In 1935, while writing his masterpiece Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. Du Bois pondered the question of why, in the wake of the Civil War, there had not developed working-class solidarity across racial lines. “The South, after the war,” he observed, “presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see for many decades.” Yet, he lamented, “the labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.” The principal reason was “the race philosophy” which “came as a new and terrible thing to make labor unity or labor class-consciousness impossible. So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South made impossible.”
