Blair Kelley; Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences; director of the Center for the Study of the American South; and co-director of Southern Futures; on the African American experience and the Black working class.
Blair Kelley is a historian of the African American experience and a public historian. She’s also deeply committed to translating history for a general audience and believes that the past is deeply relevant to current events and our nation’s future.
For most of her career, Kelley has considered herself a segregation era historian. Most recently she has studied the Black working class for her book Black Folk, which examines the Black working class from its establishment at the close of slavery all the way to the present day.
At Carolina, Kelley teaches in the American studies department and is the director of the Center for the Study of the American South, which is home to the Southern Oral History Program, the journal Southern Cultures, and Southern Futures.
If you could pick one thing for all Americans to understand about the African American experience, what would it be?
KELLEY: I’d love for everyone to understand that Black Americans are deeply American. The ancestors of most Black Americans came to the U.S. prior to the American Revolution, so while we may not often think of Black history as American history, it is. The foundations of the United States came from people whose labor was stolen from them, yet they still built a future and a legacy for themselves and for this nation.
When it comes to the Black working class, it’s important to understand that it is not just a mirror of the white working class. Because they had experienced slavery, lynchings and segregation, it was necessary for Black workers to have a strong sense of community. And that existed long before formal labor unions.
It’s often overlooked in labor history books, but domestic work done by Black women also shows how laborers can come together and organize. For example, Black women in Jackson, Mississippi, organized in 1866 to set standard rates for laundry services and establish terms that specified when laundry would be picked up and returned and that workers would only wash clothes in their own homes. This is a powerful example of women valuing their own lives and families enough to collectively organize and set boundaries to protect themselves and provide the freedom to spend more time caring for their own children.
My parents and grandparents were all storytellers who valued history. Hearing their stories about the way life used to be is what made me into a historian. As I’ve studied the Black working class, I am interested in the humanity behind these stories. I hope that as people read my books and encounter my work, the humanity of these workers is what people will see most clearly.
Distinguished and named professorships support renowned scholars and propel research at Carolina. These privately funded endowments help attract and retain the academic leaders of today, ensuring a state-of-the-art education for all Tar Heels.
As told to Audrey Smith
Photo courtesy of the College of Arts and Sciences, background illustrations by Caroline Norton
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