White mobs attacked Black workers hoping to raise their own wages

Evidence

White workers viewed Black workers, both free and enslaved, as a threat to their livelihood. According to the pro-slavery New York Herald, if four million enslaved Black workers were emancipated, they would flock to Northern cities and “the labor of the white man will be depreciated.” As documented by historian Joe Trotter, Jr., white mobs throughout the first half of the nineteenth century attacked free Black workers in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York City, and elsewhere because they were motivated by the hope that running Black people out of town would drive up white wages. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 586

Categorization

• XREF: The wage-competition mechanism as motivation for mob violence is a specific empirical claim tied to historian Joe Trotter Jr., useful for the reader’s taxonomy of contested facts. — connects to: Perceived Black labor competition directly triggered white mob violence — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 447