| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865. By Robert H. Zieger. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. x, 276 pp. $37.50, ISBN 978-0-8131-2460-5.)
Over a distinguished career, Robert H. Zieger has earned a reputation for intelligent, balanced scholarship grounded in solid research and a thorough command of the burgeoning secondary literature on American labor. Those qualities are evident in his latest work, a thoughtful, engaging, and expansive survey of the problematic relationship between African Americans and organized labor that will immediately take its place as the standard in the field.	1
The author's effortless surmounting of the boundary between African American and working-class history in the book's early chapters is an impressive feat. While emancipation brought clashes over "political, legal, and constitutional issues, the labor question lay at the heart of Reconstruction" (p. 10). The study provides an exceptionally nuanced rendering of the complexities of black community life during the period and of the variety of responses to the predicament of black workers. The prominence Zieger accords the convict lease system in simultaneously reinforcing black subjugation and modernizing the South is appropriate and his delineation of the exceptional power of antiblack racism in a context of wider ethnic and racial tensions compelling.	. . .

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