Looking South: Race, Gender, and the Transformation of Labor From Reconstruction to Globalization by Mary E. Fredrickson (review)

Mary Fredrickson’s collection of essays is a wide-ranging examination of issues that have engaged historians of southern workers and women for the last three decades. Included are essays examining the relationship between the rise of Jim Crow segregation and fears of organized labor, the ways middle class women, black and white, negotiated racial barriers as they tried to address social ills, and the place of women in southern textile unions. She concludes with an essay in which she argues that patterns found in the American South as it industrialized can now be observed in the developing world.

In the opening essay, Fredrickson argues that the Plessy v. Ferguson decision was in large part a reaction to the New Orleans general strike of the mid 1890s. The judge in the case, she contends, concerned about maintaining an orderly society, viewed the biracial composition of the strike with alarm. Thus, Judge John Ferguson’s decision created a legal foundation for the erection of Jim Crow segregation, which would ensure the maintenance of social order. The decision also had the effect, argues the author, of dividing working people along racial lines, thereby hindering effective popular power over the workplace.

This argument would be compelling, if Fredrickson had any evidence to support it. Apparently the link between the Plessy decision and the strike was shared chronology. Neither the essay nor the notes indicate that Judge Ferguson ever indicated that the strike influenced his decision. Undoubtedly the strike contributed to the larger impulse among whites to more clearly establish racial distinctions, but that impulse was not limited to a single class of whites. There were plenty of white workers in New Orleans and elsewhere who demanded the legal establishment of white privilege in the community and in the work place. One could argue that Judge Ferguson was responding to these demands when he made his decision in Plessy.

More problematic is Fredrickson’s argument in this essay and others that employer’s use of a “divide and conquer” strategy effectively undermined workers struggle for decent wages and working conditions. She argues that segmentation of the work force created a reserve army of black workers who could be used to break strikes. Many southern whites, blinded by the racism their employers encouraged, failed to comprehend the need to unite with African-American workers. What is unclear is how the creation of a privileged white work force damaged the interest of the white workers so privileged. If competition for the best jobs in industry was limited to whites, then whites could charge more for their labor than they could in a completely free labor market and did so. Indeed, unions in the south, as in the rest of the country, specifically excluded blacks from jobs and vigorously resisted employer attempts to challenge this racial segmentation of the work force. Fredrickson simply deploys the “divide and conquer” argument as if its truth is self-evident.

Fredrickson is on much firmer ground when she turns to women and reform and women and organized labor, the subjects of her research for many years. One essay explains the strategies Methodist women’s clubs of both races used to address issues that transcended racial lines, the division within the women’s suffrage movement over race, and the creation of institutions to address problems arising from southern industrialization. Fredrickson argues that Methodist women of both races shared concerns about education, lynching, and convict leasing rooted in shared religious traditions and created a relationship that allowed them to cooperate across racial lines. Such cooperation did not extend to women’s suffrage, however, as white women appealed for the right to vote by arguing that women voters would strengthen the Jim Crow system. So while women could work across racial lines in addressing social...