Did Race Really Matter? A look into the Guilded Age Worker.

Did Race Really Matter?

If one were to be asked, which would you prefer, to be a lower class white American or a recently freed African American during the Guilded Age, most would most likely respond with a preference towards being a white American. African Americans of the time had to deal with Jim Crow laws along with many other types of discrimination that white Americans would not have to deal with. However, when one closely examines the differences between the conditions of African Americans and lower class white Americans in the late 19th century, one finds that the conditions under which they lived are quite similar. During the late 19th century, there were many differences between freed African Americans and lower class whites, in many cases they were both tied to the land through sharecropping and company towns; they both often had no way to protest their treatment; however, white Americans were able to rebel against conditions quicker than the African Americans.

During the late 1800’s, both African Americans and lower class whites were in a way tied to the land that they worked. Many African Americans became victims of a practice called sharecropping. Sharecropping was a system where rich white land owners would rent African Americans pieces of land in return for a certain percentage of the crop. The land owner would also often require that a tenant buy only equipment from the renter, often leaving tenant in debt at the end of the year. Company towns were utilized by large corporations where they would have their factory workers live in a town they owned, they owned the houses, the stores anything you could buy. That means that the owner could decide the price of anything, and since one was often paid only in store credit or you ran house charges, workers would often end up in debt to the owner. Sound familiar?”

Another similarity was their inability (for a time) to protest their working conditions. There were many, albeit unconstitutional, laws in place that made it very difficult for them to get ahead. There were voting literacy tests, Jim Crow laws, Grandfather Clauses and Poll taxes all of which hindered African American’s ability to get out of the rut that many of them were trapped in. White factory workers on the other hand were put down by the management of the companies that they worked for. Management was not above using injunctions to stop labour protests, pinkertons, to discourage any type of resistance, forcing workers to sign Yellow Dog Contracts, to instate lockouts and including secrecy clauses in contracts in order to keep their workers under their thumb and unable to protest.

There was one glaringly obvious difference between the white and black conditions, whites gained their ‘freedom’ much quicker than any African Americans. Eventually, white workers found a way to form effective Unions that could organize productive strikes and informational picketing. They reasonably quickly gained some rights as far as work conditions went. For many African Americans however, they had to wait until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s for there to be any recognition of the mistreatment they had dealt with after the Civil War, blacks had to wait almost 100 years for recognition of ‘management’ and governmental mistreatment of their working conditions.

While many think that being a white labourer during the Guilded Age would be much better than being a black labourer, it is not necessarily true. Both races went through many hardships in order to gain the treatment and rights that they deserved. Blacks and Whites had to deal with being tied to the land they worked, being mistreated by management forces, however white workers were able to attain livable working conditions much quicker than any black labourer.