Black Folk Audiobook Libro.fm

There have been countless books articles and televised reports in recent years about the almost mythic white working class a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor and even the very existence of entire groups of working people including everyday Black workers In this brilliant corrective Black Folk acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story

Spanning two hundred yearsfrom one of Kelleys earliest known ancestors an enslaved blacksmith to the essential workers of the Covid19 pandemicBlack Folk highlights the lives of the laundresses Pullman porters domestic maids and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Taking jobs white people didnt want and confined to segregated neighborhoods Black workers found community in intimate spaces from stoops on city streets to the backyards of washerwomen where multiple generations labored from dawn to dusk talking and laughing in a space free of white supervision As millions of Black people left the violence of the American South for the promise of a better life in the North and West these networks of resistance and joy sustained early arrivals and newcomers alike and laid the groundwork for organizing for better jobs better pay and equal rights