Named one of Smithsonian's Best Books of 2023 An award-winning historian illuminates the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America through a stunning narrative centered on her forebears.
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 the very existence, of everyday Black workers. In her brilliant corrective, Black Folk, acclaimed historian Blair Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story. Spanning two hundred years-from Kelley's earliest known ancestor, an ensl...
Through a reexamination of the earliest struggles against Jim Crow, Blair Kelley exposes the fullness of African American efforts to resist the passage of segregation laws dividing trains and streetcars by race in the early Jim Crow era. Right to Ride chronicles the litigation and local organizing against segregated rails that led to the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 and the streetcar boycott movement waged in twenty-five southern cities...
