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How have struggles over racism intersected with struggles over labour, property, and wealth?



Module: HST5317 Race in the United States: From Slavery to Civil Rights- Take Home Exam

By: Cian Downing


Racial struggles have punctuated many periods of American history as they demonstrate the seemingly oppositional lives that black and white Americans have led across hundreds of years. However, when historians have looked back on these struggles in recent years, it has become clear that some of these struggles were in fact related to social class as well as race. Some historians have identified a parallel of interests between campaigns for racial equality and those for class equality between all Americans, and have suggested the two may be more interlinked than it is often recognised. This essay will argue that the seemingly definitive racial dividing lines of US society have actually been engineered over hundreds of years by the economic elite of America in order to protect and further their own economic interests whilst simultaneously provoking discord amongst the working-classes of the United States. To demonstrate this point, this paper will first examine the emergence of slavery in colonial and early republican America, when slavery was first implemented in order to ensure the continuation of tobacco and cotton exports and the subsequent economic benefits. I will then examine the Reconstruction years and their aftermath, where the Southern states sought to reassert their pre-Civil War ways of life by passing legislation that cast out African-Americans from political and social life, and prevented any large-scale class solidarity that reached across racial lines. Lastly, I will look at the Civil Rights Movement, conventionally seen to have started in the late-1950s, when famous campaigns against racial discrimination began on a mass scale, resulting in concrete civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. However, these failed to tackle the de facto segregation which continued in housing, employment and workers’ rights, which meant the problems faced by African-Americans were only partially solved, as the leaders of the movement were committed to what Preston H. Smith has termed “racial democracy”, rather than “social democracy”, which perceived the main disparities of US society between rich and poor, rather than black and white.

Any attempt to tell the story of race and class struggles in American history must hark back to the earliest days of the Republic. This period of intense political and social upheaval was a crucial moment for race and class relations. Unrest had begun more than a century before the American Revolution, with Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, where early settlers in the “New World” rose up against the rulers of the state of Virginia in a dispute over land ownership and employment. This convinced the authorities at the time of the need for a more organised, subservient body of labour who would work on the plantations of Virginia, where tobacco was grown for export to European cities. Since tobacco exports were crucial for the economic prosperity of the region, creating a stable labour force in the form of chattel slavery was crucial for the economic interests of the state’s ruling classes. Given that most of these enslaved people were imported from West African nations as part of the Atlantic Slave Trade, this is perhaps the first example of how racial differences were actually an issue of wealth and property, rather than simply being the product of a later-created concept known as racial ideology. After the American Revolution of 1787, slavery continued to expand across the sprawling new Republic, and Founding Fathers including Thomas Jefferson now viewed slavery as crucial to the economic prosperity of the USA. He outlines this in his work ‘Notes on the State of Virginia’, in which he describes how black enslaved people are fundamentally different as human beings to white Americans in order to justify the existence of slavery alongside a constitution that preaches equality and protects “the unalienable rights of man”. We should view this as a period where racial differences were now consolidated and internalised by the American people, and this helps to explain how race was subsequently used to draw dividing lines between people latterly.

These ideas around racial distinctions and the natural order of society were brought into dispute with the American Civil War from 1863-65 and its aftermath. With the victory of the Union army and the Emancipation Proclamation, the US Government appeared to have a mandate to reshape Southern society however it thought best. When newly-elected Radical Republicans in Congress took control of Reconstruction, a period of great social and economic advancement began for African-Americans, as they became educated through the Freedmen’s Bureau and established themselves as independent citizens of the United States. Unsurprisingly, this was highly problematic for white Southerners, who had seen their property and their entire lifestyles taken away from them in an instant, prompting a response in the form of terrorist violence by white supremacist groups. These groups have traditionally been represented as fanatical, racist men of violence, but in fact their actions were mainly motivated by property and wealth. Their lynchings and murders were attempts to restore the social system of the antebellum South, in which black Americans were subservient to whites, and worked for the latter’s economic benefit through plantation labour or as domestic servants. The fact that this was no longer the case was hard for the former slaveholders to reconcile, as they did not know any other order of society other than slavery. The violence of the KKK and other groups meant black Americans lived in constant fear of violence and intimidation, allowing white Southerners to regain a degree of control over their actions. However, beyond this we should view white supremacist violence as key perpetrators in the class warfare waged by Southern state governments, which aimed to create a schism between black and white Americans of all classes, even if both races had similar economic interests and could have worked together. However, the inaction of Southern state governments on the KKK illustrates how this seemingly racial struggle was actually rooted in issues of class, property and labour, as the ruling elite of the South weakened the unity and political power of the working-classes significantly by pitting people of similar wealth and economic interests against each other. Once the labouring classes were divided it then became nigh on impossible for the working-classes to have any chance of overthrowing the existing system. This was only furthered by the so-called Jim Crow Laws, which were introduced by Southern state governments from 1895. These laws ensured that public life in the American south remained segregated by race, with African-Americans being prohibited from sitting with whites on public transport, in restaurants or cinemas, for example. As a result, the white working-classes of the South were now convinced that their black counterparts were their enemies, as the races now lived totally separated public lives.

Jim Crow segregation brought about a narrowing of goals in Afro-American political thought, in which racial distinctions and segregation were now accepted and other economic goals were set instead. Booker T. Washington in his famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech embodies this. He called for black Americans to “cast down their bucket in agriculture, mechanics and the professions”, whilst simultaneously describing any demands for racial or social equality as “the extremest folly”. This portrays Washington’s acceptance of Southern racism and legal discrimination, on the condition that black Americans were still able to advance economically into more highly skilled employment. Whilst this is a far cry from the egalitarian rhetoric of the Reconstruction years, it is fascinating that Washington puts such an emphasis on wealth and employment. However, he fails to recognise the parallels between the class and racial struggle, as he almost celebrates the subservience of African-Americans to their white counterparts, illustrating how continued racial oppression by white Southern authorities in the later nineteenth century succeeded in dividing the working-class along racial lines, and scaling down the ambitions of African-Americans. This meant the prosperity and power of the white-controlled state governments could not be properly challenged.

In the Northern states segregation took on very different forms. Suburbanisation began in the 1930s, and new communities of middle-class Americans sprung up on the outskirts of major cities. Many of the houses in these new developments came with restrictive covenants attached to them, which usually indirectly excluded black Americans from owning a home in these districts, making this a new form of de facto segregation of American life. However, to interpret these restrictions as simply being racist may be an oversimplification. Mixed race neighbourhoods were considered to be areas of disharmony by the Federal Housing Association, so if black families moved into these new developments, it was likely that house prices would fall, meaning potential capital was at risk for both the developer and homeowner. Therefore, the exclusion of black Americans from these new suburbs arguably had financial rather than racial motivations. As a result, black communities were now mainly confined to the inner-city districts, with higher levels of poverty, crime and unemployment, and these social issues were what any campaign needed to tackle.

In this context, the civil rights successes in the South by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and others meant very little to black Americans in the North. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 respectively helped to alleviate legal segregation, but not de facto segregation, which was rooted in issues of finance, property and social class. This makes Martin Luther King and A Phillip Randolph’s foray into social issues all the more fascinating. Whilst King is revered in popular memory as a heroic figure in the racial struggles of the 1950s and ‘60s, his later years saw him and his allies attempt to tackle poverty and other social issues, crafting an inter-racial campaign with issues of social class at its heart. The “Freedom Budget”, published by King and his inner circle in Autumn 1965 illustrates this. It aimed to “wipe out poverty within ten years”, arguing that the millions of Americans suffering in poverty were “not getting their fair share of our national wealth”. The document makes barely any mention of race or racial equality, but instead focuses on class inequality and redistribution of wealth. This informs us on a lesser-known narrative of the civil rights movement – the leading figures of the campaign knew that capitalism and conservative economics would have to be challenged in order to bring about greater equality between all Americans. They recognised how racism and racial inequality was being driven by capitalism, so moved towards an quasi-socialist agenda in order to achieve their goals of racial and social equality for all Americans. Black American resistance has a long history of socialist campaigning, as Timothy Tyson’s work on Robert F. Williams, a 1950s activist who worked with the Socialist Workers’ Party, has shown. Williams collaborated with socialist groups on numerous civil rights campaigns in the late ‘50s, whilst developing an ideology that would later become known as ‘black power’. This is further evidence of a socialist tradition of class struggle within the civil rights movement, despite these campaigns generally being memorialised as racial.

In conclusion, this essay has demonstrated how racial struggles across American history have been rooted in issues of social class, wealth and property. This has often been difficult for Americans to reconcile with their own values, as the socialist solutions sometimes put forward for these issues are at odds with their own political traditions of free market enterprise and capitalism. This is perhaps why racism has remained a feature of American history for so long. When chattel slavery was first implemented on a wide scale after the American revolution, it allowed ideas about racial distinctions to crystallise and become accepted by most Americans, whereas previously they were not widely held. The implementation of slavery in order to secure economic growth through a stable workforce was the first example of the wealthy elite engineering racial differences in order to secure their own interests, but this continued into the nineteenth century. During Reconstruction and the years following it, attacks by white supremacist groups on black Southerners, combined with the Jim Crow Laws which codified segregation, acted as a means for the ruling class to divide ordinary Americans along racial lines, dashing any prospect of class unity. This meant the ruling classes were increasingly powerful, as the working-class were too divided to challenge their authority. The same is true of post-war America, where poverty and unemployment were rife across many Northern cities which were beginning to deindustrialise. However, these racial divisions that were engineered by the ruling classes meant it was not widely accepted that there was a class-based solution to these problems, despite some activists such as Robert F. Williams advocating such a move. Additionally, senior civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King initially appeared to lead a campaign for “racial democracy”, a part of his career that is especially well-known. However, he later appeared to move towards a more socialist agenda in order to end de facto discrimination against African-Americans, a recognition that in order to tackle the racial issues facing America, there also needed to be a stronger critique of capitalism, as this was the driving force behind continuing racial inequality across American history.

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