Author discusses roots of the Black working class

After the American Civil War ended, recently emancipated people were faced with the challenge of finding work to support themselves and their families. Working strategically and in cooperation with others who shared their plight, Black workers, male and female, found ways not only to survive but also to build families and communities, according to Blair Kelley, author of Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class.

Speaking June 14 at Charis Circle, the nonprofit programing arm of Charis Books & More on the campus of Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Kelley—in conversation with Bettina L. Love, a professor at Columbia University—said her recently released book chronicles how Black workers took jobs considered undesirable in the larger community and used them to elevate future generations and their communities as a whole.

In its information about the presentation Charis Circle noted, “Black Folk highlights the lives of launderesses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers, who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking jobs White people didn’t want and confined to segregated neighborhoods, Black workers found community in intimate spaces, from stoops on city streets to the backyards of washerwomen, where multiple generations labored from dawn to dusk, talking and laughing in a space free of White supervision and largely beyond White knowledge. As millions of Black people left the violence of the American South for the promise of a better life in the North and West, those networks of resistance and joy sustained early arrivals and newcomers alike and laid the groundwork for organizing for better jobs, better pay, and equal rights.”

“Black people who left the South were fleeing a bad situation, but they also brought with them valuable skills,” Kelley said.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, White women in well-to-do and even middle-class households felt that doing laundry was beneath them, Kelley said. This provided an opportunity for Black women to operate their own businesses, she added. “This was a form of entrepreneurship. They worked in their own homes, and this meant they could look after their children while they worked. Unlike many Black women at the time, they could make their own children a priority rather than someone else’s children.”

When George Pullman created the “hotel on wheels,” as he called the luxury sleeping cars on his railroads, he decided that formerly enslaved men who had worked as house servants would be the ideal choice as attendants, Kelley said. They not only had serving skills, but they also understood the “rules” about interacting with White people, including never touching a White woman even if she stumbles and is about to fall. Although Pullman paid the porters “next to nothing” and required them to pay for their meals, uniforms—even shoeshine polish—the money they earned from tips made them among the most financially comfortable people in the Black community, she noted.

“People often tell me they don’t enjoy history,” Kelley said. “I think they don’t enjoy history the way it’s usually presented. When I ask which history books are their favorites, they cite books written by people who aren’t historians. They like books such as The Warmth of Other Suns. Isabel Wilkerson, the author of The Warmth of Other Suns, is a journalist, she said, and relates history through personal stories. “That’s what I do; I don’t relate history just through facts and figures. I tell the stories of real people whose names normally don’t appear in history books but whose lives nonetheless tell history in a real and intimate way. At the same time, I’m careful to be accurate with details. If I say someone was born on a hot summer day, I actually check an almanac to research the weather on that day.”

Kelley’s book spans 200 years from one of her earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the COVID-19 pandemic. “When many people sheltered in their homes after the onset of the pandemic, people who worked in grocery stores, hospitals, post offices didn’t have that option even when the pandemic was at its height. Not all of these people were Black, but a large percentage of them were,” she said.