Securing the Workplace
Securing the Workplace
This chapter, along with the next two, interrogates the ways that police reform amplified ordinary white men’s power to police free black Baltimoreans. One site of such racial policing was the workplace. By the late 1850s, Chapter 3 shows, white workingmen were commonly engaging in job busting – i.e. chasing skilled black workingmen from the docks and rail yards with the police’s complicity. This was because the law did not treat all workers equally, even in an industrializing city where employers held much of the leverage and the vast majority of the people of color were free. Black workers were prolific in Baltimore, and the wages black Baltimoreans earned were meaningful evidence of their freedom, but the legal and institutional discrimination they confronted put them at a severe disadvantage when facing white violence in the workplace. More times than not, professional policemen confirmed the disparity.
Keywords: White men, Workingmen, Job busting, Wages, Black workers, Legal discrimination, White violence, Policemen, Policing, Freedom
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