From the slaves' jubilee to white ‘redemption’: Black working-class life in Charleston, 1861-1880

Drawing upon substantial archival research, this article explores the contours of Black working-class life and politics in one of the most important urban centres in the post-emancipation South: Charleston, South Carolina. The citadel of white proslavery ideology in the antebellum period. Charleston—with a large and combative Black majority—became after the Civil War home to an assertive Black-led labor movement, driven into the public sphere to seek not only civil and political equality but social and economic justice. The defeat of Reconstruction in the mid-1870s signalled not only the return to power of white supremacists, but also marked the beginning of a painful retreat on the part of the city's Black labourers.<br/><br/>