Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875-1920

Conclusion

C O N C L U S I O N MThe 'hen Birmingham's promoters articulated their vision of the city they hoped to create, they confronted problems of race and class relations directly. They assured Alabamiansthat African American workers would fill the most menial jobs in the iron and steel industry, freeing whites to achieve as much as their talents would allow.Whites of all classes would join together, united by their interest in the subordination of blacks and their pursuit of prosperity. Racial oppression, then, would shield Birmingham from the class conflict that had long plagued older industrial centers in the United States and Europe. This New South variant of the "mudsill" theory of social order has been the source of a long-standing historiographical tradition. Historians for many years have cited such booster rhetoric to support the argument that southern elites manipulated the racism of the white masses to dominate them as well as African Americans. They maintain that though the longterm interest of working-class whites and blacks lay in unified resistance to those who exploited them, workers rarely transcended the racial tension their bosses and political leaders activelyfostered. What this interpretation fails to understand, and whatthis study has demonstrated , is that the ideas about race and class expressed by early boosters reflected the attitudes of the white workingmen they were trying to attract to Birmingham. As David Roediger has shown, white workers experiencing working conditions uncomfortably similar to those they believed suitable 167 only for blacks continually struggled to defend their status by defining for themselves a privileged sphere of labor. They distinguished between their jobs and what they called "nigger work." ' When civic leaders and employers began trying to find much-needed skilled labor to build and operate the furnaces and rolling mills that were essential to the success of the "workshop town," they soon learned that white workers, especially skilledworkers, were reluctant to move to a place where they thought they might someday be forced to compete with black men for jobs and thereby lose the economic , social, and political privileges of their race. So recruiters adjusted their sales pitch. They addressed white workers' fears, promising them that they would never compete with African Americans in a region so deeply committed to white supremacy. Their status at work and in the community would, therefore, be guaranteed. White workers, however, remained skeptical. They knew that southern employers before the Civil War had employed free blacks and slaves to counteract the influence ofwhiteworkers. They never believed that the color of their skin alone would protect them from competition with blacks and descent into what they called wage slavery, especially should employers decide that workplace segregation no longer served their interest. Thus the first generation of skilled workers demanded control of the racial division of work. Through union rules which deprived blacks of access to the metal trades, white workers played a primary role in defining "nigger work" and in the institutionalization of Birmingham's industrial color bar.White labor constructed an ideology of white supremacy to secure and to justify their power and status in their places of work and in the community. This is not to suggest that labor unions were solely responsible for racial discrimination in Birmingham's nineteenth-century iron industry. Clearly the decline of craft unions in the i88os did not mean an end to white dominance of skilled jobs. The racial division of work that evolved in the i88os was rooted in a productive system dependent upon craftsmen, the vast majority of whom were white. Employers who managed to free themselves of union rules, and who were willing to violate racial etiquette, could not find enough replacements among African Americans, since fewblacks possessed requisite skills thanks to white control of access to the skilled metal trades during much of the i88os. Even though employers did not alter the system of segregation in the mid-i88os, whites feared that they might. Thus they desperately searched for organizational strategies that would restore their control over the shop floor and a racial division ofwork that would relegate blacks to menial labor. 168 : Conclusion Some embraced the Knights of Labor's racially inclusive philosophy. They believed that until blacks joined the labor movement they would always pose a threat to whites engaged in struggles with their employers. Most white workers, however, preferred absolute exclusion of blacks and defied the Knights' attempts to...