Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power ed. by Matthew Hild, Keri Leigh Merritt (review)

Coeditors Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt take on a challenging task with the volume Reconsidering Southern Labor History. As they note in the introduction, it has been six years since the last edited volume on southern labor history, and almost all of their predecessors focused exclusively on the twentieth century. Their volume offers chronological breadth, portrays the complex and dynamic history of southern workers across race and ethnicity, and raises important questions about the state of southern labor history.

Hild and Merritt, who have published monographs on the nineteenth-century South in recent years, bring fresh insights. The book is divided into five sections: “Early Republic and the Old South,” “Reconstruction and the Gilded Age,” the “Twentieth Century and Civil Rights,” and the “Modern South,” followed by a set of concluding essays on the future of work and the state of labor history. The essays are short and focused, around fifteen pages each. The authors have sacrificed depth — which characterized previous edited volumes, with their focus on periods within the twentieth-century South — for a more holistic vision of what constitutes southern labor history’s timeline. Theirs is a welcome development in a field that continues to struggle to make the case for intertwined histories of slavery and labor in the US South.

The first section of the volume highlights topics in the nineteenth-century South: the competition between white workers and enslaved black laborers, the history of vagrancy laws in policing free black workers, and the early history of inmate labor in the Deep South. Maria Angela Diaz provides a particularly strong essay on how Mexican laborers navigated black/white binaries along the Texas borderlands. Antebellum southern history, she writes, “does not often include Texas or the diverse populations that lived there.” Using the lens of the Cart War of 1857 — when whites attacked Mexican teamsters and murdered several — Diaz shows how Mexicans navigated an increasingly racialized context in which newly arrived white elites understood working-class Mexicans within the racial caste system of slavery. Moreover, the case study reveals “the impact of transnational forces on laborers living and working along the South’s many borders” (64). Diaz pushes southern labor history in fruitful directions, connecting current struggles of Mexican and other Latina/o workers to a longer history of criminalization and policing in the South.

Topics in the section on Reconstruction and the Gilded Age include the history of how free labor ideology would be implemented in practice and in law, the complex history of nonunionism among southern miners, and new perspectives on the history of populism in North Carolina. In a nuanced essay, T. R. C. Hutton demonstrates how labor historians should tackle the history of workers employed to defeat unions (and the companies for whom they worked). Hutton’s essay brings a new perspective to the history of the mine wars in West Virginia by turning his attention to the history of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. He states that the agency, with roots in the southern plantation economy, “employed hundreds — perhaps even thousands — of men hired from the same labor supply as were the workers they were used to oppress” (143). He also restores a longer history to the detective agency rather than focusing only on the years it targeted and harassed unionizing workers. White elites initially employed the detective agency in order to “civilize” anyone who stood in the way of industrial progress; subsequently the agency acted as a key institution in the enforcement and maintenance of white supremacy by arresting and punishing black men in Southwest Virginia. Before and after the mine wars, Hutton argues, the agency was “arguably the most wide-ranging, and therefore most powerful, law enforcement agency in the South” (144).

In a third section on civil rights in the twentieth century, authors take a broad approach, covering topics from black workers’ organizing in the early twentieth century to a comparative...