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chapter 9 Reconstruction: The Making and Unmaking of a Revolution
independent farms, and many ended up working for nearby ranches and larger farms 1865–1877
41
owned by whites. Eventually, most of the black boomtowns died out.

The Right to Work for Fair Wages
Like Jourdon Anderson, some other former slaves left the South as soon as they were
free, moving north and west in expectation of fair wages for their labor and a good edu-
cation for their children. Many gravitated to cities, where the hope of better jobs soon
faltered. Black newcomers ran into the prejudice and discrimination in hiring and wages
that had long hobbled black workers there. Managers were reluctant to hire them, and
white workers, who saw them as competition, were hostile, especially since blacks were
often hired as strikebreakers. White labor unions characteristically excluded blacks.
Some individuals were able to set out on their own. In 1865, when white caulk-
ers in the Baltimore shipyards went on strike to force the firing of more than a hun-
dred black caulkers and longshoremen, Isaac Myers, a highly skilled black caulker,
joined with other black labor activists and a small group of supportive whites to
create the black-owned and cooperatively run Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry
Dock Company. It was a strong center of black union activism, and in 1869, Myers
helped found the Colored National Labor Union to advance the cause of black work-
ers. Myers was also a proponent of interracial labor solidarity. Yet his efforts were
short-lived. By the mid-1870s, the Colored National Labor Union had dissolved due
to internal dissension and the economic depression that followed the panic of 1873.
By the mid-1880s, the company Myers had founded also had collapsed.
The idea of interracial labor solidarity was taken up by the Knights of Labor, a broad-
based union founded in 1869 that welcomed both skilled and unskilled workers and
eventually African Americans and women. With the rise of industry in the North during
and after the war, the Knights believed that only a united and inclusive labor movement
could stand up to the growing power of industrialists, who, said the Knights, built profits
through “wage slavery.” The organization’s motto was “An injury to one is the concern
of all.” At its height in 1886, the Knights had more than 700,000 members. Despite the
fact that its assemblies in the South were segregated by race, the Knights’ commitment
to interracial unionism drew African American support. Black workers fully embraced
the Knights’ major goals: the eight-hour workday, the abolition of child and convict
labor, equal pay for equal work, and worker-owned and worker-managed cooperatives.
By 1886, two-thirds of Richmond, Virginia’s 5,000 tobacco workers — many of them
black — belonged to the organization. But the Knights of Labor’s quick decline followed
its quick rise to prominence. Failed strikes and disputes between skilled and unskilled
workers weakened it internally, and the 1886 Haymarket bombing — a deadly confron-
tation between striking workers and police in Chicago — damaged its reputation. As
southern whites increasingly withdrew from the Knights, it became a largely black orga-
nization that fell victim to racial terrorism. In Richmond, as elsewhere, the demise of the
Knights doomed prospects for interracial unionism for decades.

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