A Working People: A History of African American Workers since Emancipation by Steven A. Reich (review)

Steven A. Reich’s book, A Working People: A History of African American Workers since Emancipation, is an excellent synthesis of much of the best scholarship on African American labor history that has appeared in the last fifteen or twenty years. It is thorough and does exactly what this sort of work should do by taking detailed and complex scholarship on many different topics, boiling it down accurately and in absolutely lucid prose, and knitting it together into a clear narrative. Reich is one of the most elegant writers I have ever encountered, capable of summing up large bodies of complex and subtle scholarship clearly and efficiently without sacrificing any more meaning than necessary.

A number of historiographical trends have made a work like this possible. Emerging particularly out of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, historians of emancipation and Reconstruction have emphasized more the importance of labor lately, where an earlier generation looked more at politics. Likewise, the emergence of a body of labor-oriented scholarship on the civil rights movement focuses on economic freedoms and not just social and political ones. Reich begins his first chapter with the contrabands who arrived at Fortress Monroe in 1861. He does a good job of summarizing the issues around land redistribution before turning to the fate of black workers during Reconstruction. Here Reich lays out a very clear, very useful comparison between freedpeople in southwest Georgia (drawing on the work of Susan O’Donovan), Louisiana’s sugar parishes (John Rodrigue), and South Carolina’s rice fields (Brian Kelly, Eric Foner). To readers who know the field well, it will be plain where Reich is drawing his materials, even before reading the very thorough bibliographic essay at the end of the book.

If there is a criticism to be made of this chapter, it is that in putting together such a neat story, Reich possibly trims off too many loose ends. The overwhelming emphasis here is on agriculture, which is justifiable in terms of statistics, but it would have been nice to have a bit more attention on what all the African American workers who were not out on the farm were doing. Likewise, although the focus on the South makes sense from a demographic point of view, it does neglect the admittedly small proportion of African Americans who were living beyond the South in this period. It probably also neglects black organizing during the Knights of Labor and Populist period more than it should.

The second chapter covers the Jim Crow period from the 1890s up to the 1910s. Reich wisely begins this chapter with a discussion of sharecropping and the legal (and extra-legal) tangles African American farmers got into. This then leads into industrial work, for black men, and domestic work, for black women who found more opportunities as industrialization expanded. Reich puts convict leasing in the context of the South’s industrial expansion and has a very useful section on the uneasy place of African Americans in the South’s labor movement during this period. The chapter concludes by noting that “the political conditions of the South doomed the workplace struggles of black workers in these years” (58), which sets the stage for a few paragraphs about disfranchisement and segregation. The structure of the chapter argues that the creation of Jim Crow emerged as a mode of controlling black labor, with which most readers of this journal would agree.

A chapter on the great black labor migration takes the story out of the South and into the North and Midwest. It emphasizes the forces that drew African Americans into industrial work and the harsh working and living conditions that met them. Again, Reich makes very good use of comparison, showing the differences between how African Americans were treated in the Great Steel Strike of 1919 versus in the Stockyards Labor Council. The discussion shifts to...