Freed Black sugar workers exercised immediate collective-bargaining leverage after emancipation.

Evidence

Given the large Black populations in these areas, freedmen made significant gains overnight, electing Black state officials and inspiring economic changes and labor organizing on sugar plantations. Agents from the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency responsible for ensuring Black people’s safety and welfare following the war, often noted in their reports that planters frequently complained that when they dismissed one worker, the others “would immediately quit work & threaten to leave the place.” As new wage earners, Black sugar workers acting in solidarity negotiated the best terms they could, signed labor contracts for up to a year, and moved from one plantation to another in search of a life whose daily rhythms beat differently than before. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 304

Categorization

• XREF: Collective action and reputation-based solidarity echoes the Milgrom law-merchant material on how groups enforce norms outside formal institutions.