Special Issue “More Expendable than ‘Essential’: Black Workers’ Rights and Racial Class Struggles Under the COVID Crisis”

Abstract

African American labor and working-class history is a key fi eld of research, knowl-edge, and inspiration for building a stronger and more viable contemporary labor movement within and beyond the borders of the United States today. But Black labor history as an intellectual discipline is deeply rooted in the early twentieth-century struggle against the emergence of the White supremacist order in American society. Both lay and professional Jim Crow era White writers treated Black workers as intel-lectually “ inferior ” and incapable of adapting to the labor requirements of the industrial machine. Accordingly, they de fi ned Black workers as “ expendable ” and justi fi ed the employment of Black workers in the most precarious bottom rungs of the nation ’ s expanding urban industrial economy. The fi rst generation of African American labor historians — including Charles Abram L. Harris, Spiro, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others countered such racist perspectives on African American workers and prepared the groundwork for the rise of anti-racist treatments of Black workers during the mid to late twentieth century. Building upon but moving well beyond the insights of their early twentieth-century counterparts, recent scholars of Black labor history not only demonstrate how Black workers labored under the “ special handicaps of race and color, ” in addition to the prevailing obstacles that hampered the lives of all wage earners in capitalist America. They also address the challenges that Black workers encountered in building their own communities in the face of rising class, gender, and ideological divisions and con fl icts within their own ranks: fi rst during the transition from slavery to freedom and later during the Great Migration and the rise of the urban industrial working class.