Author: William Horne

William Horne, Executive Editor of The Activist History Review, is a PhD candidate at The George Washington University researching the relationship of race to labor, freedom, and capitalism in post-Civil War Louisiana. His research interests include systems of power revolving around concepts of race, labor, incarceration, capitalism, and the state. He is a former high school teacher, barista, and warehouse worker and is an avid home gardener. His dissertation, “Carceral State: Baton Rouge and its Plantation Environs Across Emancipation,” examines the ways in which white supremacy and capitalism each depended on restricting black freedom in the aftermath of slavery. He can be followed on Twitter at @wihorne.
by William Horne March 10, 2017 1
March 2017 Spotlight On: Race

Bring Back Our Jobs: Work, Machines, and Energy Infrastructure

Sometime in the late 1930s, Irene Robertson interviewed Mary Teel about her memory of slavery and her life since. Some of Robertson’s questions clearly made the formerly-enslaved Teel feel uncomfortable, like when she asked about the Klan, education, and voting. Nonetheless, Teel’s account of slavery and its aftermath repeated a theme common among her peers: years of hard work still left her “hard up.”