Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [331]
Of growing concern, too, were black agitators who belonged to no plantation but who allegedly aroused the freedmen. Aaron Bradley, who had migrated from Massachusetts to Georgia, remained a controversial figure throughout Reconstruction; as early as 1865, he elicited strong reactions from Bureau officers:
A man named Bradley has been making speeches at S[avannah] to the colored people criticising President’s policy, advising Negroes not to make contracts except at point of bayonet, and to disobey your orders; have arrested him, he does not deny charges, proof conclusive. Genl Steedmen has ordered him to be tried by Military Commission.
Two years later, after Bradley encouraged blacks to take possessory title of certain lands, Bureau officers again cited his “pernicious influence over the more ignorant of the freed people” and asked for authority to banish him from the region.119
The organized efforts of black laborers to improve working conditions were not limited to the plantations. Again, the number of successes achieved may have been less important than the possibilities revealed by such efforts. The “new phenomenon” of black stevedores in Charleston refusing to work for less than two dollars a day was sufficiently spectacular to be noted in the leading northern working-class newspaper, as was the decision of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Memphis to break a strike of levee workers before it erupted into a full-scale riot. In 1866 and 1867, strikes also broke out among city laborers in Nashville, tobacco workers in Richmond, lumberyard workers in Washington, D.C., and stevedores in New Orleans, Richmond, and Savannah. The Savannah strike elicited particular attention, if only because white and black stevedores combined to resist a new tax imposed on their occupation; the police intervened but confined its arrests and beatings to the black workers.120 In New Orleans, black stevedores had to be restrained from lynching a contractor who had allegedly defrauded them of their wages; the police rescued the contractor, while a detachment of troops dispersed the more than five hundred stevedores who had assembled to express their grievances. In late 1865, even as many whites feared an imminent black uprising, New Orleans looked upon the rare sight of black and white stevedores joining forces to strike for higher wages. The mayor himself conceded the impressive quality of such an event, particularly the demonstration of racial unity among the workers. “They marched up the levee in a long procession, white and black together. I gave orders that they should not be interfered with as long as they interfered with nobody else; but when they undertook by force to prevent other laborers from working, the police promptly put a stop to their proceedings.”121
Whatever the promise of such combined efforts, neither white trade unions nor the black press would permit them to herald a new era in urban labor relations. When it came down to admitting blacks into the few existing trade unions, the racial barriers were impregnable. “At present, we have nothing to do with the negro,” a white carpenter in Richmond declared at a meeting of his union, “but the time is coming, and we must prepare ourselves to say to this dark sea of misery, ‘thus far shalt thou come, but no farther.’ ” Noting that sentiment, a Richmond black predicted “an irrepressible conflict between the white and the black mechanics of the South,” now that the whites had been contaminated by the same “devilish prejudice” that ostracized black mechanics in the North. In New Orleans, meanwhile, the Tribune, voice of the free colored community, adopted a stance during the stevedores’ strike that anticipated the generally hostile attitude