Labor agents were facilitators of black migration during the Jim Crow era. Labor agents were paid by northern industrialists to recruit southern blacks to work in factories in the North. Though labor agents helped bring black workers to the North, many African Americans eventually returned to the South after finding work and living conditions in the industrialized North untenable.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, James Duncan Professor of History and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, examines cloth-making in the colonial era in New England as a household industry, how and why cloth from the eighteenth century was preserved during the colonial revival, and why eighteenth-century women marked the cloth they made with their names and other details of their lives.
Which of the two views presented below, W.E.B. Du Bois’ or Booker T. Washington’s, offered a better strategy to put our nation on a quicker path to equality for African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century?