Fundamentally, the economic fear from white American workers during the antebellum period up to the present day has remained a critical factor in the African American labor crisis. Today, this economic fear continues to underwrite the present-day under-enforcement of employment discrimination and other civil rights laws. This economic fear became more and more noticeable and shrill both during and immediately after the American Civil War. Lucidly describing conditions on the ground during the period of Reconstruction (1865-1877), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote: “The poor whites… were absolutely at sea. The Negro was to become apparently their fellow laborer. But were the whites to be bound to the black laborer by economic condition and destiny, or …show more content…
Almost unanimously, following the reaction of such leaders as Andrew Johnson and Hinton Helper, the poor white clung frantically to the planter and his ideals; and although ignorant and impoverished, maimed and discouraged, victims of a war fought largely by the poor white for the benefit of the rich planter, they sought redress by demanding unity of white against black, and not unity of poor against rich, or of worker against exploiter. This brought singular schism in the South. The white planter endeavored to keep the Negro at work for his own profit on terms that amounted to slavery and which were hardly distinguishable from it. This was the plain voice of the slave codes. On the other hand, the only conceivable ambition of a poor white was to become a planter. Meantime the poor white did not want the Negro put to profitable work. He wanted the Negro beneath the feet of the white worker. Right here had lain the seat of the trouble before the war. All the regular and profitable jobs went to Negroes, and the poor whites were excluded. It seemed after the war immaterial to the poor white that profit from the exploitation of black labor continued to go to the planter. He regarded the process as the exploitation of black folk by white, not of labor by