Black Workers in Revolt: Birmingham's Working-Class Resistance Against the Violence of Racial Capitalism, 1871-2020

Abstract

This dissertation examines the Black working-class resistance against structural white supremacy in Birmingham, Alabama, from the city’s founding in the postbellum nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. The work follows a prolonged, multigenerational resistance movement from its abolitionist origins, through its radical labor emphasis in the first decades of the twentieth century, the 1950s and 1960s non-violent civil rights movement, the Black Power era, and the rise of Black political power in the 1980s. Correspondingly, the narrative examines changes in the anti-Black power structure through the same periodization, including Jim Crow white supremacy, neoliberalism, and mass incarceration. The Black radical tradition in sustained opposition to racial capitalism remains the throughline of this evolving story. Placed at the intersection of labor and civil rights history, this project combines and expands these historical narratives by reconceptualizing the Birmingham Black freedom struggle as a predominantly working-class movement with unfinished objectives. This project also considers and contests the public memory of Birmingham’s civil rights movement. Refuting the triumphalist mythos of the civil rights movement’s legacy by underscoring the incomplete revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, this dissertation examines Birmingham’s public memory institutions such as the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark to analyze how this memory landscape impacts ongoing social movements.