Bridging the gaps between African-American and labor history, this compelling study focuses on ten thousand black and white riverfront workers in New Orleans, and class and race relations through the turbulent Civil War and Reconstruction years, the racially flexible 1880s, the racially violent 1890s, and the early twentieth century's age of segregation. Arnesen explores the role of black unions in the city's larger African-American social network; the connection between race relation and union work rules; the political culture that alternately encouraged and discouraged biracial collaboration; and the rise and fall of two biracial labor federations (the Cotton Men's Executive Council from 1880 to the early 1890s, and the Dock and Cotton Council from 1901 to 1923). A pragmatic response to the reality of a racially divided work force, biracial unionism provided a strong framework for mediating racial tensions and ensuring limited cooperation across racial lines. By the early twentieth century, New Orleans' waterfront workers had forged a powerful movement that violated the basic tenets of the segregationist era. This unique study will appeal to students and scholars of African-American, labor, social, southern, or urban history.

Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923

Business & Money

Arnesen, Eric

Economics

Oxford University Press

"During the nineteenth century, American and foreign travelers often found New Orleans a delightful, exotic stop on their journeys; few failed to marvel at the riverfront, the center of the city's economic activity. . . . But absent from the tourism industry's historical recollection is any reference to the immigrants or black migrants and their children who constituted the army of laborers along the riverfront and provided the essential human power to keep the cotton, sugar, and other goods flowing. . . . In examining one diverse group of workers--the 10,000 to 15,000 cotton screwmen, longshoremen, cotton and round freight teamsters, cotton yardmen, railroad freight handlers, and Mississippi River roustabouts--this book focuses primarily on the workplace and the labor movement that emerged along the waterfront."--From the preface

Job Hunting & Careers

University of Illinois Press

During World War I, as many as half a million southern African Americans permanently left the South to create new homes and lives in the urban North, and hundreds of thousands more would follow in the 1920s. This dramatic transformation in the lives of many black Americans involved more than geography: the increasingly visible “New Negro” and the intensification of grassroots black activism in the South as well as the North were the manifestations of a new challenge to racial subordination. Eric Arnesen’s unique collection of articles from a variety of northern, southern, black, and white newspapers, magazines, and books explores the “Great Migration,” focusing on the economic, social, and political conditions of the Jim Crow South, the meanings of race in general — and on labor in particular — in the urban North, the grassroots movements of social protest that flourished in the war years, and the postwar “racial counterrevolution.” An introduction by the editor, headnotes to documents, a chronology, questions for consideration, a bibliography, and an index are included.

Black Protest And The Great Migration.

History

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

Black Protest and the Great Migration chronicles the move of Southern African Americans into the urban North during World War I and into the 1920's, using a unique collection of articles from a variety of northern, southern, black, and white newspapers, magazines, and books to explore the impact of the Great Migration.

Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)

Africa

Bedford/St.Martin's

Black Protest and the Great Migration & Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1950s a

Howard-Pitney, David

Thomas Edison and Modern America & Black Protest and the Great Migration & Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-1945 & American Social Classes in the 1950s

Gitelman, Lisa

Collins, Theresa M.

PACKARD, Vance

Polenberg, Richard D.

Americas

Southern Horrors and Other Writings & Black Protest and the Great Migration & Age of McCarthyism

Royster, Jacqueline Jones

Schrecker, Ellen

Wells, Ida B.

Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-1945 & Black Protest and the Great Migration & Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism 2e & Conservatives in ... 1981-1989 & How the Other Half Lives 2e

Jacobs, Meg

Leviatin, David

Zelizer, Julian E.

Schulman, Bruce J.

Polenberg,Richard

Black Protest and the Great Migration & Welfare Reform in the Early Republic & Rise of Conservatism in America, 1945-2000

Story, Ronald

Laurie, Bruce

Rockman, Seth

From the time the first tracks were laid in the early nineteenth century, the railroad has occupied a crucial place in America's historical imagination. Now, for the first time, Eric Arnesen gives us an untold piece of that vital American institution—the story of African Americans on the railroad.  African Americans have been a part of the railroad from its inception, but today they are largely remembered as Pullman porters and track layers. The real history is far richer, a tale of endless struggle, perseverance, and partial victory. In a sweeping narrative, Arnesen re-creates the heroic efforts by black locomotive firemen, brakemen, porters, dining car waiters, and redcaps to fight a pervasive system of racism and job discrimination fostered by their employers, white co-workers, and the unions that legally represented them even while barring them from membership.  Decades before the rise of the modern civil rights movement in the mid-1950s, black railroaders forged their own brand of civil rights activism, organizing their own associations, challenging white trade unions, and pursuing legal redress through state and federal courts. In recapturing black railroaders' voices, aspirations, and challenges, Arnesen helps to recast the history of black protest and American labor in the twentieth century.

Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality

Harvard University Press

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