In this lucid and supremely readable study, Brian Kelly challenges
the prevailing notion that white workers were the main source of
resistance to racial equality in the Jim Crow South. Focusing on a
period framed by two major coalfield strikes, this important volume
presents new evidence of the role white elites played in fomenting
racial discord at the bottom of southern society.
Supported by the voices of the coal miners, trade unionists, and
mine operators of early twentieth-century Birmingham, Alabama,
Kelly chronicles the hard-fought strike of 1908, during which black
and white miners came together in a practical alliance. After
breaking the strike, the region's powerful industrialists
consolidated their control, combining techniques anchored in the
discriminatory and paternalistic structure of the Old South with
northern-inspired welfare capitalism to hold wages to the lowest
levels in the country.
When the demand for labor brought on by World War I shifted the
balance of power and rejuvenated mineworkers' militancy, the
operators panicked, resorting to race-baiting, coercion, and
vigilantism to combat the threat of black and white unity. In the
lead-up to the dramatic 1920 strike, the employers were aided in
their efforts to split the workforce by Birmingham's small but
influential black middle class, whose espousal of industrial
accommodation outraged black miners and revealed significant
tensions within the African-American community.
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