Blair LM Kelley Transcript

SPEAKERS
Omkari Williams, Blair Kelley

Omkari Williams  00:20

Hello, and welcome to Stepping Into Truth, the podcast where we have conversations on social justice issues and how we all get free. I'm your host Omkari Williams, and I'm very happy that you're here with me today. Before I introduce today's guest, I have exciting news to share, my book Micro Activism: How You Can Make a Difference in the World (Without a Bullhorn) will be out on October 24, 2023. And it's available for preorder right now. Please grab your copy and maybe some copies for friends and family as well. Okay, that's it for this shameless self promotion.

 Omkari Williams  01:00

Today's guest Blair LM Kelley, is an award winning author, historian and scholar of the African American experience. A dedicated public historian Kelley works to amplify the histories of black people, chronicling the everyday impact of their activism. Kelley is the Joel R. Williamson, Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and the incoming Director of the Center for the Study of the American South, the first black woman to serve in that role in the center's 30 year history. Kelly's newest book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class, draws on family histories and mines the archive to illuminate the adversities and joys of the Black working class in America, both past and present. And it is my great pleasure to welcome Blair to the podcast. Blair, I am so happy to be talking to you today. Thank you so much for joining me.

 Blair Kelley  02:01

Of course, I'm thrilled to be here.

 Omkari Williams  02:03

Thank you. Let me start by saying this. Your book is absolutely beautiful. And I was moved and angered and saddened and inspired by the stories that you were sharing. And the one thing that struck me throughout the book was that in these really difficult times, starting right after emancipation, these Black folk grounded their resistance by building it in shared communities that were founded on being spaces of joy. And that felt so important. So could we start by talking about how these communities started? And that foundation of joy?  

Blair Kelley  02:44

Yes, I think it's something I learned from my own experience in community is that even in hard times, even when facing systemic things, sorrowful things, difficult things, there is laughter, there is play, and funniness. There's music and food. There's fellowship, and the sense that the world is not just the suffering you're experiencing. But your world is grounded in this community grounded in your family, your kith and your kin. And it is bigger than the challenges you face. And so I love that thing that I learned.

And so I saw that out as I was doing research, as I was building a sense of what this archive would look like, for Black Folk. I wanted to seek out that joy, I believe it's a kind of politics. And its insistence on joy, as a political stance is a really powerful reminder that Black life is not just suffering cannot be diminished, by the circumstances around it. To be Black is not something to be pitied or sorry, for. When I was teaching, I had students who were like, oh my god, I'm so sorry, things are so terrible for Black people and I'm like, baby, I I'm having a good time. I have a good life. And we go through things as a people in this country and in this world. But there is a joy. And so I just wanted Black Folk to reflect that too.

Omkari Williams  02:45

I really appreciate that because I think it's important to make a distinction between the things we go through and who we are. And I think that they get conflated often. So people look at the circumstances of being Black in the United States and they think "oh", but that diminishes the humanity of Black people. And one of the things that I loved about your book was, the humanity of Black folk was so present on every single page. It's like, No, we are just like everybody else, we have the same aspirations, we may have somewhat different struggles, but we all have struggles. And yet, we have found a way to keep joy at the center of our experience. And that speaks to not only our resilience and our humanity, but our creativity, right? Because to bring joy into some truly terrible experiences, you got to dig deep.

Blair Kelley  04:34

Yes.

Omkari Williams  04:34

And you have to be grounded in something that is so powerful, and in a vision for yourself and your family and your descendants, that is so powerful. And that's something that I've found really present in your book. So as we're in this moment of anti-wokeness, I was reflecting for, you know, the billionth time on how powerful our stories are in shaping our understanding of who we are and how we got here. So if say, Ron DeSantis, is telling the true story of the craftsmanship and the skill of enslaved Black laborers who built the Capitol and the White House that undercuts his narrative of white supremacy, and white innocence and gives weight to arguments for an accurate understanding of our history and against the lazy Black people trope. And it takes away his ability to deprive us of the stories that shape our whole narrative. And I'm wondering how, in the writing of this book, did that come into it? The whole time that we're in where we have this whole suppression of stories of American history really, was that part of what was driving this book.

Blair Kelley  07:00

So for me, I didn't learn black history from public school, I didn't learn any of those kinds of lessons from my elementary, middle, or high school experience, those teachers didn't have anything to give me around that. Those textbooks weren't giving me anything around that. And so I began the process of self-educating, doing my own research, listening to my parents and grandparents talk about what they had survived and experienced. And for me, this has always been a history and fugitivity. And so I don't want us to get so caught up in a person who doesn't know any of this history, and has no background in any of it and their vision of what should be the truth of a Black experience. We have always had to struggle to teach, to maintain, and to sustain our history. And we'll just keep doing that work. I'm team Toni Morrison, and not letting people distract me from the mission that I'm on, and the calling that's on my life. And, you know, no, I wasn't thinking about him for a millisecond as I wrote this book.

Omkari Williams  08:22

That actually makes me really happy. Yeah, you know what, we can just take the oxygen away from that conversation, and redirect it. So one of the things that is really prominent in the book, and I mean, I think people know that the Black church has long been a center of activism. But this extends that into the days of slavery before there was an actual church to go to, right? Before there was a structure. Would you talk about how the Black churches, such as they were then, became the cornerstone of what would come post emancipation.

 Blair Kelley  09:06

I've done strange things for a history of the working class or of labor in the United States, most of them will not begin and enslavement. Most of them will not be talking about church spaces. But for me, if you want to get to the roots of community, of resistance, of the building of an ethic that's different. You had to start in the history of bondage. You had to harken back to people's African roots, and the sense that they had of the world and how they explain it. And so the cosmologies that they brought with them, and intersecting with the cosmologies of Christianity, of built in fugitivity again, in those hush harbors in the woods, are the root of how people survived. And so when they move into freedom, and they build their first churches with walls they aren't random congregations. They aren't brand new conversations. But they are valuable. They are private, they are spaces in which you can educate young people and you can work collectively. You can feed one another, literally and figuratively. And they become, by no accident, movement centers in the civil rights movement. but they're also movement centers in this earlier time period of building a way of life for working class people, and a necessary one. And so, for me, starting with those earliest church spaces, also as a reminder that Black Christianity is not just the other side of a white Christianity, but it is a faith and critique. It was born that way. And it's something that would be important to maintain, in our own time, is that that fundamental critique of white supremacy that Black Christianity was rooted in.

Omkari Williams  11:01

Would you say more about that? Because I think that often people really do just sort of look at Black Christianity as this one specific way of moving through a religious world and white Christianity as a different way, and that they don't have anything to say about each other, that they're just completely separate. But that's not the case. I mean, it might be the case, from white Christianity going towards Black Christianity, but it is not the case for Black Christianity, looking at white Christianity.

 Blair Kelley  11:36

Yeah, I think for me, it was really fascinating to see that white Christianity in the context of enslavement is worried about the enslaved, right. So they want to use Christianity as a means of control, of placating, of training people to be obedient and patient and kind and good. And the enslaved figure out that there is another story in the Bible, that's about them. That's about people in bondage seeking their freedom. And boy, they build a whole nother way of looking at that text, grounded in who they know, they are. Grounded and connected to the beliefs that they can maintain, from an African past. And they have another story. And so there's a reason why Black Christianity is not simply just another, you know, a segregated space that's mirroring or paralleling white spaces, it's a space built in a fundamental criticism of the failures of white Christianity, and the age of slavery. And, and so that criticism is how people are beginning to, to have that sense of self, have a different sense of their own place in the world, that sense of joy. You know, the world didn't give it in the world can't take it away. I've never heard white people from those frame works around Christianity, it is this powerful sense of, in spite of the circumstances I face, you know, God sees me, and I am actually at the center of the story. And I will have, I can have justice, now I can have justice in the future.

Omkari Williams  13:14

Yeah, that is such a fundamentally different way of engaging with religion. Because for white Christianity, it's so much about not only for in their relationship with Black people, but even in their internal relationships, about obedience, and making sure that you stayed within these very narrow parameters. Whereas Black Christianity, because it came out of enslavement because it came out of bondage. And because it took that reading in the Bible, which certainly the white Christians did not want the Black enslaved people to be doing. And understood it to be a completely different experience than the one they were being told they were entitled to have. And I think that that has sort of followed us down for generations, where white Christianity is, I mean, now it's sort of gotten distorted into this very weird movement. But again, it's all about fear and less about joy and possibility and opportunity to be our fullest selves as God's children.

Omkari Williams  14:27

Yes, yes.

Omkari Williams  14:29

That was something I had, honestly not really thought about the disconnect in those two things in that way. And that was really important in your book, because I think it informs so much of the conversation we're having right now, in the world.

Blair Kelley  14:44

Yes. Oftentimes, you see something in there, like white evangelicals and Black evangelicals, and you're like, hey, if you're talking about a traditional Black church base, you know, from these historic congregations, those are very different people. And they have a very different outlook and they have a different origin story. And so you can't just smash it all. Now there are black people who attend more of these prosperity based modern churches that aren't necessarily connected to those stories. But in terms of a traditional congregation, their origin is different.

 Omkari Williams  15:19

Yeah, completely. And that matters immensely in everything that has sprung from that.

 Blair Kelley  15:27

Yes.

Omkari Williams  15:28

Stories direct us, they give us a pathway to follow. And these stories are really powerful. One of the stories that I really loved reading about in your book, were all the stories that you had about Black washerwomen, because oh, were they a force, Talk about them and how they informed the movement for justice across many, many different arenas.

Blair Kelley  16:03

So I've been fascinated with washerwoman my whole academic career, I read a book by Tara Hunter called To 'Joy My Freedom in graduate school. And she traces the strike of women in Atlanta, washerwomen who organized in 1881. And so I've been teaching about them and thinking about the, this whole time. I wrote about a woman named Magdalena Walker in my first book, who's the daughter of a laundress, in Richmond, Virginia. And her writings are so rich in terms of thinking about community, and what she gleaned from being a daughter of a washerwoman in terms of her own political organization, and her a building of businesses and banks and, and her trajectory of success. And so I've thought about the washerwomen for a long time. And so when I was proposing this book, I was like, Well, I have to know more.

I was a little intimidated, because there's some really great writing out there about them. And yet, when I went back and looked again, at the newspaper accounts, just all over the entire country, you could find resistance washerwomen. The first all Black women's union that I can find is an 1865 of the Union of Women in Jackson, Mississippi, who set a wage for washing clothes. They set limits on when they will do it and demands to the city, a tremendous reminder that the enslaved had a sense of their work. They had a sense of their value. They knew what a monopoly was. There was a stigma against white women washing their own clothes. And so Black women dominated that industry. And they took advantage of all those things. And you could find washerwomen in every segment of society protesting the policies, that tended to try to restrict what their work would be like. And they really could value community, they could value the raising of their own children. And they prevented themselves from being victimized by sexual assault that would have been occurring had they been working within white households. And so it's such a powerful vision that washerwomen are able to exert, even as they make very little money. They are powerful in their vision of what's possible for their own lives.

Omkari Williams  18:33

I think one of the things that really struck me was that by deciding that they would take laundry to their own homes, that that shifted the dynamic entirely because it took them not only out of the range of sexual predators, the white men who might be in the households they were otherwise working in. But it also meant that they really did have agency over how they did their work, their experience of their day doing their work, because they could be home doing their work and they did not have to conform to any standard that was set for them by white society. They did not have to be dressed a certain way. They did not have to be deferential. They did not have to worry about who was taking care of their children. They did not have to worry about being asked to do things beyond the scope of what they had agreed to do because they would go they would pick up the laundry, they would bring it back to their homes. And then on a set schedule, they would return the laundry to the owners and get paid. And that was revolutionary.

Blair Kelley  19:54

Yes, absolutely. Especially when you remember that Black women in enslavement didn't have households, right. They couldn't have households to the same extent. Their labor was tightly controlled. They were separated from their households, they were oftentimes separated from their smallest children. They really couldn't do all the things that they wanted to do. They were really scraping by with a little time that was allowed often working from sunup to sundown, right. And so you can see in freedom, they're like, No, I want to be able to raise my own children and see what they're doing and keep a good eye on them. I want to be away from that supervision that you talked about, someone nitpicking or criticizing the way they're doing, the pace at which they are working. They needed to put a pot of greens on the stove and cook for dinner while they were doing laundry that day, they could do that because they can step in their own houses and check on their own things. So just that powerful way in which they could establish a lifestyle and a household, ever basic that it was, it was theirs. And to claim that is a really powerful reminder of what their vision for their own everyday lives were like.

Omkari Williams  21:09

I also felt like them creating those boundaries around their work forced white people to look at them differently. And that that was really important. They have to engage with them, no matter how much they might have wanted not to, they have to engage with them on terms that the Black women largely set, or they would just say, You know what, I'm not going to do your laundry, you can go find someone else, and they wouldn't be able to find someone else. Because the Black women themselves were very tight knit in protecting what they had built, because they understood that their strength was in their unity, and that if they started undercutting each other, they were all going down.

Blair Kelley  22:00

Yes, yes, absolutely.

Omkari Williams  22:03

And I found myself rooting for the sisterhood there.

Blair Kelley  22:08

Absolutely. It's a it's a powerful story.

Omkari Williams  22:11

It is a really powerful story. And it is not one that I learned in school, either. So I did not hear about those washerwomen in Jackson, Mississippi. I did, however, I remember being a little girl and having a conversation with my dad, where he told me that when he was a little boy, his aspiration was to grow up and be a Pullman Porter. Because that was the most respected job that he saw Black men having. Now he went on to be a humanitarian. But as a child, that was the epitome of success. And the Pullman Porters were incredibly impactful in the fight for social justice, would you talk about them?

Blair Kelley  23:00

Absolutely. I think it's, it's a great story that you just shared about your father. I even had conversations with certain people who were like, well, they really weren't the working class because they were so important. I'm like, if you work by the hour, and for tips, and wore a uniform, I had to be on your feet all the time. You still the working class, but it's just a reminder of the importance of the way we saw ourselves.

 Omkari Williams  23:27

Yes,

 Blair Kelley  23:28

The job didn't set the limits on who we could imagine they were. The Pullman Porters were men employed by the Pullman Palace Car Company, founded by a man named George Mortimer Pullman, a white man from upstate New York, who innovated a comfortable interstate travel on trains. Before when you were on a train, and you had to sleep in your seat or they had a little cot and it was uncomfortable. He designed a car that would ride smoothly, feel very comfortable, be great for seating in the daytime and then be transformed into nighttime sleeping bursts. And part of his vision of luxury and comfort was the inclusion of Black men as servants in the spaces as porters.

 Blair Kelley  24:20

So the Pullman Porter was an all Black male labor force. In the West Coast there were some Filipino workers who were hired, some Asian workers who were hired as Pullman Porters as well, but overwhelmingly it was Black men. And the vision was that he would wait on you hand and foot tend to your every need, get whatever requests whatever information you needed while you were riding on the train for hours. And so, Black men are taking this job. Oftentimes, they're well educated, they end up being extremely well traveled, and they become accidental ambassadors to the great migration process. So as people are moving across country to relocate out of Southern communities, the Pullman porters already have those bases of knowledge. Oftentimes living in the North with ties to the South, they were transporting the Black newspapers that provided migrants with information about where to find a job or housing, they were instrumental in building a movement as well. And so they organize into the largest all Black male union successfully by 1937. But it had been decades of interest and struggle in organizing. And so they use their power as a union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, not just to elevate themselves and elevate their own pay and provide protections, but also to fight the cause of civil rights. And they do so and improve the conditions for workers in every industry, through their agitation and their activism.

Omkari Williams  25:57

I found myself so moved by their commitment the same way as with the washerwomen, it was like they weren't just looking out for themselves, they were committed to paving an easier road for those who were coming after them, or paving an easier road for those who were just moving along in that time to try and find a better life for themselves and their family. And they, they became quite politically savvy. I mean, this wasn't just them doing their unionizing in little local groups. I mean, they had serious political clout across the country. Because of the nature of their work, if they at all, just said, we're not working, that was a problem. And I found myself thinking about the civil rights movement of the 60s. And how much of that movement really came out of these workers who came before them. And I think we don't often give enough credit to the precursor to what we consider the civil rights movement, but the civil rights movement started with reconstruction. It started in that time with these Black people who were saying, we deserve this. We deserve a home, we deserve property, we deserve to be able to determine what we're going to charge for our labor. And I think that that is a story that is so important, especially right now is we're having this conversation about reparations. And there's a long history of Black folk fighting for reparations. And I think that a name most people have never heard of, is Callie House.

Blair Kelley  27:53

Yes.  

Omkari Williams  27:54

And I need you to tell us about her because she is absolutely one of my heroines.

 Blair Kelley  27:57

Yes, as we revive this conversation, I wanted us to remember that one of the progenitors of the question of reparations, and the demand was a Black woman. A working class Black woman named Callie House. She was a washerwoman, of course, because I mean, come on now.

 Omkari Williams  28:08

Of course.

 Blair Kelley  28:21

And she organized her group, really pulling small amounts following sort of a mutual aid society model to push for bills in Congress to demand reparations for ex slaves. And her demand was based around the pensions that were being given to veterans, and to her made a lot of sense. She was persecuted by the federal government, because of her activism, and accused of stealing from elderly people when she was really trying to build this movement. And so as we think of this reparations discussion now, oftentimes we aren't aware of that longer history of the question, being asked by that very first generation of people thinking about what was owed the enslaved.

 Omkari Williams  29:17

Yeah. And it was never from just a perspective of what is owed to me. I mean, as you say, with Callie House, she was really working with a mutual aid, sort of template for how she did her work in the world. And that was actually quite common. In the Black community mutual aid was how the Black people of that time survived.

 Blair Kelley  29:45

Yes, that's how you buried your dead, is how you stayed afloat if you were sick. It's how you saved up a bit. It was the root of many of our banks. It's really how we're in the penny savers clubs of the women who migrated North and were maids they were really trying to always collectively build a security for one another of any age before there was any public safety net that was available to them.

 Omkari Williams  30:13

Because it was them or nothing.

 Blair Kelley  30:16

Yes.

 Omkari Williams  30:16

And they were extremely aware of that. And so people who were barely scraping by on their own, we're still thinking about, how can I make sure that the community, this really beloved community is safe and strong and growing and making progress, even if it's slow progress. And I think that that is an important part of the story. That doesn't get shared enough? Because it shines a light on why Black activism looks the way it looks.

 Blair Kelley  30:51

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And it's important part of that we have to keep alive.

Omkari Williams  30:52

Yes.

 Blair Kelley  30:54

And remember that that there was a power in coming together and visioning how we support one another.

 Omkari Williams  31:05

I think that that is really important. Because in this society where we're so individualistic, we can lose that really easily. But that is what kept everybody going. That is the underpinning because the bottom line is, we cannot do this alone. We have to be able to be in community with each other and supporting one another. Something else I was thinking of when I was reading your book is, the Black working class has a great deal in common with the white working class, because working class is working class, right? A lot of the obstacles are are the same. And yet, there was such a successful effort at keeping those two groups apart. And you talk about that in your book. And if you would talk about that a little bit, because I think it's something that's really important in this moment, because it's still the same truth, right?

 Blair Kelley  32:00

Yes.

 Omkari Williams  32:01

Working class people should be working together across lines of race, across lines of ethnicity, their success is completely intertwined.

 Blair Kelley  32:12

Yes, absolutely. What's really powerful is the reminder that most white Southerners, for example, did not hold people in bondage. They did not benefit from enslavement. Rather, it degraded the ability of working people in the South to make a decent living because of the population of people, usually beginning in colonial times, whose families over time continue to hold people in bondage and build tremendous wealth based on their status as slaveholders. And so they were not competing in society. But rather than having a critique of enslavement, most people saw it as a possibility for them that one day to day because they were white, they might be holding people in bondage. But that trick, that ruse that really prevented them from seeing the collectivity that was possible with enslaved people, if they had all resisted, is the root of the American story, I think, in many ways. And so oftentimes, you still see white working class people not seeing that the parallels and the connections with the Black working class that I think are so powerful and important. And there's nothing that a Black working class needs that a white working class doesn't need.

 Omkari Williams  33:31

Yeah, it's exactly true. And the idea that you're going to work against, vote against your own self interest in the hope that someday you're going to be wealthy, or you know, back in those days, you're going to be able to be a slave owner, yourself, is so delusional. And yet, people will cling to that to their dying breath, rather than say, let's work together and force change that's going to benefit everybody right now. So that's something that completely frustrates me. But humans are what humans are. So here we are,

 Blair Kelley  34:10

And the ruse of race is powerful, and it's effective, and people are able to ring that bell and distract folks from their real interest.

 Omkari Williams  34:20

Yeah. And they will continue to do it for as long as it continues to work.

 Blair Kelley  34:25

Yeah, yes, absolutely.

 Omkari Williams  34:28

Our time is running short. So I need to ask you to share with our listeners three simple actions that they can take in support of the understanding of the black working class, then and now and in support of just really building a society that is one of equity and dignity. So what do you have for us?

Blair Kelley  34:52

Well, well, first, I do want people to buy my book and read it, because I do. I do think this It's an important conversation that can grow from it. And I'm so appreciative of that community that's coming. But the intersections that people can see in their own lives when we look at this history and many other histories. So you know, building up a library that really helps you see the world more broadly and more collectively, is really a first step. So Black Folk and others.

 Blair Kelley  35:23

Second, I encourage people to stay in community to stay in those third spaces outside work and home, and to invest in one another in those spaces. I think, oftentimes we, post pandemic, are trying to find those things that interconnect us. And the power that the Black working class had in the past is of building those spaces that we've already talked about the mutual aid societies, the churches, their community centers, their organizations, and so to continuing to be members of organizations that have a radical critique of how we would want to change the world is valuable still now. Hard work, but good work.

 Blair Kelley  36:04

And the third thing that I would ask is to continue to promote people learning about our past, and so to advocate in our schools, for our students for alternative means of learning and community learning, really broadly, so much of our history is still unwritten, unknown, untalked about, and we have to do a better job of reframing the Black working class and a better understanding of that. And so I see this book as the beginning of a conversation about teaching that history and, and sharing that history more broadly. So I want people to get out there and, and make sure our young people are aware and have access to broad based learning.

Omkari Williams  36:49

I so appreciate that. Because here's the thing, no sane person is holding anyone alive today responsible for what happened back in the 1800s. But if we don't understand what happened, we are shortchanging our ability to make the changes in this world that will bring us together and heal the divisions, we need to be dealing from an honest place and saying, Okay, this is the truth of it. And where do we go from here?

 Blair Kelley  37:22

Absolutely.

 Omkari Williams  37:23

So, thank you so much, Blair. I have enjoyed this conversation immensely. And your book is just beautiful. Thank you so much for the effort and the expertise that it took to write this book. I love it.

 Blair Kelley  37:37

Thank you so much. I really appreciate the conversation and the chance to talk. Thank you.

 Omkari Williams  37:45

I really can't recommend this book highly enough. These stories flow as if the book were a novel, but with the sometimes gut punching fact that these stories are true. The contributions that these Black folk made to our society are so important, and understanding them deepens the context of the conversations that we're having today. Read this book, and then reach out and let me know what you think. I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back with another episode of Stepping Into Truth very soon. And until then, remember that change starts with story. So keep sharing yours.