On Tuesday, July 23rd, RFK Human Rights hosted its July Book Club featuring the recipient of the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class by Blair LM Kelley and moderated by historian and author Ted Widmer. This work spans two hundred years―from one of Kelley’s earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the COVID-19 pandemic―highlighting the lives of the laundresses, Pullman porters, domestic maids, and postal workers who established the Black working class as a force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As her narrative moves from Georgia to Philadelphia, Florida to Chicago, Texas to Oakland, Kelley treats Black workers not just as laborers, or members of a class, or activists, but as people whose daily experiences mattered―to themselves, to their communities, and to a nation that denied that basic fact. With the resurgence of labor activism in our own time, Black Folk presents a stirring history of our possible future.

Kelley discussed her inspiration for the book, describing how she saw the rising popularity of work about the white working class and thought that she wanted to add her own perspective to discuss the unique experiences of the Black working class, adding that, to her, what makes the Black working class unique begins in history of enslavement. She decided to write a story that traced the history of the Black working class from slavery through the civil rights movement, highlighting the community building and advocacy that enabled the movement to be successful. 

Next, she discussed her unique approach with the book which combines the personal with the historical. She described how her training as a poet during her time as an undergraduate informed her writing, as well as a motivation to make history books accessible with a vivid, descriptive style. Through her evocative prose, Black Folk demonstrates that despite exclusion, Black workers had agency and organized independently, creating extensive and influential unions. She additionally focuses on women’s labor, challenging narratives that exclude women from labor history and relegate them to the domestic or apolitical sphere. 

Kelley closed the discussion by connecting the labor struggles in the book to ongoing resistance, when federal jobs, long a pathway of social mobility for Black workers, are under attack and wage exploitation continues, especially among the most vulnerable workers. Still, Kelley emphasized the hope for progress. With the book ending at the beginning of the civil rights movement, Kelley explained that she wanted to show how a groundwork was built “in the first moments of freedom.”