Hiring the Black Worker

Hiring the Black Worker

Author: Timothy J. Minchin

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2013-01-01

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0807882933

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In the 1960s and 1970s, the textile industry's workforce underwent a dramatic transformation, as African Americans entered the South's largest industry in growing numbers. Only 3.3 percent of textile workers were black in 1960; by 1978, this number had risen to 25 percent. Using previously untapped legal records and oral history interviews, Timothy Minchin crafts a compelling account of the integration of the mills. Minchin argues that the role of a labor shortage in spurring black hiring has been overemphasized, pointing instead to the federal government's influence in pressing the textile industry to integrate. He also highlights the critical part played by African American activists. Encouraged by passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, black workers filed antidiscrimination lawsuits against nearly all of the major textile companies. Still, Minchin notes, even after the integration of the mills, African American workers encountered considerable resistance: black women faced continued hiring discrimination, while black men found themselves shunted into low-paying jobs with little hope of promotion.


Race and Schooling in the South, 1880-1950

Race and Schooling in the South, 1880-1950

Author: Robert A. Margo

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 0226505014

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The interrelation among race, schooling, and labor market opportunities of American blacks can help us make sense of the relatively poor economic status of blacks in contemporary society. The role of these factors in slavery and the economic consequences for blacks has received much attention, but the post-slave experience of blacks in the American economy has been less studied. To deepen our understanding of that experience, Robert A. Margo mines a wealth of newly available census data and school district records. By analyzing evidence concerning occupational discrimination, educational expenditures, taxation, and teachers' salaries, he clarifies the costs for blacks of post-slave segregation. "A concise, lucid account of the bases of racial inequality in the South between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era. . . . Deserves the careful attention of anyone concerned with historical and contemporary race stratification."—Kathryn M. Neckerman, Contemporary Sociology "Margo has produced an excellent study, which can serve as a model for aspiring cliometricians. To describe it as 'required reading' would fail to indicate just how important, indeed indispensable, the book will be to scholars interested in racial economic differences, past or present."—Robert Higgs, Journal of Economic Literature "Margo shows that history is important in understanding present domestic problems; his study has significant implications for understanding post-1950s black economic development."—Joe M. Richardson, Journal of American History


Like a Family

Like a Family

Author: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2012-12-30

Total Pages: 541

ISBN-13: 0807882941

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Since its original publication in 1987, Like a Family has become a classic in the study of American labor history. Basing their research on a series of extraordinary interviews, letters, and articles from the trade press, the authors uncover the voices and experiences of workers in the Southern cotton mill industry during the 1920s and 1930s. Now with a new afterword, this edition stands as an invaluable contribution to American social history. "The genius of Like a Family lies in its effortless integration of the history of the family--particularly women--into the history of the cotton-mill world.--Ira Berlin, New York Times Book Review "Like a Family is history, folklore, and storytelling all rolled into one. It is a living, revelatory chronicle of life rarely observed by the academe. A powerhouse.--Studs Terkel "Here is labor history in intensely human terms. Neither great impersonal forces nor deadening statistics are allowed to get in the way of people. If students of the New South want both the dimensions and the feel of life and labor in the textile industry, this book will be immensely satisfying.--Choice


The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford

The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford

Author: Beth Tompkins Bates

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0807835641

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In the 1920s, Henry Ford hired thousands of African American men for his open-shop system of auto manufacturing. This move was a rejection of the notion that better jobs were for white men only. In The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford


Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877-1984

Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877-1984

Author: James C. Cobb

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-07-11

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 0813148669

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In the 1880s, Southern boosters saw the growth of industry as the only means of escaping the poverty that engulfed the postbellum South. In the long run, however, as James C. Cobb demonstrates in this illuminating book, industrial development left much of the South's poverty unrelieved and often reinforced rather than undermined its conservative social and political philosophy. The exploitation of the South's resources, largely by interests from outside the region, was not only perpetuated but in many ways strengthened as industrialization proceeded. The 20th Century brought increasing competition for industry that favored management over labor and exploitation over protection of the environment. Even as the South blossomed into the "Sunbelt" in the late twentieth century, it is clear, Cobb argues, that the region had been unable to follow the path of development taken by the northern industrialized states, and that even an industrialized South has yet the escape the shadow of its deprived past.


The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935

The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935

Author: James D. Anderson

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2010-01-27

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 0807898880

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James Anderson critically reinterprets the history of southern black education from Reconstruction to the Great Depression. By placing black schooling within a political, cultural, and economic context, he offers fresh insights into black commitment to education, the peculiar significance of Tuskegee Institute, and the conflicting goals of various philanthropic groups, among other matters. Initially, ex-slaves attempted to create an educational system that would support and extend their emancipation, but their children were pushed into a system of industrial education that presupposed black political and economic subordination. This conception of education and social order--supported by northern industrial philanthropists, some black educators, and most southern school officials--conflicted with the aspirations of ex-slaves and their descendants, resulting at the turn of the century in a bitter national debate over the purposes of black education. Because blacks lacked economic and political power, white elites were able to control the structure and content of black elementary, secondary, normal, and college education during the first third of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, blacks persisted in their struggle to develop an educational system in accordance with their own needs and desires.


The Color of Work

The Color of Work

Author: Timothy J. Minchin

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2003-01-14

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0807875481

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Histories of the civil rights movement have generally overlooked the battle to integrate the South's major industries. The paper industry, which has played an important role in the southern economy since the 1930s, has been particularly neglected. Using previously untapped legal records and oral history interviews, Timothy Minchin provides the first in-depth account of the struggle to integrate southern paper mills. Minchin describes how jobs in the southern paper industry were strictly segregated prior to the 1960s, with black workers confined to low-paying, menial positions. All work literally had a color: every job was racially designated and workers were represented by segregated local unions. Though black workers tried to protest workplace inequities through their unions, their efforts were largely ineffective until passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act opened the way for scores of antidiscrimination lawsuits. Even then, however, resistance from executives and white workers ensured that the fight to integrate the paper industry was a long and difficult one.


The Selling of the South

The Selling of the South

Author: James Charles Cobb

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780252061622

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From the Great Depression to the Sunbelt Era the South has pursued industrial development as the remedy for its economic ills. The mixed results of this ongoing crusade are chronicled in this path-breaking study, updated to 1990, in which James Cobb examines the expectations, achievements, and side effects of the dive for southern industrialization.


Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights

Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights

Author: Michael K. Honey

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2023-02-03

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 0252054326

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Widely praised upon publication and now considered a classic study, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights chronicles the southern industrial union movement from the Great Depression to the Cold War, a history that created the context for the sanitation workers' strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis in April 1968. Michael K. Honey documents the dramatic labor battles and sometimes heroic activities of workers and organizers that helped to set the stage for segregation's demise. Winner of the Charles S. Sydnor Award, given by the Southern Historical Association, 1994. Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize given by the Organization of American Historians, 1994. Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Award for an outstanding book in American social history.