Organizing Workers in the Shadow of Slavery: Global Inequality, Racial Boundaries, and the Rise of Unions in American and British Capitalism, 1870–1929

by Noah Zachary
published on 09 January 2026

Rudi Batzell offers a material account of how racial hierarchies formed in the United States, framing the history of racism in the labor movement as a question not of biases and prejudice but of access to property and land.

Racism is often considered a question of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. The accused racist will sometimes deploy the tired old defense that he or she "has black friends," a defense that only makes sense if racism is exclusively defined as holding a prejudiced view, and that having black friends would inherently imply the lack of a prejudice. Indeed, in our jurisprudence is the foundational concept of "racial animus," i.e., hostile feelings, that is required to establish that some official act had racist motives. In Organizing Workers in the Shadow of Slavery, however, Rudi Batzell seeks to transcend this rarely-productive conversation by returning to a more basic question: access to property.

As such, Batzell, a professor and historian at Lake Forest College, sets out to offer a material-economic account of American racism, arguing that "combating racial domination at its roots requires changing not what people believe, but what they earn and own.” To Batzell, this question, at least in the United States, begins with the aftermath of the American Civil War. The failure to redistribute massive Southern plantations to the newly liberated Black community resulted in the creation of a permanent agricultural underclass ripe for exploitation by both Northern industrialists in search of strike breakers and Southern planters seeking sharecroppers. From there, he follows the chain of cause and effect to some surprising places, covering the hate strikes staged by white-only unions to the surprising impact of informal sports teams on modern unions – and how racial divisions reappeared within them.

This book is undeniably a valuable contribution to the scholarship of race and labor. Batzell uses an extensive analysis of primary sources and economic data to track how the original failure to redistribute Southern land has inflicted the United States with an enduring racial hierarchy. As a direct result, a narrow labor movement was fundamentally unable to establish a true working-class solidarity in the United States, as racial contempt would always offer a ready wedge for managers looking to break strikes. Simply put, some workers would sometimes prefer to strike for segregation rather than for improved conditions.

Batzell’s source base covers the scholarship of the labor movement and the critical scholarship that examines racism from a material lens, as well as using illustrations, photographs, and graphs of economic data to support his argument. Moreover, he takes a global perspective on his material, exploring how racial boundary-making played out elsewhere: Japanese-Korean, English-Irish, and in South Africa. As such, this is a fairly advanced text, aimed firmly at an expert audience; it can mainly be recommended to scholars and graduate students, though undergraduates in an upper-division history class would benefit greatly from its focus on material conditions.

Ultimately, Batzell concludes that “as long as black and white workers continue to occupy such different structural positions and as long as vastly unequal rates of homeownership and wealth place black and white families in such profoundly different material circumstances,” there will be no united working class against the forces of capital. His prescription for this is “material redress,” in the forms of “ongoing reparations globally” both to formerly colonized countries and to the descendants of enslaved people. By his own admission, this seems highly unlikely; the forces of capital are growing stronger, not weaker, and racial division is deepening, not fading. Yet, undeniably, Batzell offers us an understanding of how the legacy of the Civil War sundered the American working class.

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