Transcript
Into America
‘Black Folk’ and the Soul of America
Blair Kelley: We are some of the oldest Americans here, the descendant of black slaves. And so, if we forget that, if we forget how fundamentally American we are, just by the length of history, then something goes wrong.
Trymaine Lee: It’s impossible to imagine America without the fingerprints of a black working-class.
Kelley: The collectivity, the connection, the ability to survive and remake a new thing begins in enslavement, which begins well before the founding of the nation.
Lee: For all its talk of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, America would be nowhere without the blood, sweat and tears of black labor. It began with white colonizers, trafficking and enslaving black bodies to power the economy of a nascent country and continued after the Civil War as millions of freed people became American citizens and, in the decades to come, for the very first time, started being paid for their hard work.
A black working-class was born. They continued to be a cornerstone of American society, raising America’s children, growing and harvesting America’s food, and building the throughways that will connect one corner of the country to another.
The definition of working-class doesn’t break down neatly along income lines, but typically, it includes people who do hourly work that doesn’t require much education: jobs in the service industry, domestic work and construction. While many of these jobs often keep people in or close to poverty, others, like manufacturing, have historically helped launch workers into the middle-class with enough income to fund the trappings of middling American success like cars, vacations, and college educations for their children, privileges denied them just a generation earlier.
According to the Center for American Progress, the majority of people with jobs could be considered working-class, and of that working-class, about 13% are black. That’s pretty proportional to the overall population, but when it comes to the downsides of this kind of work, black folks often face greater risk.
For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Economic Policy Institute found that 17% of people considered to be frontline workers were black. They were the transit, healthcare, delivery and grocery store workers who kept our country going at great risk for themselves and their families, all while struggling with more pre-existing conditions that made them especially vulnerable to the virus.
Kelley: And so, when COVID came, the bodies of black people were fundamentally more vulnerable. It echoed through our communities in those first months in ways that were unfathomable precisely because of the imbalance that we already were suffering from.
Lee: Through time, the black working-class and their accomplishments and contributions have mostly been ignored and really erased. But my friend, Dr. Blair L.M. Kelley is setting the record straight. She’s the incoming director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina, and her latest book is “Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class.”
Dr. Kelley, thank you so much for joining us.
Kelley: Thanks for having me.
Lee: Now, I’ve been looking forward this for days just to have the opportunity to talk with you, so thank you.
Kelley: I’ve been looking forward for, like, about a year.
Lee: Here we are.
Kelley: Yes.
Lee: Magic has happened.
Kelley: Yes, absolutely.
Lee: I’m Trymaine Lee, and this is “Into America.”
Today, Blair and I talk about the enduring importance of the black working-class. We break down the stereotypes that have plagued this group for generations, and we get into why America would not be the country it is today without black folk.
Kelley: I’m a historian of the African-American experience, and I love black people, and I love thinking about where we come from and how we’ve experienced the world over time. And now I’ve written “Black Folk,” which I think is a culmination of lots of the things I’ve been interested in my whole career.
Lee: I love the name “Black Folk,” and I love this cover, the black and white, the silhouette of these black folks, this family walking down the street. There’s so much dignity and beauty baked into this cover, and the name, it says it all.
And it really brings together this book two things that I’ve been immensely fascinated with, right? It’s like black folks, our journey south, and what we’ve experienced before and after the migration, but then also working-class people that we both come from.
Kelley: Yes.
Lee: And so, I wonder oftentimes in these conversations, especially in class analysis, white folks get the benefit of being college-educated. Working-class, the strata is kind of clear. But black folks are just black people, right? And so, I wonder if they just do black, it don’t matter. Educated, impoverished, it doesn’t matter. We’re all lumped in together. And so, as you think through a class analysis that includes black people in it, how do you define the working-class?
Kelley: So that was like the big question. You know, I sat with that for a while. Some people said, well, because some of the Pullman porters were college-educated, they were not the working-class, and other people were like, you know, what jobs are you leaving out?
“Black Folk” wasn’t intended to be sort of a catalog of everything or sort of a sociological analysis, but really rather a focus on people who worked for hourly wages and/or tips, and really needed each other and needed organization and support to do that.
And also, I included agricultural workers, domestic workers, who had statistically been left out of much of the analysis around who the working-class were. But their labor is essential to understanding the black experience and understanding where we come from as workers overall. So for me, I had to start with that sort of more comprehensive, broader brushstroke than I think others might have.
Lee: In the current contemporary political sense, we’re always talking about this mythical white working-class, but never fully considering what it means to be a member of the black working-class in Ohio or Pennsylvania or New Jersey, right?
Kelley: Yes.
Lee: Can you speak to that kind of dynamic?
Kelley: I think we take these black experiences for granted. I think we’re not thinking of them as the real terrain of politics. And yet, I think of people like Stacey Abrams, who is, you know, from a working-class family who really mounted structural campaigns to think differently and more broadly about a black working-class and the impact that they can have, even in states where we thought they couldn’t move the needle is a moment for us to draw our attention back to what black working-class communities really look like and where they come from and what questions are important to them.
Lee: And no surprise that Stacey Abrams, a master organizer, emerges from the working-class. Speak to the history of the organizing heft and all the work put in by black working-class folks to organize politically and for civil rights.
Kelley: Well, they had to build a world for themselves. They had to envision what was possible. Here, you have a people who have come out of bondage with nothing, come with no wealth, no land for the most part, nothing to speak of except for each other and for the community they had built in enslavement.
And they use that community resource. They use that knowledge of each other, that broader sense of kin that they have to build because of the dislocations of enslavement. They carry that with them and they organize. They organize unions, they organize political leagues, they organize churches that come out of the faith ways that they had practiced as enslaved people, ones that were critical and distinct from the faith of their masters.
Lee: How has this group been left out when their work, their bodies, their presence are so central to the American story whether a domestic worker, the washer women, the people working on landscaping, like, how are we missing historically this huge group of people?
Kelley: I think there’s a incredible invisibility around black life where we don’t think about what black people are experiencing, that their very presence gets erased. When we think back to the roles of women who worked in white household, the whole idea was to kind of disappear, right, not to be intrusive or disturb the conversations that were going on. They were to be behind the scenes. And oftentimes, they were quite anonymous where people barely knew the people working in their homes.
There was one story of a woman who passed away in Philadelphia and the family she worked for didn’t know her name. So they had to describe her in the black newspaper by her coat, and her shoes, and her clothes in the hopes that someone would recognize those items and come and claim the body. So it’s a reminder of the erasure that happens not just societally, but personally for so many black workers.
Lee: Wow. How did you arrive at this book? I know it’s been a few years in the making. Obviously, you know, a lot of us have these conversations because, again, we come from working-class people. And so we’re not looking at this from an outsider’s perspective. As you described —
Kelley: (Inaudible).
Lee: — in your introduction, W.E.B. DuBois, “The Soul of Black Folks,” as an outsider. He’s a black man raised in the north in white spaces.
But being, you know, black and of the community, it’s routine. We can take it for granted. How did you arrive at this book and this analysis?
Kelley: Very often, I think black authors are not writing the things that we already just sort of know and think, and then someone who is not from the community will come in and be like, oh, well, look at this thing. This is very interesting. And it’s something we’re all like, yeah, we all know that.
And so, I wanted to dive into the things that we know, that we’ve all experienced. I’ve done a few book events so far, and everyone keeps coming up to me, my grandmother was a domestic and my grandmother was a washerwoman. I remember her ironing while I was sleeping. And now I realize, you know, the context around that.
Lee: Yeah.
Kelley: So I just wanted to broaden the context of situations that were very typical for most of us and yet not things that we’ve really dove into to think about what is extraordinary at the heart of it.
Lee: You know, going back a little bit, when we think about domestic workers and washerwomen, we think of this kind of at least a stereotype of these unskilled, kind of uneducated laborers, these workers, but that is a stereotype. Many folks were educated. Speak to this kind of stereotype that we’ve had of working-class people, especially historically.
Kelley: I think that the language of unskilled I found so interesting. It’s a sort of sociological language and categorization that maybe say carpentry or bricklaying or masonry work would make you a skilled worker. And agricultural work would not be considered skilled work. And certainly, doing laundry or serving as a domestic servant would never be considered skilled in those kinds of traditional frameworks.
And in “Black Folk,” I throw all that out because if you look at the work, let’s say, of washerwomen who are making their own soap, who are using different chemicals and bluing agents to get things to be white or boiling water, pressing clothes, like there’s a real science behind what they do to make the clothes get clean, and smooth, and fresh, and bring them all back.
And so, the idea that folks who do all that labor are unskilled, it was hard work and it was skilled work. And it took an intelligence and a training that was passed down woman-to-woman and families that really enabled women to do it. So, you know, I was watching those videos that they put on Twitter and Instagram of migrant farm workers in California. I remember them bundling the radishes. And the motion of grabbing the radish, creating the appropriate size bundle, wrapping it, and cutting it was like one fell swoop.
And the idea that that would be unskilled, I mean, I’m pretty sure that the average person would like cut their foot, their hand, something. It would take forever to do what was happening. So they’re skilled, and we have to sort of throw out those older notions of, you know, these are the fields that we respect, and these fields we don’t. All of it takes work.
Lee: All of the ingenuity, I think back when I was a kid and you look at the poster or the book of black inventors. And it’s like the ironing board or something.
Kelley: The mop.
Lee: The mop, all these things made life easier that folks were doing day in, day out they had to try to find ways to be more efficient and effective. And that ingenuity was coming out of these so-called unskilled workers.
Kelley: Yes, absolutely.
Lee: And your family’s journey, your own family plays a central role in telling this story of black folk more generally. Talk to us about the role your family played and, like, how you went about the work of discovering or rediscovering the family lore.
Kelley: Well, my mother was an older mom at the time that I was born, now would be just a regular mom. We’ve taken away some of the crappy ideas we had about when you were supposed to have your baby.
Lee: Now, she’s regular. Back then, she’s 27, right? She —
Kelley: Yeah. She was in her 30s. And she was the oldest woman on the ward when I was born, and it was —
Lee: Wow.
Kelley: — like a big deal made out of it. I’m thankful that that’s gone now. But because of the age gap that she and I had, I think she wanted me to know the world she came from and the things she experienced. I mean, she was born in the midst of the Great Depression. Her family migrated when she was an infant to Philadelphia.
And as a toddler, her mother was a domestic worker. So she wanted these stories to be my stories. And so, she told me these stories. My grandmother told me the stories. My grandfather told me the stories. My dad, who’s born and raised in Philadelphia, but from Southern parents, told me the stories of his family and their journey to Philadelphia over and over and over again.
They would just tell me like I had never heard the stories. And I would, you know, correct my mom, but like, oh, you know, you told me that before. She’s like, so anyway.
Lee: Yeah. And going through it again.
Kelley: Yeah, she wanted me to have those stories to be my own. And so, when I went to sit down and think about, well, who are the working-class? How do I make this really personal and really ring out from the way that I came to learn it? I thought of those stories.
Lee: I wonder, if you can recall, like what those earliest stories, like when do you remember hearing those stories for the first time. And then many years later, what are some of the stories that you that you discovered for the first time?
Kelley: So I start the book with the story of my great-grandfather, Solicitor. I started there because I remember being in my grandfather’s house that he built with his own hands in West Atco, New Jersey, and listening over and over to the sound of his voice.
He sounded so different. He had both a lisp and a deep accent. So I didn’t really understand everything he was saying until I was about four because there were certain words where I’m like, what is he saying? Who’s he referring to? What’s going on? And so, I listened very closely to him because of it, listening to his stories, and listening to like what his father had to go through to save his family and to run from sharecropping as if they had been enslaved.
But then to find them in the census and to see, you know, that they were in a place called Comer, Georgia, and then to understand and unpack that my family had been enslaved in a place called Elbert County, Georgia, a place I had actually done some scholarship and research on in my first book. I was like, wait, I know this. I know this place. I’ve been in and around this place not knowing that that’s where I’m from. There was both what I knew, and then these new discoveries, and these things that really wanted to be seen.
Lee: And though this is your family’s story, it’s a vehicle for so many of our stories, right? You talk about West Atco. I grew up literally a mile, half mile from West Atco, like I know people in West Atco. And so, to imagine these black folks coming up from the south to work in Philadelphia and find their way to South Jersey, did you feel even more connected to our story? I mean, certainly you do this for a living, but did this —
Kelley: Absolutely.
Lee: — give you entree into even a different part than you’ve ever explored?
Kelley: Well, so, you know, trained historians are taught, you know, not to do mystery, right? You know, don’t write about yourself, sit around and ruminate on your own life and your own journey. That’s the formal talk of historians.
But for me, this was an incredible opportunity to think a bit about my family, who are exceptional and interesting, but not alone in the kinds of journeys they have taken. And the intersections that so many of us have in those stories just has been really exciting to think about that we deserve to let regular people have those exceptional spotlights.
Lee: We’ll be right back.
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Lee: Alongside washerwomen, blacksmiths and postal workers, one of the jobs that Dr. Blair Kelley explores in her new book, “Black Folk,” is the Pullman porters, who made up one of the original engines of the black working-class.
Kelley: The Pullman Porters are incredible and something I would love to teach most of my career, because I think they tell us so much. The chance to write about that history was really incredible to me.
George Mortimer Pullman is the founder of the Pullman Palace Car. It’s a sleeping car where it converts from daytime sitting to nighttime sleeping. It’s intended to be luxurious and comfortable. And in his vision of comfort and luxury, he pictured black men like in the Antebellum South, waiting on you hand and foot in this very comfortable and luxurious space.
Lee: It must be nice, huh?
Kelley: I know, right? And so, he ends up hiring so many black men from right after the emancipation to serve as Pullman porters. They weren’t allowed to be conductors on the train or have higher level jobs, but they were slotted to be Pullman porters. And so many black men were hired.
And so, the racist division of George Mortimer Pullman ended up being the power of black men to organize in a really tremendous way. And so, you end up with a monopoly on this kind of employment. And they organize a union. Now, it’s a hard-fought battle. Generations are fighting for a union for Pullman porters. But eventually in the 1930s, they succeed under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph and C.L. Dellums and so many others who are fighting tooth and nail and organizing all over the country to help the Pullmans.
That fight for the Pullman Porters is broader than just a traditional union struggle where it would mainly be the workers themselves. It was happening in communities. It was happening in women’s clubs and groups all over the country, really giving their organizational heft to those fights as well. So they turn after their success in becoming the largest all black union into the fight for access for federal jobs, into the civil rights movement. And they really became a major hub of how the civil rights movement was launched.
Lee: And A. Philip Randolph is this giant that I feel like we —
Kelley: Huge.
Lee: — where’s the movie? Where’s the —
Kelley: Oh, my God.
Lee: — I don’t know, just like —
Kelley: Well, we had a little Pullman like TV movie, but —
Lee: Yeah.
Kelley: — he’s big. He was well-spoken, the son of a working-class preacher in Florida, targeting working-class and migrant workers in his community. And so, he really had that ethic and that commitment to the black working-class, in particular, and a real class analysis.
Lee: And really, to your point, it is foundational in what we would understand later as the broader civil rights movement.
Kelley: Absolutely, hugely foundational. He organizes what’s called the March on Washington Movement in the 1930s, which eventually becomes the March on Washington that we know in the 1960s.
Lee: Tell us a story of Amzie Moore, a longtime postal worker. And I wonder how important that role was in terms of helping to build this working-class. And when I think of even in the modern sense, my uncle Gary was a postal worker. He was like one of what we consider middle-class people in the family because he had a boat, he had the airplane, all from the working hard as a postal worker.
Kelley: I know, that’s right. Postal work, it was really fascinating. It’s grounded in citizenship, right? It’s the only job that’s listed in the Constitution, the only working-class job listed in the Constitution, and should be constitutionally guaranteed. So, of course, they try to keep black men and women from doing the work at all in first generations. And so, we don’t really see the first formal postal carriers who are black until after the civil war. Oftentimes, they are veterans, and this is a real mark of public service on the federal level.
And so, a person like Amzie Moore, who is an architect of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, who works with people like Bob Moses, he was a postal worker. He used it to gain access to federal things that were better than the Mississippi thing. So he got a federal loan to build his home. And he also, when he gets fired for organizing, he appeals to Washington, D.C. And it’s like, there’s no reason here for me to be fired. I need my job back. I’m a federal employee. So he’s using those rights to wedge against local authorities who wanted to see him hurt, and punished, and fired.
Lee: Wow. So your book ends as the Civil Rights Movement is kind of gearing up. And I wonder what’s happened in terms of the working-class since then. You know, in the last 50 years or so, how have things evolved and developed?
Kelley: Well, there are both really important gains, and then I think there are some losses. The Civil Rights Movement creates a set of circumstances where black people can be enabled to move out of black communities. They’re not hemmed in by segregation laws anymore. And yet, we still see profound levels of what we call de facto segregation that aren’t driven by law, but are driven by long-term customs, and then the residue of segregation, this afterlife of segregation that continues on.
Black workers are still more unionized than their white counterparts, and yet, they’re living in a region that has historically been hostile. Most black people are living in the south, where unions are anathema and not common. And yet, there is that desire for organizing and a new generation that I think is coming along.
But I think that the Civil Rights Movement answered some of the public and societal concerns of race, but they didn’t necessarily get to complete the work in fighting for that full living wage, the things that King was fighting for when he died and was murdered. He was centering the black working-class, but the American working-class and what he was doing at that moment. And so, I think it’s important for us to lift that question again and again and again about how we create just circumstances for workers, living wages, health care, access to clean water, clean air, decent food. How do we make sure that those are thought of as rights as well?
Lee: Why does this conversation, certainly, when it comes to politics or the way we engage with class and black folks, it’s you have deep poverty, abject poverty, the impoverished, right? And then on the other side, you have all of this celebrity and wealth that show like, look, they can do it, right —
Kelley: Mm-hmm.
Lee: — but we don’t often talk about the working-class. So in this contemporary context, why does this book, you know, engaging with this notion of the working-class black folks, why does that matter now?
Kelley: Well, I think black people matter all the dang time.
Lee: All the time, every day.
Kelley: Every day.
Lee: All of us.
Kelley: And I think it’s how you tell the story of America. I think we don’t get here without the unique story of people who don’t come as immigrants, but who come in bondage, but still manage to build the nation and build their own community alongside that process of exploitation and degradation. And so, I wanted not just a story about what had happened to black people, but the ways in which black people actualizing a world that they want to see as best they can in spite of those circumstances. And so, we need a broader sense of who the working-class can be.
And if you look at these black people who have gone before, they have lessons to give and stories to tell about the power that we have when we are more collective and the power that we can gain when we care about the least of these, and care about our children, and prioritize those things over personal material gain.
There’s something to be learned here for all of us about the ethic of care that can come into play.
Lee: Wow. You know, we’ve had conversations before about balancing the pains of existing while black in America and all the tribulations and all the violence heaped upon us in various ways. With the joy of being black in America and everything we’ve created and finding that thing in us, that spirit that we have, talk to us about the joys that we’ve created.
Kelley: One of my favorite things that happened in the process of writing this book is I got a picture book from my cousin who passed away. And then that package was this photo book of a family reunion that happened on my great uncle’s land and my grandfather’s land there in West Atco. And they had all the folks from down south who had not come out of North Carolina where they first migrated. They had folks from Atlantic City, all over, you know, our little family diaspora. There were beautiful pictures of, you know, eating and all those big old Cadillacs lined up in the yard next to each other to, you know, demonstrate their newfound prosperity.
And I remember that as a little one, just having so much fun running back and forth between the two yards and being with my cousins from Winston, Salem, playing and having a good time, my Philly cousins and, you know, that ability to come together to celebrate, to pass down, to teach the new generation about where we come from, and who your forebears are, and what your family really looks like was so important to them.
And so, there’s a picture of my grandfather, the children of Solicitor, who survived all sitting with their spouses. And so, it made me think, you know, I start the book with them fleeing in the nighttime under fear of death and destruction. And there they are, sitting on their own land, celebrating where they come from.
It’s a powerful turn when we remember the joy, and we remember the communion, and we remember the collectivity that comes from that community.
Lee: Dr. Blair L.M. Kelley, thank you so much for your time. It’s always enlightening speaking with you, and this is an important work for the canon, right, for us understanding our experience in this country. This seems to be a foundational work, so thank you so much. Appreciate your time.
Kelley: Thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure.
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook using the handle @intoamericapod, or you can tweet me @trymainelee, my full name. If you love the show or even like it, please help spread the word. You can do that by rating and reviewing “Into America” on Apple podcasts or wherever you’re listening right now.
“Into America” is produced by Isabelle Angell, Allison Bailey, Mike Brown, Aaron Dalton, and Max Jacobs. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Our executive producer is Aisha Turner. I’m Trymaine Lee. We’ll be back next Thursday.
Kelley: Woo!
Lee: That was (inaudible), made it easy.
Kelley: Best interview so far. (LAUGH)
Lee: There we go. Listen, that was little spark —
Kelley: Yeah.
Lee: — little spark there.
Kelley: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I’m excited to hear it.