Black Folk: A History of the Black Working Class with Dr. Blair LM Kelley

The Robert F. Smith Explore Your Family History Center is excited to host Dr. Blair LM Kelley, award winning historian, author, professor, and director for the Center for the Study of the South at UNC-Chapel Hill in conversation with Gene Demby, host of NPR's award-winning podcast Code Switch, about Kelley's new book Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class.

Spanning two hundred years—from one of Kelley’s earliest known ancestors, an enslaved blacksmith, to the essential workers of the Covid-19 pandemic—Black Folk 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. Taking jobs white people didn’t want and confined to segregated neighborhoods, Black workers found community in intimate spaces, from stoops on city streets to the backyards of washerwomen, where multiple generations labored from dawn to dusk, talking and laughing in a space free of white supervision and largely beyond white knowledge. As millions of Black people left the violence of the American South for the promise of a better life in the North and West, these networks of resistance and joy sustained early arrivals and newcomers alike and laid the groundwork for organizing for better jobs, better pay, and equal rights.

Please join us on June 24, 2023 at 11am in the Oprah Winfrey Theater. There will be books for sale and a book signing after the program.