Age of rebellion races11/30/2022 The “Reconstruction” of the South only began when federal troops occupied former Confederate states in 1867 and demanded former confederates pledge loyalty to the union or lose their political rights. Thousands of freed people who tried to leave plantations or refused to work at the terms offered were murdered in the first years after emancipation. In other words, the new laws snatched back the liberty of newly freed slaves, and punished those who refused to bend. When the Civil War ended, Confederate officers returned to their plantations and immediately established “black codes” that limited a black person’s right to hold property, teach, preach or travel. It took almost one hundred years of agitation, resistance, political organizing and the bloodiest war of our nation’s history to end that “most peculiar institution.” But the defeat of the Confederacy did not permanently destroy the power of southern landowners or their ideology of racial superiority. Slave rebellions were terrifying to the political authorities, not only because of physical danger they represented to a minority white elite, but because they exposed the violence required to maintain slavery as a system. Over the years, after every real or imagined slave uprising, these laws were made harsher, and black workers were further stigmatized and dehumanized. Relatively early in colonial America, Southern landowners recognized that they could maximize their profits by using African slaves to work their land, and a body of law was implemented to rationalize permanent race-based enslavement. We owe it to our members, our children and our country. The labor movement can and must be at the forefront of efforts to push back against the politics of division. Some unions responded by embracing integration others resisted.Įven after civil rights legislation finally made racial discrimination illegal in the 1960s, conservative politicians used racial stereotypes and white fear and anxieties to divide working people. In the decades between the two wars, business interests deliberately used race and ethnic differences to undermine labor unity. When African Americans moved north in the 20th century over the course of two world wars and the Great Depression, they found more personal freedom-but they also found ongoing discrimination and unequal access to economic opportunities. That region’s cultural isolation from, but continuing political and economic influence on the rest of the country continues to this day. The story of race and labor in America starts with the treatment of black workers in the South. This kind of violence is easier for the slaver to rationalize if the enslaved is viewed as less than human. And progressive labor leaders like John Lewis and Walter Reuther knew the labor movement could not be whole without the participation of black workers.īoth union and civil rights activists understood that labor rights are human rights, and that to constrain a person’s liberty-to choose one’s work, to earn enough to support a family, to marry, to travel-is a deliberate act of coercion. saw unions as essential to the ability of black workers to rise and achieve equality. Progressive race leaders like Fredrick Douglass, W.E.B. Abolitionists, textile workers, train porters, Knights of Labor, tenant farmers, miners, auto workers and sanitation workers lived their commitment to racial equality and joined together to demand a better, more just America. Yet throughout our history, ordinary women and men fought and died for a racially inclusive vision of economic justice. The legacy of prejudice that was produced and reinforced by slavery and Jim Crow continues to shape American political institutions and thinking in profound ways. And after race-based slavery was finally outlawed, a new generation of political elites allowed a new race-based system of coerced labor to become law and remain in place for another hundred. 15, 2014, Missouri AFL-CIO ConventionĪmerica’s Declaration of Independence asserts that “all men are created equal” and “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yet our founding fathers, some of whom were slave-owners, incorporated slavery into our political institutions and defended it for almost a century. Every city, every state and every region of this country has its own deep history with racism. “Racism is part of our inheritance as Americans.
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