Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America Since 1865
For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America Since 1865
For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America Since 1865
Ebook519 pages12 hours

For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America Since 1865

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

5/5

()

Read preview

About this ebook

The definitive collection of speeches and writings by the labor leader, civil rights activist and founder of The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

In 1925, A. Philip Randolph became the first president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, America’s first majority-Black labor union. It was a major achievement in a life dedicated to the causes of civil and workers’ rights. A leading voice in the struggle for social justice, his powerful words served as a bridge between African Americans and the labor movement.

This volume documents Randolph's life and work through his own writings. It includes more than seventy published and unpublished pieces drawn from libraries, manuscript collections, and newspapers. The book is organized thematically around Randolph’s most significant activities: dismantling workplace inequality, expanding civil rights, confronting racial segregation, and building international coalitions.

The editors provide a detailed biographical essay that helps to situate the speeches and writings collected in the book. In the absence of an autobiography, this volume offers the best available presentation of Randolph's ideas and arguments in his own words.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateApr 23, 2014
ISBN9780813146645
For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America Since 1865
Author

Adam Moore

Robert H. Zieger, professor of history at the University of Florida, is author of Rebuilding the Pulp and Paper Workers' Union and American Workers, American Unions

Related to For Jobs and Freedom

Related ebooks

Politics For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for For Jobs and Freedom

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
5/5

1 rating0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    For Jobs and Freedom - Adam Moore

    INTRODUCTION

    I still have a hard time confessing that I didn’t stay for Dr. King’s speech. As far as I was concerned, civil rights was a matter of politics and morality, not religion. Anyway, I had parked a long way off, it was getting late, and I had to pick up my wife at the Prince Georges County bank, where she worked. As I threaded my way back through the throng lining the Reflecting Pool, across the Washington Monument grounds, up along Pennsylvania Avenue, the speakers’ voices grew fainter. I had parked on one of the side streets off East Capitol Street, behind the Library of Congress (my normal haunt in those dissertation-writing days), so I made my way through the Capitol grounds. It occurred to me that I should find some souvenir of the March on Washington, something to prove to my progeny and to the students to whom I would one day teach U.S. history that I was there. The discarded orange-and-black placard lying behind a low hedge would do the trick, even if it did have a slight tear. The UAW Says Jobs and Freedom for Every American, it read. Since my ambition was to be a labor historian, it seemed the perfect choice.

    But I must admit that I hadn’t really thought much about the jobs part. Civil rights was about public accommodations, voting rights, and schools.¹ Certainly, demonstrators in southern towns and cities had demanded employment in the stores and shops. But it was the classrooms, the voting booths, and the hotels and restaurants that made the biggest headlines. Of course, an instant’s reflection affirmed that the placard was dead right: without jobs, freedom was a coin of limited value. Jobs were the modern equivalent of the Reconstruction era’s forty acres and a mule—and we all know what happened when the freedmen were denied title to the land that they and their forebears had worked for generations. Yes, it was true: this was indeed about jobs and freedom.

    For Jobs and Freedom rests on two basic assumptions and explores two central themes. The assumptions are (1) that it is appropriate for a study of race and labor in modern America to focus on the experiences of African Americans and to consider other racial and ethnic groups in terms of their relationship to black workers, and (2) that labor unions are legitimate—indeed, necessary—components of a free and democratic society. The two basic themes, both of which flow from these assumptions, are (1) the struggles of African American workers to attain full citizenship, in the workplace as well as in the polity, and (2) the relationship between the labor movement’s egalitarian ideology and its racial practices.²

    Focusing on the experiences of African American workers is appropriate because of their distinctive history and because of the extent to which African Americans have always been regarded—and still are regarded—as other. It is true that other distinctive ethnic and racial groups have faced discrimination and hardship. Only African Americans, however, were slaves; only African Americans had to endure more than a hundred years of the systematic denigration known as Jim Crow. The special and inferior status of African Americans was established at the beginning of the United States’ existence as an independent nation, as asserted in the Constitution and embodied in the Naturalization Act of 1790. The nineteenth-century debate over slavery was a debate about black labor. Questions about the economic, political, and legal status of African Americans dominated the Civil War era. Among discrete ethnic and racial groups, only African Americans have been the specific subject of constitutional amendments.

    Over the past decade, labor and race historians have been debating the theme of whiteness as it relates to the history of ethnicity in the United States.³ Discussion has centered on the degree to which various immigrant and minority groups were considered white and on the process by which they became white. Although this subject has generated sharp exchanges, both sides affirm that blackness was the negativity that defined whiteness. All this work, including the commentary by critics such as Eric Arnesen, accepts as a basic premise that African Americans have been regarded as other, or nonwhite, throughout American history. Sociologist George Yancey, in Who Is White? Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide, develops this same theme, projecting it into the next half century.⁴

    To be sure, for more than a hundred years, Asians, and especially Chinese, were singled out for particularly harsh and racist treatment. The meager protections available to African Americans by virtue of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments did not apply to Asians, who were ineligible for citizenship. Clearly, Latinos also suffered degrading treatment, economic exploitation, and political isolation, as ably documented by historical scholarship. In both cases, however, circumstances distinguished Asians and Latinos from African Americans. At any given time between the 1870s and the 1950s, relatively few Asians lived in the United States, largely because of the draconian immigration laws passed between 1882 and 1924. The Chinese population of the United States, such as it was, was concentrated in a few urban centers, mostly on the West Coast, with smaller communities scattered along the western railroad routes and in mining centers. Once the legal status of Asians had been established, their place in the political and economic order rarely entered into the national political discourse.⁵

    From the Mexican War of 1846–1848 to the 1960s, most of the Latino population of the United States had its origins in Mexico. Although it is true that in Texas and elsewhere in the Southwest, Anglo cultural and political authorities erected legal and social barriers against Chicanos reminiscent of Jim Crow, these were usually more sporadically enforced and monitored than was the case in Alabama and Mississippi. Latinos in Texas and California served in economic roles broadly similar to those of their black counterparts in the Southeast, but segregation was less rigid, and the boundaries between claimed ethnic identities were more permeable. Nowhere, even in rural Texas, did the presence of Latino communities evoke the degree of repression and exclusion that virtually all African Americans endured. Far more than African Americans, residents of both Hispanic derivation and Asian origin had representatives of sovereign nations, with which the United States generally sought friendly relations, to monitor and sometimes protest their treatment.⁶

    Differences in the status and public regard accorded to African Americans in comparison with other once-despised racial and ethnic groups remain very much in force. According to recent polling data, black exceptionalism has retained its potency among whites and is particularly noticeable among Hispanics and Asian Americans. African American economist Glenn Loury, no friend of affirmative action, has stressed the tenacity across the entire nonblack ethnic spectrum of the distinctive otherness imputed to blacks. Whites’ resentment of affirmative action and preferential hiring policies has focused almost exclusively on black recipients; those polled registered little antagonism toward other beneficiaries, whether Hispanic, Asian, or female. Despite a softening of racial attitudes in the past fifty years, in virtually every area of American life, Americans of all nonblack ethnic identities have singled out African Americans as less worthy than people of other races or ethnicities. White potential home buyers show no concern over the presence of Latinos or Asians in a neighborhood but express significantly negative views when blacks are present. Indeed, John Skrentny, a leading student of the contemporary politics of race, cites one persuasive study that found that even greater percentages of Latinos and Asians than Euro-Americans wished to live in neighborhoods with no blacks at all. Survey after survey has revealed employers’ preference for Asian and Latino workers over African Americans. Blacks have had by far the lowest rates of interracial marriage in comparison with other ethnic groups, and Skrentny notes, There is the simple but little-noticed fact that only blacks are defined by the one-drop rule that means any black ancestry at all makes a person black, while persons of mixed Latino-white or Asian-white parentage are ordinarily able to select their own racial identity. As novelist Toni Morrison put it in 1973, the move into mainstream America always means buying into the notion of American blacks as the real aliens. Whatever the ethnicity or nationality of the immigrant, his nemesis is understood to be African American.

    The second major assumption of For Jobs and Freedom—that a strong and autonomous labor movement is a legitimate and essential component of a democratic society—requires a brief explanation. For much of the century after the end of the Civil War, no domestic issue aroused more passion and public debate than the labor question. In one sense, the labor question involved a wide range of subissues, such as poverty, immigration, disparities of wealth and power, unemployment, and the health and safety of working people. For most, however, the labor question revolved around workers’ efforts to form unions for self-protection and employers’ efforts to resist unionization in the name of freedom of contract and industrial efficiency. The slow and sporadic rise of a strong trade union movement, culminating in the emergence of mass unions in the country’s central manufacturing, transport, and mining industries in the 1930s and 1940s, brought organized labor into the heart of the nation’s economic and political life. In the post–World War II decades, armed with an ideology that the labor movement was intrinsically a force for social justice and with a determination to improve the living standards and reduce the insecurity of industrial workers and their families, newly invigorated unions helped promote the sustained economic expansion and create the social safety net that characterized the postwar period. For a generation, labor leaders such as John L. Lewis, Philip Murray, Walter Reuther, George Meany, and César Chavez advanced a worker-centered program of political economy that resonated powerfully both in the nation’s workplaces and in the voting booths. Over the past twenty-five years, however, the once-potent labor movement has been on the defensive, struggling to come to terms with a rapidly changing economic base, shifting demographic patterns, and a political environment hostile to collective action on the part of workers. Even so, with sixteen million members, the labor movement of the early twenty-first century remains a significant factor in American life, perhaps nowhere more so than in the political arena, where its alliances with women’s, civil rights, and even environmental organizations, along with its considerable financial and organizational resources, make it a still-potent force.

    Defense of organized labor as a positive factor in American life arouses little argument among most practitioners of labor history. Indeed, for most participants in the boom in labor historiography over the past generation, the problem with the labor movement is that it has been neither strong nor autonomous enough. But in another part of the academic universe, there are many for whom the beneficial presence of labor unions is far from axiomatic. Historians of a free-market orientation, though in the minority in the fields of labor, race, social, and gender history, have produced studies that challenge labor historians’ general default in favor of unionism. Of particular note is the work of David Bernstein and Paul Moreno, both of whom see organized labor’s often unedifying historical record with respect to workplace racial issues as being rooted in its fundamental illegitimacy as a cartel-seeking and inefficiency-producing special interest.⁸

    Most of this critique of unions or the labor movement or organized labor, however, focuses on the activities of the railroad brotherhoods and the building trades’ craft unions, particularly as they functioned before the 1950s. Both free-market advocates and civil rights advocates have had no difficulty establishing the role that race played in enabling these unions to restrict the labor supply and create job trusts that excluded blacks, as well as other minorities and women. Critics have amply documented the role played by legislatures and governmental agencies in validating and reinforcing race-based discrimination. They have been less willing, however, to acknowledge that, for the most part, black workers have sought entry into the labor movement and, when faced with exclusion by white unions, have sought to create their own unions. Free-market critics likewise find the post–World War II political alliance between organized labor and the civil rights movement, with all its difficulties and internal disagreements, difficult to explain.

    By no means are all the critics of labor’s racial record doctrinaire free-market advocates, however. Indeed, some of the most stinging criticisms have come from ardent civil rights advocates, many of whom at least initially regarded labor as an ally in the African American freedom struggle. Until his death at age eighty in 2005, Herbert Hill, labor secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) between 1951 and 1977 and afterward a prominent academic and journalistic commentator, endlessly called attention to the gap between organized labor’s egalitarian rhetoric and its actual practices. Committed to the legitimacy of collective action in the achievement of social and racial justice, scholars such as William Gould, Bruce Nelson, Michael Goldfield, and David Roediger have nonetheless emphasized the strains of racism and hypocrisy that they believe have characterized dominant elements in the labor movement—and among the white working class more generally—throughout American history.⁹

    For Jobs and Freedom acknowledges these criticisms of organized labor. At the same time, I see it as playing a more complex and, in the end, more edifying role than either free-market or collective-action critics posit. I see organized labor as having a workplace and civic role distinct from its econometric functions. Whereas free-market economists and their historical counterparts see unions exclusively as a means by which workers seek market-distorting wage advantages, For Jobs and Freedom is particularly attuned to the role that unions claim in fostering workplace equity and civic engagement. For example, the building trades unions, operating in a notoriously dangerous sector of the economy, negotiated closed-shop agreements in part to ensure that plumbers, ironworkers, electrical workers, and other tradesmen would work with trained fellow craftsmen and thus enjoy a safer workplace. Coal miners sought and gained state regulations restricting entry into the man-killing mines; railroad unions used collective bargaining to attempt to curb the industry’s appalling toll of dead and injured. The problem with discriminatory closed-shop agreements and discriminatory municipal licensing laws was not that they regulated the workplace. It was that they discriminated.

    Free and potent unions also reflect workers’ desire for protection from arbitrary treatment, unfair disciplinary proceedings, and punitive or incoherent personnel policies. Opponents of organized labor and of governmental intervention in labor markets contend that in the long run, unfair and ruthless employers suffer from the alienation of their labor force. Even they, however, must acknowledge that the long run can be very long indeed, as Ford Motor Company workers of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s could (and did) testify.

    Throughout modern American history, black labor activists have combined a critique of free labor markets with advocacy of collective action, either in collaboration with whites or, when necessary, apart from them. As A. Philip Randolph and other black labor activists knew, the logic of free labor markets leads to competition for jobs, whether along racial lines or on the basis of some other factor. The resulting rush to the bottom encourages—indeed, often compels—wage reductions, deteriorating health and safety conditions, and job insecurity. Only by organizing could workers hope to moderate these corrosive features of private enterprise. Black workers no less than their white counterparts knew that moral capitalism¹⁰ was too important to be left to the capitalists, especially those whose fixation on short-range profit rendered them heedless of social and human costs. Those who stress the connection between jobs and freedom and who believe that only through principled social activism is progress possible must, in the end, come to terms with the admittedly ambiguous history of the labor movement.¹¹

    The purely econometric view of the role of unions ignores organized labor’s relationship to the broader civic life of the nation. Discussion of politics is restricted to unions’ efforts to establish and defend monopoly privileges. Organized labor has consistently supported expansion of the suffrage, expansion of educational opportunities, and, at least since the 1930s, every important initiative in civil rights. The World War II Fair Employment Practice Committee and Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which were supported by organized labor but opposed by most large employers—were thus sensible public policies designed to rectify injustices while leaving untouched the main body of wage, safety, and union recognition legislation that undergirded collective bargaining. Although it is true that labor activists have foregrounded public issues of specific concern to unions, it is also true that the labor movement has led the way in countless voter registration drives, civic education programs, and community forums.

    Indeed, the current crisis in health care and pension shortfalls illustrates how organized labor’s ability to speak for large numbers of workers and their families can contribute to more rational and enlightened public policies. In the uncertain economic circumstances of the globalized present, the limitations of employer-provided health and pension benefits are becoming increasingly evident. General Motors staggers under the weight of retiree pensions and health care costs as it struggles to compete with foreign firms whose workers can rely on publicly provided benefits. Sixty years ago, Walter Reuther and other labor advocates tried—on the whole, unsuccessfully—to educate their corporate bargaining partners about the dangers of employer-specific benefits and enlist them in the campaign to broaden New Deal pension and health care programs. Failing that, Reuther negotiated the best plans he could, expecting that eventually even the most antigovernment employers would see the logic of public provision. Remarks Malcolm Gladwell, It has taken half a century, but the world may finally be catching up with Walter Reuther.¹²

    In short, although debate over the economic role of trade unions is necessary, the labor movement has never rested its claims for public recognition and worker loyalty on bread-and-butter promises alone. For Jobs and Freedom regards the labor movement’s relationship to the democratic polity as crucial to its historic mission. Clayton Sinyai captures this critical aspect of organized labor, past and present: one of the central . . . concerns of the American labor movement [has been] . . . educating working people for democratic citizenship. Unions and laborite political organizations, he continues, have been (and are) not just engines of economic betterment but of civic education as well. They have aspired to be schools of democracy, and continue to do so.¹³ Hence, any consideration of the theme of race and labor in modern America must have at its heart the relationship between organized labor’s egalitarian civic claims and its complex—and, it must be said, often disappointing—engagement with the country’s profound racial dilemmas.

    For Jobs and Freedom traces its two central themes—blacks’ struggles for equity and inclusion, and organized labor’s compromised egalitarianism—through historical narrative. It embraces the period from the abolition of slavery to the present, with a glance back at the antebellum period and a nod toward the future. Its seven chapters are organized chronologically, although chapters 6 and 7, dealing with the very recent past, are somewhat overlapping. Throughout the book, my challenge has been to make use of the energy and aspirations of my personal commitment to both the labor movement and the cause of civil rights while crafting a historical narrative that meets high standards of objective scholarship and intellectual honesty. Since that day in August 1963 when I didn’t stay to listen to the greatest public speech of the twentieth century, I have signed a lot of petitions, attended a lot of meetings, voted in a lot of elections, and written some checks. For the most part, however, I have spent my time in libraries and classrooms, pondering, with the help of my colleagues and students, the connections between race and labor in modern America. In the end, it is the story of the struggle that continues to inspire me, both as a student and as a citizen. We still have a long way to go, but there is always the hope that one day we will indeed have jobs and freedom for every American.

    1

    THE FIRST FRUITS OF FREEDOM

    During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the American people embarked on a vast social experiment. Three and a half million former slaves, previously excluded from the civil economy, now joined a free working class, itself undergoing a dramatic transformation. The formal ending of slavery in December 1865 specified no particular political, legal, or social status for the freedmen. Even the great constitutional amendments of 1865–1870 and the Reconstruction-era civil rights laws left key aspects of blacks’ status and circumstances unclear. Throughout the first postbellum generation, the role that former slaves would play in the nation’s labor force, their relationship to former masters and to fellow workers, and the place of blacks in the labor movement remained ill defined and open to sharp and sometimes violent contestation.

    By the end of the nineteenth century, African Americans had become trapped in a subordinative, repressive, and discriminatory economic and racial order, victimized in both North and South by popular attitudes and legal structures. Soon after the Civil War’s conclusion, freedmen’s dreams of land acquisition died. A regime of agricultural labor characterized by chronic indebtedness and, at best, limited opportunities for self-improvement prevailed. On the land, in the mines, on the building sites, and in the kitchens and laundries, black wage workers toiled in the most hazardous, least desirable, and lowest-paying jobs. The vast majority of black farmers labored as sharecroppers and tenants on land owned by whites. Selective application of harsh penal statutes forced thousands of African Americans into coerced labor in the mines, in construction gangs, and in the pine forests.

    Even so, during the bleak postemancipation decades, black workers and farmers continued to struggle for inclusion in the free producing class, and not always fruitlessly. Against the odds, the proportion of black farmers who owned the land they tilled slowly increased. Rising literacy rates and a vigorous black press and civil and religious institutions helped give voice to the aspirations and grievances of African Americans. Agricultural workers, longshoremen, miners, and other African American workers joined together to protect their economic and civil rights. For the most part, the struggles of black farmers and workers to gain recognition as citizen-producers enjoyed little support from their white counterparts and, indeed, often aroused their hostility, but significant episodes of biracial activism provided an intriguing, and some thought hopeful, counterpoint to the otherwise bleak tale of racial victimization.

    Visions of Labor

    Although contemporary discussion and subsequent historical accounts of the postbellum period often focus on political, legal, and constitutional issues, the labor question lay at the heart of Reconstruction. ‘You will find,’ declared one South Carolina planter in late 1865, ‘that this question of the control of labor underlies every other question of state interest.’ ¹ Northern politicians and reformers, southern whites, and the freedmen themselves advanced sharply divergent views about the role and status of the former slaves and their place in the political economy of work. Southern planters and their political allies grudgingly acknowledged the death of slavery but were determined to maintain tight labor controls. Blacks, they held, would not work except under compulsion; they could not be trusted to work autonomously, nor should they be encouraged to entertain hopes of upward mobility. For most white southern landholders, as well as for many northerners eager to resume the profitable prewar trade in southern cotton, the successful revival of the war-ravaged South’s agricultural economy necessitated closely supervised gang labor to ensure faithful and efficient work. For southern planters, effective labor discipline entailed corporal punishment. In the absence of coercion, declared one planter, The negroes work [only] when they please . . . and rely largely upon hunting and fishing for sustenance. There was only one conclusion: Labor must be commanded completely, or the production of the cotton crop must be abandoned. A federal agent summarized the common opinion among Mississippi planters in the summer of 1865: Every planter . . . premised his statements with the assertion that ‘a nigger won’t work without whipping.’ ² This being the case, southern whites moved rapidly at the end of hostilities to impose slavelike conditions that featured corporal punishment, insistence on a deferent and servile demeanor, and closely supervised labor gangs, just as they had before the war.

    Northern political and reform leaders rejected this approach even though they shared the desire to rebuild the cotton-based economy of the South. The victory of the North represented not only the victory of the Union; it was the victory of free labor as well. The promise of American life lay in the opportunity for men of all stations and races to advance through diligent labor and sober habits. Abraham Lincoln himself had spelled out the formula: The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land . . . ; then labors on his own account, eventually employing others who, in turn, replicate the process.³ In ninety-nine cases out of every hundred greatness is achieved by hard, earnest labor and thought, declared the editors of Harper’s Weekly. Degraded conditions among African Americans, argued free-labor advocates, were the result of slavery; free labor would end them. Far from being congenitally feckless and improvident, freedmen embodied this free-labor doctrine. At a time when increasing numbers of workers in the North were flooding into the factories, southern blacks’ overwhelming commitment to agriculture indicated that they would be in a unique position to advance from wage labor to farm ownership, as the free-labor ideal envisaged. Northern white workers joined unions and waged strikes. Lazy southern whites had grown dependent on slave labor. But freedmen, in the view of one representative northern newspaper, were humble, but self-reliant; teachable . . . anxious to learn. . . . Their ambition, the Cincinnati Daily Gazette declared, is to buy, with their own hard-earned dollars, a little piece of land that they can call their own.⁴ Thus, the triumphant North was obliged, in this view, to promote the free-labor ideal by disallowing the restrictive legislation—the Black Codes—that southern states adopted in the immediate aftermath of war. Federal troops and civilian authorities occupying the defeated South would curb corporal punishment and insist that landowners pay fair wages.

    At the same time, fearful that newly freed slaves would lack the incentive to maximize their cash income, free-labor advocates felt obliged to instruct freedmen about the virtues and obligations of free labor. To this end, in March 1865, Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—known commonly as the Freedmen’s Bureau—to oversee the immediate welfare of former slaves, to promote education, and to put free-labor ideas into practice throughout the former Confederacy. Its director, General O. O. Howard, told a group of expectant blacks in 1865 that the bureau would promise them nothing but freedom, and freedom means work. Other northern free-labor advocates even more sternly stressed the obligations of freedmen and their families to obey their employers, put aside idle dreams of landownership, and embrace the gospel of hard and disciplined labor.⁵

    What of the freedmen themselves? Throughout the postwar years, they advanced distinctive notions of moral economy and asserted the rights due them as victims of slavery and as defenders of the Union. Rejecting both slavelike compulsion and the narrow calculus of profit and loss implicit in the free-labor formulation, most freedmen hoped to gain autonomous access to land so that they could engage primarily in subsistence farming, with at most a modest involvement in the risky cash-producing markets for agricultural goods. Smallholdings, either individually owned or cultivated through self-directed cooperatives, would free them of daily contact with former masters and other whites; provide the social space necessary for the building of schools, churches, and other civil institutions essential for personal and racial advancement; and undergird their exercise of newly gained civil and political rights. And even before the fighting had stopped, former slaves began efforts to realize these goals.

    To be sure, some southern blacks, especially younger men, implicitly accepted the free-labor agenda by working for wages on construction projects, in urban trades, and on farms. To an extent, then, these men quickly became part of an emerging multiracial American working class, although for many of them, wage work was a short-term strategy, with landownership or at least farm tenancy the eventual goal. A handful, generally drawn from the lighter-skinned ranks of prewar free Negroes, pursued individual success and mobility through entrepreneurial endeavor, political ambition, professional development, or a combination of these activities. These men became part of the emerging southern black middle class, deemed by free-labor advocates to be the bedrock of a progressive and republican political and social order, and often serving as the articulate voice of the ill-educated black working masses.

    The vast majority of former slaves, however, clung to a vision of the future centered around subsistence farming. Former slaves, black newspaper editors, clergymen, and politicians asserted that simple justice dictated some sort of compensation for two centuries of slavery and for African Americans’ military contribution to the preservation of the Union. Only widespread black landownership, African Americans believed, could make real the exercise of newly granted civil and personal rights. This is our home, declared former slaves in South Carolina in a petition to President Andrew Johnson in the fall of 1865; we have made these lands what they are. Without title to the holdings that they and their ancestors had worked for two centuries, we cannot feel our rights Safe. Indeed, claimed a Virginia freedman, those who had toiled under slavery and had flocked to the colors during the war had a divine right to the land.

    In fact, freedmen’s hope that Reconstruction would include a distribution of land to former slaves quickly died, but they insisted on a sharp departure from the work regimes that had prevailed during slavery. In the wake of war, they had little choice but to enter into individual contracts with landowners, specifying tasks, compensation, and other details. Increasingly, they were successful in compelling planters to agree to arrangements by which each black farmer worked a particular section of the farm, living with his family in separate quarters. They resisted corporal punishment, abandoning landlords who refused to acknowledge their rights and who continued to attempt to control their personal and family lives. Former slaves everywhere strove to keep women and children out of the fields, where, under slavery, they had toiled as a matter of routine. Planters lamented these changes in plantation routine, predicting disastrous declines in production, but freedmen’s labor was so crucial to southern agriculture that they were largely successful in limiting landowners’ power. Everywhere, freedmen–cum–plantation employees insisted on specific compensation for tasks such as fence mending, equipment repair, and animal tending that were not directly connected with the cultivation of crops.

    Farmers, Sharecroppers, and Agricultural Laborers

    The exact means by which freedmen pursued an autonomous life differed in the several major agricultural areas of the South. Those who had toiled on cotton farms and plantations—the largest category of former slaves—sought individual farms of their own, free from white supervision and discipline, preferably through landownership (which was rarely achieved). Alternatively, they insisted on various sharecropping and tenant farming arrangements to obtain at least a degree of autonomy, and they refused to work in gangs or endure close scrutiny of their personal lives.

    When former slaves in Louisiana’s Sugar Belt were thwarted in their desire for individual holdings, they found a source of strength in group labor arrangements to carry out the complex and capital-intensive cultivation and processing of sugarcane. They insisted, however, that they—not their former owners or other planters—be the ones to form up the work gangs, ensuring that these groups would be mutualistic and cohesive. In the distinctive circumstances of southern Louisiana, gang labor encouraged worker solidarity, both in the fields and in the freedmen’s communities. For two decades after the end of the war, these cohesive work arrangements encouraged the assertion of labor rights, political activism, and even military mobilization.

    On the Sea Islands and lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia, former slaves had cultivated abandoned plantations even during the war, initially with the support of federal authorities. When the government ruled that former owners who took an oath of loyalty were entitled to have their land restored, freedmen fought back, resisting their ouster. The Freedmen’s Bureau, which was required to enforce the land restoration, had to call on the U.S. Army—including black regiments—to evict the former slaves. Though thwarted in their attempt to keep the land that they and their ancestors had cultivated for almost two centuries, African Americans in the coastal regions insisted that the special advantages they had gained with respect to relatively unsupervised work routines, access to hunting and fishing land, and cultivation of individual plots be continued, often in violation of the competitive dicta of free labor. Indeed, in some districts along the South Carolina–Georgia border, freedmen were able to force nominal landowners to concede a sort of de facto proprietorship of the land.

    In the first three years following the end of the war, former slaves, southern whites, and government officials advanced their competing visions of agricultural labor in the former Confederacy. Military officers and Freedmen’s Bureau officials sought to educate both freedmen and their white employers about the meanings and obligations of a free-labor regime. They insisted that planters abandon corporal punishment, which they regarded as incompatible with free labor, and cease efforts to direct the personal lives of their former chattels. At the same time, however, they regarded the prompt revival of staple crop production as critical not only to the rebuilding of the southern economy but also to the economic health of the entire country. For the most part, they were unsympathetic to former slaves’ claims for small, individual landholdings, fearing that such arrangements would lead to mere subsistence farming and retard the revival of cash-producing crops such as tobacco, rice, cotton, and sugar. Thus, most northern politicians and reformers upheld the right of former slave owners and other planters to reclaim their land and to employ African Americans to work on it, now as wage earners. They insisted that former slaves sign yearly labor contracts, specifying wages and conditions, on an individual basis. Agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau acted as advisers to both planters and freedmen in the drafting of these documents and as arbiters in disputes arising out of their application. To planters, bureau agents counseled restraint and fair dealing; to former slaves, they urged hard and faithful service, frugal habits, and abandonment of hope for a quick redistribution of land. Typical was the advice that the bureau’s Virginia representative offered to former slaves there in June 1865. He admonished them not to expect largess from the federal government or to expect former masters to provide for you in sickness and old age. Freedmen must be industrious and frugal, he said, and he urged former slaves to avoid agitation and strife. Be quiet[,] peacable, law abiding Citizens, he counseled.⁷

    Throughout the South, freedmen responded to the realities of free labor with a combination of resentment and resignation. Bitterness over what former slaves believed were broken promises festered. Wrote a newly freed slave to General Howard in 1866, ‘we were friends on the march’ and ‘brothers on the battlefield, but in the peaceful pursuits of life it seems that we are strangers.’ A lifetime later, another freedman recalled, ‘De slaves spected a heap from freedom dey didn’t git. . . . Dey promised us a mule and forty acres o’ lan’,’ but delivered only admonitions to work hard and obey former masters.⁸ In all, a series of confused and contradictory federal programs that initially seemed to promise widespread land redistribution resulted in fewer than 100,000 former slaves gaining title to land, and usually to marginal and isolated holdings that were difficult to farm profitably and difficult to retain in the face of surrounding white hostility to evidence of black advancement.

    Bitter disappointment over federal land policies, however, did not preclude an energetic defense of blacks’ new civil and political rights. Into the mid-1870s and, in some places, well beyond, former slaves formed the core of an aroused black electorate that sent scores of African Americans to state legislatures and to the U.S. Congress. In most of the former Confederate states, blacks—many of them former slaves and current sharecroppers—held local offices and served as local law enforcement officials. In a few areas, African Americans were able to assert citizenship rights and to resist at least some aspects of mounting oppression and victimization in the political and legislative arenas until the dawn of the twentieth century. Especially during the heyday of Reconstruction, which lasted until 1877 in some states, African Americans, in an alliance with Republicans and reform-minded whites, kept alive the egalitarian legal and political status promised by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and by federal civil rights laws.

    Although

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1