The Black American Short Story in the 20th Century

Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Keri Leigh Merritt reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these 'masterless' men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war.

https://rapidgator.net/file/10b1696676b444fcd85c64f8507f7cf7/The.Black.American.Short.Story.in.the.20th.Century.pdf

https://nitro.download/view/74D259661AC6ACE/The.Black.American.Short.Story.in.the.20th.Century.pdf