Cutting through Jim Crow: African American lumber workers in the Jim Crow *South, 1919--196

The largest employer of African American industrial workers in the Jim Crow South, lumber provided a basis for the social and political transformation of black family and community life in the mid-twentieth century. Critical of previous studies that show black southerners either excluded from or victimized by the industrial South, this dissertation argues that black workers utilized the resources offered by lumber employment to reshape race, class and gender relations in their communities and the region as a whole. The study draws upon oral history interviews, government, company and union archives, and local newspapers, and focuses on the sawmill towns of Bogalusa (Louisiana), Chapman (Alabama), and Elizabethtown (North Carolina).;Lumber firms were notoriously itinerant before the First World War, hiring rural men who accepted seasonal wage work as a supplement to family farming. As farming became less profitable after the war, black men sought lumber work as a primary source of income for themselves and their families. Black women were usually excluded from lumber work, but they also moved to sawmill towns where they operated boarding houses, stores and cafes, and performed domestic work for theirs and other families. Industrial employment offered black families more control over individuals' entry into the labor market, greater access to cash, and more regular leisure time. These factors contributed to the growth of a vibrant black working-class leisure culture in southern sawmill towns.;Industrial employment also brought black southerners under the jurisdiction of an expanding federal labor bureaucracy in the 1930s and 1940s. New Deal labor laws raised wages for African American common and semi-skilled laborers. The National Urban League and the NAACP pressured the AFL and the CIO to provide institutional support for black workers' shopfloor activism during the Second World War. Employers' resistance to federal labor laws and some white workers' resistance to racial egalitarianism limited black workers' gains, leading black sawmill town communities to join the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Advancement toward higher wages and workplace rights ended with the decline of southern lumber employment due to mechanization and transition to pulp and paper production in the 1960s and 1970s.