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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908–1921 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001) |
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ALTERNATIVELY ATTACKING and defending Herbert Gutman's 1968 article, "The Negro in the United Mine Workers of America," a seemingly endless flow of scholars continue to debate the relative importance of White workers' support for and Black workers' resistance to the Jim Crow system. As Brian Kelly points out in this important intervention, opposing sides of the "Gutman-Hill Debate" are both compatible and true. Neither position pays significant attention, however, to the extent to which "the terms upon which Black and White workers came together in the early 20th-century South were set by White élites."( 205) Whereas previous scholars have examined the dynamics that built or limited interracial cooperation during periods of union strength, Kelly directs our attention to a much more typical period of defeat. He reminds readers that even when unionists challenged the social order established by employers they did so sporadically and always from a defensive position. |
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This intervention relies on a well-researched investigation of the labor policies employed by Alabama's leading mining firms between the interracial UMW strikes of 1908 and 1920. After devastating the UMW in 1908, employers struggled to attract reliable workers without conceding wage standards and working conditions that may have attracted miners on their own initiative. They addressed this "Operator's Dilemna" by offering modest welfare programs such as housing and healthcare to skilled White workers and through a system of "Racial Paternalism," which combined minimal incentives to attract Black migrants from plantation regions, forced labour through convict leasing, and the cultivation of what NAACP officials described in 1914 as an "utterly Booker T. Washingtonized" Black professional class. (99) While employers convinced themselves that their social policies satisfied both Black and White workers, Kelly argues that their success depended upon a plantation system that provided a steady supply of impoverished Black workers and upon the Alabama Coal Operators Association and the Democratic Party that successfully excluded both White and Black workers from unions or meaningful political participation. |
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The chimerical quality of employer's paternalism became clear during World War I, Kelly argues, when labor shortage, economic growth, and increased federal labour regulation conspired to tip the "balance of power" in the coalfields toward a small, typically insignificant, tradition of anti-élite militancy that had survived in northern Alabama since before the Civil War. (133) Yeoman farmers had turned the region into a hotbed of dissent against the Confederacy, and their descendents in the Greenback-Labor Party, the Knights of Labor, and eventually the UMW continued to poke holes in Redeemer and New South advocates' argument that White supremacy benefited all Whites equally: "It is all bosh when it comes to employing labor," one union official remarked after the Redeemers helped crush the 1908 strike. (120) In response to Herbert Hill's charge that Gutman ignored White working-class racism, Kelly points out that in the context of such limited options, "what seems remarkable is not so much the level of animosity between Black and White miners as their ability, through the experience of interracial cooperation, to begin to question certain fundamental aspects of southern racial protocol." (121) To those who would romanticize either Black or White workers' ability to sustain such a challenge, he reminds readers how quickly managers removed their twin masks of White supremacy and racial paternalism, providing miners once again with a choice between interracial cooperation and submission to an employer-dominated society. Using the combination of legal force and mob-rule perfected during Redemption, the mining firms sealed off the possibility of the former. "You are between the devil and the deep blue sea," UMW organizer Van Bittner observed with only a touch of hyperbole in 1921, "if you don't keep the union here you are going to starve to death." (199) |
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Like much of the literature on interracial unionism, Kelly's study focuses narrowly on workplace politics. The emphasis on working-class impotence may excuse him from providing more social history of the miners, but his argument raises unanswered questions about the process through which White and Black élites forged their class relationships outside of the point of production. He claims that the "main fault line among" Birmingham-area mining firms ran between "Progressives" who invested in welfare capitalism and those who one employers' journal described as being "without ideals and apparently without shame." (61) The rest of the chapter demonstrates, however, that this distinction grew primarily from lack of resources and was in fact a thin veneer over the quest for profit that united all employers. What, then, is the significance of employer's ideology? Was the Progressives' ability to set the tone in Birmingham simply a factor of economic might, or did they win a battle for hegemony? Answers to these questions would have required a much wider reading of Birmingham's élite press and perhaps an examination of social and political institutions that might have forged class consciousness and served as battlegrounds for competing sections of the city's ruling class. |
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These questions become even more compelling at the state level. Governor Braxton Bragg Comer plays a central role in this story, but Kelly implies that mine owners enjoyed his support automatically and unconditionally. Were there no instances in which Comer, who owned a textile mill and a cotton plantation, perceived a conflict of interest with those involved in coal? How was the history of the UMW shaped by classic questions of New South historiography concerning the relationship between industrialists and the Black Belt élite? Like southern textile and lumber firms, coal companies were typically family-owned and under-capitalized. Did competition among them and with other industries not shape the development of labor relations in the region? Kelly's vague comparison between mining and other New South industries points toward the need for more expansive social and political studies in the tradition of C. Vann Woodward, Jon Wiener, and Barrington Moore. |
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Kelly is similarly dismissive of ideological or social divisions within Birmingham's Black middle class. We read that racial paternalism "enjoyed a unique advantage in the unmatched hegemony of Booker T. Washington's accommodationist outlook among the district's most prominent 'race leaders.'" (98) In the same chapter however we see firm evidence that Black institutions such as churches and fraternal lodges often bridged class divisions within Birmingham's Black communities and were therefore "ambiguous" in their allegiance to employers as opposed to the UMW. Kelly makes a sound argument that Black professionals and shop owners found some benefits in segregation, and he points out that leaders of Birmingham's Republican Club and Alabama's state weekly maintained close ties to Washington's Tuskegee Institute. That does not explain, however, how these individuals overcame the ideological tensions that wracked the National Association of Colored Women, the Black Baptist Convention, and other élite-led institutions during the same period. The wartime labour conflicts that destroyed racial paternalism in 1919 also produced Birmingham's chapter of the NAACP, an organization that Kelly describes throughout his study as a more radical road-not-taken by Birmingham's Black élite. Why did this alternative emerge when it did, and why did the NAACP become the voice of accommodation in Robin D.G. Kelley's study of Birmingham in the 1920s and 1930s? Such ambiguities underlie the analytical problems produced by what Kelly describes as the "blurring [of] class distinctions in the black community." His biographical note promises a forthcoming study of "black elites and the labor question in the Jim Crow South." I imagine that he will arrive at more nuanced, and perhaps revised, conclusions. |
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William P. Jones
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
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