The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Workers in the Jim Crow South (review)

Given the impressive range of recent scholarship on southern labor, the absence of a serious reconsideration of the region's lumber industry and its multiracial workforce has left an inexcusable void. At the turn of the century, sawmills and logging camps employed more workers than any other industry in the South, among whom African Americans comprised a substantial majority. William P. Jones's The Tribe of Black Ulysses fills that void as it makes a powerful case for the centrality of lumber in southern black working class culture. Jones chronicles the industry's complex interaction with local conditions in three discrete settings and illustrates the relationship between economic and technological evolution and changing race and labor relations.

Though the book succeeds in situating lumber in a rapidly changing and racially polarized South, its aim is more ambitious. Jones asserts that black Southerners' experience in lumber directly refutes the "myth of Black Ulysses" that was articulated by sociologist Howard Odum in the 1920s. Odum's argument—that black Southerners were "essentially incompatible with modernity"—played a strong role in establishing the stereotypic image of the alienated working-class black man. This characterization lingers still among pundits who attribute persistent racial inequality to some timeless pathology of black working-class men. This study contradicts Odum's case and suggests that, far from being traumatized or disoriented by their experience in lumber, "African Americans retained the ability to negotiate and … even determine the direction of economic transformation in the early twentieth-century South."

Jones offers a cursory sketch of developments in the industry prior to 1920, but the study focuses on the postwar, transitional period between its "Cut-Out-and-Get Out" phase, during which low capitalization and "unlimited" timber stands shaped an unstable industry, and the "conservation" phase that followed, when rapid depletion of timber stocks brought an end to "cream skimming" and a new arrangement between employers and workers allowed more stable communities to take root. It concludes in the late 1950s, when industrial decline threatened the hard-won gains that black workers had finally managed to win. Among the many strengths of the study is the author's ability to illustrate these changes and their impact on black working-class culture in discrete settings in Bogalusa, Louisiana; Chapman, Alabama; and Elizabethtown, North Carolina.

For the period under study, Jones finds that while lumber workers certainly faced hardship, on the whole black workers managed to assert their own interests. Bringing an impressive array of methodological approaches to bear in making his case, Jones is at his best in documenting the integrity of black community life and identifying the dynamic forces transforming black working-class culture in the early twentieth century. The evolution of musical tastes from barrelhouse blues, suited to the raucous ambience of the early logging camps, to commercially influenced swing more congruent with the stable community life of the "conservation" phase, is charted with analytical intelligence and originality. Attempts by Zora Neale Hurston and others to locate a pristine, authentically "black" culture were futile and misguided, Jones argues: the constant interaction between black and white, local, regional and national, folk, and commercial cultures in the New South meant that interchange and continual adaptation were the order of the day.

The Tribe of Black Ulysses is not without its flaws. The author is anxious to assert black workers' agency, but an engagement with the substantial literature on welfare capitalism in and beyond the South would have helped frame the problem in a way that acknowledges both the scope for self-assertion and the limits to agency. Few scholars would dispute that where organization became viable, black workers often proved themselves the most capable, militant fighters in the South—a "natural constituency" for trade unionism. But their general predicament presented real obstacles as well, and the power that their employers and...