A Sweeping History of the Black Working Class

Books & the Arts / June 12, 2024 By focusing on the Black working class and its long history, Blair LM Kelley’s book, Black Folk, helps tell the larger story of American democracy over the past two and a half centuries. Ad Policy A female welder. Circa 1930s-1940s. (Corbis/Getty) The famous “I Have a Dream” speech, arguably the best-known public statement by Martin Luther King Jr., was given at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In it, King urged the nation on in tackling segregation and political inequality, but he also talked about economic injustice: How, he asked, could Black Americans continue to live “on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity”?  King was not alone in highlighting the economic disparities ravaging Black America on that day. The March on Washington, after all, was about jobs as well as freedom, and one of the themes that connected the plethora of speeches given by the leaders of the burgeoning civil rights movement was a concern about economic inequality and the desire to realize freedom in all the domains of life—not just politics and civil society. “Yes, we want a Fair...