Blair Kelley, "Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class" (LIveright, 2023)

Summary

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Episode Overview

In this episode of New Books in Political Science (New Books Network), host Susan Liebell interviews historian Dr. Blair L.M. Kelley about her new book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (Liveright, 2023). The conversation delves into the overlooked but foundational role of Black workers in American history—centering on laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers—while weaving in Dr. Kelley's own family story. Together, Liebell and Kelley explore how Black working people built institutions, transformed unions, shaped public policy, and constructed vibrant communities in the face of exclusion, violence, and systemic racism. The episode brings to light how these individual and collective struggles inform today’s debates on reparations and labor activism.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Book’s Personal and Scholarly Genesis

• Dr. Kelley recounts being approached for the book due to rising interest in the “white working class”—prompting her to reflect on the Black working class and her own family’s migration and labor history.
  • “For me, weaving in the family stories is how I teach. It’s how I think...If real humans don’t fit the theories or the grand frameworks that we as scholars create, who are we talking about?” (Dr. Kelley, 06:47)

2. Research Methods: Oral Histories, Family Stories, Photographs

• Kelley’s family stories (especially from her mother) shaped her worldview and informed the book; archival research and oral histories (e.g., Duke’s “Behind the Veil” project) helped her link personal history with broader trends.
• Graduate students aided in curating photographs and oral history collections, providing poignant images and narratives that amplify the book’s themes.
  • “It was a thrill to get to go to the archival record, to go to the census record and piece those bits and tales back together and see their truths reflected in those archival sources.” (Dr. Kelley, 09:01)
  • Kelley highlights the importance of showing Black workers both as individuals and as members of families and professions.

3. The Centrality of Community and Collective Survival

• Kelley contrasts the mythology of the American individualistic “bootstraps” narrative with the reality of Black collectivism as survival in the post-slavery era.
  • “They were reliant on remaking kin and community because of the trauma of slavery...their mythology...is fundamentally different. And it’s not valuing profit or accumulation in a sort of individualistic way, but really the networks of support, of community, of communication over time and space become so important.” (Dr. Kelley, 16:37)

4. Deep Dives into Professions & Labor Resistance

a. Washerwomen: Agency, Skill, and Resistance

• Laundry became stigmatized Black women’s work but was also a site of autonomy, activism, and power—rooted in home-based labor and mutual support.
  • “Washer women immediately begin to determine that they will do this work in their own yards, in their own spaces, so that they can prioritize their own households...and that they will do it on their own schedule.” (Dr. Kelley, 20:09)
• Early unionization (e.g., Jackson, Mississippi, 1865) highlights Black women’s political consciousness and organizing skill.
• Importance of physical and intellectual labor—“a mix of art and science and physical effort”—and the role of private space in collective empowerment.
  • “They don’t make a lot of money, but they do get to determine the rest of their lives in really key ways to keep them a little bit safer and a little bit more connected to their family than they had been in enslavement.” (Dr. Kelley, 22:03)
• Resistance to workplace violence and exploitation, including sexual assault and lack of legal recourse, led many to choose laundry over domestic work.
  • “The choice to be a washerwoman...provided that space for women to be able to stop on a front step and not get roped into household dynamics that were more and more dangerous for them.” (Dr. Kelley, 24:55)
• Political influence was exercised through strategic labor withdrawal, e.g., Atlanta washerwomen’s strike.

b. Pullman Porters: Visibility, Surveillance, and Organized Power

• Pullman porters, central to Black male employment, were highly visible, tightly surveilled, and purposely denied autonomy (often called “George” or “boy” regardless of their real names).
  • “The entire idea of their employment was to be that man servant...made black workers essential to this employment.” (Dr. Kelley, 28:54)
• Despite surveillance, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters formed after a decade of struggle, ultimately becoming a springboard for wider civil rights organizing.
  • Pullman porters used their unique role traveling the country to circulate Black newspapers and foster community consciousness.
  • “They were tightly surveilled, spied on even as they organized. But they managed to build a union...” (Dr. Kelley, 29:30)
• The government and white-only unions often excluded Black workers, necessitating separate organizing and advocacy for inclusion.

c. Postal Workers: Pathways to Citizenship and Dignity

• Postal work, at one time legally reserved for white workers, became a platform for Black workers to gain stability, respect, and upward mobility—despite persistent violence, legal exclusion, and discriminatory civil service practices.
  • “Some of them are lynched and killed in the effort. Some of them are attacked as they deliver. The myth of the black male rapist inserts itself into postal work...” (Dr. Kelley, 37:06)
• Postal workers’ efforts ultimately helped to pave the way for civil rights advocacy and contest the myth of fairness in “colorblind” civil service hiring.

5. Nuances in Government Role and Labor Protections

• The New Deal’s landmark labor protections largely excluded Black workers (domestics and agricultural workers), cementing racial divides in labor rights.
  • “By not pushing to include domestic and agricultural work, it was basically creating a racial divide in the protections in the country.” (Dr. Kelley, 32:40)
• Kelley points out that narratives like “Rosie the Riveter” only told a partial story:
  • “Rosie the Riveter had a black maid cooking dinner and tending to her children while she was gone, and we’ve never told that story on that national level.” (Dr. Kelley, 35:10)

6. Reparations, Historical Memory, and Contemporary Labor Activism

• Reparations are threaded throughout the book, with Kelley urging readers to see both the collective scale and “individual human costs” of these labor histories.
  • “Having someone’s labor intergenerationally could really make on a family...slowing that question down for me is a really powerful way to think about it and to remember the real cost for today’s workers.” (Dr. Kelley, 41:09)
• The book’s historical narrative is also intended as inspiration for modern labor resistance in contemporary settings—Amazon warehouses, supermarkets, nursing homes.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Black Collectivity:
  “The American mythology of lifting oneself by the bootstraps...I found the opposite for black Americans, that they were reliant on remaking kin and community because of the trauma of slavery...”
  Dr. Kelley, 16:37

• On Methodology:
  “If real humans don’t fit the theories or the grand frameworks that we as scholars create, who are we? Who are we talking about?”
  Dr. Kelley, 06:47

• On the Agency of Washerwomen:
  “I see the organization of women in 1865 into a union in Jackson, Mississippi, which was just bowled me over. Such a reminder...workers have a consciousness, have a sense of what difference their labor makes.”
  Dr. Kelley, 21:42

• On Labor and Political Power:
  “[Pulling] out of that labor market gets those policies taken off the table and really reminds the city that there’s no alternative. And if we don’t consent, this is not going to work for you.”
  Dr. Kelley, 26:52

• On Federal Government’s Role:
  “By not pushing to include domestic and agricultural work, it was basically creating a racial divide in the protections in the country.”
  Dr. Kelley, 32:40

• On the Overlooked Story of Domestic Labor:
  “Rosie the Riveter had a black maid cooking dinner and tending to her children while she was gone, and we’ve never told that story on that national level in the way that we should.”
  Dr. Kelley, 35:10

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Timestamps of Important Segments

• 03:35 — Introduction: Framing the Black working class as central to American history
• 05:10 — Kelley discusses her entry to the topic and the importance of family stories
• 09:15 — Family history and use of oral histories and archival photos
• 16:32 — The myth of the American working class vs. Black collectivism
• 19:26 — Washerwomen’s labor: autonomy, skill, and early unionizing
• 24:52 — Violence faced by domestic workers; leverage and resistance
• 27:30 — Shift to Pullman porters: public presence, surveillance, union organizing
• 32:22 — Exclusion of Black workers from New Deal protections
• 35:07 — The real story behind wartime women’s labor ("Rosie the Riveter")
• 36:54 — Postal workers: overcoming exclusion, building citizenship, and dignity
• 40:29 — Reparations and contemporary relevance

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Final Thoughts

This episode demonstrates Dr. Kelley’s blend of rigorous scholarship and personal storytelling, offering an accessible yet nuanced narrative of Black labor history. The conversation highlights how the history of Black working people is not only foundational to American society but also instructive for current and future labor struggles. The episode closes with Dr. Kelley’s hope that the book will reshape the national conversation about work, dignity, and justice:

“We have a narrative that’s not true, and this is a really great effort at refocusing it and rethinking this.”
Susan Liebell, 42:38

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Recommended For: Historians, labor activists, students of race/class/gender, and anyone interested in re-centering narratives of American work and identity.

Transcript

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

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[Marshall Poe]

On Download Today hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. This in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk.

[Susan Liebell]

Welcome.

[Marshall Poe]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Susan Liebell]

Welcome back to New Books in Political Science, a podcast on the New Books Network. I'm Susan Liebell at St. Joseph's University and today I'm joined by Dr. Blair L.M. kelly to discuss her new book, Black the Roots of the Black Working Class, published by the Norton imprint live right in 2023. In the United States, the stoicism and importance of the working class is part of the national myth. The term is often used to conjure the and challenges of the white working class. And this obscures the ways in which black workers built institutions like the railroads and universities, but also how they transformed unions, changed public policy and established community. In Black Folk, Dr. Blair LM Kelly restores the black working class to the center of the American story by integrating the lives of laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids and postal workers. The book is both a Personal journey and a history of black labor in the United States from enslavement to the present day. With a focus on a critical era after Southern emancipation to the early 20th century, when the first generations of black working people carved out a world for themselves, Dr. Kelly captures the character of the lives of black workers not only as laborers, activists, or members of a class, but as individuals whose daily experiences mattered to themselves, to their communities, and to quote the nation at large, even as it denied their importance. As she weaves together rich oral histories, memoirs, photographs and secondary sources, Dr. Kelly shows how black workers of all genders were, quote, intertwined with the future of black freedom, black citizenship, and the establishment of civil rights for black Americans. She demonstrates how her own family's experiences mirror this wider history of the black working class, sometimes in ways that she herself did not realize before writing the book. Even as the book confronts violence, poor working conditions, and a government that often legislated to protect the interests of white workers and consumers, Black Folk celebrates the ways in which black people, quote, built and rebuilt vital spaces of resistance. Grounded in the secrets that they knew about themselves, about their community, their dignity and their survival. Black Folk looks back, but also forward. In examining the labor and challenges of individuals, Dr. Kelly sheds light on reparations and suggests that Amazon packaging, processing centers, supermarkets and nursing homes can be spaces of resistance and labor activism in the 21st century. Dr. Blair Ellen Kelly is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and incoming director of the center for the Study of the American South. The first black woman to serve in that role in the center's 30 year history. She is also the author of Right to Ride, Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy V. Ferguson from the University of North Carolina Carolina Press, and I am delighted to welcome her to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

[Susan Liebell]

Blair, how did you come to be interested in the black working class and write this particular book? In fact. And one thing I'm really interested in is whether your family was always going to be part of the story.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

So this came to me in an interesting way. I was approached by my editor who had been reading the literature that's come out about the white working class over the past decade, I'd say, and was wondering about the black working class. And, you know, came to me with it. And initially I'm like, well, I'm not a labor historian. I don't write unions and I don't, you know, this is not the work I do. I've done movement work and things around the African American experience more generally, but not so much the working class.

[Susan Liebell]

And.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

He said to me, you know, how would you write this book? How would you approach this question? And I thought of my family. I thought of my grandfather escaping from Georgia as a teenager with his. His family under the direction of his father, who realized that sharecropping would never be fair. I thought of my grandparents migration journeys. I thought of my father working as a ship fitter at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. And I thought of his father and his migration and his journey into Philadelphia in the 1920s. And so I was struck by the degree to which their story mirrored the kinds of things I've been teaching over the years and the emphasis I put on the human experience of being black and working class. And so I pitched that as my proposal, and it was accepted. And so I just started down that journey. And for me, weaving in the family stories is how I teach. It's how I think. It's how my brain works. If. If real humans don't fit the theories or the grand frameworks that we as scholars create, who are we? Who are we talking about? So I always go to that human experience and try to capture that, both for my own family and then for the people I'm studying that I discovered along the way, who I tried to treat as if they were my family.

[Susan Liebell]

Well, and that is part of the brilliance of this book. I'm not in your class, so I. I haven't had that experience of getting to know you. I didn't know you at all in reading the book. But what comes through from the very first page and really carries you through this is a page turner. And I, you know, I. I read a lot of history books, and some of them are. Have compelling subjects. Some of them are beautifully written. This has both. And it also has a kind of a narrative structure that makes it a page turner, despite the amount of information. And I think part of that is this naming of names. Like you. You want us to, you know, know who Cali House is, even if we didn't know it before we came into the book. And you want us to know some of your relatives, but you also want us to know people who followed those similar paths and wrote these were incredible memoirs or participated in oral histories so that you can speak in their words. And that is the part that I just loved. You call out how. When these oral histories are done, they are often done by observers who have never been in a backyard Washing area, and they've arrived without invitation. And to have the person who was interviewed's perspective so that the. The workers speak for themselves is just such a stunning, stunning part of this book as a reader. Okay, so let me ask you a little bit about method and how it is that you got these stories. I mean, there are moments in the book where I think, whoa, where is this coming from? And I go to the footnotes. So tell. Tell the listeners a little bit about where you found these stories, the family stories, the other ones that are really crucial to the narrative.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

So, my family stories, my mother was a storyteller, and she would tell me the same stories over and over and over again to the point where I was like, ma, I know that story. And she's like, yeah, anyway, and she would tell it again. And I think, you know, we had a bit of an age gap. She was an older mother for the time now, not an older mother at all, but like in her late 30s. And so I think she wanted me to know the world that she grew up in. And so much had changed in her lifetime. And when she was born, there wasn't a refrigerator in the house. There was an icebox. And so she was like, I need you to understand the sort of structural and. And difference in text of what was possible between when I was a child and now that you're growing up. So she really emphasized these family stories, her own experiences, the experiences of her grandparents and her parents. And so those were just part of my brain and how I think about my family initially. And those stories are interlayered with different family members telling me the same stories, my grandparents telling those same stories. And so it was a thrill to get to go to the archival record, to go to the census record and piece those bits and tales back together and see their truths reflected in those archival sources. In addition to that, I'm, you know, I'm an avid oral historian. I've taught oral history for a long time. It was one of the first things I did in graduate school was participate in a project called behind the Veil at Duke University. And so I used the behind the Veil collection. I've used other oral history collections that I discovered. My graduate students did an amazing sort of treasure trove hunt for different oral histories around the country for me. And so I just had the pleasure of just listening through them and finding the right ones that fit. And by amazing happenstance, I was able to find people who were connected to my family histories. A place called Elbert county was really resonant in My ancestors story of enslavement. And I found an Awasher woman who was born in Elbridge county, and I found a woman from Accomac County, Virginia, who probably migrated within a year of my grandfather. And so those kinds of amazing connections and really the beautiful little things that were happenstance really made such a difference in making those stories come alive for me. And, you know, not all of it even felt like happenstance. A lot of it felt like, you know, that these were things I was supposed to know and needed to know to really tell that grander story that's a bit bigger than me. And so I leaned into those moments.

[Susan Liebell]

No. And I teach in Philadelphia, and I think that your family went to Philadelphia. So many families went to Philadelphia. It's not surprising to me that actually your story maps on to some of these other stories in such profound ways. Because I think Philadelphia is under understood as, as so central to the building of not just the black working class, but black professions, just black institutions. And so I, I, it, it is, you know, you say in the book, and I'm gonna get the quote wrong about the, the number of people that trace their ancestry to the black working class in the period that you're talking about. So. And I think that sort of supports and makes it so much more understandable that all people who came from this, from this remarkable moment have these sort of ties that it wouldn't be so hard to see the combinations. Let me ask you a question about the photos, which are unbelievable. This book is unbelievable. And again, how you sort of mix up family and archival photos. And I wondered, how did you, how did you look for photos? Did you have strategies? Were you looking for places? Were you looking for occupations? What kind of work did you have to do to find these photographs?

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

So in addition to the family photos, which were of course much more easy to get permission for, huh. I work with some of my graduate students and former grad students to call through collections. And so they built up this huge archive of different photos from around the country for me to go through and really pick. And so I could try to amplify the professions that I wanted to talk about. And then also the sort of poignant moments, you know, finding the picture of a black woman made on her knees cleaning a set of steps was such a powerful one because it was a story I wanted to tell. And then my graduate student found that photograph for me, and without even knowing that that's what I was talking about in that chapter, which was so resonant. And then just some really beautiful things that were somewhat public access and some were in vanishing Georgia, which fit beautifully. Pictures of places that were within really proximate distance of my family that I wanted to capture. So it was. I could have had triple the number of photographs in this book because there was just so much to illustrate and to tell the picture. Thrilling part.

[Susan Liebell]

Sorry to throw out the picture. And it's two pictures of that maid are my favorites on 184 and 187. The fact that first somebody is above the stairs looking down at her and we see her face, but then he is behind her and we see her on her knees. And I just keep asking myself, well, who is Jack Delano? How is he taking these pictures? And look what he was trying to capture. He doesn't just want her face. He wants her taken from behind to show the work that she does. Which you talk in detail about this getting down on your knees instead of using the mop that had been invented by a black inventor of wanting people on their knees, which is also a very powerful moment in the book. Let's talk a little bit about the term working class. You write in the book that the term is often used to highlight this American myth. And it's really associated with thinking about white working class. Sometimes just the male white working class. Talk to me a little bit about, you know, you weren't a scholar of the working class. You know what you know, but. But you had studied movements, and movements are often organized by the working class. So talk to me a little bit about how it is that black Americans have been defined outside of the working class and defined in ways that are the opposite of what you present in the book. The opposite of stoic and hard working.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

Yeah. I think that the American mythology of lifting oneself by the bootstraps and the independence of an American spirit, and that you really don't need other people or any kind of collectivity to be impactful. I found the opposite for black Americans, that they were reliant on remaking kin and community because of the trauma of slavery, that they come to think of themselves in different kinds of ways. The mythology that they share with themselves about who they are is fundamentally different. And it's not valuing profit or accumulation in a sort of individualistic way, but really the networks of support, of community, of communication over time and space become so important to survival and for success and for transformation in the 20th century. And so it was really a powerful reminder of the things I did know from studying movement history that you could see those networks, you could See that connectivity and something that I have always been teaching my students, to really see it amplified over and over again when I honed in on studying these professions, was a really powerful reminder.

[Susan Liebell]

There are some huge themes in the book that run through all of the chapters. Rule of law, the rule of unions, reparations, how important communication and networking is, building collective consciousness, violence, respect. I can't tell you how much is written in the margins of this copy of the book of just how unbelievably thought provoking the book is, and also how much I learned from the book, because I actually did not know very much about washerwomen strikes. And I was sort of surprised at some things that I should know that I didn't know. So thank you. I'd like to start with this chapter that you wrote, and you title it from something that you took from the census, where this woman, Sarah, lists her occupation as laundress and her industry as at home and her employer as working on own account. And you in you title her chapter Working on own account, which I think is really beautiful. Talk to us a little bit about laundry at this time, why it is so associated with black women and why it is that they sought it out as something that would empower them.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

So laundry work, particularly in the south, but nationally overall, was connected to black women and to black women in slavery. It was arduous work. You had to make soap, boil water, bring things out by hand before the advent of any of the machinery of the 20th century, even the basic rudimentary machines, the ringers and press rolls that they come up with to get water out of laundry that households get in the 1930s and 40s before all that. And so black women do that work in enslavement, and they do that work in freedom because it becomes associated with them as a race and therefore stigmatized. So as they move into freedom, it's amazing to see that washer women immediately begin to determine that they will do this work in their own yards, in their own spaces, so that they can prioritize their own households and raising their children or grandchildren, and that they will do it on their own schedule, that they won't do it faster and accelerate this, but really take the days of labor that it really requires. And there's a big fight about it, because white employers would like more and faster, and they want control, and they want black women to do this work in addition to other kinds of labor within white households and really just become household employees. And so they push back on this immediately. I see the Organization of women in 1865 into a union in Jackson, Mississippi, which was just bowled me over. Such a reminder that in enslavement, black men and women had a vision about what their labor meant and a sense of their power. We talk so much about consciousness raising and union organizing. This is a reminder that workers have a consciousness, have a sense of what difference their labor makes. They need resources, they need support, but they don't necessarily need to be taught about what difference their work makes in the world. They can see for themselves, they can observe for themselves. And so I think that's a really powerful reminder of the true context of organizing in that moment. So washer women are at the hub of this kind of thinking. And then they also use their power not just to. To support each other, to get days off, to get holidays, to set basic minimum wages for themselves. They don't make a lot of money, but they do get to determine the rest of their lives in really key ways to keep them a little bit safer and a little bit more connected to their family than they had been in enslavement. And they also use their power for others. They organize with other labor organizations in coalition with streetcar boycotts, which I studied in my first book. And they're just feisty and amazing, independent folks. And, you know, there's a beautiful book by Tara Hunter to Join My Freedom, which I just adore. And I will mention every time I do a media appearance because her work was such a guide to me as I was becoming a historian. And I thought when I went to this. Oh, her example of this Atlanta washerwoman in the 1881. That's the thing. That's the amazing thing that happened. I'm going to have a hard time writing something else, but when I went through the record, I learned that Atlanta was the tip of the iceberg, that there were smaller, similar struggles everywhere around washer women. And so the breadth of it was astounding.

[Susan Liebell]

This chapter is amazing and has you do this with every single chapter. You show us that this labor that people take for granted is highly skilled. And in this chapter, you talk about how laundry is a mix of art and science and physical effort. And so that the physical effort gets a lot of attention, but not the. What do you add to a stain and what temperature is the water? And all of these things that you show the nuance of the work, which therefore means not everybody can do it. And this is part of what they recognize. I also love in this chapter how you describe their space and how it is that that Space helps them with this collective consciousness and understanding of what they do. So when they have a spare minute, they're not being ordered to do something else by an employer. They're having conversation. They're taking care of their children, but they. They have space for conversation that is not being surveilled. And surveillance plays such a huge role. Especially when you get to the chapter on the Pullman porters. Because they're being surveilled every second.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

Yeah.

[Susan Liebell]

Meanwhile, the washerwomen have some sort of space to discuss labor away from you. Call it space making away from their supervisors. And they're making their own timetables. You alluded to safety, and I just want to press you a little bit on that, because that's another theme in this book, is the kind of violence that all workers face in this time period that you're talking about. But there's some that are more particular to women who work in households. And I thought you'd maybe expand on that a little.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

Absolutely. I really wanted to blend in the consideration of sexual assault that black women had to take as domestic workers. Women who worked in household were often considered appropriate targets for the aggressions of white men and white women. And from physical violence to sexual violence, they really had no recourse, no ways of protecting themselves. So the choice to be a washerwoman oftentimes paid a little bit less than it would have to live in as a domestic in a household. But it provided that space for women to be able to stop on a front step and not get roped into household dynamics that were more and more dangerous for them. And there's an awareness of it and a consciousness about their desire to stay free from those kinds of attacks is part of what they point to in their own labor organizing.

[Susan Liebell]

And it's even seen by people you might not think would see it. You have this quote from John Ray of the Knights of Labor saying, I think these women need to protect themselves from, quote, the avariceness of some of the brethren, and they shall have it if I'm forced to remain here long enough to accomplish it. He's not really the one who accomplishes it. They do. But it's interesting how many people are aware of this, that this. This is a vulnerable. An additional vulnerability for them. Another part of this chapter that I absolutely love is that the women don't have the vote, but yet they have political influence through not doing the laundry. And I just thought I couldn't reread that part enough because I thought that was fascinating way of leveraging Power.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

Yes, yes, absolutely. I think that the Atlanta strike teaches me that. But then you see that replicated in places where there are new laws proposed about regulating laundresses. Then pulling out of that labor market gets those policies taken off the table and really reminds the city that there's no alternative. And if we don't consent, this is not going to work for you. It's really something. The phrase good help is hard to find kept popping up in my mind as I was doing this work because they made themselves hard to find if the circumstances were wrong.

[Susan Liebell]

No, I love that part. And the white community has so stigmatized the doing of the laundry that there is no competition, which creates yet another point of exploitation by the workers themselves. They recognize that you don't have choice, and we can get a betterment for our conditions in this way. I also love that there's this contrast between this chapter, which is about private backyards, women talking to each other, and the next chapter, which is about the Pullman porter. And I think if you pushed people on black working class in the early 20th century, you might get them to remember the Pullman porter. Because the face of Pullman was the black worker in the uniform, positioned in a particular way with. With names that were not their own. So this one is very, very different. Very, very public. And. And again, you're using a person, Cornell Lawrence Dellums, to tell the story and tell us a little bit about how this kind of work, which also had complex networks and community building and communication, was so different from the way in which the washer women worked.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

Yes. So the Pullman porters were on display when they were at work and on call. The entire idea of their employment was to be that man servant. George Mortimer Pullman designed the Pullman palace cars, sleeping berths during the night that could be transformed into luxurious seating in the day to make long distance travel very comfortable for passengers. And so he invoked this stereotype. He was up from upstate New York, but, you know, I guess everybody has these stereotypes in their head at that time. And so he thought of black men as the antebellum, generous, wealthy plantation, and that you would have a refined black man waiting on you hand and foot. So that was really the image that he used. And again, made black workers essentially to this employment. There were some Asian, particularly Filipino workers who did so on the West Coast. But for most of the country, it was an overwhelming majority of black men. Becomes the largest private employer of black men in the United States. So like washerwomen, they end up with this accidental leverage over the labor market. But unlike washerwomen, they don't really have those private spaces, as you said. And so they were tightly surveilled, spied on even as they organized. But they managed to build a union over at least one decade of concentrated effort, but I would argue a longer time period of desiring organizing in their work.

[Susan Liebell]

I liked that part of the book. The way you always go back to show how it is. This didn't just come out of that one particular moment. I think it's one of the strengths of your, you know, the way you write history. And this chapter has such little details that are so amazing. I want to find a way to use my. Your book and my teaching. And I've been trying to think it through of what it is students could get. And one thing here is you talk about how Pullman allowed for the porters not to be called by their names, but to either be called George, which was his name, or.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

Or boy.

[Susan Liebell]

And the person that you're following, Cornell, Lawrence Dellums, was named after Paul Laurence Dunbar, the poet. And when you cite that moment in the poem, the mask that grins and lies, the kind of things you need to put up with when you are disrespected. And then the fact that the brotherhood of sleeping car porters, the union that's ultimately formed, is service, not servitude, as the motto. I just loved the way you brought all of those things together. And also the way they were using the trains to bring newspapers back and forth like the washerwomen who are also walking around in the streetcars. It's just terrific. I wanted to ask you about the federal government because it plays a kind of a. It's not exactly a villain, but it's a sort of lurking presence that's not always positive. So sometimes the government seems to help, sometimes it doesn't. Tell us a little bit about the government that is supposed to be regulating wages and how it is that they include or do not include the black working class.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

So the overwhelming working class, when the government finally sort of butts into industry in a massive way during the New Deal in ways that are super helpful for most workers, they exclude domestic workers and they exclude agricultural workers. So you exclude a bulk of black workers in that moment from hourly protection and minimum wage limits. And it's a really powerful little streak in this memory of, okay, the New Deal made such a difference. It did. And yet by not pushing to include domestic and agricultural work, it was basically creating a racial divide in the protections in the country. The Pullmans also were excluded initially from railway protections because they were connected to the cars and not to the railroads themselves. The white union chartered itself as an all white union and excluded the black Pullman Porter workers from the very beginning. So they had to build their own separate union union, which was quite a fight. But eventually, in 1937, they're able to do so and be recognized federally. And that was such a powerful intervention. So you have both the exclusion and the inclusion. But the Pullman Porters use their platform to push for more coverage for black workers, for more inclusion in industry and defense jobs. They build the March on Washington movement in the 1930s and 40s, which becomes the group that brings the March on Washington in 1963 that we all know of. And so their long tail in terms of improving the condition of workers really comes from their own organizing history. A union that was built not just by pulling foreigners, but by black people in general who were concerned about their condition and participated in making their union possible.

[Susan Liebell]

No, and I love in the book how it is you show how the federal government and the established unions both along the way are helpful and also discriminatory and hurtful. That the, the not including domestics in those wages means that the wages are low and that allows white women to go back to the workforce because they have hired underpriced, underpaid domestic, black domestic workers. So it's empowering one group of people at the exp of another. And you really show that in a. In a nuanced way throughout the book.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

Yeah, that. That was the one that really struck me in the gut. You know, the story that we tell of women workers, Rosie the Riveter is going in and supporting the country. Rosie the Riveter had a black maid cooking dinner and tending to her children while she was gone. And we've never told that story on that national level in the way that we should.

[Susan Liebell]

And the other story you tell about that woman going to be Rosie the Riveter is she doesn't even know the name of the person who's living in her house. And that is a gut punch moment in the book in which a woman dies and her employer does not know her name. She's been working in her house. And I like the way earlier in the book you've talked about the myth of the mammy. You've talked about the myth of black women wanting to rock the babies and nurse the babies, babies and hear and that it's, oh, we're all one big family. And then this is sort of shown to Be such so the opposite when somebody doesn't even know where to go if somebody dies in their own home. The last thing I want to ask you about is the postal workers. And this chapter is entitled Everything sufficient for a good life. And it is the most uplifting of the chapters. Even though it starts out badly, that fear after the Haitian revolution means that in 1825, they take away the ability to be a postal worker from anybody but free white persons. So it doesn't start out well, but the triumph of the postal workers is incredible. And the ways in which that prosperity and dignity, which is an important part of the chapter, changes things. Want to unpack that just a little bit?

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

Yeah, absolutely. I think we take for granted the black presence in the post office. Black workers in places where there's a decent sized black population can often be the majority of postal workers. So we sort of think of it as easy, and we don't slow down that thinking. There's a great historian named Philip Rubio who's done amazing work on the post office. And so I draw on some of his scholarship and again, some amazing oral histories and some of the things I knew from my study of. Of movement history to pull together a reminder of the degree to which postal work is tied to our citizenship. It's delineated in the constitution. It is the only sort of labor that becomes exclusively white by law early on. And that black workers fight to be postal workers, and that some of them are lynched and killed in the effort. Some of them are attacked as they deliver. The myth of the black male rapist inserts itself into postal work, that somehow when you go to deliver the mail to a household, you'll be victimizing the white women in that household. A flip of the real sort of people who are victimized in white households over and over again, systematically. And so it's just by drawing close to that history, it told a much different story than I think many of us would assume about the black inclusion and postal work. And that it was a site of struggle well into the mid 20th century where black workers had to fight for their rights to be included, to be able to get through the civil service exam in a fair way and have the right to jobs. And then they use those pathways to really build other pathways for black workers to be included in postal work. And they use that to be a launching path for civil rights.

[Susan Liebell]

I was reading the postal worker chapter while I was also reading the Supreme Court's recent decision on affirmative action. And I thought they were really important. In fact, I Think your book is really important for this particular Supreme Court historical moment because this notion of colorblindness, this notion of equal opportunity, the idea that a civil service exam means that everything is now quote unquote neutral, when actually there's a built in loophole in which somebody can choose the person who doesn't have the top score if they want to. You know, allowing for a little bit of. Of prejudice there from the. The white supervisors who are, are choosing and also the extent of the violence, how much work has to be done just to get to equal pay and leave and other kinds of worker safety issues. So I think this chapter is very, very important to help us understand just how much happens before. But you do talk about reparations and how maybe it's easier to see what would be due a person who cleared a land as opposed to talking about it in that big way. And reparations is sort of all throughout the book anyway. I wonder if you wanted to say a little bit more about that and also your hope that the book encourages people in new workplaces that are not Pullman cars or, you know, washerwomen's backyards to organize.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

Yeah, I really thought of the reparations question as extremely important to reflecting on this moment and reflecting on the fact that black workers had thought about reparations questions in the past. You mentioned Kelly House early on. She's such an important forebear, I think, a washerwoman who organizes others to think about reparations questions before, at the turn of the 20th century. And so what's really powerful here is that individual impact. I mean, I think we can think on this massive scale, but we don't think about the individual human cause costs that all of that had and the individual human impacts that having someone's labor intergenerationally could really make on a family. And so slowing that question down for me, I'm a bad mathematician. Slowing those questions down for me is a really powerful way to think about it and to remember the real cost for today's workers. I think it's so important to remember the value and the power of black networks, black institutions, and a black ethic that draws from a unique American experience. Oftentimes we're talking about this is a country of immigrants and we are erasing the experience of Native Americans and the. The experience of black Americans when we do that work. And that in having those different histories, there's a different way of thinking about self and approaching those questions that's valuable and helpful, I think, to all workers today. As we build and we see. I think this particular moment of striking workers, we really have to build another narrative about what solidarity can get us all and how we can rethink what might be fair and just for working generations today.

[Susan Liebell]

Well, Blair, I cannot thank you enough for joining me for this conversation and writing this book. I loved reading it. I look forward to assigning it, gifting it to other people. And I think what you just said is just so important. We have a narrative that's not true, and this is a really great effort at refocusing it and rethinking this. Is there anything I haven't asked you that you want to say about the book?

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

I think you did a great job of asking me some really great questions.

[Susan Liebell]

Well, it is such a good book, I can't recommend it enough to everyone. I've been talking to Dr. Blair L.M. kelly, and her book is Black the Roots of the Black Working Class from live right Norton 2023. And I will have links to all of the books that that Blair mentioned in the podcast in the show notes. Thanks so much, Blair.

[Dr. Blair L.M. Kelly]

Thanks for having me.

[Susan Liebell]

Oh, thank you so much.