Article Review Paper
Read the article carefully and completely. Take notes on the key points in each section and organize them in the following manner in preparation to write the paper.
a. The first paragraph of your essay: i. What is the author’s primary argument? You should be able to state this in one sentence. Be clear and concise.
ii. Summarize the source material used to defend the argument. Explain what types of sources are used (government documents, letters, military records, newspapers, books, other academic articles, etc.).
iii. To be clear: Source material is found in the bibliographic documentation provided by the author. Depending on your article, this documentation can be found at the end of the article in a “Notes”, “Bibliography”, “References”, or “Works Cited” section. Some authors place this documentation at the bottom of each page. These notes are known as “footnotes.”
b. The second paragraph of your essay: i. Provide a summary of the article’s content. What important people, places, and events are examined?
c. The third paragraph of your essay: i. In your view, what are the article’s strengths? That is, what did the author do well?
d. The fourth paragraph of your essay: i. In your view, what are the articles weaknesses? That is, what could the author have done better?
4. Write a paper addressing the items listed in #3 above.
5. Review the “Article Review Paper: Guidelines” provided below. These guidelines include content reminders and instructions related to formatting, editing, and submitting the paper.
6. Reminders: (1) Put your name on the paper; (2) Place the bibliographic citation for your chosen article at the top of the first page.
1. Use the paragraph outline provided on the course syllabus to organize your essay. Be sure to address all of the items listed.
2. Each paragraph should be a minimum of five to six sentences. Of course, if you need to provide a complete explanation of the various items, you should write more.
3. Since you will be allowed to rely directly on the article in writing your paper, I will expect a quality response. I will pay special attention to your explanation of examples. Don’t just list an example. Explain it completely, and tell me why it is an example.
Formatting your paper
1. Type your name in the upper left-hand corner.
2. Type the bibliographic citation of your chosen article on the first line of the paper (author’s name, title, etc.).
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5. Important: Explain concepts in your own words: While the occasional use of a direct quote is OK, do not simply copy your authors words throughout. When I grade your paper, I plan to focus on the extent to which you are able to explain things in your own words. This is the only way for me to know that you did the reading and understand it. Papers that are simply a string of direct quotes will not receive very high marks.
Labor History, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2003
Sentinels for New South Industry:
Booker T. Washington, Industrial
Accommodation and Black Workers
in the Jim Crow South*
BRIAN KELLY
In 1912, “race war” broke out in Cuba. The island’s hard-won independence, formally
attained in 1902, had failed to deliver the “nation for all” that nationalist visionary Jose
Marti and his largely black and mulatto following had aspired to. Instead white Cuban
elites attempted to emulate the standards of “civilization” laid down by their North
American counterparts, laying the foundations for a society in which blacks and
mulattoes remained second-class citizens. Afro-Cuban war veterans, outraged at the
government’s failure to reward their sacrifices over many years, organized the Partido
Independiente de Color, demanded their “rightful share” to the fruits of independence,
and in 1912 led an armed revolt that was brutally suppressed by the US-backed
government, at a cost of more than 3000 lives.1
As their descendants had for generations before them, American Southerners on both
sides of the color line paid careful attention to the events unfolding in the Caribbean,
refracting their significance through the prism of their own distinctive approach to the
“race problem.” Startled at what seemed to them a costly failure in racial control, white
Southerners congratulated themselves on having eliminated the volatility intrinsic in
bi-racial coexistence by anchoring racial difference in an elaborate system of formal
segregation: its absence in Cuba seemed a perilous defect.
A more remarkable evaluation of the Cuban events came from Booker T. Washing-
ton,2 who emerged as the dominant figure in African American politics nearly two
* The author wishes to acknowledge the generous support of the British Academy, the Academic
Council at Queen’s University Belfast, and the John Hope Franklin Collection of African and
African-American Documentation at Duke University for funding the research that made this article
possible. He would also like to thank Jorge Giavonnetti for bibliographic advice on the 1912 revolt in Cuba
and Eric Arnesen, Tera W. Hunter and Peter Rachleff for critical comments on an earlier draft of this
article. None of them are responsible for the interpretation advanced above.
1 The most authoritative account of the events appears in Aline Helg, “Our Rightful Share”: The
Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). See also
Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth Century Cuba (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2001), Louis A. Perez, Jr., “Politics, Peasants, and People of Color: The
1912 ‘Race War’ in Cuba Reconsidered,” Hispanic American Historical Review 66, 3 (1986), 509–539.
2 In 1898 Washington entered an arrangement with the US military allowing matriculation of Cuban
and Puerto Rican students at Tuskegee Institute. Some among them led a series of strikes and
mini-rebellions at Tuskegee over complaints about food and prohibitions against their playing baseball
on Sundays. “Largely because of the Latin students,” notes Harlan, “the school had to construct a
guardhouse. The Cubans refused to eat … and struck against their work. When a teacher and a student
tried to put [one of the leaders] in jail, his compatriots jumped them, but they succeeded in making the
arrest. Guns were flourished before order was restored.” Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The
Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 283.
ISSN 0023-656X print/ISSN 1469-9702 online/03/030337-21 2003 Brian Kelly
DOI: 10.1080/002365603200012955
338 Brian Kelly
decades earlier when, during the 1895 Atlanta Exposition, he issued a public call for
reconciliation based on black accommodation to the Southern status quo. In an article
addressed to the northern, white readership of The Continent entitled “Negro Leaders
Have Kept Racial Peace,” Washington expounded on why African Americans, with
“much more reason for a resort to physical violence” than their Cuban counterparts,
had held back from a resort to “rebellion or insurrection.” “The answer is simple,” he
explained. After emancipation, “wise … self-sacrificing” whites had undertaken the
“training of negro leaders (‘teachers and ministers … doctors, pharmacists, lawyers,
farmers, businessmen or politicians’) who were placed … as sentinels in every negro
community in the South” and who “kept a steady hand on the masses of the colored
people.” Exalted by a relieved white America as the authentic embodiment of dimin-
ished black aspirations, Washington had often pointed out to whites the utility of
conservative leadership in sustaining racial detente, but seldom had he offered such an
unguarded appraisal of its role in containing black insurgency.3
Historians have been reluctant to accept Washington’s word that one essential
function of post-Reconstruction race leadership had been to reconcile the black
“masses” to their place in the segregated South. One prominent recent study has
credited him instead with “la[ying] the groundwork for the militant confrontation of the
Civil Rights Movement,” while a second describes Washington as a “radical and
effective [advocate] of African-American power.”4 Others understate the tensions that
developed between race leaders and black workers, stressing the contribution of
elite-led “uplift” to institution-building in the black community, locating within such
work an important sphere of agency, and asserting its ostensible cross-class appeal. But
this mildly exuberant tone is difficult to square with the meager gains secured for
ordinary black Southerners in the Age of Washington, and obscures the regressive
thrust at the heart of the accommodationist project.5 The considerable advances made
over the past generation in reconstructing black Southerners’ experience under Jim
Crow, evident in a vibrant and expanding historical literature, are undermined by a
continuing reluctance to examine tensions within the black “community.” A historio-
graphical lineage that began, appropriately, with recognition of the need for nuanced
scholarship has delivered, over time, a mostly laudatory evaluation that emphasizes
acommodationism’s subversive capacity6 but prevaricates in delineating its relationship
with Southern white elites or its complicity in shoring up the system under which black
workers languished.
This article attempts to lay the groundwork for a reevaluation of elite-led racial uplift
3 Booker T. Washington, “Negro Leaders Have Kept Racial Peace,” The Continent (Chicago) 43
(October 3, 1912), 1382, in Booker T. Washington Papers (hereafter BTW Papers), ed. Harlan, vol. 11
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 33–34.
4 Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000 (New York: Penguin, 2001), xiii.
5 For general remarks about the strengths and weaknesses of this scholarship as it applies to the
turn-of-the-century urban South, see my “Racial Uplift and Racial Solidarity in Early Twentieth-Century
Birmingham: A Review of Lynne B. Feldman’s ‘A Sense of Place’,” online at: http://h-net.msu.edu/
cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx � vx&list � h-labor&month � 0107&week � e (July 2001).
6 Virtually all assessments of Washington, including my own, accept the conclusion reached in early
studies by Louis Harlan and August Meier that he combined public submission to white supremacy with
surreptitious attempts to challenge specific elements of the Southern racial order. Harlan writes that
Washington “clandestinely financed and directed a number of court suits challenging the grandfather
clause, denial of jury service to blacks, Jim Crow service in transportation, and peonage. Thus, he
paradoxically attacked the racial settlement he publicly accepted.” See Harlan, Washington: Making of a
Black Leader, preface, n.p. See also Meier, Negro Thought in America, 110–114.
Sentinels for New South Industry 339
by excavating the relationship between Washington-style accommodation and white
elite designs for the industrializing South. It aims to demonstrate that the “race
problem” extant at the New South during the traumatic years of its early industrial
development was, to a far greater extent than most historians have acknowledged,
rooted in the antagonism between propertied white elites committed to industrial
transformation and a mostly propertyless black working class that would provide the
fodder for the remaking of the South. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s compelling proposition
that Jim Crow can best be understood as “racial capitalism”—“a system that combined
de jure segregation with hyperexploitation of black and white labor”—suggests that
black workers belong at the very center of any meaningful understanding of the period,
and not relegated to the margins or written off as an inert mass carried along under the
protective wing of black petit bourgeois leadership, well-intentioned or otherwise.7
A wide range of sources confirm that black labor was the lever with which New South
modernizers hoped to lift their region out of the lethargy to which plantation slavery
had condemned it. Industrial promoters agreed that “cheap, docile, black labor”8 was
the key to the region’s future, an axiom they articulated frequently and in remarkably
explicit terms. Booker T. Washington’s significance—and the function of accommo-
dation more generally—can best be understood in terms of the compatibility of his
formula for race progress with elite requirements for a tractable workforce. Historians
working from a “race relations” framework continue to gauge the efficacy of Washing-
ton’s strategy by drawing up a balance sheet of losses and gains for the race as a whole,
and then speculating about whether the “protest” strategies advocated by rivals W. E.
B. DuBois or William Monroe Trotter might have delivered more. But like Washing-
ton’s admirers, they assume a “unitary racial experience” under Jim Cow which, as
Judith Stein has suggested, “denies the historical existence of those black who lost both
to Booker T. Washington and the dominant [white] classes in the age of segregation.”9
* * *
The “new men” brought to power in the South after the overthrow of Reconstruction—
industry-oriented individuals like Atlanta Constitution editor Henry W. Grady, his
co-thinker at the Manufacturers’ Record Richard H. Edmonds, lumber baron John
Henry Kirby and his counterparts in coal and iron, Alabama’s Henry DeBardeleben
and Tennessee’s A. S. C. Colyar—exhibited a contradictory, almost schizophrenic,
attitude toward the mass of black laborers in their midst. None of them entertained the
notion that freed men or women should enjoy the same rights of citizenship as their
white neighbors, and few showed any restraint in cataloguing the Negro’s deficiencies,
invariably ascribed to innate racial characteristics. While they refrained, on most
occasions, from publicly indulging in the crass style of race-baiting associated with the
demagogues of the age, New South industrial elites were hardly paragons of racial
egalitarianism. At best they exhibited a paternalistic attitude toward the “inferior” race;
confronted with a challenge to their ascendancy they proved themselves as adept at
playing the race card as the most extreme white “radicals.”
Simultaneously, however, the modernizers recognized black labor as a vital asset in
7 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “Mobilizing Memory: Broadening Our View of the Civil Rights Movement,”
The Chronicle Review, July 27, 2001, online at: http: //www.chronicle.com.
8 George Gordon Crawford, Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad executive, cited in George R. Leighton,
Five Cities: the Story of Their Youth and Old Age (New York: Ayer, 1998), 129.
9 Judith Stein, “Black and White Burdens: Review of Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., ‘Black Americans and
the White Man’s Burden, 1898–1903’,” Reviews in American History, March 1976, 89.
340 Brian Kelly
the New South’s industrial renovation. Frustrated at times by what they regarded as the
“undependability” of black labor, industrialists were nevertheless unanimous in ac-
knowledging that it constituted one of the cornerstones in constructing a prosperous
future. “The greatest resource of the South,” a typical editorial in the Manufacturer’s
Record asserted in 1893, “is the enormous supply of cheap colored labor.” Opportunity
“for the masses of negroes” lay in transforming the region’s untapped natural endow-
ment into profits. “Its vast mineral wealth is to be uncovered, millions of feet of timber
are to be cut, thousands of miles of railroad are to be constructed[, and] great drainage
projects are to be carried through … with all the incubuses placed upon them, the
negroes are a vital factor in Southern advancement,” they insisted. “Today the South
could not do without them for a week.”10
While it may be true, as some have argued, that black workers provided the most
fertile ground in which Southern trade unionism could sink its roots in the 1950s,11 the
opposite seems to have been the case in the period before World War I. If we take white
employers at their word, the most attractive qualities manifested by black labor in the
post-Reconstruction period were its vulnerability and lack of a disposition for collective
organization. “As a laborer [the black worker] has no equal for patient industry and
mule-like endurance,” a South Carolinian wrote in 1890, articulating a nearly universal
theme. The ex-slave, “by the blessings of freedom, is now willing to toil from year’s end
to year’s end for about one-half of the [former costs] which [we] once paid for the fruits
of his labor. This same man is the iron mine laborer, the furnaceman and the mill man
of the future that will yet aid his white friends of the South to take the lead in the
cheapest production on the continent.”12
With all its limitations, the Populist revolt provided the last large-scale opportunity
for black plebeian self-assertion before World War I.13 While the years after its decline
in 1896 would be punctuated by intermittent, localized confrontation between orga-
nized black workers and their employers,14 the possibility that these could feed into a
wider challenge to the status quo—as they had during the upheaval accompanying
Reconstruction—had been dramatically weakened. Populism’s defeat and the wave of
reaction accompanying it hastened the disintegration of the collectivist impulse that had
infused black politics since emancipation, and disfranchisement eviscerated the political
10 “The Negro as a Mill Hand,” Manufacturer’s Record, September 22, 1893.
11 See Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1993), 214–277. Honey’s argument is sharply challenged by Alan Draper in
Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968 (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1994),
10–13.
12 “Southern Bessemer Ores,” Manufacturers’ Record, October 25, 1890.
13 In recent years a rich historical literature has documented the centrality of labor militancy as a key
component of post-Reconstruction black activism. See, for example, Berlin et al., Freedom: a Documentary
History of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), particularly Series 1, vols. 2 and 3,
The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor. Historians disagree on whether the Populists ever actually challenged white
supremacy. More important here, however, is the question of whether Populism was perceived by the
Southern ruling class as a threat to the racial order. About this issue, it would seem there can be little debate.
14 For useful surveys of black labor activism in the Jim Crow South, see Paul B. Worthman and James
R. Green, “Black Workers in the News South, 1865–1915,” in Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience,
ed. Huggins, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971); Eric Arnesen, “Following the Color Line of Labor:
Black Workers and the Labor Movement before 1930,” Radical History Review 55 (1993), 53–87; Rick
Halpern, “Organized Labor, Black Workers, and the Twentieth-Century South: The Emerging Revision,”
in Race and Class in the American South since 1890, ed. Stokes and Halpern (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 43–76;
Daniel Letwin, “Labor Relations in the Industrializing South,” in A Companion to the American South, ed.
John Boles (London: Blackwell, 2001), 424–443.
Sentinels for New South Industry 341
terrain upon which that impulse could be expressed. Among the mass of black
agricultural workers and the growing numbers abandoning the Cotton Belt for the
mines, mills, and timber camps of the New South, the deteriorating racial climate taxed
whatever reserves of optimism and cohesion remained. From the perspective of South-
ern employers, Jim Crow’s utility in anchoring the vulnerability of black workers and
sustaining the low-wage regime they deemed essential to regional development was
among its most attractive features.
In the new era commencing with the elites’ triumph over the agrarian challenge in the
mid-1890s, leading proponents of Southern industrialization labored systematically to
revive the paternalist rapport their agrarian forebears had formerly enjoyed with the
black masses. Black workers anxious to leave behind the stifling despotism of plantation
life represented to men of the New South a ready-made army of cheap menial laborers,
who could not only be profitably deployed in the extractive industries emerging
throughout the region but, it was assumed, might potentially operate as a labor reserve
indispensable for restraining the inflated expectations of working-class whites. By 1910
some 1.2 million African Americans labored on the nation’s railroads and in its
factories and mines, an overwhelming majority of them in the South.
The revival of this elite-led racial paternalism shaped, in profound ways, the new
orientation of black politics articulated by Washington in his speech before the 1895
Atlanta Exposition. The “Age of Washington” commenced with the demise of Populism,
and coincided precisely with the period described by W. Rayford Logan as the “nadir”
in African American history. The pact announced by Washington in 1895 has been
evaluated almost exclusively in racial terms—as a declaration of the surrender of black
political aspirations and the postponement of the struggle for civil equality. But an
exclusive focus on its racial import obscures the degree to which “compromise” reflected
a growing, class-based rapprochement between elites on both sides of the color line.
Washington’s intervention might be more meaningfully understood as the inauguration
of a partnership between New South white elites and their counterparts in the increas-
ingly conservative black middle class, now convinced of the futility of political agitation
and increasingly enamored with the Gospel of Wealth. The real losers in this pact were
not black Southerners generally, but more specifically the black working classes.
In articulating the basis for elite collaboration, Washington gave voice to a tendency
that had been coalescing among black conservatives since the overthrow of Reconstruc-
tion and which had been tempered in the confrontation with Populism. African
Americans who, following emancipation, had linked their fortunes to those of their
ex-masters in the Democratic Party had evolved from being an exotic, inconsequential
and widely detested fringe on the margins of the black community to one which, aided
by the patronage of white elites, grew in numbers and self-confidence in the 1890s.15
15 Judith Stein, “ ‘Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others’: The Political Economy of Racism in the
United States,” Science and Society 38 (1974–75), 434–441; Meier, Negro Thought in America, 38–39. On
black Democrats, Else Barkley Brown writes (123–124) that “[b]lack men and women … throughout the
South, initiated sanctions against those black men perceived as violating the collective good by supporting
Conservative forces. Black Democrats were subjected to the severest exclusion: disciplined within or quite
often expelled from their churches and mutual benefit societies; denied board and lodging with black
families.” Later, as “formal political gains … began to recede and economic promise became less
certain … political struggles over relationships between the working-class and the newly emergent
middle-class, between men and women, between literate and non-literate, increasingly became issues” in
Richmond (130). See Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African
American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (1994), 107–146. See
also Peter Kolchin, First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama’s Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction
342 Brian Kelly
Within the Republican Party, the radicalized freedmen and women who had consti-
tuted the phalanx of the Union Leagues during Reconstruction had experienced defeat
after defeat—initially at the hands of the Klan and white paramilitaries, but later by
their own “lily-white” Republican leadership. Many who remained prominent in the
party at the end of the 1880s had long since jettisoned the plebeian manifest at the high
tide of Radical Reconstruction; their numbers consisted increasingly of place-seekers
and rising elites, who “found themselves tied inextricably to the lot of the black masses
even when they no longer articulated their interests.”16
Paradoxically, the formalization of the color line punished black workers even as it
promoted the ascendancy of a black entrepreneurial elite within the confines of the
ghetto,17 widening this social gulf even further. The Populist challenge had divided the
black middle class, rekindling for a minority the vision they had entertained before
Redemption, but its main effect was to inject a sense of urgency into the attempts by
white planters and rising industrial elites to solidify their alliance with black conserva-
tives. And this emerging milieu did not leave them wanting.
It was their evolving collaboration with emerging race leaders that permitted New
South propagandist Henry Grady to state with confidence, amidst the early rumblings
of the agrarian revolt in 1887, that he and his counterparts across the region had “no
fear” of black “domination.” “Already we are attaching to us the best element of [the
black] race,” he told an audience at Texas, “and as we proceed our alliance will
broaden.”18 Washington and others did not merely resign themselves, reluctantly, to
weathering hard times in partnership with white elites; they enthusiastically shared the
logic underpinning Grady’s program. Louis Harlan, who can hardly be accused of
projecting a hypercritical image of Washington, described him candidly as “a black
counterpart of Grady,” insisting that “it was not merely that Washington was circum-
spect, that the mask he turned to Southern whites was a mirror. Washington not only
seemed to agree with whites who were racially moderate and economically conservative;
he actually did agree with them” (emphasis in original).19 No surprise then that Atlanta
Footnote 15 Continued
(Westport: Greenwood, 1972), 132, and the documents in Herbert Aptheker, A Documentary History of
the Negro in the United States, vol. 1 (New York: Citadel, 1951), 565–568, 576–579 and Edmund L. Drago,
Hurrah for Hampton!: Black Red Shirts in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Fayetteville: University of
Arkansas Press, 1998), 57–94. August Meier writes that while initially “those who [stood] with the
Democrats tended to be the old servant class or successful, conservative businessmen,” the composition
of Democratic supporters changed as Southern blacks dejected by the desertion of their cause by
Republicans began to tactically divide their votes. See Meier, “The Negro and the Democratic Party,
1875–1915,” Phylon 17 (1956), 2, 173–191 (quote from 174).
16 Stein, “ ‘Of Mr. Booker T. Washington’,” 432.
17 August Meier, “Negro Class Structure in the Age of Booker T. Washington,” Phylon 23 (1962), 258.
Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) writes that the “Negro elite—professional men, lawyers, or small, financially
ambitious merchants … were quite eager to promote the concept of ‘separate but equal’. Thus in only ten
years after the Emancipation, there was already a great reaction setting in. All the legal chicanery and
physical suppression the South used to put the Negro back in his place was, in effect, aided and abetted
by a great many so-called Negro leaders.” Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York:
Harper Trade, 1963), 53.
18 Henry W. Grady, The New South and Other Addresses (New York: Maynard, Merrill & Co., 1904),
53. Oliver Cromwell Cox writes that “[t]he Southern oligarchy proposed to use the best Negroes, the most
gifted of them, to forestall the political aspirations of their own people.” Cox, “Leadership Among Negroes
in the United States,” in Studies in Leadership: Leadership and Democratic Action, ed. Alvin W. Gouldner
(New York: Russell and Russell, 1950), 238.
19 Harlan (ed.), BTW Papers, vol. 2, 321; Harlan, Washington: Making of a Black Leader, 166.
Sentinels for New South Industry 343
Constitution editor Clark Howell, after noting that there had been some “initial
opposition” among white directors of the 1895 Exposition to permitting a Negro to
share the podium, insisted that Washington’s speech amounted to a “full vindication”
of Grady’s views, and that “there was not a line in the address which would have been
changed even by the most sensitive of those who thought the invitation to be
imprudent.”20
In the context of this developing affinity between elites on either side of the color
line it was unremarkable that, in his appeal to white Southern employers to “cast down
your buckets where you are,” Washington stressed the tractability of black labor in
terms aimed at alleviating concerns being expressed in the industrial press. “Cast your
buckets among those people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields,
cleared your forests, [built] your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from
the earth” (emphasis added). Confronted several years later with a growing clamor for
immigrant labor to remove solve the problem of black “inefficiency,” he stressed the
same qualities: “We have never disturbed the country by riots, strikes, or lockouts,” he
reminded whites. “Ours has been a peaceful, faithful service.” Or again, in an article
which appeared in the Southern States Farm Magazine in 1898: “The negro is not given
to strikes and lockouts. He believes in letting each individual be free to work where
and for whom he pleases,” a declaration that complimented perfectly the open-shop
policy upheld by Southern industry. “He has the physical strength to endure hard
labor, and he is not ashamed or afraid to work.”21
Washington’s affirmation of black working-class passivity should be understood not
merely as a rhetorical mask with which he sought to cultivate the support of influential
whites. Nor was his an idiosyncratic position out of step with the thinking of black elites
elsewhere in the South. While some in that milieu resented the obsequiousness that
pervaded so much of Washington’s public posturing, in general they were united in
acquiescing to white elite prerogatives, and the subordination of labor to capital formed
an essential element of that outlook in Gilded Age America. The outlook popularized
by Washington resonated in the statements of numerous black ministers, educators,
and newspaper editors. There remained, to be sure, small corners of community life
outside the grip of the accommodationists, but few advocates of racial uplift contem-
plated a fundamental challenge to the existing social order.
If Populism at its zenith had broached the possibility of a coalition of lower-class
blacks and whites, the accommodationists’ prescription for race progress was founded
upon the opposite proposition: an alliance with the “better class of white men.”
Washington explicitly held up the example of black support for Populism, and Radical
Republicanism before it, to support the accommodationist view that freedmen had been
given the franchise prematurely.22 In a speech that reconstructed in its entirety the
white elite rationale for the color bar and positively welcomed Southern restriction of
the ballot by property and educational qualifications, a speaker at the first annual
meeting of Washington’s National Negro Business League (NNBL) in Boston (1900)
recalled freedmen’s susceptibility to “all sorts of wild doctrines” that had aimed at
20 Harlan (ed.), BTW Papers, vol. 4 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 17, n. 1.
21 Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (New York: A.L. Burt, 1901), 159; “The Educational and
Industrial Emancipation of the Negro: An Address before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences,”
February 22, 1903, in BTW Papers, ed. Harlan, vol. 7 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 94;
Southern States Farm Magazine, January 1898, in Harlan, BTW Papers, vol. 4, 375.
22 See, for example, Washington, Up From Slavery, 158.
344 Brian Kelly
“break[ing] down the political power of his former masters” and elevating former slaves
to “places of trust and responsibility.”23
The accommodationist doctrine in fact reproduced all the main elements of the
vulgar, white supremacist interpretation of the recent past (an interpretation, it should
be noted, that had been pioneered by the nation’s leading academic historians): that the
“fidelity and love” of black Southerners for their ex-masters had been corrupted by
unscrupulous carpetbaggers and scalawags taking advantage of black ignorance (a theme
regularly deployed by Grady); that federal intervention under Reconstruction had
“artificially forced” racial equality upon the region, upsetting its natural hierarchy; even
the notion that slavery had provided blacks with a “school of civilization,” the benefits
of which had been allowed to slip away during the rupture in paternalist relations. The
ideological foundations for a growing convergence between accommodation and an
increasingly innocuous racial uplift borrowed heavily from the consensus among white
elites that the black “race”—deprived after emancipation of white moral guardianship—
was in free fall, deteriorating rapidly and perhaps even on the road to extinction.24
Even where they took exception to the malevolence underlying this new consensus,
race leaders committed to the doctrine of uplift acquiesced in the assertion that reform
of the black masses was an essential element in, and a precondition for, defusing racial
tensions. Having abandoned any possibility of a frontal challenge to white supremacy,
race leaders resigned themselves to aiding black workers in adapting to a sharply
circumscribed existence within the boundaries set by Jim Crow. One prominent black
Alabama educator identified “two distinct problems” facing graduates of Washington’s
Tuskegee Institute: “the problem of extending education to the masses of our people
and the problem of so adjusting the people to their actual conditions that the two races [can]
live and work together in harmony …” (emphasis added). “We must admit,” he
continued, “that there are entirely too many [African Americans] who are ignorant and
superstitious, too many who are gamblers and drunkards … Tuskegeeans operate under
the motto: ‘Go ye into all parts of the South and change these conditions’.”25
Leavened with an uncritical faith in the ameliorative powers of the market, uplift
relieved Southern white elites of their own culpability in black laborers’ plight, placing
the burden for advance squarely upon the black working class itself. Shaped by the twin
imperatives of “Jim Crow terror and New South economic development,” Kevin
23 H. C. Harris of Birmingham quoted in Proceedings of the National Negro Business League, Boston
(August 23–24, 1900), 219.
24 Washington shared the concern expressed by white elites that the “lesser race,” deprived of patrician
guidance, was rapidly “deteriorating” and perhaps even on the road to extinction. David W. Blight traces
the emergence of white consensus about black degeneration in “popular literature … minstrelsy, film, and
cartoons, and, most tellingly, … in academic high places. Produced by historians, statisticians in the service
of insurance companies, and scientists of all manner, a hereditarian and social Darwinist theory of black
capacity fueled racial policies of evasion and repression. By the turn of the century, [popular] Negrophobia
was … buttressed by highly developed, academic notions of blacks as a ‘vanishing race,’ destined to lose
the struggle of natural selection.” David W. Blight, “Quarrel Forgotten or Revolution Remembered?
Reunion and Race in the Memory of the Civil War, 1875–1913,” in Union and Emancipation: Essays on
Politics and Race in the Civil War Era, ed. Blight and Simpson (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press,
1997), 162–163. See also Fairclough, Better Day Coming, 12–13, 25. Typical of this view was an editorial
in the Manufacturers’ Record which warned that “In considering [the race] problem most of us are prone
to forget that the Negro is but forty years removed from slavery; that those forty years have done much
to counteract the benefits conferred by slavery upon the Negro in the elemental training which changed
him from an indolent savage to a worker …” Manufacturers’ Record, May 1, 1902.
25 William J. Edwards, Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
1993), 109, 110–111.
Sentinels for New South Industry 345
Gaines has written, black elites adopted a strategy of moral guardianship that
“transformed the race’s collective historical struggles against the … planter class into a
self-appointed duty to reform the character and manage the behavior of black workers
themselves.” As a solution to the problems of black poverty and powerlessness uplifters
attempted to instill faith in the bourgeois imperatives of individual thrift, faithful service
to one’s employer, sobriety and self-discipline. But, as Leon Litwack has observed, the
“rhetoric of uplift proliferated almost in direct proportion to its irrelevance to the
working lives of most black Southerners.”26
Some race leaders won to uplift were hopeful that a protracted demonstration of
service and submission would gradually clear the way to meaningful reform; others
seemed driven by a palpable contempt for the masses that mirrored white hostility.
Either way, their embrace of uplift affected powerfully the black middle class’s outlook
on the labor question, with consequences that can be gleaned in elite attempts to
“reform” black domestic workers at the turn of the century. Evidence of white
impatience with the impertinence of black female domestics littered the Southern press
intermittently at the close of the 19th century. The protest by one employer in 1883
that the domestics’ penchant for “leaving without any particular reason at all” was
making it “dangerous to invite company three days ahead” attests to the exasperation
that the “servant problem” gave rise to and the paternalistic demeanor of those on the
receiving end of black disaffection.27 In the early years of the new century, a general
perception seems to have emerged among employers of domestic workers that the
situation had become intolerable, and a corrective campaign ensued, enthusiastically
supported by prominent accommodationists.
In introducing New York Post editor Oswald Garrison Villard to the Sixth Convention
of the NNBL in 1905, Booker T. Washington announced to delegates that the
grandson of famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison would lecture on a subject that
race leaders “have been too timid” in discussing, but one which “vitally concerns the
interest of [the] race.” The guest speaker proceeded to dissect the South’s labor
problem in terms entirely compatible with Grady’s vision and in language laced with
the most denigrating racial stereotypes. Expressing astonishment at the “intense feeling
with which the servant problem is discussed” in Southern homes he had visited, Villard
identified the “available but unwilling supply of household servants” as a “genuine
menace to the welfare of the colored race” and a state of affairs which “gives the white
mistresses a feeling of personal injury as one shamefully wronged.”
“The work is there, and the pay is ready,” Villard asserted, “but many colored people
simply will not avail themselves of their opportunities. They prefer to live in their
dilapidated Negro quarters until driven to work by necessity. And then—so runs the
all-too-familiar tale—they come only to be wished away. They are dirty, slovenly, often
impudent, habitually lazy and dishonest and unwilling to work steadily.” Citing a recent
article by the Dunning school Reconstruction historian Walter L. Fleming on “The
Servant Problem in a Black Belt Village,” Villard acknowledged that there were “some
good colored washer-women, as there are a few good capable servants,” but held that
the majority were “shiftless, work irregularly, and do not always know the difference
between mine and thine.” In concluding, he recalled an encounter with a “millionaeir
26 Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 20; Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim
Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), 148.
27 Testimony of Mrs. Ward, November 15, 1883, Report on Relations Between in Labor and Capital, vol.
4 (Washington: U.S. Senate Commission on Education and Labor, 1885), 343, cited in Hunter, To ’Joy
My Freedom, 59–60. On day-to-day resistance among Atlanta domestics, see Hunter, 57–62.
346 Brian Kelly
[sic] southern banker” who had been brought to tears when recounting “the wonderful
tact and ability and skill of his old Negro mammy who had … served five generations of
his family.” “Is not the colored race recreant to its duty if it fails to produce thousands
of mammies like this?” he prodded delegates, attempting to impress upon them the
“supreme need of household training for the mass of colored women of this country.”28
No evidence survives of delegates’ reaction to Villard’s scathing speech, but Washing-
ton’s laudatory, anticipatory remarks at the outset, along with the fact that the NNBL
chose to reprint the talk in its entirety, suggests that while those present may have cringed
at its most derogatory elements, they accepted its main premise. Washington and others
were on record several years earlier calling for action along the same lines. Extolling the
“love and attachment between the races at the South,” the Tuskegeean’s co-thinker and
sometime rival William H. Councill wrote in the Colored American of the “wonderful
chance” for “honorable” domestic work, urging black domestics to make themselves “the
choicest jewel of every Southern home.” The first Hampton Negro Conference at
Washington’s alma mater in 1897 stressed the importance of domestic training for
relaxing racial tensions: “One way to establish better relations with the white people will
be to give them better cooks, better laundresses, better chambermaids, better housekeep-
ers,” the gathering’s most influential speaker suggested. Both Hampton and Tuskegee
rejected education for women in “belles letters, art and music” in favor of courses that
emphasized domestic skills, and one of Washington’s trusted confidantes, Melvin H.
Chisum, served in his early years as the “proprietor of a ‘Training School for Colored
Servants’.” Washington himself would later assert, in the Colored Alabamian, that since
“[t]he white child spends a large proportion of its time in the arms of the Negro woman
or Negro girl,” black domestics “should be clean … intelligent, and … above all, moral.”29
The cadre of race leaders influenced by Washington accepted without serious objection
white employers’ allegations about black workers’ thriftlessness and lack of discipline.30
Like their counterparts elsewhere in the South, Birmingham’s iron and steel bosses
grumbled about black workers’ “shiftlessness” and their proclivity for “wandering and
moving about.” “Generally speaking,” a reporter for the Birmingham Age Herald asserted
in 1903, “the colored worker of Alabama is not a success when he is taken from the
cotton field and harnessed to the chariot of coal and iron.” A steel executives’ complaint
that blacks exhibited a tendency to walk off the job “whenever the notion strikes them”
typified the tone of the Southern industrial press generally. “If there is a show in town,
or an excursion on the Fourth of July, or a burial, it makes no difference what the
excitement may be,” he protested. “[T]hey will just drop their work and go off.”31
28 Speech of Oswald Garrison Villard, Proceedings of the National Negro Business League, Sixth Annual
Convention (August 16–19, 1905), 45–48, 52.
29 Councill in Colored American, August 11, 1900, cited in Meier, Negro Thought in America, 210; Fanny
Jackson Coppin cited in Cynthia Neverdon-Morton’s discussion of the Hampton Negro Conference in
Afro-American Women of the South, 113. Article on the futility of education in “[a]rt and music for people
who lived in rented houses and have no bank account” appears in Tuskegee Student 14 (1902), 1–3, cited
in Harlan (ed.), BTW Papers, vol. 6 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 469. Chisum’s early career
is discussed in Harlan, BTW Papers, vol. 7, 219, n. 1. Washington’s comments on domestic training
appeared in Colored Alabamian, January 23, 1909.
30 For an in-depth treatment of tensions between accommodationists and black workers in the Birmingham
district, see my “Beyond the ‘Talented Tenth’: Black Elites, Black Workers and the Limits of Accommodation
in Industrial Birmingham, 1900–1921,” in Time Longer than Rope: Civil Rights before the Civil Rights Movement,
ed. Adam Green and Charles Payne, Jr. (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming 2003).
31 Birmingham Age Herald, August 16, 1903; James W. Sloss cited in Daniel L. Letwin, “Race, Class
and Industrialization: Black and White Coal Miners in the Birmingham District of Alabama, 1878–1897,”
Ph.D. dissertation, New Haven, 1991, 55.
Sentinels for New South Industry 347
Washington expressed similar consternation: “One of the weak points in connection
with our people being employed in [manufacturing],” he wrote, “is that too many of
them yield to the temptation to go off on excursions, picnics, etc., when their work
demands their time and attention.” In her important North Carolina study, Jeannette
Thomas Greenwood notes that the “better class” of blacks “expressly targeted camp
meetings, public baptisms, and excursions,” identified by one local editor as “three of
the strongest agents in the demoralization and breaking down of our people.” The
Manufacturers’ Record published in October 1897 a flattering review of a sycophantic
“study” by Georgia accommodationist Dr. R. H. Johnson that, in its view, delivered
“gratifying relief from the insane optimism which has characterized much of the
treatment of the negro question in certain quarters.” Crediting Washington’s leadership
with “opening the way to such a study,” the review quoted at length a passage urging
Negroes “all over the country” to “organize against laziness, immorality, drunkenness,
immoral ministers, teachers, physicians and reformers of all kinds, organize against
excursions, hot suppers as now conducted, and … respect the laurels of virtue of all
women.”32
In many areas, Washington’s National Negro Business League, described by one
historian as “the organizational center of black conservatism,”33 served as a supplier of
unskilled black labor to employers, and here the potential for a clash between uplifters
anxious to demonstrate black workers’ employability and workers unimpressed with the
wages and conditions on offer was evident. Birmingham Hot Shots editor Reverend
William T. McGill exhorted black miners during a strike in 1908 to stop their
“[constant] grumbling about the white people not paying us for what we do,” insisting
on another occasion that “at none of the [steel and iron] plants is the colored man
discriminated against in any way or manner.” His more prominent successor, W. H.
Councill protégé Oscar Adams, used his weekly Birmingham Reporter to harangue black
workers on the importance of steady work habits and loyalty to one’s employer. After
an unsuccessful attempt to recruit workers for openings at a plant employing black
labor exclusively, Adams conveyed his bitterness that after sending “twenty-five or
thirty men to the factory … not a third of them remained, not half of them began to
work.” Unable to fathom any other explanation why workers might walk away from
such a generous “opportunity,” Adams attributed the embarrassing outcome to their
failure to “see the need for so much money at the loss of their usual frolic.”34
Sharing the philosophical outlook of white elites, race leaders discouraged by pervas-
ive working-class ambivalence were led to denounce the black poor in terms that
matched the invective peddled by hostile whites. They worried openly that the irre-
deemable element would “drag the race down” and attempted to proscribe elements of
working-class life that seemed to breach proper race decorum. Adams used the pages
of the Reporter to warn his readership regularly against association with the “unworthy
Negro,” the “Negro swell,” the “Negro gambler … of the crap game gentry,” and the
“dishonest Negro,” all of whom seemed to be “conspiring to pull down what the
‘worthy’ of the race had built up.” In Charlotte, Greenwood argues, race leaders
“attempted to distance themselves from the rest of the African American community,
32 BTW to Glenn R. LeRoy, March 31, 1903, in Harlan, BTW Papers, vol. 7, 109–110; editor W. C.
Smith in the Charlotte Messenger, February 24, 1883, cited in Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, 85.
33 Fon L. Gordon notes that NNBL supporters “provided local, middle-class opposition to suffrage
leagues, the Niagara Movement, and the NAACP.” Gordon, Caste and Class, 78.
34 Birmingham Reporter, August 9, 1919.
348 Brian Kelly
FIG. 1. A number of black-run newspapers developed close ties with southern industrialists and urged black
workers to steer clear of trade unions. During the Alabama miners’ strike of 1908, Birmingham Hot Shots
editor Reverend William T. McGill admonished black strikers to stop their “constant grumbling about
the white people not paying us for what we do.” He lauded black strikebreakers (as in the cartoon above)
but denounced strikers as “good-for-nothing vagabonds” who had brought “disgrace [upon] the race” (Hot
Shots, August 26, 1908).
articulating disgust and occasionally revulsion for ‘the masses’ even as they stressed race
pride, solidarity, and uplift.” The temperance question, especially, exposed the chasm
dividing the city’s black workers and elites: defeat of a prohibition ordinance revealed
that race leaders “had little political clout in their own community—despite their
alliance with powerful whites and their contention that they were the new race leaders.”
Tera Hunter’s rich depiction of dance hall culture in early 20th-century black Atlanta
reveals a comparable rift: elites added their influence to white attempts to shut down
the halls, arguing that “the better class doesn’t want them, and the worst element
should not be permitted to have them.”35
Their conspicuous targeting of secular black working-class leisure activity, and in
35 Birmingham Reporter, December 4, 1920; August 9, 1919; Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, 85, 96;
Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 173, and Chapter 8, “Dancing and Carousing the Night Away,” 168–186.
Hunter concludes the chapter by suggesting that “[m]uch was at stake for the black middle class in this
struggle to contain and eradicate vernacular dance. The controversy over dancing occurred as a modern
black bourgeoisie asserted its claim to define and direct racial progress. The black elite sought to impose
its own values and standards on the masses, to obliterate plebeian cultural expressions that, in its view,
prolonged the degradation of the race” (186). Feldman contends, similarly, that “members of the middle
class believed it was their duty to perform as role models for the downtrodden and that the crude behavior
Sentinels for New South Industry 349
particular the unregulated, sexually charged atmosphere of the dance halls, “blind
tigers” and “jook joints,” suggests that uplifters were particularly embarrassed by their
inability to win the masses to prevailing middle-class standards of sexual morality. In
this effort black clergy, female church auxiliaries and women’s sections of the fraternal
orders fought a rearguard action against what they perceived as rampant promiscuity,
trying to win skeptical black working-class women to a “higher and nobler woman-
hood”36 that stressed the importance of legal unions—and of chastity before marriage
and monogamy within it. But, as Deborah Gray White has argued, the reformers’
designation of chastity as the “litmus test of middle-class respectability … established
an orthodoxy bound to drive a wedge between themselves and the masses of black
women.”37
The declining authority of mainstream churches among black workers, expanded
possibilities for secular leisure activity, and the growing social distance between black
elites and newly urbanized African Americans were all likely contributors to this failure.
In some parts of the urban South, black elite congregations had by the turn of the
century established themselves in buildings physically and socially removed from the
black masses,38 and their disdain for the emotional style of worship prevalent in
working-class congregations is heavily documented. In the feudal company towns
taking form around the extractive industries and home to a large percentage of the
industrial working class, believing workers of both races manifested a preference to
worship away from the surveillance of company officials and employer-subsidized
ministers.39 Often they were attracted to independent preachers or to the Holiness and
Pentecostal sects that proliferated in such settings.40
Substantial numbers of black workers seem to have exhibited scant enthusiasm for
formal worship of any kind. A Birmingham camp physician noted in 1907 that the
“churches wield only a limited influence” over the lives of black miners, who “make no
pretense toward being religious, even tho [sic] moral,” and maintained that the “lodges
seem to draw many that are uninfluenced by the church.” More suggestive was the
Footnote 35 Continued
displayed by members of the lower classes was responsible for the race’s problems, including Jim Crow
legislation.” Feldman, Sense of Place, 189.
36 Birmingham Reporter, August 12, 1916.
37 White, Too Heavy a Load, 70.
38 William E. Montgomery argues that in the years following Reconstruction an “expanded [black]
aristocracy,” which included the “mulatto-dominated elite [and] blacks from the ranks of teachers,
ministers, lawyers, and physicians … formed their own churches” in order, one contemporary observer
suggested, “to get as far as possible from the ordinary Negro.” Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and
Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865–1900 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1993), 260.
39 Wayne Flynt, “Alabama White Protestantism and Labor, 1900–1914,” Alabama Review, October,
1981, 206, 208.
40 Montgomery writes that as “the Baptist and Methodist churches became more conservative, with
expanding bourgeois values, their services and congregations looked and sounded more like the
Presbyterian, Congregational, and Episcopal churches of the black aristocracy” and “began to lose their
appeal to poor, uneducated people who looked in growing numbers to the new holiness, pentecostal, and
spiritual movements for the religious experiences that would elevate their lives. See Montgomery, Under
Their Own Vine and Fig Tree, 345–346. Paul Harvey concurs, arguing that “[r]acial and cultural interchange
figured importantly in early Holiness/Pentecostalism. A faith born not in the South, but attracting white
and black southern folk disaffected by the embourgeoisment of dominant urban religious institutions, early
Pentecostalism functioned much like the early national camp meetings.” Harvey, “Racial Interchange in
Early Southern Pentecostalism: Paper Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical
Association,” November 16–19, 2001, New Orleans, 1.
350 Brian Kelly
report of a perplexed Texas sawmill manager who informed superiors that while “we
have got a good bunch of people in this [racially mixed] camp … they care nothing
about Church work and will not donate anything” to maintaining a minister, even
though workers found it “no trouble to make up three or four hundred dollars when
one of their co-workers get burnt out, sick or something.” Anxious to promote religious
work, the official nevertheless warned management against solving the problem by
sending an occasional preacher, since “they will not go to hear him preach unless they
just want to have some place to go.”41
The unwillingness or inability of black workers to voluntarily abide race leaders’
moral injunctions occasionally led uplifters to resort to more authoritarian means.
Mississippi’s leading exponent of black self-help and racial accommodation, Isaiah
Montgomery, recounted in a 1907 interview the methods by which his all-black colony
at Mound Bayou had purged itself of indecency. When the “moral condition” of the
community had become an “issue” some years previously, “a committee was appointed
from each of the churches to make a house to house canvass [sic] … in order to
determine to what extent loose family relations existed.” Forty couples found to be
living together “without the formality of a marriage ceremony” were prevailed upon to
“marry within a certain length of time or … be prosecuted.” Most married; some left.
And in contrast to Charlotte and other Southern towns, where race leaders had tried
but failed to win the masses to prohibition, the sale of alcohol was banned by decree in
Mound Bayou.42
Uplifters’ attempts to regulate black working-class life extended into the workplace
itself. Employers frustrated with their lack of success in anchoring black workers to
steady, full-time industrial labor frequently solicited race leaders’ advice, and many
responded enthusiastically. Washington spoke on at least two occasions to orchestrated
mass meetings at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, one of the
largest employers of black industrial labor in the South. The first of these, in 1909, was
hosted by “an efficient colored committee … ably and materially assisted by the white
citizens who turned out in large numbers … and completely filled the lower floor of the
local theater.” A detailed report of the second such assembly, held three years later,
sheds some light on the aim of Washington’s intervention. The meeting originated in
talks between R. R. Moton of the Hampton Institute and prominent local race leaders
concerned with the “distinct need of having the 2250 colored men and boys co-operate
with the general manager” in “getting [them] to work regularly.”43
Prior to Washington’s visit, the Tuskegee Student reported, the Company’s frustration
with the undependability of its black workers had led to fears that “the introduction of
foreigners” was imminent. A recent pay rise seemed to have made matters worse, it was
alleged: “idleness and irregularity were increased” as a result. Speaking before a
segregated audience that included black laborers and “those who [could] bring unusual
influence upon them—mothers, wives, ministers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and busi-
41 “The Alabama Mining Camp,” The Independent, October 3, 1907, 790–791; J. B. Hodges to W. N.
Sangster, January 15, 1923, Box 47�4, “Church-Blox,” Kirby Lumber Company Collection, RG D-034,
Houston Metropolitan Research Center (hereafter KLCR).
42 World’s Work 14 (1907), 9125–9134.
43 “An Address by William Taylor Burwell Williams on Washington’s Tour of Virginia,” July 4, 1909, in
Harlan (ed.), BTW Papers, vol. 10 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 144. Williams was a Hampton
graduate and later a member of the faculty at Tuskegee. The 1909 Newport News visit was followed up by
a trip to Page, West Virginia, where Washington addressed a meeting of black miners (148). 1912 meeting
reported in “An Account of a Speech in Newport News, Virginia,” Tuskegee Student, August 1, 1912.
Sentinels for New South Industry 351
ness men,” Washington reportedly exhorted workers to “stick to their jobs and, instead
of recklessly and foolishly spending their good wages, build better homes and
churches.” Urging them to “do their full duty and more than they were being paid for,
to keep their word,” and to “co-operate heartily with those in authority,” Washington
announced the opening of a company-run YMCA and night school, emphasizing that
management would “do all that it can to keep its colored workers off the streets and
give them an opportunity of becoming more efficient and reliable.”44
The specter raised in the events at Newport News of the displacement of black
workers with immigrant labor highlights another crucial point of convergence between
Southern capital and the accommodationist program. Integral to the outlook pro-
pounded by Washington and much of the middle-class race leadership was the convic-
tion that only by proving themselves the most tractable, economical, and
uncomplaining source of menial labor could the black masses secure a permanent
monopoly over unskilled work in the South. This perspective led them not only to trim
their demands for racial justice but, significantly, to oppose the occasional efforts of
black workers to assert their rights through trade union or other forms of collective
organization.
Disfranchisement, civil inequality, and racial violence were not incidental aspects of
the black Southern experience in the years straddling the turn of the century, but their
function is best understood when considered in the full, and distinctive, framework of
New South labor relations. Although no stratum of the black South was immune from
racial animosity during this period, as Nell Painter insists, its effects were felt dispropor-
tionately by “poor black men, the foundation of the southern working class.” The
“victimization of prosperous black men,” she writes, was “almost incidental to the
immobilization of millions of black workers.” Voting restrictions targeted the same
class, leaving the privileges of black elites largely unaffected.45
The strategy pursued by accommodationists in the face of mounting reaction was
predicated upon emphasizing this distinction between themselves and the black masses:
they countered Jim Crow in transportation with an argument for physical separation
along class lines, insisting that respectable blacks should not have to endure traveling
in the same coach as the dregs of the race;46 they accepted educational and property
qualifications in voting as positive, remedial steps that would allow the intelligent
element to lead;47 they refrained from straightforward denunciation of the most des-
picable acts of violence out of fear that speaking out would jeopardize their cherished
partnership with the “better class” of whites. Washington’s feeble rebuke to a white
audience at the turn of the century that it was “unreasonable for any community to
expect that it can permit Negroes to be lynched or burned in the winter, and then have
44 “An Account of a Speech in Newport News, Virginia,” Tuskegee Student, August 1, 1912.
45 Nell Irvin Painter, “Social Equality, Miscegenation, Labor, and Power,” in The Evolution of Southern
Culture, ed. Numan V. Bartley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 60.
46 Gaines writes that elites “opposed racism by calling attention to class distinctions among African
Americans as a sign of evolutionary race progress … The self-help component of uplift increasingly bore
the stamp of evolutionary racial theories positing the civilization of elites against the moral degradation
of the masses.” Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 20–21. Greenwood reports that Charlotte race leaders opposed
Democratic Party legislation calling for segregation on the rails “chiefly on the grounds that it did not take
into account class differences among blacks.” They voiced “no objection to being separated from white
people if they will place colored ladies and gentlemen in a coach where they can be protected against white
and black roughs alike …” Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, 204–205.
47 See Washington to John Elbert McConnell, December 17, 1885, Harlan, BTW Papers, vol. 2, 284.
352 Brian Kelly
reliable Negro labor to raise cotton in the summer” provides a particularly poignant
reminder of the limitations of this approach.48
In a region where, as one editorial predicted, “long hours of labor and moderate
wages will continue to be the rule for many years to come,” black workers’ vulnerability
offered Southern employers a powerful means with which to maintain stability. Dis-
paraging occasional objections that pervasive “ignoran[ce], thriftless[ness], and
inefficien[cy]” ruled out the general employment of black labor in industry, editors at
the Manufacturers’ Record noted that, despite its alleged shortcomings, “the Southern
employer … shrinks … from having white labor introduced which will call for conces-
sions and demand rights denied the negro.” The “presence” of black workers “has
prevented the spread of labor organizations in the South,” another concluded, leaving
the region “comparatively free from … futile interruption by strikes and other distur-
bances.”49
Black elites by and large accepted these generalizations—indeed they celebrated the
tractability and conservatism of the black masses and believed that these qualities
offered strategic leverage in developing close relations with leading whites. Herein lay
the basis for sharp tensions between black workers and race leadership.
“Notwithstanding the advice of conservative[s] who propagated Booker T. Washing-
48 Washington’s speech cited in Basil Mathews, Booker T. Washington: Educator and Racial Interpreter
(London: SCM Press, 1949), 223. Some measure of white elite reaction to the accommodationists’ silence
on racial violence can be gleaned in the satisfaction expressed by white observers at annual meetings of
Washington’s National Negro Business League. Reporting on the NNBL’s 1900 Convention in Boston,
Gunton’s Magazine noted that although “[t]he New Orleans riots occurred while the preparations for the
conference were being made,” the “streets of New York resounded to the cries of negro-hunting mobs
just at the time when many of the delegates were leaving their homes to come to Boston,” and the
“newspapers were filled with accounts of the disturbance at Akron,” the proceedings passed without “one
single reference to the riots or the conditions which gave rise to them.” “These were business men, come
to Boston for a definite purpose with which politics had no connection.” The Boston press reported
similarly that “There was no politics [or] clamoring for rights. There was as little sentimentality as in a
meeting of stock jobbers or railroad directors.” See Harlan, BTW Papers, vol. 6, 76–77. In almost identical
terms the Manufacturers’ Record (“Negroes Who Work,” August 27, 1903) remarked on the NNBL’s
Nashville Convention in 1903 that it was “gratifying to hear so few complaints urged against the white
people … But two babblements were uttered against ‘the oppressions’ of the white man out of a delegation
of 1500 representatives of the industrial negroes from every part of the country. This serves to show that
that portion of the negro race which wishes to work had no cause for just complaint. It is the loafer, the
idler, the fellow who wants the government to come to his assistance, the improperly educated, who want
social equality and advantages that their merits do not justify.”
49 “Cheap Southern Labor,” Manufacturers’ Record, August 16, 1890; “The South and Labor,”
Manufacturers’ Record, August 10, 1905; “The Negro Problem,” Manufacturers’ Record, October 28, 1898.
See also “Difficulties of the Labor Problem in Southern Industries,” Manufacturers’ Record, July 20, 1905:
“One quality of the negro … is that he shows no disposition to unionize or to strike in the aggregate, however
embarrassing his striking as an individual may be”; “Labor in the South,” Manufacturers’ Record, May 15,
1886: “… one great cause of [the] rapid development of manufactures at the South is the comparative
steadiness of labor in that section and the infrequency of strikes and wrangles … [T]he difference in
steadiness and freedom from interruption is an enormous advantage to Southern industry.” In their classic
study, Greene and Woodson acknowledged both the paternalist dynamic and the strikebreaking role of
black workers, though they focused more closely on Northern industry in the early to mid-20th century.
“The main factor in the increase of Negroes in the iron and steel industry,” they wrote, “has been the
general absence of the tendency among Negro workers to unite for collective bargaining.” While their study
highlighted the ways in which organized labor’s racism reinforced the alienation of black workers from
organizing efforts, they found black workers “so bound to the interests of their employers that little fear
of their striking was entertained by factory owners.” Lorenzo J. Greene and Carter G. Woodson, The Negro
Wage Earner (Washington, DC: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1930), 252.
Sentinels for New South Industry 353
ton’s pro-industrialist philosophy,” Eric Arnesen has written, “black workers were
hardly strangers to classic forms of class conflict” during this period. In the lumber
camps, the docks and levees, the mines and mills, black workers challenged, even if they
could not disrupt completely, the accommodationists’ pretense that they spoke for
black Southerners generally.
Prominent accommodators opposed almost universally any attempt by black workers
to raise their conditions through collective organization. Washington maintained an
abiding hostility to trade unionism throughout his long public career, deriving less from
(understandable) revulsion at organized labor’s mostly horrendous record regarding
black workers than from his strategic calculation that race progress would accrue
through the masses demonstrating their utility to capital.50 He had been deeply
influenced by the anti-labor outlook of his mentors at the Hampton Institute and,
despite a generally positive experience as a coal miner in the Knights of Labor,
consistently derided the intervention of “professional labor agitators” in language
compatible with the employers’ anti-unionism. His response to a 1914 letter from a
Pullman Porter representing 7000 workers “persecuted on every side” exemplifies this
approach. Evading the author’s complaint that the Pullman Company was “afraid that
we will have a union among ourselves to fight them,” and that management “discharge
every man who starts any helpful movement,” Washington responded with a vague
message of support for an organization that would “help in maintaining a higher
standard of efficiency, not only as employees but as men.”51
Evidence from throughout the South makes clear that race leaders played a promi-
nent role in inoculating black workers against the contagion of trade unionism. Often
they did so under the direct, paid supervision of white employers. An 1891 cotton
pickers’ strike revealed the potential fracture lines among rural blacks: Delta field hands
and landless workers overwhelmingly supported the strike while black landowners
generally sided with white planters. A bi-racial posse dispatched to put down the strike
in Arkansas’ Lee and Crittenden counties killed 15 black workers and jailed six others.52
The collaboration between white and black elites in Alabama’s Birmingham district was
more dramatic: from the 1880s, prominent black Democrats directed “Negro welfare
work” on behalf of local coal and iron bosses, a relationship formalized after the rise of
Tuskegee. Under Washington’s leadership, a steady stream of black teachers and
welfare workers made their way to Birmingham’s industrial Mecca, carrying his ex-
plicitly anti-union message to black workers. During the 1908 coal strike—in which the
UMW was subjected to vicious race-baiting in the local press—race leaders came out
squarely on the side of the operators, and again in 1920 Labor Department officials
50 Harlan writes that Washington “all his life reflected the general viewpoint that Bryce [editor of
Hampton’s conservative Southern Workman] expressed.” Cox concludes that the “essentially capitalist
philosophy of individualism [led] Washington to take a consistently antilabor position in the continuing
struggle between capital and labor.” See Harlan, Washington: Making of a Black Leader, 90–91; Cox,
“Leadership Among Negroes,” 255.
51 Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (New York: A.L. Burt, 1901), 62; F. E. Edmunds to
Washington, July 4, 1914; Washington to Edmunds, July 8, 1914, in Harlan (ed.), BTW Papers, vol. 13
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 81, 84.
52 Gordon, Caste and Class, 117–118. See also William F. Holmes, “The Arkansas Cotton Pickers’ Strike
of 1891 and the Demise of the Colored Farmers’ Alliance,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 32 (1973),
107–113.
354 Brian Kelly
noted that “all of the Negro preachers [were] subsidized by the companies and were
without exception preaching against the negroes joining the unions.”53
Planters anxious to frustrate a challenge to their prerogative, Birmingham coal
operators and steel kings, North Carolina tobacco manufacturers and Louisiana and
Texas lumber barons all seemed acutely aware of the importance of racial divisions in
maintaining their hold over labor costs, and of the utility of accommodationist hege-
mony for advancing their own aims. Southern industry’s invulnerability to trade
unionism was widely attributed to the potency of these divisions, and employers
showed deliberation in their efforts to maintain such a state of affairs. An especially
forthright lumber company official determined to counter efforts of the Brotherhood of
Timber Workers to organize Louisiana in 1911 advised his superiors that “there is one
strong point that could be used effectively against [the BTW], if properly handled, and
that is the negro question. No order can succeed in this country or in this sec-
tion … where the negroes and whites are allowed to affiliate together on an equal
social basis and if this information was judiciously disseminated it would have a
splendid effect in breaking it up.” A year later the Lumber Trade Journal was warning
employers that the IWW “knows no race or color. It accepts the negro as a member on
an equality with the white man, and the most ignorant foreigner is equally if not more
welcome … than is the skilled worker.”54
These remarks only expressed in candid terms the usually unspoken basis of labor
relations among Southern lumber operators. The Southern Pine Association—one of
the two main employers’ organizations in the industry—attributed the absence of union
organization to “racial antagonism between whites and Negroes.”55 Internal records of
the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association teem with evidence of management’s
appreciation for the special vulnerability of black workers and their determination to
prevent any tampering with the status quo. The response of a manager at Groveton,
Texas, faced with a walkout over a missed payday is revealing in its delineation
of the role reserved for black labor by the timber bosses: “Sixty-five men quit and are
trying to get others to quit,” he reported. “Perhaps we can corral enough Negroes to
operate.” Another reported in the midst of a campaign to root out union sympathizers
that he was “not hiring any men at present but what I know, except for a few country
niggers.”56
The lumber operators’ acute understanding that the race issue offered a powerful
antidote against unionization is unsurprising. What is remarkable is their ability to draw
race leaders into their designs. Relying upon a substantial cadre of black ministers and
educators, between 1910 and 1920 SLOA-sponsored speakers visited at least seven
53 For an extensive discussion of Birmingham race leaders and their involvement with industrial elites,
see my Race, Class and Power, especially Chapter 3, 81–106. On Tuskegee involvement in welfare work,
see Stein, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” 447–448, and C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the
New South, 358–359. Labor Department observations on black preachers in the 1920 strike appear in
Edwin C. Newdick, “Employers Foster Race Prejudice,” February 24, 1919, Records of the Department of
Labor, RG 174, National Archives, Washington, DC.
54 M. L. Alexander to M. L. Fleishel, November 4, 1911, Box 205, KLCR; Lumber Trade Journal,
December 15, 1912.
55 “Special Report on Industrial Conditions in the Mills and Logging Camps of the Southern Pine
Association,” August 1918, Box 67b, Southern Pine Association Records, Louisiana State University
Archives, Baton Rouge, cited in James E. Fickle, “Management Looks at the ‘Labor Problem’: The Southern
Pine Industry During World War I and the Postwar Era,” Journal of Southern History 40 (1974), 68.
56 Cited in Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad, Nameless Towns: Texas Sawmill Communities, 1880–1942
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 113; J. W. Herndon to C. P. Myer, September 15, 1911, Box
197, KLCR.
Sentinels for New South Industry 355
Southern states in an attempt to neutralize union agitation and counter the black
exodus out of the South. In the face of BTW attempts to organize in 1911, a manager
from Browndel, Texas orchestrated a series of mass meetings led by a local black
teacher (reported to be “a great deal above the average intelligence among the colored
population” and “wholly on our side”) that passed resolutions renouncing the union
and pledging loyalty to the company. Several years later, the Kirby Lumber Company
contracted with I. W. Crawford to speak at employer-sponsored Emancipation Day
celebrations and in 1917 offered him work “for at least twenty, and perhaps thirty days”
lecturing black workers at 12 sawmills and five logging camps.57
The lumber operators dramatically intensified their efforts in the postwar period.
They directly sponsored at least three “race” newspapers aimed at containing black
militancy and curtailing migration. The short-lived Voice of Colored Labor was published
out of the Pythians’ Hall in Birmingham and circulated mainly in rural districts in
Alabama and Mississippi. The Negro Advocate, printed in Arkansas (1917–1922) under
the direction of the employer-subsidized black minister Milton Hampton, would,
SLOA officials hoped, “keep the colored laborers of the South satisfied with their
conditions[,] advise against the exodus … [and] elevate their morals.” Directors in New
Orleans assured SLOA members that the newspapers’ “articles and editorials will be
closely scrutinized by this office.” Their most remarkable feat involved the New
Orleans-based National Negro Voice, however. A memo circulated among SLOA mem-
bers along with the first edition introduced the publication as “a Negro paper that is
being sponsored and controlled by a few large organizations whose members are
employers of Negro labor.” The “aim and purpose of the paper,” members were
informed, was to “combat the evil influence of the radical Negro papers and magazines
published in the North.” It would be overseen by an employer-appointed Financial
Secretary (to whom “all published material had to be submitted”) who would be “the
only white man that will come in direct contact with the Negro editor and Manager [R.
A. Flynn of New Orleans], who does not and will not know what organizations are
financing the enterprise.”58
The systematic attempt to inscribe racial divisions permanently into the contours of
labor relations in lumber and maintain the continued exploitation of black workers at
the heart of that system represented a highly sophisticated version of a strategy being
pursued throughout the industrializing South. In their more candid moments leading
white elites acknowledged that cheap black labor was the cornerstone upon which their
New South would be raised. In that sense, at least, industrial exploitation and Jim Crow
were organically intertwined. Reconciled for the foreseeable future to the imposition of
white supremacy, imbued with a paternalist sense of moral guardianship over the less
fortunate members of their race, and unapologetic about linking their fate to the
ascendancy of the white “better classes,” middle-class race leaders pursued an elitist
strategy that led them inevitably to forsake the interests of the black masses for whom
they claimed to speak.
The accommodationist formula has been criticized, both by Washington’s contem-
porary critics and by present day scholars, mainly for its renunciation of the struggle for
57 W. T. Hooker to C. P. Myer, August 14, 1911, Box 197, KLCR; Kirby Company to Crawford, June
6, 1917, Box 338, KLCR.
58 Voice of Colored Labor, 1923, Box 343, KLCR; SLOA to All Members, November 5, 1918, Box 489,
Kurth Collection, Forest History Collection, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State
University, Nacogdoches, TX.
356 Brian Kelly
civil and political equality, or at least for having forsaken the open pursuit of these aims.
The outworn practice of juxtaposing protest and accommodation in an attempt to
measure the tactical efficacy of each rests on the premise that one or the other might
have delivered better results for the race as a whole. But this method ignores the
shared class outlook embedded in the strategy espoused by both camps.59 The critical
issue about Washington and his co-thinkers is not whether they acquiesced in or
fought surreptitiously against specific aspects of racial oppression in the South, but
whether in their role as intermediaries between Southern capital and black labor
they served—or could possibly advance—the best interests of “the race.” Alabama
sharecropper Nate Shaw reminds us, eloquently, of Washington’s limitations. Criticiz-
ing him for “lean[ing] too much on the white people that controlled the money,” Shaw
insisted that Washington “didn’t respect his race of people enough to go rock bottom
with them … He wanted his people to do this, that, and the other, but he never did get
to the roots of our troubles.” Historians concerned with reconstructing African
American life in the Age of Washington have for too long ignored conspicuous
evidence of black working-class dissent: it is time to let the Nate Shaws have their
say.60
Scholarship on relations between black elites and the black masses during the Age of
Washington stands today at an important crossroads. While some of the recent
literature, saddled by what Eric Foner has identified as a “desire for a history of
celebration,”61 indicates a continuing reluctance to lift the veil on intraracial tensions,
the elements of a more penetrating interpretive approach are evident, dispersed
throughout some of the most exciting new scholarship at the margins where labor,
women’s and African American history intersect.62 Even where it has hesitated in
59 Despite their considerable differences, before the turn of the century both Washington and DuBois
pursued elitist solutions to the predicament of black Southerners. But while DuBois looked to a
“Talented Tenth” to lead the black masses, he never pursued the alliance with white elites so central
to Washington’s outlook. After 1900, of course, the gulf between them widened further, and by the First
World War the cadre that would form the NAACP began to pay serious attention to the predicament
of black laborers and to openly criticize Southern white employers, an important shift precluded for
Washington by his commitment to industrial accommodation. On the early symmetry between
Washington and DuBois, see Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black–White Relations in the American
South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 73–75, and Adolph L. Reed Jr.
W. E. B. DuBois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 53–70.
60 Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: the Life of Nate Shaw (New York: Knopf, 1974), 543.
61 Eric Foner, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York: Hill & Wang,
2002), xiv.
62 An abbreviated list of such scholarship would include, in order of publication, Thomas Holt, Black
Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1977); Neil McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1982); Peter J. Rachleff, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865–1890 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1989); Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and
Politics, 1863–1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Joe William Trotter, Coal, Class, and
Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–1932 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Janette
Thomas Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy: The Black and White “Better Classes” in Charlotte, 1850–1910
(Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1994); Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public
Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7
(1994), 107–146; Fon Louise Gordon, Caste & Class: The Black Experience in Arkansas, 1880–1920
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership,
Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1996); Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom:
Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997);
Sentinels for New South Industry 357
drawing the conclusions suggested by its own evidence or stumbled upon intracommu-
nal tensions as a minor aside in a larger story, a rich evolving literature has begun to
expose the need for a forthright engagement with the significance of class in the African
American experience under Jim Crow.
Footnote 62 Continued
Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1999); Lynne B. Feldman, A Sense of Place: Birmingham’s Black Middle Class Community,
1890–1920 (Tuscaloosa, 1999); Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women
in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001); Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama
Coalfields, 1908–1921 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).