[Detail] Soldier and Two Women.
Labor Movements
Although slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation, a search on peonage yields some news articles about African Americans who remained in servitude against their will. An article from the February 6, 1904 Cleveland Gazette describes six children who were enslaved for six years after their father was killed. Editorials that are critical of other forms of child labor appear in a 1905 Cleveland Journal piece and an essay in the January 1913 edition of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, which notes, "This agitation on behalf of the mill and factory children (all white) is bound to react in favor of the black children of the South."
- According to the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review editorial, why would concern for white children lead to concern for black children? Upon what concepts of the nation and of childhood is this belief based?
- What are the similarities and differences between slavery and child labor?
- Is it surprising that child labor continued after the Emancipation Proclamation?
- How might any of these authors have responded to the Supreme Court's decision in Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company (1922) to invalidate the Federal Child Labor Law of 1916?
Concerns for child labor were just one facet of the late-nineteenth-century movement toward unionization. The Knights of Labor actively recruited African-American workers. By 1886, approximately 60,000 African Americans had joined the union. A search on Knights of Labor provides some brief newspaper accounts of African-American participation in the union and employers' concern that this participation would lead to increased expenses.
- Why did the Knights of Labor appeal directly to African-American workers?
- How would this organization have benefited from such enrollment?
- What are the benefits of joining a union?
- How might African Americans' history of slavery and their experience during Reconstruction have affected their attitudes towards unionization? How might these attitudes have differed from those of white workers?
