These notes are part of the Black Reconstruction Reading Group‘s study material.
Book: Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. DuBois
Chapter: 1 – The Black Worker
Time period: pre-Civil War Location: the North, the South, and the West
Main Topic: A description of Black people as workers, enslaved.
Main Subject/Person/People: Black workers.
Themes:
Integration of Black people into US society.
Democracy – slavery as a contradiction against democracy. The erosion of democracy is seen in the increased oppression of Black people.
Labor force – labor theory of value, of slave labor being the basis of economic growth.
White immigration – position of poor white workers. White workers as class traitors.
Free Black labor/people – keeps mentioning them as a reminder that not every Black person was a slave. Black people could vote, if they owned property and were free, in many states, at one time. The laws initially allowed free Black people to exist (as per democracy), but the franchise and other rights were eroded in different ways, over time.
Runaways – the Safety Valve of Slavery. Runaways were exceptional people who left the South, leaving slavery able to function with less rebellion.
Black worker as the revolutionary force, and the Civil War as a revolutionary war for democracy.
Notable Quotes:
* “From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed.”
“The giant forces of water and of steam were harnessed to do the work of a growing pyramid of commerce and industry; and they not only could not be spared, if this new economic organization was to expand, but rather they became the cause of new political demands and alignments, of new dreams of power and visions of empire.” p.5
* “As slavery grew to a system and the Cotton Kingdom began to expand into imperial white domination, a free Negro was a contradiction, a threat and a menace.” p.7
“[Slavery] was a sharp accentuation of control over men beyond the modern labor reserve or the contract coolie system.” p.11
“The system of slavery demanded a special police force and such a force was made possible and unusually effective by the presence of the poor whites.” p.12
* “Slavery bred in the poor white a dislike of Negro toil of all sorts. He never regarded himself as a laborer, or as part of any labor movement. If he had any ambition at all it was to become a planter and to own “niggers.”” p.12
* “Not only was the fugitive slave important because of the actual loss involved, but for potentialities in the future. These free Negroes were furnishing a leadership for the mass of the black workers, and especially they were furnishing a text for the abolition idealists.” p.13
* “The true significance of slavery in the United States and to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy.” p.13
“Up from this slavery gradually climbed the Free negro with clearer, modern expression and more definite aim long before the emancipation of 1863. His greatest effort lay in his cooperation with the Abolition movement. He knew he was not free until all Negroes were free.” p.14
* “Above all, we must remember that the black worker was the ultimate exploited; … It was thus that the black worker, as a founding stone of a new economic system in the nineteenth century and for the modern world, who brought civil war in America.” p.15
“The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black.” p.16
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