For Thursday (2/24) and Tuesday (3/1)

For Thursday (2/24) and Tuesday (3/1) – – let’s read up to the end of Part Four in William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge (1941). Trigger warning: Attaway’s novel is a brutal exploration of labor and race in Depression America.

One way of reading Attaway’s novel is to read it in the context of The Great Migration – – the massive dislocation and relocation of Black Americans from the South to the industrial and commercial zones of the Northeast (New York City, Boston, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, etc.) and the Midwest (Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Youngstown, etc.) and eventually the West (L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, etc.).  From around 1915 to 1945 or so, millions of African-Americans were cast from an agricultural economy and agrarian society into the factory and city.  (In a way, this narrative can also be read as one instance of a much larger, global story of modernity and modernization.). Whether in Tennessee or Michigan, field or factory, racism and class relations remained major determinants of everyday life.  As a leftist, Attaway strove to understand how both factors forged and re-forged Black working-class experience.