Waterfront Workers: New Perspectives on Race and Class

Few work settings can compete with the waterfront for a long, rich history of multi-ethnic and multiracial interaction. There were Irish dockers from Chelsea to Ashtabula to Tacoma; African Americans, Poles, Germans, Scandinavians, and Italians joined the Irish on New York’s docks; Eastern Europeans worked with the Irish and blacks in Philadelphia, and farther south, African Americans were the majority on the Baltimore waterfront in the 1930s. On the Pacific Coast, where the Chinese were excluded and African Americans were relatively scarce until World War II, waterfront workers were mostly white. In Waterfront Workers, five scholars explore the complex relationships involved in this intersection of race, class, and ethnicity.