the most promising prospects for rebuilding a vibrant labor movement in the 21st century. As historian Robert Zeiger concluded in his synthesis of black labor history, “It was an article of faith among many African Americans, and many white supporters as well, that blacks and other people of color represented the only real hope of reviving and revitalizing a labor movement that had been in decline for a quarter century.” [vi]
Writing ahead of the 2016 election, historian Liz Faue also emphasized the potential for building a broader and more inclusive labor movement during the early 21st century. These efforts included not only the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM), but also the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the struggle for LGBT rights, and the Fightfor$15movement for a higher minimum wage for all workers. In Faue’s view, these movements energetically addressed “the challenges of young, undocumented, minority, and women workers” in a “new form and in a new language.” [vii] Labor scholar Michael Zwieg and historian Robin Kelley reinforce this perspective. In particular, Kelley urges activists to “stop referring to the South as a political backwater, a distinctive site of racist right-wing reaction” and to build interracial working class alliances across regional as well gender, racial, and sexuality lines. [viii]
But the obstacles to a unified labor movement are exceedingly strong: some African American activists and their nonwhite allies as well as women from a variety of ethnic and racial groups have despaired at building alliances with white male workers. These activists detest the persistence of white male privilege in the workplace; white workers’ anti-welfare state ideology; and, most of all, white workers’ failure to embrace a variety of ethnic and racial group workers as comrades in arms against unjust postindustrial global capitalist labor policies and practices. [ix] Hence, early 21st century poor and working class blacks continue to supplement their labor organizing strategies with new forms of grassroots activism as well as cross-class, interracial, and interethnic electoral politics.
Recent urban black politics buoyed Barack Obama’s two presidential bids as well as the emergence of the Black Lives Matter Movement during his second term. [x] By the time Obama arrived in Chicago to work as a community organizer during the early 1980s, the city’s black community had already carved out new and highly articulated patterns of multiclass and multiracial coalition politics. In 1973, for example, packinghouse worker and union leader Addie Wyatt and her husband Claude (an early packinghouse employee and later postal service worker) had joined the Committee for a Black Mayor and helped to lay the groundwork for the election of Harold Washington as Chicago’s first black mayor in 1983 and Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 “Rainbow Coalition” campaigns for the Democratic Party’s endorsement for president. In his analysis of Obama’s election as the country’s first African American president, historian Peniel Joseph concludes that Jackson’s two presidential runs, which brought scores of new working class black voters into the electoral process, “provided a blueprint for the Obama campaign.” [xi]
After Obama’s reelection to a second term as president in 2012, the increasing incidents of police brutality underlay the groundswell of grassroots activism that launched the BLM in 2013. Following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of unarmed Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, a gated suburban community, activist Alicia Garza and others used new internet technology, a pivotal factor in Obama’s campaigns, to generate a movement that soon not only resulted in street level protests against police brutality from coast to coast, but also produced some 25 organized local chapters of the movement across the country. As indicated by the case of Ferguson, Missouri, these efforts also reflected the social and political impact of the increasing suburbanization of African American working-class life and poverty in recent decades. [xii]
Under the impact of the 2016 presidential election and the triumph of the most conservative wing of the Republican Party, massive street protests broke out in cities nationwide. Many Black Lives Matter activists called for deeper and more extensive local grassroots organizing as well as greater engagement in the established electoral system. Alicia Garza, a pioneer in the development of the BLM as well as an organizer for the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance, reported “doing a lot of work to build bridges between other movements and communities caught in the crosshairs of Trump’s agenda . . . It’s a real opportunity for us to build a movement of movements . . . Our futures are tied to each other.” [xiii]