African-American Strikebreaking from the Civil War to the New Deal

When African-American workers broke labor strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were acting in opposition to established social norms concerning race, class, community, and the state. Imagine platoons of African-American men who ordinarily lacked protection of their most basic civil rights escorted by police into a hostile European-American community to take the jobs of European-American workers who were expressing their working-class consciousness through a labor union that excluded their fellow African-American workers. Scholars have interpreted African-American strikebreaking as an example of the ethnic stratification characteristic of the American working class (Bonacich 1976; Gutman 1962, 1987; Foner and Lewis 1979, 1980; Spero and Harris 1931). What was its political-economic context? That is the central question of this essay.