| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 57

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908–1921 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2001)

THE NEW LABOUR history has been built around the conviction that workers have a hand in making the world around them by articulating and acting upon a collective sense of their class experiences. In Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, Brian Kelly deemphasizes the power and possibility of workers' agency as he argues for the necessity of, what he phrases, "bringing the employer back in." (9) In making this argument, Kelly uses W.E.B. DuBois's point that racism was "carefully planned" to underscore his own contention that Alabama operators were the architects of southern race hatred in the coalfields. In Race, Class, and Power, we learn much about the power dynamics between workers and employers and, more significant in its originality, between working-class and middle-class Blacks. Kelly has a keen ability to pen a forceful and provocative argument regarding the materialist top-down side of racism. But Kelly vacillates between ascribing to the employers of Alabama's coal miners a monolithic power and, in turn, showing them to be a divided force (between large employers like TCI and smaller employers that were part of the Alabama Coal Operators Association). The author's wavering leaves the reader unsure, therefore, about how much and what exactly is gained by an emphasis on "the employer."

Race, Class, and Power focuses on the period between 1908 and 1920, the nadir of mining unionism in Alabama, to illustrate the operators' hegemony in the coal-fields. Crushing the interracial United Mine Workers [UMW] was both a blessing and a curse for management. Although their victory allowed them to reign supreme, the defeat forced operators to come to terms with the root cause of the industry's weakness. Before 1908, coal mine owners blamed the union for their own inability to compete with coal companies in the North. The industry's real problem, however, had little to do with the UMW and much more to do with operators' failure to successfully recruit and retain a viable labour force. Operators were unwilling to pay competitive wages to southern skilled miners, many of whom left the region after the UMW's 1908 defeat. Racist attitudes prevented them, initially, from hiring and training African American men to do skilled work. The solution, for a brief period, was immigrant labour. Immigration did not solve the labour supply problem. Kelly argues that there were two reasons for this: an inflexible biracial "caste system" in which operators alternated between hinting at ethnic whiteness while treating immigrants like Blacks, and the unwillingness of immigrants to remain in Alabama when better opportunities appeared elsewhere. Though his analysis could be richer and its historiographical context clearer, Kelly's findings on the racialization of immigrant workers in the South is an important addition to labour and immigration history which has tended to focus on the in-between identity of immigrants in the urban North. Kelly suggests that because operators were unwilling to alter working conditions to keep immigrant labour in the South, and because employers understood that Jim Crow laws written for plantation exploitation would benefit them, they turned to African American workers. The cause and effect trajectory that Kelly assumes regarding the use of Blacks to mine coal is interesting. Kelly's assumption on this point seems rather speculative as the author provides no chronological markers and only paltry evidence to prove his suggestion that employers were not simultaneously trying to exploit immigrant and African American labour.

Regardless, once Blacks made up a significant portion of the mining labour force in the state, their presence in the coalfields reshaped relations between working-class and middle-class Blacks. It is in this analysis which includes the intraracial conflict within Alabama's African American community and the interracial connections between Birmingham's Black and white elites that Race, Class, and Power makes its most significant contribution to the field. Kelly argues that employers cultivated ties with middle-class Blacks in hopes of pacifying African American miners who increasingly rejected the accommodationist notion of individual "racial uplift." These interracial elite ties included locals, whom coal companies hired in their welfare capitalist ventures designed to deter miners from union organizing, and extended outward to count Booker T. Washington and other Tuskegee graduates among their connections. Kelly shows that Birmingham's middle and working classes had competing interests. The former was not only anti-union — many argued that "strikebreaking was ... a legitimate activity for blacks" (100) — but, because they benefited from segregation, they also vehemently opposed interracial working-class organization which the UMW epitomized at the turn of the century. Through churches and fraternal organizations which touted accommodation and bourgeois ideology, race leaders hoped that African American miners would identify their racial interests above those of class. But despite their efforts, which were bolstered with coal mine companies' support, Blacks in the coalfields developed a working-class sense of race. As the racial and class identities of coal miners emerged, Kelly proves just how important Black workers' ideas were in the moulding of the UMW's interracial unionism. In drawing out the complexity of race and class relations, Kelly's book succeeds in complementing Daniel Letwin's seminal monograph on Alabama coal miners. (12)

As adept as Kelly is at bluntly reiterating his argument regarding the central role that Alabama coal operators played in causing race hatred among workers —in the conclusion he does not waver in this assertion, noting that "white workers absorbed — racial chauvinism" and that "the principal force in maintaining black oppression ... were its ... employers" (205) — he falters in his reiteration of the arguments of those historians he is so bent upon challenging. His failure to fully articulate the complexity of their arguments, which are based on DuBois's notion of "the wages of whiteness" (the foundational concept upon which labour scholars of whiteness have based their work and the very historiography which Kelly is attempting to amend), make his contention about materialism seem incomplete and rather thin.


Caroline Waldron Merithew University of Dayton

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