Black FolkBlack Folk

"Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story. Spanning two hundred years--from one of Kelley's earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the Covid-19 pandemic--[this book] highlights 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"--Publisher description