Capitalism and the Making and Unmaking of Black America (African American Past, Session 04)

so Lonnie this next session on capitalism in the making them and making of urban America was all over the map and I think we planned it that way and it turned out that way we had a range of perspectives that went from America's first black millionaire to the ongoing problems of poverty in the inner-city and the ongoing problems of poverty and opportunity in rural America among black land holders so I think it would be interesting for students and teachers to think about how this kinds of kind of range models the way we do history the different ways of thinking about communities and our ability to disagree with one another and how it gives the public different portals into this question that in some ways what this session does and I think what will resonate with students is it said here are traditional ways to look at capitalism and its impact here are non-traditional ways to look at exceptional stories of people who are able to overcome the limits of sort of the racism in a capitalist system but also here's what this means for those who were landless here's what it means for those who find themselves in cities trying to adjust to a new factory system so that in a way what this session does for me is it's messy my capitalism it's complicated like understanding how capitalism has shaped so much of the African American experience and it is full of ambiguity looking at those who embrace capitalism versus those who try to find alternative systems so this was a large messy section just like Catholics what I'm hoping is that features are also able to use this to help students think about the relationship between history and public policy William Julius Wilson who gave one of the presentations has been central to that integration he's been an advisor to presidents he's a sociologist not a historian but he's used history in advising presidents on how to think about poverty policy in all the sessions but especially this one we tried to do something that historians talk about all the time to themselves which is how to give people a useful and usable history how do you help people understand that history matters not just because you look back but you use it to shape the world you're facing today and so I thought this sessions brilliantly would give people an opportunity to understand how these debates steeped in history are fundamentally crucial going forward in this country there can be little doubt that capitalism in its developmental arts has fed off the bodies of african-americans in a variety of well-known and often devastating ways it is hyper exploited the labor of enslaved and freed men women and children driving the country's economic growth at crucial historical moments it has disrupted black families and communities through forced relocation seasonal employment and underemployment and a variety of legal devices American capitalism has confined black workers to regional and local labor markets where they long receive the lowest of wages and suffer the greatest of vulnerabilities it is benefited from the use of black convict labor and some of the most dynamic modernizing sectors of the economy especially the post-civil war southern economy American capitalism has contributed to the construction of the edifice we know as Jim Crow it has created a large black underclass whose prospects for escape are extremely limited and it has helped turn criminality and mass incarceration in two sources of profit as well as social control they also suggest the complex and dynamic how complex and dynamic the black relationship with capitalism has been indeed they remind us that capitalism's developmental arts have themselves been shaped by black struggles for freedom that would be meaningful for opportunities that could be rewarding culturally as well as economically for empowerment that their places of work and for political access that might influence public policy the papers also remind us that African Americans both seized occasions to turn the instruments and logics of capitalism to their own advantage and charted out alternatives to those logics and instruments either to contest or to evade capitalism's full embrace african-american history it seems to me offers a distinct and compelling vantage point from which to understand how American capitalism emerged how it came into crisis eventually how it was transformed in a corporate and potentially corporatist direction how it was required in moments of crisis to move along some social democratic paths and how its relationship to the state at all levels was almost perpetually rearranged let me offer a few examples african-american history as no other shows that American capitalism is only part of a global system of social and economic relations there is no such a thing as American capitalism without the global context and set of interconnections that make possible the accumulation of Labor and other vital resources african-american history that is in economic and in other terms is by definition transnational history and it demands that we think in very expansive ways in whatever work historically we do african-american history almost as no other give the lie to mythology's of the market and how the market operates mythologies that depict the market as a trans historical institution in which all parties seem to behave according to sets of transnational rules the African American transition out of slay every is emblematic in this regard demonstrating that labor markets are born and they developed and that they are invariably products of struggle among actors who want very different things former slaves wanted land in economic independence former slave owners wanted submission and near absolute control something is close to slavery as was possible neither wish to bargain in market terms neither got what they wanted and some semblance of a labor market when it did emerge was the outcome of intent and of often violent battles african-american history demonstrates as well that capitalism by its very nature generates formidable opposition and that even if the opposition doesn't fully succeed it creates new fields of force and requires new diversions african-americans failed to win land reform in the Civil War era but they struggle and we'll hear more about this in many ways to loosen the grips of the labor market to acquire land to reconstitute their families and communities and to disentangle themselves from the tentacles of capitalist instruments and exploiters they created their own towns rent groups and emigration societies eventually they built national and international political movements organized around the goal of defeating European imperial powers in Africa the Caribbean and elsewhere around the globe and of advancing the cause of social justice everywhere at the same time African American history shows that capitalism like any social system makes for hierarchies and contradictions within the population it feeds upon we are all well aware of the important forms of social differentiation that developed among african-americans beginning with their enslavement and continued to structure their communities at times in politically consequential if not convulsive ways but we tend to pay less attention we'll hear more about this to the actors in institutions that defy the representation of those communities those who make their peace with the capitalist order and seek to benefit from it who themselves exploit members of their communities and who effectively build underground economies of goods and services many of them illegal that are simultaneously valuable to African Americans and often essential to the running of the larger capitalist order finally african-american history deepens our understanding of the intersections of race and class and of the discourses of protest that the development of capitalism has produced and reproduced african-americans have composed a major segment of the American working class as both slaves and free people for longer than any other social or ethnic group in the country the American working class in American labor history cannot be understood apart from either African Americans or the racialization z-- to which their presence and struggles have given rise their critiques of slavery and the slave trade their aspirations for a different sort of freedom than either their owners or the federal state intended their demands for self-governance and for power as workers and their ideas of how social justice might be enacted through the mechanisms of the state have been central to the how the problems of capitalism have been framed and how major reforms have been pursued but over the last 15 years this has changed there's much more attention two black land owners and I think it's as a result of the 1999 settlement of the Pigford versus Glickman class-action suit which found the US Department of Agriculture guilty of discriminating against black farmers this new research reveals the ways that land ownership was much more widespread than we've acknowledged and much more important to the black freedom struggle than we've than we've ever imagined it reveals that most black farm owners were struggling for land to resist engage and confront the advance of American capitalism so they were embracing property relations and kept the property relations of capitalism in order to escape the social relations of capitalism for the former slaves land ownership was essential many people have referred to this they deemed control of land to be integral to their lives as emancipated people and to their children's future the government swiftly betrayed the free people's aspirations for land but also gave white farmers opportunities to become landowners through various homestead acts and other instruments despite federal betrayal and violent resistance African Americans quest for land did not end a significant number of African Americans managed to buy land by pouncing on slim opportunities one example of this was in North Carolina where the migration of turpentine production to Georgia during the late 19th century cleared the way for some sharecroppers both black and white to buy land for the first time we're also beginning to appreciate how central black women were to land acquisition women and children often ran the farm wild men held jobs and other places on other farms and other lines of work in addition to playing a managerial role many black women took the lead in purchasing farms they were the ones scouting out you know auction sales and reading but they were often the literate ones who reading these ads and finding out what was going on women's household production and sale of surplus surplus farm products also played a crucial role in making land ownership possible there is a woman who one of the students in my oral history project breaking new ground interviewed named Nettie - - sir who kept a garden and she was featured in a newspaper article for keeping a garden for over 40 years of her adult life but she credited her grandmother with showing her that way of living that subsistence garden way of living that everybody's talking about now that black women white women in the rural South had been living they were living like that for years and then you also have to think about the countless other black women in the South who never did attain land but nevertheless also drew on these strategies of keeping gardens in order to make a living and to have a decent life the savings women created by keeping gardens taking in laundry sewing their own clothes all of this contributed to the remarkable growth in the number of farm owners in 1865 the number of black farm owners in the southern states was negligible by 1920 there were 220 thousand farms in the country owned by African Americans or a quarter of the farms operated by black people and even these census numbers fail to capture the extent of land ownership because the census only counted farms that were considered commercially viable black farm owners ranged from those who quote-unquote we're living like white folks and having sharecroppers of their own having people who they paid to run the farm to people who owned less than an acre of land so it was a broad swath of people but most of them owned much less than 30 acres forty acres for these farmers owning land represented the promised if not always the substance of sanctuary from economic dependence and violence during the Jim Crow era it also often was part of a mix of several types of labor that they relied on to make a living very few african-american farm owners were economically secure enough to rely on farming alone to support their families they passed together a living from a variety of sources seasonal railroad construction selling farm selling farm products and even often having their children work on the farms of other landowners often other black people though and that's something that we don't hear enough about this high point of land ownership in 1920 is where historians usually abandoned the story of african-americans and they just focus on the decline we move on to the great migration we move on to the new Negro Renaissance another way they managed to buy land was through what's known as dual tenure and this is one of the most important contributions that scholars have made in the last 15 or 20 years about african-american farm owning and farmers in general farm families work the sharecroppers or renters while also working their own land Irene Walker led four of her grown children in buying several tracts of land near the Mississippi River her grandson Samuel Lee was a teenager when his family bought land in an interview that's part of that oral history collection he remembered how owning land changed his grandmother his parents and his extended family it really caused them to get more energy from somewhere because just about all their spare time when they were not working on a farm that we rented they would be up there cutting down trees moving the trees and trying to get more for themselves get more of their own land you see to me he said it was a beautiful thing because they felt that there was going to be some great benefits from it they say now when we get this done we're going to have our own land it just means something to own land you know have a piece of land that you can call your own and nobody can put you off it you don't have to worry about a man being able to tell you I don't need you anymore while Samuel E and his grandmother Irene we're becoming landowners for the first time they also were confronting a capitalist transformation of Agriculture that replaced human labor with machinery and relied more heavily on chemicals with devastating consequences for the environment and for human health mostly the human health of african-americans but fewer and fewer people were growing more and more unluckiness farms of course this transformation of farming was a worldwide phenomenon in this country african-americans were far from being the only victims of this capitalist change in agriculture but the changes fell disproportionately harder on them because they tended to run farms that were significant significantly smaller than those of white farmers and they tended to earn less than white farmers they also weren't fully armed as citizens because disfranchisement and other forms of racism stripped them of the means to protect their interest in the realm of politics the steep decline in the number of black farm owners prompted a new under-recognized part of the black freedom struggle to emerge a new smaller group of farm owners began calling attention to what they call black land laws and his economist Robert Brown paid a lot of attention to this but historians still haven't looked as much into the problem of black land laws as economists and other social scientists have they pointed out the contradiction that even though civil rights legislation was expected to bring greater freedom the plight of black farm owners was getting only worse beginning in the 1960s organizing and protests culminated in the Pigford decision which was meant to compensate black farmers for income lost because of discriminatory lending practices and other violations by the USDA the most important recent book on this activism is dispossession discrimination against African American farmers and the age of civil rights which is by Pete Daniel my mentor here at the National Museum of American history and a former curator here he reveals how discrimination against black farm owners became more extreme during the 1960's as the US Department of Agriculture punished farmers who took in the who took part in the civil rights movement by denying them access to federal farm loans the number of farms owned by black people during the 1960s alone fell from 74 thousand to about 45 thousand he exposes the contradiction that black farm owners experienced heightened racism at the hands of this government agency at the very moment when the legal achievements of the civil rights movement should have ended such discrimination my research has focused on understanding not so much why people left the field or how they were forced off of the field but why people continue to farm in the midst of this well-documented discrimination toward African Americans and agriculture and on the flip side of that the domination of agribusiness we must see this quest for land and the enduring struggles of these land owners as a crucial part of the struggle for economic justice it's part of the unfinished business of the civil rights movement african-american farm owners along with sharecroppers farm workers and other women and men who never left the field were at the vanguard of the fight for economic justice in the south let me begin with an example the colored American anti-masonic grocery Association which existed for a few months in the summer of 1841 which I'm sure no one in the room ever heard of before certainly as far as I can see has never been written about by anyone a group of African New Yorkers got together issued 450 shares with a face value of $5 and they were going to open up a grocery store for the mutual benefit of members at this time the New York Stock Exchange is just taking off and has just began to be taken seriously there's a quote from the newspaper of about the person studying is about how much a person's respectability was enhanced by being a stockholder so taking the lead from Wall Street these african-americans created their own market in 18 in 1841 black New Yorkers were buying and selling shares holding stockholder meetings where they were using proxies when things went sour one faction even offered to redeem shares at face value plus 6% interest and later some office holders were buying back shares from compatriots in order to gain control of the color of American anti-masonic got a grocery sociation with the intention of breaking it up and selling off its assets it all sounds surprisingly modern from far from standing off to one side as the American economy began to take off these African Americans were striving to participate in and profit from financial capitalism they may have failed but their striking behavior was at odds with the more familiar depiction of African Americans in these years simply as economic victims my flora is into New York legals records and newspapers have convinced me too that there was much more there was more to black life particularly black business life than the way it's usually depicted usually Americans have finally acknowledged that slavery existed in New York when I first started off I had struggles with professional historians who when I said I was working on the interstate be in New York said spoke slowly to me because I'm a foreigner said you sure you got the right place now after the exhibit at the New York Historical Society is generally accepted but everyone now thinks slavery ended and then quality happens and then we're hanging around waiting for something interesting to happen ie the hähnel in a sense and so it's a long nothingness out there but I kept on coming across African New Yorkers who speculated in land and chairs and engage with the market and much as it might same fashion as their white neighbors over 30 years I've I am my colleagues sleep ma person who's in the audience is one of them we've probably read somewhere in the vicinity of 100 read and skim read 100,000 court cases I've probably read 200,000 pages of 19th century newspaper and just collected material and stories about blacks the don't fit into the pattern so that I can chuck them at people who want to synthesize far from being crushed by economic transformation these african-americans saw the changes occurring around them as an opportunity and grasped it from the moment of freedom they entered with enthusiasm into the marketplace that is not always thrive but they most certainly tried I'm very occasionally they succeeded beyond any possible expectation my main example of an ethnic American entrepreneur left out of the story of New York history is Jeremiah Hamilton about whom coincidentally I have just published Prince of Darkness the untold story of this black entrepreneur mentioned in print four times since 1900 and three of the four mentions the misleading or inaccurate was not only one of the earliest Americans labeled a millionaire but he also slashed a swathe through lily-white world of Wall Street in the middle third of the 19th century he made his early first turns up running counterfeit coin to Haiti for a consortium of New York merchants in 1828 as a 20 year old I get caught then three 1830s he specializes in over ensuring ships and then sinking them and then claiming the money back in fact the insurance industry in New York begins to form an association in part to stop him because they formed by 1836 they have got an agreement amongst themselves that no venture that Jeremiah Hamilton was a that would be insured in any way shape or form which he manages to get around by some very fancy legal maneuvering he speculated in real estate in 1836 he owned in today's money well over 10 million dollars with the land buildings and a 400 foot long Wharf and Pakeha half of the Kip sea basically and a hunk of Astoria as well he bought and sold shares for whites indeed he ran up what was called a pool that's a forerunner of a modern hedge fund for white clients and he went head to head in a stock market battle on Wall Street with Cornelius Vanderbilt Vanderbilt admitted that there was only one person in a stock market battle on Wall Street that he respected and it was this black guy he doesn't say he's black he just gives his name but if you look at the biographies of Vanderbilt to the won all sorts of awards they never mentioned this black guy he's totally erased is he just doesn't register during the Civil War they were white New Yorkers almost groveling before Hamilton sending him cigars and champagne in order to gain access to this black man's opinion as to whether or not they should buy or sell railroad stocks so he's recommending buying or selling railroad stocks railroad companies that he actually couldn't write on their trains so there's sort of there's all sorts of weird wonderful ironies I'm in 1840 across what we 45 43 44 something a second New York Stock Exchange part of the resolution that anyone who buys or sells shares from Jeremiah Hamilton will be expelled from the stock exchange I just it just ignored this and it keeps on going in fact White's keep on buying and selling shares with him and investing in the late 1840s for a few years Hamilton left New York for Glover half the world retreat in New Jersey the arresting image of this black millionaire strolling through the terrace garden in front of his 10-bedroom mansion surveying the splendors of his estate replete with a trout stream a fishing pond quail Woodcock's nope another game hunting does not accord that world with our usual understanding of the way african-americans lived in the antebellum north how such a figure could be so completely ignored still baffles me indeed I would suggest that it's more than just accident at some level American historians have expected to find black economic failure and then gone out into the archives and found it in doing so they have also looked straight past examples of black achievement perhaps I'm still much too much influenced by the example of Jeremiah Hamilton but it seems to me at least that Ralph Ellison's powerful metaphor metaphor a blindness from invisible man still has surprising relevance if if we're talking about these people as individuals as falling between the cracks then again to use the vernacular Australia's and it's a bloody big crack if a millionaire this big fall through I remain confident that if people bother to do some archival work the sources will continue to yield more unknown stories of similar black individuals and enterprises to those of William Thomson the brothel owner Jeremiah Hamilton and the color of American anti-masonic grocery association that in most senses that's my first point which was what I've just been talking about is that the work of recovery of the black of the history of black business even though there's someone like Julia Walker's encyclopedia attempts to recover it and nowhere near complete and there's an awful lot of work available for graduate students if they're interested in the subject to go out there and recover something of this history my second point is that a little bit more thought about what constitutes business would not go astray in my view historians would benefit from using a more imaginative and realistic definition of business and business achievement although most will readily admit that african-americans have faced enormous discrimination much of it specifically designed to prevent blacks getting ahead economically there remains a reluctance to allow that that discrimination affected the contours of black economic development directing efforts into other channels african-american entrepreneurs be they madam Walker back number bud who has really caught my fancy of life or Casper Holstein succeeded when they moved into areas where they would not be in direct competition with white firms sometimes white authorities deem those areas to be illegal while it's true that American blacks found is neither a Ford Motor Company nor a coca-cola company an African American did invent numbers gambling African American should be assessed not for their shortcomings measured against some impossible white standards but for what they actually achieved and personally I am a little worried about whether what they achieve was legal or contributed to Negro uplift here in particular I think historians can benefit by a lot of the really interesting work I think on this has been done by ethnographers of various sorts going into contemporary American you know in the last ten years urban America doing a lot of work I'm often struck reading those ethnographies from sociologist anthropologist whatever how little a sense of history they have so on the one hand many business historians strike me as being really boring and then but many ethnographers strike me as having no idea that the things that they're looking at in Harlem in 2001 they actually have a history and if you are aware of the historical record and the archives you can find parallels similarities examples of these things all over the place so you can find a lot of what they're talking about in in archives in the 1920s and 30s my main example there is numbers and which i think is numbers is the most important black business in the first half of the 20th century for mine and that's a my colleagues and I actually wrote a book trying to demonstrate precisely at that point I would ask you to think back half a century or so to 1963 when a quarter of a million people gathered on the mall for the Lincoln Memorial for the march on Washington present that day were tens of thousands of trade unionists whose numbers funding logistical assistance and moral support helped make this gathering and historic success the initial organizers of the March were the civil rights legend a philip Randolph and his assistant and friend Byard Rustin Randolph was at the time the most important prominent african-american trade unionist in the country a man who is considered to be the Dean of the civil rights movement the purpose of the march was captured in its title the march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom the demonstration was not simply about civil rights broadly construed it also had a pronounced economic dimension for among its demands were recalls or passage of a federal Fair Employment Practice Act a higher minimum wage a serious public's work program designed to aid the many many unemployed black and white indeed the jobs demand rested on understanding that all American workers not just blacks but whites as well needed access to employment something the organizers argued the government was responsible for ensuring jump ahead a few years to 1968 and the sanitation workers strike in Memphis in that very southern city the revolution brought about by civil rights may have won voting rights in a degree of desegregation but it left untouched a racial division of labor they rested upon black subordination and exploitation and in that fateful year sanitation workers affiliated with ask me why not on strike in a city that denied to them dignity and withheld from them work at a decent wage and denied them union representation the strike attracted the support of trade unionists from around the country as well as that of Martin Luther King jr. who has assassinated while in town on the strikers behalf at that moment the labor movement was a civil rights movement the sanitation workers union a vehicle not merely for wages and better working conditions but for civil rights and human rights as well civil rights and labor rights then were unquestionably intertwined what were once called the race question and the labor question were intimately connected but that had always been the case even when the relationship between the two looked very different in early decades later the 1940s Rayford Logan's simply and directly declared that quote the Solidarity of labor is just another myth as far as the history of American labor is concerned unquote discriminatory white unions were ubiquitous in the pre-world War two nation indeed from reconstruction to in some instances the 1950s 60s and beyond unions regularly excluded blacks from key sectors of the labor market and otherwise restricted them to the least desirable jobs and that sorry record accounted for blacks traditional antipathy toward organized labor the record of employers was hardly different entire sectors of the labor market were closed to black workers as one group of black laborers in the state of Washington put it in the early 20th century quote there is still such prejudice against our color and especially against our condition as freed people of color that we are excluded for most every sphere of employment except those which are burdensome temporary and menial and character unquote this was a refrain that was repeated countless times and could be found in newspaper after newspaper speech after speech and petition after petition from emancipation onward for the century after the Civil War sharp and enduring barriers restricted the employment opportunities of racial minorities in the United States removing them became a goal of at least a portion of the civil rights movement and historians Charles Payne and Adam green once wrote the quest for economic justice their word has defined some of the most challenging and managed ative and unappreciated campaigns engaged in in black America I am engaged in the process of writing a biography of a philip Randolph whose story I will make reference to in my remaining remarks and in writing that biography I come up against on a daily basis the intertwined character of the labor and race questions Randolph was a socialist a black socialist a rare breed in early twentieth-century America he advocated for interracial unionism at a time in the 20s and teens early 30s when most white trade unionists had no interest in admitting black members he advocated for black membership and trade unions at a time when the black elites ministers elites editors businessmen preached an anti-union gospel and cautioned black workers to not bite the hand that fed them that is the employers who hired them into unskilled or menial jobs but the advent of the Brotherhood of sleeping car porters in 1925 changed the conversation in black America the movement organized Pullman porters and maids has been a national school in economics for the race the young journalist Floyd Calvin noted in 1927 we are beginning to see he continued that the new Negro is seeking economic emancipation through organized effort by demanding that he dictate the conditions of his employment unquote Calvin was no stranger to Randolph or black socialism having briefly worked on Randolph's journal the messenger before moving on to more mainstream black Weekly's and he was no socialist but he recognized the novelty and the potential of Randolph's crusade to organize Pullman porters the economic life of the negro now has the center stage Randolph told the younger reporter until we get down to the question of working wages of hours and working conditions we will never strike at the roots of our racial ills the Brotherhood would be just the beginning someday Randolph admitted I hope to see a kind of economic organization directing and controlling the various craft and divisions of labor among Negro workers they will be taught how to strengthen themselves by the cooperation ideal unquote for the moment the late 20s the Brotherhood was engaged in for a fight for economic emancipation that was one of a number of phrases the unfinished task of emancipation the next emancipation and the unfinished revolution that Randolph and his allies used whatever the precise wording the phrase spoke to the economic dimension of the civil rights struggle a dimension with a long history that predated Randolph and the Brotherhood now over the past generation a healthy number of historians Joe Trotter tera hunter Dan let win nan Woodruff or Lewis Mike honey Rob korstad and many others have written about traditions a black trade unionism and black labor activism that took root despite white Labor's racial practices and beliefs in the late 19th through early in mid 20th century a visible minority of black southerners found in unionization a means to pursue the same goals as white workers raising wages shortening the working day improving job conditions in many instances their efforts reflected a quest for workplace dignity and a modicum of respect or at least a lessening of brutal treatment from white managers one should not exaggerate the numbers or the impact of this black labor tradition for the vast majority of african-american workers north and south remain outside of the industrial labor force and outside of the ranks of organized labor at least into the Great Depression and the 1940s what began to change notably in the 20s 30s was the broader orientation of black America toward the labor question and a relationship of black workers to the labor movement and the Brotherhood of sleeping car porters was in part responsible for that what it did was to foster a new openness to unionization in black communities and to spearhead a new far more aggressive approach to protest to make a long story short drawing on recently passed New Deal labor laws the Brotherhood prevailed in 1935 winning decisively a government supervised Union representation election two years later it negotiated an unprecedented and path-breaking contract with the Pullman Company if success inspired numerous groups of other black workers to organize borders soon had company from red caps and dining car workers the gospel of trade unionism spread beyond railroaders ranks a crucial importance was the emergence in the mid 30s of the Congress of racial organ dust really organizations the CIO which was committed to industrial organization unionization of black workers seldom in the world's history as a social movement achieves a speedy and spectacular success as the CIO concluded for black trade unionists in Los Angeles in 1937 through its quote amazing series of organizing successes the CIO changed a psychology of the American labor movement from one of discrimination segregation and defeatism to a movement of liberality swayed by the principle of democracy giving assurance in victory to all workers respective of color class or creed unquote well that's an exaggerated assessment to be sure flat workers did not flood into organized Labor's ranks nor had Union discrimination vanished but it's hard to dispute the simple fact that one sector of the labor movement had dropped some of its exclusionary barriers and welcomed black participation and that black Americans responded accordingly shifting toward any more Pro Union stance and by the early 40s in much of basic industry automobile manufacturing steel rubber electrical meatpacking and the light the CIO succeeded when a union representation elections and attracting substantial black support by 1943 some 400,000 African American workers and joined the labor movement in the longer paper that is on the website for this conference I discussed the struggles for fair employment waged during and after the Second World War spearheaded by the march on Washington movement represented by executive order 8802 and the creation of the Federal Fair Employment Practice Committee what those struggles ultimately did was not create a permanent fair employment edifice in the United States but at least put the issue of discrimination industry and in trade unions the issue of fair representation and a fair employment on the political agenda where it would remain allowing organizers to conduct campaigns over the next two decades now the economic dimension of the various movements for civil rights did not perish after the Second World War and were not sacrificed during the Cold War era as some scholars have recently suggested true the communist oriented variant of the movement the Communist Party its allies and left LED unions National Negro Congress and other front organizations in particular suffered intense repression at the hands of congressional invested the FBI and federal and state prosecutors but that repression neither silenced the voices of a broader left nor eliminated economic issues from the civil rights agenda black trade unionists as the historian will Jones has demonstrated quote retained considerable influence in local movements for economic justice and racial equality in the post-war era until the end of his life grand off along with many other black trade unionists and civil rights activists maintained that equality for black Americans required both civil and economic rights that the progress for black Americans required not only the passage and enforcement of civil rights and anti-discrimination laws but economic policies designed to ensure the economic health of black America in the 50s and 60s he focused on not only employment discrimination but joblessness and the challenges posed by automation it is becoming increasingly clear Randolph argued in 1962 that no lasting political freedom or social equality is conceivable without the integration of the Negro into the economic life of the nation unquote black unemployment was substantially higher than white unemployment black income substantially lower the nation had he said passed the stage where fair employment practices on the part of management unions and the government can in themselves face what was required was a massive job retraining program on a scale infinitely more ambitious than anything now envisioned along with large-scale Public Works programs to provide immediate jobs for the millions of unemployed Negroes as well as those he called The Forgotten workers the pariahs the exiles The Untouchables of our economy that agenda was embodied in the demands of the march on Washington in 1963 now in the end the protestors of the 1960s got some things but not others certainly not the jobs program the raise and minimum wage that Randolph called for the 64 Civil Rights Act in the 1965 Voting Rights Act were tremendous achievements one against considerable odds they went a long way for guaranteeing formal equality before the law and transforming for millions the textures of daily life but the larger anti-poverty agenda President Johnson's poorly fought war on poverty notwithstanding remained unfilled the 64 Act Randolph concluded would not make a significant dent in the problem of joblessness among Negroes fair employment practices while absolutely necessary will not be meaningful without full employment the Urban league's Whitney Young called for a Marshall plan to rebuild America's cities Randolph and Rustin called for a freedom budget in 1966 proposing the expenditure of a hundred and eighty billion dollars to end poverty in the United States in the end though that there wasn't a Marshall Plan for America cities and the freedom budget was not enacted by the middle of the 60s the civil rights coalition began to fracture liberalism was increasingly divided over the war in Vietnam Social Democratic proposals to rebuild cities to end poverty received scant attention from the Johnson administration the conservative backlash ensued that ensured that those dreams would remain only dreams but Randolph and his allies continued to hammer away at the crisis of jobs in poverty afflicting black and white America predicting continued violence and the cities unless major steps were taken I have walked up and down the streets of Harlem for 60 years Randolph testified before a Senate committee in 1966 I do not recall the time when I met a young man with who I was not able to talk I've attempted to talk to them about life about their future their hopes their aspirations and they view you with cynicism and skepticism if not disgust and contempt and sometimes they end up with abuse the violence that erupted during the hot summers of the mid-1960s would only reinforce his concern a great deal had changed over the course of that of the last half-century the race riots or urban rebellions of the 60s did not prove to be permanent developments in American life Great Society programs while falling short of their goals made a difference in the lives of millions title 7 and affirmative action programs changed the demographic and gender composition of countless job categories the labor movement has become far more inclusive and diverse the Voting Rights Act as enfranchise millions of african-americans denied the ballot and the black middle class grew substantially in size but civil rights and labor rights remain intertwined even if the nature of the relationship is different today than it was in 1919 41 in 1963 and despite the dramatic changes in American society one can imagine Randolph and his many allies would conclude that the next emancipation is yet to be accomplished that the unfinished revolution is still unfinished and that the pursuit of economic emancipation or in our current language economic justice remains as urgent as ever well it's really nice to follow Erik really excellent presentation when's your book coming up the a philip randolph biography don't ask that question okay so it's a really great to address this august body and the title of my presentation is on inner city black males engage in it or maybe I should say experience with American capitalism and they are is late I noticed that some people in the front rows here are naughty I will take no more than 10 minutes I promise now be the disproportionate number of african-american males in this country is one of the legacies of historic segregation and discrimination however aside from the effects of current segregation and discrimination including those caused by employer bias that I will soon talk about a number of impersonal economic forces have contributed to the incredibly high rate of joblessness among low-skilled black males in the correspondingly low incomes these forces include changes in the relative demand for low-skilled labor caused by the computer revolution the globalization of economic activity the declining manufacturing sector and for black males in particular the growth of service industries where most of the new jobs for workers with limited skills and education are concentrated now in this recent brief presentation I would like to focus on this last factor associated with a relatively high jobless rate of low-skilled black men the gradual shift from manufacturing to service industries now this shift has created a new set of problems for low-skilled black males because those industries feature jobs that require workers to serve and relate to consumers in a study we conducted in Chicago in the early 1990s whose findings are still relevant many employers favored women and recent immigrants of both genders who have come to populate the labor pool in the low-wage service sector over black men for service jobs in our study employers of entry-level workers in the service industry felt that consumers perceive inner-city black males to be dangerous or threatening in part because of their high incarceration rates you see in the past african-american men simply had to demonstrate a strong back and muscles to be hired for a physical labor in a factory at a construction site or on an assembly line they interacted with peers and foremen not with consumers today they have to increasingly search for work in the service sector where employers are less likely to hire them because they are seen as unable to sustain positive contact with the public employers maintain that black males lack the soft skills that jobs require the tendency to maintain eye contact the ability to carry on polite and friendly conversations with consumers the inclination to smile and be responsive to consumers requests however demanding or unreasonable they may see consequently black male job seekers paste rates of rejection because employers feel they lack these soft skills now the prevalence of such attitudes combined with the physical and social isolation of people in color of color living in inner-city areas of concentrated poverty severely limits the access that poor black men have to informal job networks you know the casual networks of people or acquaintances who can pass along information about employment prospects now this is a notable problem for black males especially considering that many low-skilled employees first learn about their jobs through an acquaintance or were recommended by someone associated with the company research suggests that only a small percentage of low skilled employees are hired through advertised job openings or cold calls the importance of knowing someone who knows the boss is illustrated by this employers calmness to one of our interviewers the employer stated quote all of a sudden they take a look at a guy and unless he's got an end the reason why I heard this black kid the last time is cuz my neighbor said to be yeah I used him for a few days he's good and I said you know what I'm going to take a chance but it was a recommendation but other than that I've got a walk-in and who knows and I think that for the most part a guy sees a black man he's a bit hesitant unquote now such attitudes are classic examples of what social scientists call statistical discrimination employers make generalizations about inner-city black male workers and reach decisions based on those assumptions without reviewing the qualifications of an individual applicant the net effect is that many inner-city black male applicants are never given the opportunity to prove themselves and although some of these men score an entry-level jobs because of the poor working conditions and low wages many others would readily accept such employment and although statistical discrimination contains some elements of class bias against poor inner-city workers it is clearly a racially motivated practice a number of other studies have documented employer bias against black males for example research by my our bird colleague diva pager revealed that a white male applicant with a felony conviction was more likely to receive a callback or job offer than a black male applicant with a clean record now basically employers believe that women and recent immigrants of both genders are better suited than black males especially those with prison records for entry-level service jobs this image has been partly created by cultural shifts in national attitudes that reflected concerns about the growth of violence in the ghettos in the eyes of many Americans black male symbolized its violence crimes for law and order quote-unquote resulted in a more punitive criminal justice system and a dramatic increase in black male incarceration the high incarceration rates of low-skilled black males are very much connected to their high jobless rates it's a vicious cycle being without a job can encourage the illegal money-making activities in order to make ends meet which increase the risks of incarceration upon release from incarceration a prison record carries a stigma in the eyes of employers and decreases the probability that an ex-offender will be hard resulting in a greater likelihood of even more intractable joblessness fourth forced to turn to the low-wage service sector for employment inner-city black males including a significant number of ex-offenders have to compete often unsuccessfully with a growing number of female and immigrant workers if these men complain or otherwise manifest their dissatisfaction they seem even more on a try to employers and therefore encounter even greater discrimination when they search for employment because of the feelings many inner-city black males express about their jobs and job prospects reflect their plummeting position in a changing economy it is important to link these attitudes with the opportunity structure that is the spectrum of life chances available to them in society at large and then the end by saying that to address this problem I would first focus on the chronic joblessness in the neighborhoods where these men are concentrated in terms of public policy a strong case could be made to introduce a bill in Congress designed to specifically target unemployment areas with the highest rates of joblessness like inner-city ghetto areas that would include the creation of public sector jobs for people who cannot find employment in the private sector and when I talk about public sector jobs I mean the type of jobs provided by the work Progress Administration WPA during the Great Depression work that would help improve the infrastructure in our communities including state and local park districts that suffer from lack of upkeep and limited hours cleaning playgrounds beaches and other recreational areas including streets twice not once a day now in calling for public sector job programs I am thinking especially about those black youths who have been stigmatized by prison records and who find it virtually impossible to find jobs in the private sector you

Channel: American Historical Association

Views: 4,387

Keywords: slavery, forced relocation, seasonal employment, sharecropping, convict labor, labor market, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, Jeremiah Hamilton, first African American millionaire, Wall Street, capitalism, trade unionism, poverty, March on Washington, A. Philip Randolph, African American history, black history, history, National Museum of African American History and Culture, NMAAHC, American Historical Association, AHA, history museum, African American culture, history education

Id: dq9Pnwzd4p4

Length: 63min 18sec (3798 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2017