Three Books for Black History Month

February is Black History Month, and this year’s this is “African Americans and Labor.” Here are three books I recommend:

1. Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy 1865-1914. Higgs argues that despite significant coercion, there were sufficient competitive forces in the American (and in particular southern, where most black Americans lived) economy to allow African Americans as a group to significantly improve their standard of living during the relevant time period. The book, written in the 1970s, received an undeservedly negative reception from the Marxist-dominated labor history world.

2. Paul Moreno, Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History. In my review of this book, I wrote:

Moreno, unlike many historians, does not treat black workers and the black people more generally as passive bit players in a larger class conflict between “capital” and “labor.” Nor, unlike many historians, does he pay disproportionate attention to the relatively few examples of racially egalitarian unions in the pre–New Deal period, which some historians use as purported exemplars of the true spirit of labor solidarity. Rather, he properly treats African Americans as striving as best they can to promote their individual and collective well-being in a hostile economic and social environment.

3. David E. Bernstein, Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal. My book started from a simple premise that went almost entirely unrecognized in the relevant literature: given that black Americans lacked political power, one could expect that labor regulations at best would not take their interests into account, and at worse would intentionally be used to exclude them from the labor market. I back up that basic intuition with studies of laws restricting labor recruitment in the south, licensing laws, railroad labor laws, prevailing wage legislation, and New Deal labor laws. I also note that contrary to conventional wisdom, court decisions protecting free labor competition tended to help black workers in the relevant time period.

I’m not going to argue that these are necessarily the three *best* books one can read on African American labor. But I would say that if you are interested at all in the subject, you have probably already read books and articles from a more standard progressive or Marxist perspective, and these books are both well-researched and provide a more market-friendly and regulation-skeptical perspective.

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