Hostname: page-component-6bb9c88b65-k72x6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-07-25T09:14:05.247Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

African-American Strikebreaking from the Civil War to the New Deal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Warren C. Whatley
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

When African-American workers broke labor strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were acting in opposition to established social norms concerning race, class, community, and the state. Imagine platoons of African-American men who ordinarily lacked protection of their most basic civil rights escorted by police into a hostile European-American community to take the jobs of European-American workers who were expressing their working-class consciousness through a labor union that excluded their fellow African-American workers. Scholars have interpreted African-American strikebreaking as an example of the ethnic stratification characteristic of the American working class (Bonacich 1976; Gutman 1962, 1987; Foner and Lewis 1979, 1980; Spero and Harris 1931). What was its political-economic context? That is the central question of this essay.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , Winter 1993 , pp. 525 - 558
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1993 

References

Barnes, Charles B. (1915) The Longshoremen. Philadelphia: Fell.Google Scholar
Barnum, Harold T. (1970) The Negro in the Bituminous Coal Mining Industry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Bergman, Leola N. (1945) “The Negro in Iowa.” Iowa Journal of History and Politics 46: 3–90.Google Scholar
Bonacich, Edna (1976) “Advanced capitalism and black/white race relations in the United States: A split labor market interpretation.” American Sociological Review 41: 34–51.Google Scholar
Bruce, Robert V. (1959) 1877: Year of Violence. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.Google Scholar
Campbell, Robert A. (1982) “Blacks and the coal mines of western Washington, 1888-1896.” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 73: 146-55.Google Scholar
Cayton, Horace R., and Mitchell, George S. (1939) Black Workers and New Unions. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Chicago Commission on Race Relations (1922) The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Interchurch World Movement (1920) Report on the Steel Strike of 1919. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.Google Scholar
Cotkin, George B. (1978) “Strikebreakers, evictions and violence: Industrial conflict in the Hocking Valley, 1884-1885.” Ohio History 87: 140–50.Google Scholar
Dickerson, Dennis (1986) Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1980. New York: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1902) The Negro Artisan. Publication no. 7. Atlanta: Atlanta University Press.Google Scholar
Erlich, Richard L. (1974) “Immigrant strikebreaking activity: A sampling of opinion expressed in the National Labor Tribune, 1878-1885.” Labor History 15: 529-42.Google Scholar
Flynt, Wayne (1968) “Florida labor and political ‘radicalism’, 1919-1920.” Labor History 9: 73–90.Google Scholar
Fogel, Walter A. (1970) The Negro in the Meat Packing Industry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Foner, Phillip S. (1965) The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Foner, Phillip S. (1970) “The iww and the black worker.” Journal of Negro History 55: 45–64.Google Scholar
Foner, Phillip S. (1974) Organized Labor and the Black Workers, 1619-1973. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Foner, Phillip S., and Lewis, Ronald L. (1979) The Black Workers during the Era of the American Federation of Labor and the Railroad Brotherhoods. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Foner, Phillip S., and Lewis, Ronald L. (1980) The Black Worker from 1900-1919. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Foner, Phillip S., and Lewis, Ronald L. (1981) The Era of Post-War Prosperity and the Great Depression, 1920-1936. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Foster, William Z. (1920) The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons. New York: Huebsch.Google Scholar
Franklin, Charles L. (1936) The Negro Unionist in New York. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Friedman, Gerald (1988) “Strike success and union ideology: The United States and France, 1880-1914.” Journal of Economic History 43: 1–26.Google Scholar
Gottlieb, Peter (1987) Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916-30. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Gottlieb, Peter (1989) “Black miners and the 1925-28 bituminous coal strike.” Labor History 28: 232-41.Google Scholar
Greene, Lorenzo J., and Woodson, C. G. (1930) The Negro Wage Earner. New York: Van Rees.Google Scholar
Griffin, John I. (1939) Strikes: A Study in Quantitative Economics. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Grossman, James R. (1989) Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Gutman, Herbert G. (1960) “The Braidwood Lockout of 1874.” Journal of Illinois State Historical Society 53: 5–28.Google Scholar
Gutman, Herbert G. (1962) “Reconstruction in Ohio: Negroes in the Hocking Valley coal mines in 1873 and 1874.” Labor History 3: 243-64.Google Scholar
Gutman, Herbert G. (1976) Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working Class and Social History. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Gutman, Herbert G. (1985) “Trouble on the railroads in 1873-1874: Prelude to the 1877 crisis?” in Leab, Daniel J. (ed.) The Labor History Reader. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Gutman, Herbert G. (1987) Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class. New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Hammett, Hugh B. (1975) “Labor and race: The Georgia railroad strike of 1909.” Labor History 16: 470-84.Google Scholar
Harris, William H. (1982) The Harder We Run. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Herbst, Alma (1932) The Negro in the Slaughtering and Meat Packing Industry in Chicago. New York: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Herbst, Alma (1971) The Negro in the Slaughterhouse and Meatpacking Industry in Chicago. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Higham, John (1984) Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Jacobsen, Julius (1968) The Negro and the American Labor Movement. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Jacoby, Sanford M. (1985) Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900-1945. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Charles S. (1930) The Negro in American Civilization. New York: Henry Holt.Google Scholar
Katzman, David M. (1973) Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Keiser, John H. (1972) “Black Strikebreakers and Racism in Illinois, 1865-1900.” Journal of Illinois State Historical Society 65: 313-26.Google Scholar
Kellogg, Paul U. (1914) Wage-Earning Pittsburgh. Philadelphia: Fell.Google Scholar
Kessler, Sidney H. (1952) “The Organization of Negroes in the Knights of Labor.” Journal of Negro History 37: 248-76.Google Scholar
Kessler, Sidney H. (1954) “The Negro in labor strikes.” Midwest Journal 6: 16–35.Google Scholar
Kusmer, Kenneth L. (1976) A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, Earl (1991) In Their Own Interest: Race, Class and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, Ronald L. (1984) “Job control and race relations in the coal fields, 1870-1920.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 12: 35–64.Google Scholar
Lewis, Ronald L. (1987) Black Coal Miners in America. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.Google Scholar
Licht, Walter (1983) Working for the Railroad. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Maloney, Thomas, and Whatley, Warren C. (1992) “Making the effort: The racial contours of Detroit’s labor markets, 1918-1948.” Paper presented at the annual Cliometrics meetings, Miami, Ohio, May.Google Scholar
Man, Albon P. Jr. (1951) “Labor competition and the New York draft riots of 1863.” Journal of Negro History 36: 375–405.Google Scholar
Marshall, Ray (1965) The Negro and Organized Labor. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Marshall, Ray (1967) The Negro Worker. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Marshall, Ray (1972) “Black workers and the unions.” Dissent 19: 295–302.Google Scholar
Montgomery, David (1987) The Fall in the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Northrup, HerbertR. (1944) Organized Labor and the Negro. New York: Harper.Google Scholar
Osofsky, Gilbert (1966) Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Perlman, Jacob, and Frazier, Edward K. (1937) “Entrance rates of common laborers in 20 industries, July 1937.” Monthly Labor Review 45:1491–1510.Google Scholar
Reid, Ira De A. (1930) Negro Membership in American Labor Unions. New York: Negro Universities Press.Google Scholar
Reid, Ira De A. (1969) Negro Membership in American Labor Unions. New York: Negro Universities Press.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Daniel (1988) New Orleans Dockworkers: Race, Labor and Unionism, 1892-1923. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Spero, Sterling D., and Harris, Abram L. (1931) The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat.Google Scholar
Stern, Mark (1977) “Black strikebreakers in the coal fields: King County, Washington—1891.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 5: 60–70.Google Scholar
Taft, Phillip (1966) “Violence in American labor disputes.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 364:127-40.Google Scholar
Trotter, Joe William Jr. (1985) Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Tucker, Helen A. (1909) “The Negroes of Pittsburgh.” Charities and the Commons 21: 599–608.Google Scholar
Tuttle, William J. Jr. (1966) “Some strikebreakers’ observations of industrial warfare.” Labor History 7: 193-96.Google Scholar
Tuttle, William J. Jr. (1969) “Labor conflict and racial violence: The black worker in Chicago, 1894-1919.” Labor History 10: 408-32.Google Scholar
U.S.Bureau of the Census (1975) Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial times to 1970. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of Labor (1921) The Negro at Work during the World War and Reconstruction. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U. S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (1938) Strikes in the United States, 1880-1936. Bulletin no. 651. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Washington, Booker T. (1913) “The Negro and the labor unions.” Atlantic, June, pp. 756-67.Google Scholar
Whatley, Warren C. (1990) “Getting a foot in the door: ‘Learning,’ state dependence, and the racial integration of firms.” Journal of Economic History 50: 43–65.Google Scholar
Whatley, Warren C., and Wright, Gavin (1990) “Getting started in the auto industry: Black workers at the Ford Motor Company, 1918-1947.” Paper presented at the annual ASSA meetings, Washington, DC, December.Google Scholar
Wolters, Raymond (1970) Negroes and the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery. Westport, CT: Greenwood.Google Scholar
Worthman, Paul B. (1969) “Black workers and labor unions in Birmingham, Alabama, 1897-1904.” Labor History 10: 357–407.Google Scholar
Wright, Gavin (1986) Old South, New South. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Wright, R. R. Jr. (1905) “The Negro in times of industrial unrest.” Charities 15: 70–73.Google Scholar
Zunz, Oliver (1982) The Changing Face of Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar