Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South

Land, Labor, and Politics in the South

Black and White

T. Thomas Fortune

Foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley

Introduction by Seth Moglen

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

On a summer day, when the great heat induced a general thirst, a Lion and a Boar came at the same moment to a small well to drink. They fiercely disputed which of them should drink first, and were soon engaged in the agonies of a mortal combat. On their suddenly stopping to take breath for the fiercer renewal of the strife, they saw some vultures in the distance, waiting to feast on the one which should fall. They at once made up their quarrel, saying, It is better for us to be friends, than to become the food of crows or vultures.

—Æsop’s Fables.

FOREWORD

The massive protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the spring of 2020 have turned virtually every activist into an abolitionist. Although movements to abolish prisons and police have been around for decades, the Black Spring rebellions popularized the idea that caging and terrorizing people not only makes us unsafe but that the obscene costs of state violence should be reallocated for things that do keep us safe: housing, universal healthcare, living wage jobs, universal basic income, green energy, and a system of restorative justice. As abolition became the new watchword, everyone was scrambling to understand its historical roots. Reading groups popped up everywhere to read W. E. B. Du Bois’ classic, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), since he had coined the phrase abolition democracy, which Angela Y. Davis revived for her indispensable little book of the same title.¹

I participated in Black Reconstruction study groups and public forums meant to divine wisdom for our current movements. But I often wondered why no one was scrambling to read T. Thomas Fortune’s Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South. While Du Bois praised Reconstruction efforts to establish and improve the penitentiary system in what proved to be a futile effort to eliminate the convict lease,²

it was Fortune who wrote: The South must spend less money on penitentiaries and more money on schools; she must use less powder and buckshot and more law and equity; she must pay less attention to politics and more attention to the development of her magnificent resources… (89). Much shorter but no less powerful than Black Reconstruction in America, Fortune’s Black and White anticipates Du Bois’ critique of federal complicity in undermining Black freedom, but sharply diverged by declaring Reconstruction a miserable failure. He argued that the South’s problems can be traced to the federal government allowing the slaveholding rebels to return to power, hold the monopoly of land, and strip Black people of their short-lived citizenship rights, and the government’s refusal to compensate freed people for generations of unpaid labor. The result was a new kind of slavery: "the United States took the slave and left the thing which gave birth to chattel slavery and which is now fast giving birth to industrial slavery (235). Du Bois echoes Fortune, but adds that white labor’s investment in white supremacy promoted by capital ensured a system of industry which ruined democracy."³

Fortune, by contrast, believed racism would ultimately wither away, but not without a struggle. Formerly enslaved people, with proper education, would have to lead the way. He remarked on how Black people came out of bondage, not as robbers and thieves but as industrious, hard-working, family and community-oriented people, "while the white men of the South, the capitalists, the land-sharks, the poor white trash, and the nondescripts, with a thousand years of Christian civilization and culture behind them… organized themselves into a band of outlaws, whose concatenative chain of auxiliaries ran through the entire South, and deliberately proceeded to murder innocent men and women for POLITICAL REASONS and to systematically rob them of their honest labor because they were too accursedly lazy to labor themselves (152). Yet he still believed interracial working-class unity was possible and necessary for political reasons: to bring an end to monopoly and private ownership of land, which he believed to be the source of inequality and a transgression of the common right of man, and a usurpation which produces nearly, if not all, the evils which result upon our civilization; the inequalities which produce pauperism, vice, crime, and wide-spread demoralization among all the so-called lower classes (136).

So where is Black and White? Where is T. Thomas Fortune in the pantheon of radical Black intellectuals? I’m not the first to ask these questions, they have been raised with each edition published over the last half century. The most common answers attribute Fortune’s relative obscurity to his behavior. He shifted with the political winds. He renounced his radicalism to become an acolyte of Booker T. Washington. He drank too much and had an uncontrollable temper. The list is long. The truth is, in African American circles—especially among the Black press—T. Thomas Fortune never sank into obscurity. He remained a celebrated figure in Black letters throughout his life and for many decades after his death in 1928. Deemed the dean of Negro journalism, he was the subject of flattering obituaries and occasional profiles recalling his contribution to politics, the press, and fighting racial injustice. Fortune was variously described as one of the most brilliant journalists in the country; a man of principle, conscience, and integrity who could never be bought; a valiant warrior who fought with his pen to the very last.⁴

In 1949, Roscoe Conkling Simmons published a particularly hyperbolic portrait of Fortune, giving him credit for advancing the careers of both Booker T. and Frederick Douglass. Simmons declared him New York’s greatest citizen after the fall of Robert E. Lee.⁵

Missing from nearly all of these tributes is any mention of Black and White. Indeed, Du Bois never once cites Fortune in Black Reconstruction.⁶

August Meier’s landmark 1963 study, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915, is one of the first texts to discuss Black and White, though his remarks barely fill a single page. He writes, Not until W. E. B. Du Bois converted to socialism some twenty years later, did a distinguished Negro leader state with such intellectual vigor the thesis of class conflict and the identity of interests of the black and white workers.⁷

Emma Lou Thornbrough, Fortune’s first and only biographer, includes an eight-page summary of the book’s contents but provides very little context or critical engagement.⁸

However, to conclude that the book simply fell out of public view would also be a mistake. Black and White is arguably one of the most rediscovered texts in African American letters. In 1969, the pioneering independent scholar, William Loren Katz, reissued Black and White in the series he edited, The American Negro: His History and Literature, for Arno Press—an imprint of the New York Times. The following year, Johnson Publishing issued another edition as part of its Ebony Classics series.⁹

Thornbrough’s biography appeared two years later, earning much critical acclaim.

The real problem is that even as it was rediscovered the book wasn’t being read, or read very carefully. Historian James M. McPherson’s painfully short Preface to the Arno Press edition actually disparaged Fortune for his quasi-Marxist and utopian belief that Black and white workers have common interests and, in Fortune’s words, should unite under one banner and work upon the same platform and principles for the uplifting of labor.¹⁰

But in the early 1880s, this argument was neither utopian nor necessarily Marxist. The interracial labor insurgencies we associate with the Reconstruction era were not over; on the contrary, they intensified. In 1877, workers waged a nation-wide strike wave that began with railway workers in West Virginia, spread to Maryland, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and ultimately St. Louis, where socialist-led workers organized the nation’s first general strike. And despite the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, the Knights of Labor, the Greenback Labor Party, and the Readjuster Party organized biracial labor campaigns and upheld the promise of multiracial democracy in the region. By 1880, biracial working-class-oriented coalitions were still holding on in places like North Carolina and Virginia. In fact, the Danville Race Riot of 1883 proved to be a major catalyst for the book precisely because it resulted in the overthrow of the Readjusters—an interracial party that called for the cancellation of the Confederate war debt in order to reduce the tax burden on workers and farmers and fund public schools, repeal the poll tax, and ultimately break the power of the plantocracy and the banks that held the debt. Fortune sided with the Readjusters for refusing to vote to tax themselves to pay money borrowed without their consent (24). Although his response to the violent overthrow of the Readjusters by white supremacists was to propose a new national Black organization that could effectively and systematically protest lynch law, mob violence, segregation, the penal system, and the inequitable distribution of school funds, he nonetheless saw the potential of interracial labor organizing in Virginia.¹¹

But Fortune was no Marxist, and his anti-capitalism was ambivalent at best. He was against monopoly and the concentration of wealth, an issue that concerned many classical economists at the time trying to understand growing inequality and the boom and bust cycles of U.S. capitalism during the Gilded Age. On one side, he rejected the bogus Social Darwinist theories of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner who claimed that the wealthy owed their success to natural selection and the natural laws of the free market. Business acumen, character, frugality, thrift, a work ethic, and intelligence were heritable traits that the poor and non-whites presumably lacked. Of course, few robber barons displayed all of these characteristics, but it did not stop them from invoking evolution to explain the deepening wealth divide they were creating. Darwinian explanations for class inequality found their greatest proponent in Yale Professor William Graham Sumner, whose book, What Social Classes Owe Each Other, appeared a year before Black and White. His answer, not surprisingly, is nothing: neither the rich nor the government ought to help the poor since it would disrupt the natural order. The poor can learn the values of success so long as they are unhindered by government aid, irresponsible charity, or trade unions. Government’s role is merely to protect the property of men and the honor of women.¹²

Clearly, at the time Fortune regarded capital and labor as antagonistic. He wrote in a column in 1886, The black man who arrays himself on the side of capitalism as against labor would be like a black man before the war taking sides with the pro-slavery as against the anti-slavery advocates.¹³

But this did not mean he supported socialist or anarchist movements. In fact, he drew primarily on thinkers who not only believed socialist and anarchist groups undermined organized labor, but opposed strikes and militant labor action as dangerous. Fortune’s explanation for inequality draws heavily on William Godwin Moody’s 1883 text, Land and Labor in the United States, which argued that land monopoly replaced small farms with food factories worked by machines or tenant farms peopled by feudal slaves, resulting in overcrowded cities, low wages, high unemployment, and poverty. Moody also blames labor unions for the state of the economy. Of all the monopolies and tyrannies of capital, he writes, there is not one that equals the suicidal selfishness of the workingmen.¹⁴

Unions, he asserted, have destroyed the apprenticeship system, deskilled labor, dictated wages, and forced workers to strike which disrupted productivity and encouraged idleness and violence. Moody proposed replacing strikes with intelligent arbitration, reducing the working day to six hours in order to increase employment, raising wages, and permitting more leisure time. His solution to land monopoly was to end tenant farming, redistribute land to the people through the Homestead Act, double tax all unimproved lands, and grant government control of transportation.¹⁵

Fortune stops short of blaming organized labor. He sees the problem as one of relative overproduction—the workers don’t have the means to purchase the glut of commodities they are producing—and competition, which is the real culprit in lowering wages and driving unemployment (102). At the same time, his decision to append the testimony of R. Heber Newton before Senator Henry Blair’s Hearings on Relations Between Labor and Capital (1883) to Black and White suggests some accord with Newton’s assertion that strikes are outmoded and destructive and ought to be replaced by arbitration (206).

Strikingly, while Black and White mentions Indians in passing, Native people do not figure in Fortune’s proposal for biracial class politics. This omission is perhaps surprising given Fortune’s own Native heritage, not to mention the fact that as he wrote Black and White the U.S. military was still embroiled in Indian wars and the Dawes Act, which divided up Native lands into individual allotments in order to break tribal sovereignty and make more land available for settlers, was still three years away. And he championed the Homestead Act even though it granted settlers claims on indigenous lands. But Fortune, like most Americans, accepted the myth of Indians as a dying people, exterminated by superior force and intelligence, as in the case of the poor Indian of our own land (74).

Another source Fortune drew on was Henry George’s book, Progress and Poverty, which identified private ownership of land as the main source of inequality. Instead of confiscating land, George proposed a single tax that would, in effect, transform private ownership of land into a kind of lease, since it would no longer be profitable to hold land without making it productive. This would break up monopoly landownership, render other forms of taxation unnecessary, pay for public institutions and infrastructure, and ultimately lead to greater distribution of wealth. As George put it, "laissez faire (in its full true meaning) opens the way to a realization of the noble dreams of socialism."¹⁶

The Marxists begged to differ, especially Karl Marx himself. In a letter to Friedrich Sorge, Marx criticized George for ignoring wage labor, while believing that the transformation of rent into taxation paid to the State must bring about the automatic disappearance of all the abuses of capitalist production. So the whole thing is merely an attempt, tricked out with socialism, to save the capitalist regime and, indeed, to re-establish it on an even broader basis than at present.¹⁷

Henry George did not set out to abolish capitalism so much as create greater equality within it. He was also not so keen on labor organizations, which he characterized as destructive of the very things which workmen seek to gain.¹⁸

As Seth Moglen correctly points out in his introduction, what Fortune took from George was the idea of abolishing private ownership of land—although, much like his position on capitalism, he seems to waver on this point. He measures Black progress in terms of land and wealth accumulation, predicting that within fifty years African Americans would own at least thirty-five million acres of land. The future landlord and capitalist of the South, he concludes, are no longer confined to the white race: the black man has become a factor, and he must be counted (135). Obviously, his prognostications were way off, but did he regard this trend as a foreboding or a sign of success? His ambivalence led reviewers to wildly divergent interpretations of his arguments. A writer for the Christian Union called the book dark and pessimistic, and took issue with his claim that whites monopolized land and Black people continued to suffer from racial prejudice and an economy-based greed.¹⁹

By contrast, a reviewer for the Philadelphia Inquirer found the book incredibly optimistic: [Fortune] anticipates a happy future for the colored people in the Southern States, for he thinks they will eventually own a great deal of the land in that section and have a corresponding degree of intelligence, influence and independence.²⁰

Of course, what these and other reviews failed to mention was his conclusion. No matter how he analyzed the crisis or whose ideas he drew upon, Fortune was crystal clear about what to do. "The hour is approaching when the laboring classes of our country, North, East, West and South, will recognize that they have a common cause, a common humanity and a common enemy; and that, therefore, if they would triumph over wrong and place the laurel wreath upon triumphant justice, without distinction of race or of previous condition they must unite!" (152).

It was this common cause, the unity of working people across the color line, that has drawn the most skepticism over the years for Fortune’s work. But Fortune turned out to be prescient, and history proved him right. For the last 137 years, the South has been the epicenter of the country’s multiracial democratic movements. Jim Crow, lynching, and disfranchisement were ruling class responses to interracial movements to preserve and expand democracy, protect the rights of working people, redistribute land, and dismantle the plantation oligarchy. Every one of these legal and extralegal measures to break democratic insurgencies were sanctioned by the federal government. Southern states passed the most draconian anti-labor, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant laws not because they are conservative but because more than one-third of the electorate couldn’t vote. And yet, some of the most militant interracial strikes have taken place in the heart of Dixie, from coal and iron ore miners in Alabama; waterfront workers in New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola, and Charleston; textile, lumber, and poultry workers in North Carolina; sharecroppers in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama; and farm workers in Florida and Georgia, to name but a few. A Black-led interracial movement delivered a second Reconstruction and a Poor People’s Campaign, and Black, Native, and poor white Southerners spearheaded the environmental justice movement. And as twenty-six million people took to the streets to condemn the police killing of George Floyd, Black, Latinx, and white working people were trying to organize Amazon workers, miners, and prisoners in Alabama.

Black and White remains a transformative text inspiring new generations. In 2009, I taught the book in an undergraduate seminar at Duke University. Rob Stephens, a thoughtful white student and native North Carolinian, wrote a paper for the class describing Fortune’s book as a scathing analysis of racist capitalism in the United States, and the laws complicit therein as well as a (re)vision of the possibilities for a broad-based, bi-racial struggle for autonomous development among the laborers of the South. He saw something that most critics, skeptics, and even sympathetic scholars like James McPherson, missed. [W]hen Fusion politics and the Populists Movement still held real promise to unite the white and black laborers of the South in a coalition against capitalist power, there was still hope that class-based struggle would overwhelm White Supremacy.²¹

Rob was already a seasoned activist when he showed up in my class, having organized against gentrification in Durham. But he carried Fortune’s injunction with him, and then encountered a brilliant, fearless organizer making the same plea for interracial working-class unity. His name was Reverend William Barber. Rob spent three years as a field secretary for the North Carolina NAACP under Reverend Barber’s leadership and helped organize North Carolina’s Forward Together-Moral Monday Movement. Today Reverend Stephens is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, the National Political Director for Repairers of the Breach, and the Deputy Director of the Mass Poor People’s Assembly for the Poor People’s Campaign, both organizations founded by Reverend Barber and Reverend Liz Theoharis.

Reverend Barber, perhaps more than anyone, has taken up Fortune’s challenge to future generations to build a new movement, to unite working people and the poor in common cause. He calls it the Third Reconstruction.²²

It is being led by a new fusion politics through organizations such as the new Poor People’s Campaign, Project South, Southerners on New Ground (SONG), Kindred: Southern Healing Justice Collective, Cooperation Jackson, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, the Free Alabama Movement, the Movement for Black Lives, and a variety of abolitionist organizations demanding an end to prisons and police. The Third Reconstruction is the closest we come to fulfilling Fortune’s radical dream—and exceeding it. They are calling for an end to structural racism, poverty, inequality, ecological devastation, the carceral state, war and militarism, and a new moral revival that will put people and the planet before profit.

You will find the seeds for this revival right here, in black and white.

Robin D. G. Kelley

INTRODUCTION

Timothy Thomas Fortune was the most eloquent and influential African American radical of the late nineteenth century. The leading Black journalist of the 1880s and 1890s, he was also a militant activist who founded the Afro-American League, the first national political organization to fight for full equality for Black Americans. Fortune is a decisive figure in the African American protest tradition. In his writing and activism, he constituted a bridge between the militant visions of the Black abolitionists and the rise of the Niagara Movement at the turn of the twentieth century. His influence on the generation of Black protest leaders that followed him is concrete and direct. It was Fortune who gave W.E.B. Du Bois his first writing opportunities as a correspondent for his newspaper, and the young Du Bois viewed Fortune as a mentor and role model. It was Fortune who brought Ida B. Wells to New York to continue her anti-lynching campaign in the pages of his paper, the New York Age, when vigilantes in Memphis threatened her life and destroyed her press. It was Fortune’s platform for the Afro-American League that provided a model for the NAACP. There is no way to understand accurately the contours of the modern civil rights movement, from Du Bois and Wells to Martin Luther King Jr., without understanding Fortune’s intellectual and institutional contribution to it. And there can be no proper assessment of the nature and persistence of African American economic radicalism—from the Fourierism of Sojourner Truth to the contemporary visions of Angela Davis and Cornel West—without grasping Fortune’s role in elaborating the economic intuitions of the Black abolitionist generation into a coherent socialist analysis of racial capitalism in Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South.

Black and White is Fortune’s masterpiece. The first socialist book written by an African American, it is a foundational text for the Black radical tradition and a milestone in the intellectual history of the American Left. It is required reading for anyone who cares about the African American freedom struggle—and the wider movement for racial and economic justice in the United States. Having spent his own childhood in slavery and having survived the horrors of Reconstruction and its aftermath, Fortune set out in this book to explain why the abolition of slavery had not made African Americans free. In the first half of Black and White, he offers a passionate account of the ways in which white racism had deformed America from its inception—and had doomed Black people to slavery and, after emancipation, to unique forms of violence and discrimination. In the second half of the book, he argues that institutionalized racism was only one part of the problem and that the continued oppression of African Americans was also the result of an underlying economic system that had exploited the labor of Black people during hundreds of years of slavery and that continued to exploit them (and poor people of other races) after the Civil War. He insists that if the legacy of slavery was ever to be overcome, and if the United States was ever to realize its long-betrayed promise of equality, there would need to be a fundamental transformation of the capitalist economic system as well as the elimination of white racism.

Despite its importance, Black and White is largely unread today. The reasons for this neglect are complex, as I will explain below, and they have in part to do with the paradoxical character of Fortune’s later political development. But beyond these biographical complexities, Black and White has remained half-buried—acknowledged by experts but not widely read—because it has always been an unsettling work. When it was first published in 1884, Fortune’s book represented an exceptionally bold demand for racial and economic equality. It told painful truths about the role of white racism in American history and it called for fundamental change in the economic order. Most Americans have preferred not to face such provocations. With the exception of two short-lived reprints that appeared at the height of the modern civil rights movement, Black and White was out of print throughout the twentieth century. It is my hope that readers are, at last, ready for Black and White—and that this edition will enable Fortune’s most important work to reach the wide audience it deserves.

THE LIFE AND CAREER OF T. THOMAS FORTUNE

Timothy Thomas Fortune was born into slavery in Marianna, Florida in 1856. Emancipated with the rest of his family at the end of the Civil War, he came of age during Reconstruction, experiencing both its promise and its violent betrayal. Fortune’s father, Emanuel, emerged after the war as a leader of Marianna’s Black community, which elected him to the Reconstruction-era Florida Constitutional Convention and then to the Florida House of Representatives. This period of hopefulness was shattered by the reimposition of white supremacy in northwestern Florida. The Ku Klux Klan murdered with impunity scores of African Americans in Marianna in the 1870s and drove Republican leaders—including Emanuel Fortune—from the town through a campaign of assassinations and death threats. This reign of terror broke the health of Fortune’s mother and contributed to her early death.¹

By the time he reached adolescence, Fortune had already learned the painful lesson shared by millions of freedmen and freedwomen: that the end of slavery had brought neither equality nor justice to African Americans. In a little more than a decade, his people had been politically disenfranchised, economically exploited, constrained by segregation, and terrorized by lynching and other forms of racial violence. Fortune would spend his adult life analyzing this unjust social order and seeking to understand how it might be resisted and transformed.

Like most formerly enslaved people, Fortune had limited opportunity for formal education. He attended a school set up by the Freedman’s Bureau for a few months and, as a young