This article is adapted from Dr. Cha-Jua’s address “Stolen Labor, and Hindered Opportunity,” presented at the African Descent–Citizens Reparations Commission (ADCRC) public meeting on October 4 at the Krannert Center in Urbana. All of the presentations from that gathering are available on the ADCRC YouTube channel. You can get more information about local efforts towards correcting historic inequities by contacting cureparations@gmail.com. They have regular meetings at the New Covenant Fellowship in Champaign and are currently celebrating the reparations resolutions from both the Champaign County Board and Urbana City Council. These include $25,000 from each towards supporting various activities in support of reparations.
I explore here two distinct problems in the sociohistorical experience of the Afrikan American worker in Illinois. The first concerns the lived history of Black workers, their material conditions, work relations, and resistance to anti-Black racial oppression. The second is historiographic and examines the marginalization and distortion of Black workers’ experiences in the “Land of Lincoln.”
I address the second issue first. A bourgeois bias exists in the writing of Afrikan American history. Labor and urban historian Joe William Trotter spoke of it in a 2021 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books. Trotter observed:
“When we look at the historiography of African Americans writing on African American history, for many years we tended to privilege the stories of those outstanding figures who rose to the pinnacle of success. . . . But I felt that ordinary, everyday lives of working people were shortchanged. . . . So, my work has been about bringing the Black worker more to the forefront within African American history and using that as a way to talk about how the African American community shaped the country.”
He advocates shifting its emphasis to the drylongso, the everyday, ordinary person—thus, refocusing Afrikan American history on the modal Black sociohistorical experience, the working-class Black majority. After all, in any historical period 88–99 percent of Afrikan Americans were either enslaved persons, sharecroppers, domestic servants, washerwomen, wage workers, menial laborers in the public sector, or contemporary subproletarians laboring in part-time, temporary, low-wage, ununionized, and benefitless jobs.
The first problem, analyzing Black workers’ experiences, reveals two relationships: 1) they shared labor exploitation with white workers; and 2) they suffered additional racial burdens. In 1927, historian Charles H. Wesley identified these as “wage slavery . . . the continual exploitation of . . . black workers” and “special handicaps of race and color,” superexploitation and racial terrorism.
Black male workers were generally confined to so-called “Negro jobs,” lower-paying, hot, dirty, and dangerous” labor, and remunerated a third less than white workers doing the same job. Additionally, they were often victimized by lynching and racial pogroms.
Black Workers in Illinois, 1819–65
From its founding, Illinois was hostile to Afrikan Americans. The 1819 Illinois Constitution included “Black Laws” which discouraged Afrikan American migration. To reside in the state, they were required to present “freedom papers” to a magistrate. The 1848 Illinois Constitution prohibited quasi-free Black refugees from immigrating into the state and made it illegal for enslavers to manumit enslaved persons within its boundaries.
These provisions were largely pushed by white workers, who feared Black competition. The 1853 “Black Law” subjected any Black person who entered the state and remained for ten days “to a fine of $50” and, “if the fine was not paid,” sale to “to any person” who paid it.
Throughout the state, especially in the southern region, fear of Black workers inflamed white Illinoisians. The Cairo Weekly Times and Delta newspaper reported the town was “entirely overrun with free [n-word].” When that statement was published, Cario’s Afrikan American population numbered 30.
However, by 1862, 1500 self-emancipated Afrikan Americans had streamed into Cairo. Democrats accused Republicans of seeking to “Africanize” Illinois. In response, they sponsored a convention to write a new constitution. The proposed Democrat constitution included a more restrictive “Negro Clause.”
The new constitution was not ratified, but the anti-Black article was approved by 57 percent of voters in the northern region, 90 percent in central Illinois, and 97 percent in southern Illinois!
Moreover, on June 2, 1863, Illinois became one of five states to ratify the Corwin Amendment. The bill would have prevented Congress from passing legislation that abolished or interfered with any state’s “domestic institutions . . . including . . . persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.”
Black Workers in Illinois during the Second Nadir, 1874–1924
In a partisan vote, on January 24, 1865, the Illinois legislature repealed the Black Laws. Yet Black people did not acquire human rights until after the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870. By then, Black refugees fleeing the South had exploded the state’s Afrikan American population. The number of Cairo’s Black residents grew from 47 in 1860 to 1,849 in 1870; while Chicago’s increased from 1,000 to 3,691.
Illinois’s white worker “labor aristocracy” viewed Black workers as racially inferior invaders and excluded them from labor unions.
Barred from unions by white workers, Black laborers were at the mercy of white capitalists. The capitalists exploited their labor and white workers violently assaulted them as strikebreakers. Superexploitation was the norm, as capitalists deliberately paid Black workers less to do the same jobs.
During the Second Nadir, 1874–1924, 16 anti-Black-labor racial pogroms transpired in Illinois. Terrorist assaults on Black workers took place in every region of the state, from Cairo to Chicago and East St. Louis to Braidwood. The racial massacres in Pana (1898), East St. Louis (1917), and Carterville (1899) stand out. Estimates of the number of Black people killed in these labor racial pogroms range from 48 to 250, with the East St. Louis racial massacre comprising 39 to 200 of the murdered Afrikan Americans.
The first racial labor terrorist incident occurred in February, 1874. three hundred striking white workers at the Robert Lehman mines in St. Clair County attacked 25 Black workers, destroying their residences and belongings, and “driving some from the county.”
The 1898 “Battle of Virden” involved a mob of 500 to 1500 striking white miners and their supporters attacking a trainload of Black miners. In the October 13 melee that followed, five Black miners were killed and seven wounded.
As was often the case, racialized labor disputes sparked other forms of racial antipathy. After the Battle of Virden, animosity against Black folk was so intense that several surrounding communities transformed themselves into sundown towns: communities that violently purged Black residents and decreed all Black folk must leave before sunset. The Central Illinois town of Toluca was such a place. When a rumor spread about the importation of Black workers into the area, “many colored men were forced to leave town.” A month after the Virden racial battle, 100 white Toluca miners stormed the Marshall County Jail in Lacon. The mob forcibly removed F. W. “George” Stewart, who was accused of rape, and lynched him from a tree. Stewart’s lynching was one of 19 that occurred in Illinois during the Second Nadir. Illinois is tied with Kansas for the most lynchings of Black folk in a northern state.
The Meanings for Reparations
- The Black reparations movement calls for reparatory justice: repair, compensation, and restitution.
- Racial terrorism provides us with identifiable victims and perpetrators. We can identify private and state actors who either neglected their duty or conspired with the murders.
- In these ethnic cleansings, Afrikan Americans were assaulted, raped, and murdered; their property stolen, and Black churches, lodges, and businesses destroyed.
- Black people were often forced to abandon their homes.
- An emphasis on racial terrorism also offers an opportunity to focus reparations on communities, on collective as well as individual loss.
Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua is a Black/Africana Studies scholar-activist who uses historical methodologies. He teaches in the departments of African American Studies and History at UIUC. He has been engaged with local and national Black liberation movement organizations since his teen years; he is currently an organizer for the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM).