Resident Strangers: Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama

Jennifer Brooks's Resident Strangers unravels the tumultuous labor environment in New South Alabama by examining immigrant laborers’ experiences during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To spur agricultural recovery and industrial growth, Southern planters and industrialists sought to control African American mobility while recruiting foreign labor to cultivate the cheapest, most obedient labor force possible. This effort, however, was largely unsuccessful. Resident Strangers highlights the precarious status of foreign-born laborers by examining the expectations for their exploitation, the inconsistent consequences they faced for resisting Southern industrialists, and the economic forces that ultimately hindered their success despite Alabama's postwar boom.In six densely packed chapters, Brooks argues that immigrant laborers contributed to New South Alabama in ways that were both nationally significant and distinctly Southern. In the first chapter, Brooks examines Alabama's efforts to support immigration to mitigate dependence on newly emancipated Black laborers who might have pursued new opportunities in the Midwest or Northeast. Immigration campaigns vilified African Americans while promoting Northern and Western Europeans as ideal replacement laborers. Although census data does not support claims of a steep population decline in Black communities before World War I, this did not prevent Alabama leaders from enacting punitive crop lien laws, expanding the convict lease system, or appointing immigration commissioners with backing from both public and private interests. These mechanisms ultimately ensnared Black and foreign-born laborers alike, establishing a volatile labor economy.Chapter 2 begins with the story of Charley Sing, who, in August of 1893, was attacked in his laundry business. While Mr. Sing's identification of a Black man who assaulted him did not result in a conviction, his marriage to his Black female employee led to both him and his wife being jailed. Brooks explains how the convergence of labor challenges, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the transience of Chinese racial identity in the New South provided Chinese residents in Alabama with more agency than they may have experienced in the West or Northeast but nevertheless left them targeted and vulnerable to victimization. Their ties to the local community often dictated the outcome of their encounters with the justice system and their very personal safety.Chapter 3 focuses on Italian encounters with racial violence in the New South. Italian immigrants were the single largest group of European laborers and “experienced a racialization that derived, in part, from the association with Black labor” (86). Brooks draws on archival interviews to explore the ways in which Italian field hands moved into alternative occupations, such as retail grocery service, which were necessarily established in proximity to Black neighborhoods. If Italian grocery proprietors were victimized, they were described either as “white” or as “foreign” or “strange,” depending on whether the alleged perpetrator was white or Black, further cementing the insecurity of their status (92).The latter half of Resident Strangers examines mine strikes and episodes of violence—such as the Blocton train ambush—and how their subsequent legal trials were reported in local newspapers in ways that manipulated the racial identities of the African American and foreign-born laborers who were involved. Brooks also shares select accounts of foreign-born laborers who landed in the convict lease system, demonstrating how easily those who arrived from countries preferred by Alabama's immigration boosters became imprisoned shortly after their arrival.The strength of Brooks's work lies first in her biographical approach. She recovers the voices of marginalized laborers, reframing the immigrant experience in New South Alabama as one of individual vulnerability rather than a homogeneous struggle. Moreover, the breadth of Brooks's sources—including manuscripts, newspapers, legislative reports, court and convict records, and census data—creates a rich and fluid narrative. The thematic transition from exploitation in the first half of Resident Strangers to resistance in the latter half means that the chapter on victims of the convict lease system could have been introduced earlier. However, this does not diminish the importance of this work as both a regional history of industrial labor and a study of vulnerability in the context of agricultural revival.This work will appeal to scholars who seek to understand how agricultural revival in the New South was stymied by those who depended on its recovery the most. The story of Alabama's New South is not one of the absence of immigrants, but one that can be more accurately told through their perspectives.