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Work
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 7638 Includes: Early Years of Exploration and Colonization | Revolution and Disruption | The Antebellum Years | The Civil War and Postwar Years | BibliographyIn early America, the idea of a black leisure class was unthinkable. Given the few allowances African Americans had for free time and the heavy demands of slavery, it is arguable that they worked harder than any other group in early America. It is a quirk of historical research that African American work patterns have always been considered apart from labor history. That skewed perspective has changed as scholars compare black and labor on a spectrum of experiences and emphasize the amount of work done together or in proximity to one another. Black work can no longer been seen as a homogeneous experience, but any history of it has to take into account when it occurred and where. Work is a fundamental human activity, and scholarship on labor history needs to take into account other aspects of a person's life such as the family, religion, personal habits, and nationality. This essay, however, will emphasize work lives. ...
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Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 4529 Includes: The Great Migration. | The Depression and World War II. | After the War and Beyond. | BibliographyAfrican American work in the twentieth century largely existed within, or was directly influenced by, what W. E. B. Du Bois referred to in his classic 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk as the “color line.” Although there were innumerable black people of achievement and great moments of courage, hope, and unity, a black person's color was commonly the marker of how high he or she could reach in American society. This was true in the first half of the century when Theodore Selden, a train porter, was killed when the train on which he worked jumped the tracks. His body was identified by the Phi Beta Kappa key (from Dartmouth, class of 1922) that he wore with his uniform. The importance of race was true in the year 2000when the income of an average white family topped $50,000 while the income of ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 2885 Includes: Demand for Labor | Computers Change the Demand for Labor | Effects on Black City Residents | Effects of Changes in the Global Economy | ConclusionRecent economic trends that have impacted the African American workforce. Despite African Americans' strong focus on racial discrimination in employment, their economic fate is inextricably connected with the structure and functioning of the modern economy, including the global economy. Racial bias continues to be an important factor that aggravates black employment problems. Nonetheless, to overemphasize the racial factor would obscure the nonracial economic forces that have sharply increased joblessness and declining real wages among many African Americans in the last several decades. As the late black economist Vivian Henderson (1975) argued several years ago, racism put blacks in their economic place and stepped aside to watch changes in modern economy disrupt that place.In the following ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 74...Household Income Growth 1960–2002
1960 1970 1980 1990 2002 Total (in current dollars) All Families 5,620 9,867 21,023 35,353 53,106 Married-couple families 5,688 10,169 23,141 39,895 61,433 Female householder, no spouse 2,983 4,797 10,408 16,932 28,590 Black All Families 3,233 6,516 12,674 21,423 33,525 Married-couple families N/A 7,816 18,593 33,784 52,246 Female householder, no spouse N/A 3,576 7,425 12,125 21,189 Source: U.S. Census Bureau.
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