KELLEY: Often by the pound in terms of cotton or the ability to work continuously in sort of other circumstances - sugar, for example. What were the ways that slaveholders would measure productivity? And you're actually asserting that the way this country thinks about work and really what productivity looks like started with the assessment of productivity of enslaved Africans. So the ways in which the country became built up over time were about African skill and African knowledge. They knew how to grow rice in West Africa, and so they were purchased in particular to grow it there. In South Carolina, for example, the rice culture there became so wealthy because it was a West African set of traditions. They figured out how to plat the land properly. So when you would visit a plantation today and you would see sort of flat vistas and, you know, runoff and little creeks and no trees in certain areas and trees in others, those massive trees had to be cleared, and they had to be cleared by hand. And much of the country was in forms of wilderness settled by Native Americans, but not the sort of massive land clearing necessary for a plantation culture. KELLEY: Well, you know, it's important to remember that the first enslaved generations, they come well before the founding of the nation. Can you explain briefly the kinds of labor required to prepare the land for what would first be tobacco and later cotton? MOSLEY: We're talking more than - it's estimated, actually, more than 15 million enslaved Africans were brought here for that sole purpose of exploiting their labor. And so when you see every election season, they pile into some diner in the Midwest somewhere and start asking those voters exactly what they think as the working folks, you want to make sure that they're remembering that there's a broader working class that isn't all white, isn't all Midwestern and also has a lot to teach us about this country and what's possible. And I think when you take Black Americans out of the American story, you start to miss things, and you start to forget the fuller and richer context. I'm a historian of the African American experience. KELLEY: I mean, I think it's sort of an ongoing truth. MOSLEY: Blair, what was it about that moment when you were watching television and you heard those commentators on TV talking about the white working class that you said to yourself, I need to write this book? Her first book, "Right To Ride: Streetcar Boycotts And African American Citizenship," chronicles the litigation and organizing against segregated rails and streetcars. Williamson distinguished professor of Southern studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Blair Kelley gives an expansive view spanning 200 years, from one of her earliest known ancestors to the essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.īlair Kelley is director of the Center for the Study of the American South, a Joel R. "Black Folk: The Roots Of The Black Working Class" gives a portrait of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids and postal workers who contributed to the wealth and prosperity of this country, playing major roles in organizing for better jobs, better pay and equal rights. From slavery to the formation of labor unions as we know them, it is the Black working class, Kelley writes in her new book, that is also at the center of the American story. She felt the news media was obscuring the existence of one of America's vital work forces. Over the last few years, University of North Carolina professor Blair Kelley would often bristle when she heard the way TV commentators used the term white working class.
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