Long before the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s made a frontal assault on the reigning segregationist order, African American workers had to struggle against both their employers and fellow white workers. Because their efforts to secure their workplace rights pitted them against the broader structures of racial oppression, their activism constituted nothing less than a form of civil rights struggle.

Uniting the latest scholarship on race, labor, and civil rights, The Black Worker aims to establish the richness of the African American working-class experience, and the indisputable role of black workers in shaping the politics and history of labor and race in the United States.

To capture the complexity of African Americans’ experiences in the workplace, this reader examines workers engaged in a wide array of jobs, including sharecropping, coal mining, domestic service, longshoring, automobile manufacturing, tobacco processing, railroading, prostitution, lumbering, and municipal employment. The essays’ subjects include black migration, strikebreaking, black conservatism, gender, and the multiple forms of employment discrimination in the South and North. Other contributions deal explicitly with state policy and black workers during the transition from slavery to freedom, World Wars I and II, and the 1960s.

The variety of challenges made by these workers, both quiet and overt, served as clear reminders to the supporters of white supremacy that, despite their best efforts through violence, fraud, and the law, as long as they insisted on racial inequality, the “race question” would never be fully resolved.

Contributors: Eric Arnesen, Beth Tompkins Bates, Cynthia M. Blair, Tera W. Hunter, William Powell Jones, Brian Kelly, Robert Korstad, Nelson Lichtenstein, Joseph A. McCartin, Steven A. Reich, Leslie A. Schwalm, Nan Elizabeth Woodruff

Eric Arnesen is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His books include Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality, and Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents.

Contents
 Introduction
 Eric Arnesen
 1. "Sweet Dreams of Freedom": Freedwomen's Reconstruction of
 Life and Labor in Lowcountry South Carolina
 Leslie A. Schwalm
 2. The Quicksands of Economic Insecurity: African Americans,
 Strikebreaking, and Labor Activism in the Industrial Era
 Eric Arnesen
 3. "Work That Body": African American Women, Work, and Leisure
 in Atlanta and the New South
 Tera W. Hunter
 4. Industrial Sentinels Confront the "Rabid Faction": Black
 Elites, Black Workers, and the Labor Question in the Jim
 Crow South
 Brian Kelly
 5. "We Must Live Anyhow": African American Women, Sex Work, and
 the Informal Economy in Chicago, 1880-1900
 Cynthia Blair
 6. The Great War, Black Workers, and the Rise and Fall of the
 NAACP in the South
 Steven A. Reich
 7. The Organizing Tradition among African American Plantation
 Workers in the Arkansas Delta in the Age of Jim Crow
 Nan Elizabeth Woodruff
 8. Mobilizing Black Chicago: The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car
 Porters and Community Organizing, 1925-1935
 Beth Tompkins Bates
 9. Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early
 Civil Rights Movement
 Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein
 10. "Simple Truths of Democracy": African Americans and Organized
 Labor in the Post-World War II South
 William Powell Jones
 11. Managing Discontent: The Life and Career of a Leamon Hood,
 Black Public Employee Union Activist
 Joseph A. McCartin
 Contributors
 Index