BlackEconomics.org®
This is a special African American (Afrodescendant) History Month (AAHM) release from BlackEconomoics.org. It was invited by the Jackson Advocate of Jackson (MedgarEversville), Mississippi. The Jackson Advocate is an 87-year-old Black newspaper known as “The Voice of Black Mississippians.” We extend our deep appreciation to the Advocate’s Editor Emeritus, Mrs. Alice Tisdale, who invited this submission.
Introduction
It poured after the Jackson Advocate’s Editor Emeritus, Mrs. Alice Tisdale, agreed to a BlackEconomics.org’s proposal in response to her invitation to prepare a special article on “Black Labor” for African American (Afrodescendant) History Month. Initially, we considered “Houdining” our way out of the invitation by hemming and hawing about not being a “Labor Economist.”(i) But after due consideration, we recognized the opportunity to share relevant aspects of what rained in our window.
This article walks the historical chronology of Black labor in the US using well-known and labeled eras related to Black Americans’ 400-plus-year undeclared war against racism, discrimination, and exclusion that continues today. It highlights labor opportunities available during these eras and discusses how economic expansion and our social activism produced expansions of the job/occupational menu from which Black labor could choose. It concludes with a recommendation that we read the tea leaves and recognize that we are in an “Every People for themselves period,” which warrants a new mindset about determining the future of Black labor in the nation.
Ante Bellum Era
Once our ancestors arrived, Black labor became the core of the American economic enterprise. For example, Black economist Trevon Logan and his co-author Richard Hornbeck estimated that the average value of income produced by slave versus free farm labor differed by about 50 percent in 1860, with slave labor producing the higher income.(ii) This statistic alone pinpoints a very important benefit that has inured to the US economy from Black labor throughout the nation’s subsequent history.
Using skills brought with them and new skills developed here, a considerable number of slaves and free Blacks labored in industries beyond agriculture leading up to the Civil War. Here, we refer to non-professional occupations and industries that we label: Forestry and fishing; Construction; Mining, Manufacturing; Wholesale/Retail Trade; and Transportation and Warehousing. There are numerous accounts of highly skilled slaves who earned income and purchased their and/or members of their family’s freedom by working independently from their owners under contract or dividing their time between independent contract work and work with their owners. Of course, owners held the independent labor contracts, and they faced no regulatory requirements concerning compensation for their highly-skilled slaves.
Immediate Post Bellum and Reconstruction Eras
During the 1865-1867 Black Codes years in former slave states, Whites sought to reimpose slavery-like conditions on Blacks through new laws that contradicted the purposes and intents of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.(iii) However, US Congressional Reconstruction Acts of 1867 opened a ten-year “Reconstruction” era, and former slaves were able exercise certain rights extended by the aforementioned Constitutional Amendments.
As the Reconstruction era unfolded, non-elite White Americans recognized the precariousness of their employment situation and the necessity of capturing the best (read most highly compensated) employment opportunities. Whites developed strategies for accelerating their skill levels; excluding Blacks from certain employment opportunities altogether; and for “re-enslaving” Blacks through the criminal injustice system so that prison programs could provide very cheap labor to toil in White-owned enterprises.(iv)
These strategies were fully operationalized after the “Compromise of 1877,” which ended the Reconstruction era.(v) The Ku Klux Klan swelled in membership; the Black male prison population ballooned; and the Jim Crow Era fully bloomed.
Jim Crow Part I
We define Part I of the Jim Crow Era to extend from 1877 to the US Supreme Courts 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson Decision, which made “separate but equal” the law of the land. While the sharecropping tradition continued well beyond 1896, it found its footing and power during Jim Crow Part I. To the extent that non-urban former Black male slaves and their families had not moved to the Western frontier, had not relocated to a Northern State, and were not imprisoned in a Southern State, then sharecropping was their likely lot. Sharecropping might be best described as an arrangement where prospects for not being permanently indebted to the landowner were small-to-none. Consequently, while Southern agriculture was a profitable and favorable undertaking for landowners and benefited the nations’ consumers, it was a nightmare for Black sharecropping farmers and their families.
Northern and Southern nonurban Blacks provided labor for nonagricultural industries that operated in nonurban areas; e.g., forestry, fishing, and mining.
It was common for former slave and free Blacks, who traveled to the Western Frontier during this period to form small Black towns that facilitated agricultural trade. In certain cases, Blacks were able to obtain large tracts of land and grew semi-perishable produce that could be shipped to urban centers or for further processing. Some of these Black farmers became wealthy and famous.(vi)
Urban Blacks in the South and North lived in segregated communities and began developing enterprises permitted by Whites:(vii) Including maintenance and repair and small residential construction; small (wholesale/retail) trade establishments; printing (newspapers); small Black finance and insurance companies; personal care services (e.g., barbershops, beauty salons, and laundries); mortician services; and recreational and entertainment houses. For cities with sizeable industrial and commercial sectors, Blacks worked in manufacturing establishments; the transportation sector; and the public administration sector serving as support personnel for producing utility, health, and other core governmental services. Also, Blacks attained sufficient educational qualifications to operate educational [elementary, secondary, and post-secondary (Historically Black Colleges and Universities that were created through government land grants)] institutions and to fill all, or almost all, occupations in these institutions. Black medical, dental, and legal professionals could be found practicing, but not universally so.
Jim Crow Part II
During the period we define as Jim Crow Part II that spanned from the start of the 20th century to the promulgation of Civil Rights Laws in the 1960s, the nation became increasingly urbanized, mechanized, and modernized. Improved communications and transportation systems opened doors to new occupations. However, the “separate but equal” law prohibited Blacks from advancing apace with the broader society because racism and discrimination persisted.
Important markers for Blacks labor-wise during this period were the formation of what we know today as “Black legacy organization:” e.g., the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); the Urban League (NUL); and certain newly arising and fast growing Christian religious denominations.
As the nation’s economy expanded to meet needs for World War I (WWI), and as the Black population grew, the first phase of the Great Migration occurred as Black American relocated from Southern States to large Northeastern and Midwestern cities. Also, White workers in important industrial occupations formed labor unions to secure more benefits from industry owners to improve the former’s quality of life. Black workers, who were no strangers to labor unions, attempted to coalesce with non-Black labor to form unions, but they mainly sought to form labor unions of their own.(viii) The most formidable Black labor union during the first half of the 20th century was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. By the mid-1920s, fast-paced US economic growth enabled Black labor and business owners to flourish and to motivate a surge in artistic, cultural, and musical expression that birthed the Harlem Renaissance. This marked the onset of an unending chain of Black cultural and sports superstar entertainers that has not ended. In addition, this period witnessed the arising of concerns about Black Americans’ predicament as a “kept People” that remains today.(ix)
The “Roaring 1920s” sank to the “Great Depression of the 1930s.” Black Americans, who were some of the hardest hit by the morose economy were those whose antecedents had migrated West after the Civil War and became prolific and wealthy agricultural producers. Depression droughts transformed vast amounts of farmland’s topsoil into dust that blew away and causing large financial losses for some of these agricultural producers. However, a very positive development during the 1930s was the inauguration of the nation’s Old Age Survivors and Disability Insurance Program (that provides Supplemental, Disability, and Social Security Income). Initially, the program was not intended for Black workers employed in the “household” sector; but the program was modified in the early 1950s to incorporate workers employed in less formal arrangements than those existing in the highly formalized business sector.
The nation’s economic roller coaster lurched upward during the 1940s for Black workers who engaged in the second phase of the Great Migration from Southern States to Northern and Western urban centers where implements of war were being produced to satisfy demand generated by a rapidly expanding WWII. A significant portion of the Black and White male labor force was absorbed into the nation’s military, which opened opportunities for Black and White women to enter relatively high paying occupations vacated by the newly conscripted military personnel. After WWII, sentiments about the previously sacrosanct and prototypical nuclear family would never be the same.
Notably, the military’s push for more equal treatment of Black and White military personnel during and especially after WWII as a requirement for saving lives was a key factor in opening the door to Civil Rights for Black Americans. The mere fact that the US military had little choice but to permit Black Americans to work in occupations that were off limits to Blacks outside the military signaled an important change in national sentiments concerning the capabilities and uses of Black labor. A significantly expanded occupational palette became available to Black Americans entering the labor force.
Civil Rights Era to Today
After the nation calmed and rebalanced following WWII, the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court Decision perturbed the nation’s cultural equilibrium again. “Separate but equal” disappeared as the law of the land in favor of requirements to “desegregate” public educational systems. The Brown case and a myriad other cases, at least theoretically, produced unlimited opportunities for Black Americans (Afrodescendants) to obtain the knowledges, skills, and abilities required to perform in every conceivable occupation, firm, or industry in the nation. That is, by the end of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, there were no national legal barriers to Black Americans capturing opportunities to work.
The reality is that racism and racial discrimination continue today. The nation has approved, operationalized, and then abandoned two well-known methods for leveling the playing field so that Black Americans can prepare to compete with our non-Black counterparts:(x) Affirmative Action (1961/5 – 2023); and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI 2020-2025). In fact, the nation’s newly elected President and his controllers and supporters have determined that no national governmental assistance should be provided to Black Americans to improve our prospects for competing effectively in the nation’s socioeconomic system.
Conclusion
This abbreviated history reveals that the role of Black American (Afrodescendant) labor has changed as the nation’s economy expanded and evolved and as we forced changes by squeezing out opportunities inherent in the nation’s laws. We have always been behind the curve; always playing catchup; and—in Black American parlance—”always a day late and a dollar short.” Many Black Americans believe that our current predicament derives from implementation of the so-called “Project 2025 Plan.” If true, then we should all be motivated to adopt and implement our own plan. We should discontinue reacting to others’ plans and dictates and operationalize our own labor agenda that is well integrated with a comprehensive strategic plan for our long-term future.
This new posture is imperative because oligarchs and plutocrats, who control the US and global economies, are acting without regard for humanity—save their own. A logical outcome from transforming the economy by fully utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), robotization, and biological and biochemical (virus) warfare technologies is to render laborers, workers, and the common person—as Richard Prior would say—”null and void.” Our concern is that oligarchs and plutocrats have not explained their vision for labor in the world of tomorrow. We should not await their explanation. Rather, we should move forward as expeditiously as possible with our own plans for becoming:(xi) Unified; mentally and spiritually re-grounded in an Afrikan consciousness as enabled by adherence to the Nguzo Saba;(xii) self-reliant; self-determined; and a liberated People.
The most favorable aspect of our expected future is that we will recognize our power to achieve what we desire as a People. Not as some baseless rosy vision, but based both on our ancient Afrikan history and our recent American history as a segregated People. We should realize that certain important metrics indicate that we are worse off today than we were under Jim Crow “segregation” and in our own areas of influence (communities) and evolving our own world. This should be no surprise. As descendants of Kemetians, we should know (and should have known) that integrating/combining unequal substances (in this case Whites possessed substantially more population, education, economic, political, and military/police power than Blacks) would and could only produce under naturally occurring conditions the following outcome: Superimposition of the nature and will of the more powerful upon the less powerful.
Looking ahead we can guarantee our success (however we define it) by extinguishing our obsessive love for the material and rejecting related paths for obtaining it, which often involve roles as “entertainers.” Entertainers may accrue high near-term compensation, but, too often, they produce very adverse long-term outcomes for our People.xiii When we become unified and introspective about our current condition, why we are who we are, what we should be, and what we should desire for our and our descendants’ future, then there is no power in Heaven or the Earth that can prevent us from working and achieving success.
©B Robinson
021425
End Notes
i We claim no special expertise as a “Labor Economist” or as an “Economic Historian.” However, the economics discipline requires knowledge of a wide range of topics; including the two just mentioned.
ii See Richard Hornbeck and Trevon Logan (2023). “One Giant Leap: Emancipation and Aggregate Economic Gain.” National Bureau of Economic Research, WP 31758. https://www.nber.org/papers/w31758 (Ret. 02/10/25). The authors estimate that the average value of income earned by farm slaves in 1860 was about $60 per annum, but only about $40 per annum for free farm workers. This difference is largely explained by the higher intensity work effort required and performed by slaves.
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iii As a quick refresher: The 13th Amendment abolished slavery; the 14th Amendment guaranteed birthright citizenship and its concomitant rights and privileges; and the 15th Amendment extended voting rights to Black males.
iv Melissa Rubio-Ramos (2022). “From Plantations to Prisons: The Race Gap in Incarceration After the Abolition of Slavery in the US.” ECONtribute: Markets & Public Policy. Discussion Paper No. 195 https://www.econtribute.de/RePEc/ajk/ajkdps/ECONtribute_195_2022.pdf (Ret. 021425). See Figure 2 on page 13 that shows the Black incarceration rate rising from about 1.8 per 1,000 population in 1870 to about 5.7 per 1,000 population in 1900—a more than tripling of the incarceration rate during the 30-year period.
v The Compromise of 1877 involved hazy and incompletely documented events that enabled the peaceful determination of the winner of the 1876 Presidential Election. The compromise permitted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to ascend to the US Presidency in March of 1877 instead of Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. In exchange for conceding the presidency, Southern Democrats obtained an agreement from Republicans to order the withdrawal of remaining Federal military forces from Southern states. This enabled Southern Democrats to reimpose their racist will in these states and end the Reconstruction Era.
vi See Quintard Taylor (1998). In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990. W.W. Norton & Company: New York.
vii Although rare, Black Americans began obtaining training to serve as medical, dental, and legal professionals at Northern institutions before the abolition of slavery in the 19th century. By the second half of the 19th century, Black Americans were engaged in practicing these professions in both Northern and Southern States.
viii Two important Black American labor unions that formed during the 19th century were: (1) American League of Colored Laborers (1850); and (2) Colored National Labor Union (1869). The venerable Frederick Douglas was associated with both unions and was elected President of the Colored National Labor Union in 1872. Source: Generative AI, Experimental (021425)
ix The impact of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association was most evident in selected parts of the nation during this era.
x These two methods were aligned with the purposes and intents of EEO (Equal Employment Opportunity) Laws that were first established by the US Government in 1965.
xi A plan worth considering is: Long-Term Strategic Plan Panel (2023). Long-Term Strategic Plan for Black America. Long-Term Strategic Plan Panel. Honolulu, Hawaii; https://www.ltspfba.org/LTSP/fin_ltspfba_071223.pdf (Ret. 021025)
xii Nguzo Saba is derived from the Ke Swahili language and is translated as “seven (Afrikan) principles.” Each day of the end-of-year Kwanzaa Celebration emphasizes one of these important seven principles. Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga is the “creator” of Kwanzaa, which is described here: https://www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org/ (Ret. 021425).
xiii There are numerous sources that identify adverse outcomes for Black Americans that are linked to media images that depict Black Americans unfavorably. However, we urge readers to consult: Op. cit. (Long-Term Strategic Plan Panel) p. 75; second full paragraph.