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Book Review
| The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South. By William P. Jones. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005. xv + 235 pp. Illustrations, acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index. Paper $20.00.
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| William P. Jones, in The Tribe of Black Ulysses, examines the role of African Americans in the southern lumber industry—an amalgam of businesses that was by far the largest industrial employer in the South during the years from 1870 to 1910. The industry also had an African American majority workforce making mill work an essential part of African American participation in the southern industrialization process. Historians often have depicted black workers as passive actors; however, Jones's monograph portrays them as active participants and shapers of southern industrialization. |
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To illustrate the economic, social, and labor variables in the lumber industry, Jones focuses on three southern firms over several decades—the Great Southern Lumber Company in Bogalusa, Louisiana, the W. T. Smith Lumber Company in Chapman, Alabama, and the Greene Brothers Lumber Company in Elizabethtown, North Carolina. The author uses these case studies to dispel long-held beliefs regarding African American labor in the southern lumber industry. In particular he rejects the Black Ulysses labor model first introduced by sociologist Howard Odum during the 1920s—a representation describing black workers as alienated from the industrial South as well as their families. To the contrary, Jones maintains that black workers used their employment in the industry as a basis for strengthening their families by establishing "new roles for themselves as husbands, fathers, and members of communities" (p. 9). African American lumber workers employed during the earlier period of 1870 to 1910 often were employed as seasonal mill workers (as were whites). Many black workers held onto an ultimate dream of earning enough income to purchase land in order to allow them to support their families as independent farmers. As the lumber industry transitioned into a year-round operation in the decades after 1910, many black workers moved their families to company towns, eventually abandoning the autonomous farmer ideal. |
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Jones covers standard labor history topics such as unionization efforts, life in the company towns, leisure activities, and the wage differential between white and African American workers. He includes an excellent description of women's roles in the sawmill communities as spouses, but also relates several examples of how single women were employed in these communities as well. An unexpected topic covered in Black Ulysses is a detailed and informative discourse on African American music. Jones begins his discussion with the barrelhouse blues heard in the sawmill town saloons during the 1920s and 1930s and concludes with a description of the more "acceptable" and sophisticated swing played at management sponsored gatherings. |
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The author's examination of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal National Recovery Administration (NRA) documents the endemic discrimination against black workers in the southern lumber industry. Federal labor laws, such as the NRA, intended to improve the lives of both black and white workers, often were subverted by individual companies and trade organizations such as the Southern Pine Association so as to continue the inequitable pay scale. As was true of other southern industries of the time, African American lumber workers engaged in a constant struggle for decent wages and access to more skilled and higher paying jobs. |
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William P. Jones has fashioned a fine labor history of an important but often overlooked industry. He has used an extensive range of resources, including interviews, manuscript collections, newspapers, magazines, musical recordings, and numerous secondary publications. |
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Mary Ellen Wilson is professor of history and vice president for academic affairs at Middle Georgia College. She has published several articles on the Georgia longleaf pine lumber industry. |
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