Class and Race: Examine how class divisions within both white and Black communities affected attitudes toward segregation. How did elite and working-class interests intersect with racial ideology?
Author: Martin Munyao Muinde
Email: ephantusmartin@gmail.com
Introduction
The interplay of class and race has been central to the development, endurance, and contestation of segregation in the United States. To understand attitudes toward segregation, scholars must attend not only to racial categories but also to the class stratifications that structured incentives, anxieties, and political alliances within both white and Black communities. Class divisions shaped how different social groups experienced and rationalized segregation, how they mobilized for or against it, and how elites translated economic interests into racial policies. The aim of this essay is to analyze rigorously how class cleavages influenced attitudes toward segregation, teasing apart the differing stakes of elites and working classes among whites and Blacks. I argue that elite economic and political imperatives often produced racial strategies of containment and paternalism while working-class actors—driven by economic insecurity, social aspiration, and cultural anxieties—both reinforced and complicated segregation through a mix of accommodation, resentment, and occasional cross-racial solidarity. This argument situates class as a mediator that modified but did not erase the force of racial ideology in producing and sustaining segregated orders (Du Bois 1935; Woodward 1955; Katznelson 2005).
Methodologically the essay integrates social history, political economy, and cultural analysis. It draws on historical case studies from the postbellum South through the Jim Crow era while also attending to national-level processes that reshaped regional outcomes. The analysis will proceed in sections: conceptual framing of class and race interaction, class divisions within white communities and their effects on segregationist attitudes, class divisions within Black communities and how class shaped responses to segregation, the intersection of elite and working-class interests across racial lines, political and economic mechanisms that institutionalized class-inflected segregation, the cultural and ideological work that reproduced those arrangements, and finally how class conditioned resistance and reform strategies. Throughout, the essay offers evidence of how class did not simply overlay racial hierarchies but actively reconfigured the meanings and practices of segregation in specific institutional contexts (Katznelson 2005; Bonilla-Silva 2003). ORDER NOW
Conceptual framework: class, race, and interest
A robust comparative and analytical account of class and race demands precise conceptual distinctions. Class refers to differentiated positions in the production system, access to capital, and varying degrees of control over labor, whereas race indicates socially constructed categories that assign status, rights, and recognition. The relationship between class and race is dialectical; class shapes interests and incentives while race structures symbolic boundaries and moral rhetorics. Analytical clarity requires distinguishing between material interests, status interests, and identity-based group attachments. Material interests often incline actors toward policies that secure economic advantage or labor discipline; status interests orient actors toward prestige-maintenance and social distinction. Identity attachments mediate both, offering frames that legitimize policies by invoking moral, religious, or cultural vocabularies. In the context of segregation, these three registers—material, status, and identity—operate simultaneously, creating overlapping coalitions and fissures across class lines within racial groups (Omi and Winant 1986; Du Bois 1935). ORDER NOW
It is also analytically important to foreground scale and institution. The incentives of a landed planter, a white urban merchant, a Black artisan, or a tenant sharecropper vary dramatically; hence attitudes toward segregation cannot be reduced to a singular racial psychology. Institutions mediate these incentives: labor markets, electoral systems, municipal governance, criminal courts, and educational bureaucracies translate class-based interests into concrete policy choices. The localism of American political structures means that class-inflected racial orders often varied by county and city, producing a patchwork of segregation regimes whose coherence rested on shared cultural vocabularies and cross-class bargains. Comparative historiography reminds us that elite preferences can be decisive when they control coercive and legal mechanisms, yet working-class attitudes shape the political feasibility and daily enforcement of segregation. Thus, a comprehensive account must integrate micro-level everyday practice with macro-level institutional power (Woodward 1955; Katznelson 2005).
Class divisions within white communities and attitudes toward segregation
Within white communities, class divisions produced a spectrum of attitudes toward segregation that ranged from paternalistic guardianship to aggressive economic exclusion. Southern elites such as planters and industrial capitalists often supported segregation insofar as it secured a steady, cheap, and controllable labor supply. For agrarian elites, segregation served to preserve social distance and hierarchical control while maintaining labor discipline through legal restrictions and local enforcement mechanisms. In urban contexts industrialists and business elites sometimes favored policies that stabilized labor relations and avoided disruptive racial conflict that might disturb investment; yet they also invested in exclusionary housing and public order to protect property values and maintain a racially stratified workforce. Elite endorsements of segregation were therefore frequently framed in managerial and paternalistic language, even as they reinforced structural inequality and political disenfranchisement (Woodward 1955; Katznelson 2005).
Working-class whites had distinct but overlapping incentives and fears that shaped their support for segregation. Labor market competition, cultural anxieties about status decline, and the social necessity of distinguishing oneself from racialized others pushed many white workers to accept or support segregationist measures. When white manufacturing or mining workers feared wage erosion or the use of Black labor as strikebreakers, racial hostility hardened into political demands for exclusionary labor practices and racial job hierarchies. In rural areas small farmers and tenant farmers often embraced segregation as a means to secure social esteem and claim status above Black agricultural laborers. At times working-class whites pushed for policies that were more extreme than elite preference because symbolic assertions of whiteness offered immediate psychological and social returns even when the long-term material benefits were ambiguous. Hence class-specific concerns interacted with racial ideology to produce robust grassroots support for segregation in many locales (Bonilla-Silva 2003). ORDER NOW
Class divisions within Black communities and responses to segregation
Class stratification within Black communities likewise shaped divergent responses to segregation, yielding complex patterns of accommodation, resistance, and strategy. Black elites—landowners, professionals, clergy, and black business proprietors—often adopted strategies that balanced accommodation with advocacy. Some Black elites sought negotiated spaces within segregated systems by building parallel institutions: schools, churches, mutual aid societies, and businesses that could sustain community life and provide limited access to resources. At times these elites emphasized respectability politics as a means to claim social legitimacy and to blunt white paternalism, arguing that uplift and moral discipline would garner white tolerance or concession. Yet elite strategies could also be conservative, prioritizing institutional preservation over radical transformation when they believed incremental gains were more feasible than direct confrontation (Du Bois 1935; Litwack).
Working-class Black people faced acute vulnerability under segregation because of limited access to stable employment, precarious tenancy, and rampant discrimination in public accommodations and criminal justice. Their attitudes toward segregation were shaped by survival calculus; many engaged in everyday forms of resistance—work slowdowns, flight to urban labor markets, informal economic networks, or legal challenges—while others prioritized immediate material needs over public protest. The Great Migration illustrates how working-class Black agency could convert economic grievances into collective movement, as millions relocated to northern industrial centers in search of better wages and less regimented segregation. Yet within destination cities class divisions persisted, and working-class Black attitudes toward integration varied according to experiences of employment discrimination, housing segregation, and political opportunity. Thus class within Black communities created differentiated repertoires of action rather than a singular stance toward segregation (Foner; Du Bois 1935). ORDER NOW
Intersection of elite and working-class interests across racial lines
The political coalitions that sustained segregation often depended on alignments and tensions between elite and working-class interests—alignments that could cut across racial boundaries or reinforce them. Among whites, elites derived benefit from a racial status hierarchy that pacified potential white labor unrest by offering racial privilege as a substitute for class solidarity. The political scientist Ira Katznelson has argued that in mid twentieth-century America welfare and labor policies were often racially structured such that the expansion of benefits for white workers came at the expense of Black inclusion, creating “racially exclusionary welfare mechanisms” that buttressed white working-class support for conservative racial orders. This arrangement created a stabilizing pact: elites secured cheap labor and political dominance while many white workers received material or symbolic advantages that mitigated class antagonism (Katznelson 2005).
Cross-racial class alliances did occur but were fragile and often suppressed by elite manipulation of racial fears. Where multiracial coalitions formed—often under the pressure of economic crises, populist movements, or labor organizing—they exposed the structural interests that might unite working-class whites and Blacks. However segregationist elites deployed coercive means, legal disenfranchisement, and racialized rhetoric to fracture such alliances. Conversely, Black elites sometimes found limited common cause with progressive white elites over issues like urban reform or educational expansion, but these alliances were conditioned by white elites’ reluctance to challenge deeper structures of racial privilege. Thus intersections between elite and working-class interests produced both the social glue of segregation and the occasional fault lines through which reformist pressure could pass (Katznelson 2005; Woodward 1955). ORDER NOW
Political and economic mechanisms that institutionalized class-inflected segregation
Multiple political and economic mechanisms translated class interests into durable institutions of segregation. Voting restrictions such as literacy tests and poll taxes disenfranchised Black voters and reduced the political power of working-class Blacks and poor whites, enabling elite-dominated legislatures to pass segregation statutes with minimal accountability. Municipal zoning and housing policy reinforced residential segregation in ways that reflected both property owners’ investments and working-class anxieties about neighborhood change. On the economic side, labor market segmentation—the channeling of Blacks into precarious agricultural, domestic, or low-wage industrial work—was sustained by employer practices, legal restrictions on union inclusion, and criminal justice policies that disciplined the labor supply. These mechanisms were not only instruments of racial control but also served class interests by preserving property hierarchies and stabilizing labor costs for elites (Bonilla-Silva 2003).
Public schooling and municipal expenditures further embedded classed racial hierarchies. Underfunded Black schools, vocational curricula that tracked students by race and class, and discriminatory allocation of public resources reproduced intergenerational disadvantage. For white working-class communities, segregated schools could provide a status buffer; local political leaders often used segregated schooling to maintain social order and to signal the community’s racial boundaries. The combined operation of fiscal policy, education governance, housing regulation, and labor law thus produced a legal and institutional matrix in which class interests were inseparable from racial ordering, demonstrating how public policy mediated the intersection of class and race in everyday life (Omi and Winant 1986; Woodward 1955). ORDER NOW
Cultural formations, ideology, and the reproduction of classed racial attitudes
Culture and ideology were central to how class divisions translated into enduring attitudes toward segregation. Respectability politics among Black elites sought to assert moral claims that could counter white justifications for exclusion, while simultaneously reflecting classed ideals about propriety and social mobility. For many white workers, cultural narratives of honor, family, and racial purity offered psychological compensation for economic insecurity. Popular media, religious sermons, and local print environments circulated stories that linked social respectability to racial comportment, thereby legitimating both class and racial hierarchies. The symbolic economy of race and class produced a moral grammar that naturalized segregation as an orderly arrangement rather than a contested structure of power (Du Bois 1935; Bonilla-Silva 2003).
Cultural markers such as dress, speech, and consumption patterns became signifiers of classed racial identity. For whites, distancing from Blackness could be achieved through conspicuous consumption or membership in fraternal organizations; for Blacks, adopting middle-class norms was often a strategy to negotiate dignity under segregation. These cultural practices shaped attitudes toward segregation because they either invested in the maintenance of separation as a form of social distinction or, alternatively, made integration a threat to carefully constructed identities. Thus ideology and culture were not merely epiphenomenal but operated as active mechanisms by which class differences produced divergent attachments to segregation and to visions of social order (Omi and Winant 1986). ORDER NOW
Class-conditioned resistance and strategies for change
Class position also influenced how actors resisted segregation and the kinds of strategies they pursued. Black working-class activists often emphasized economic demands—better wages, fair hiring, and labor rights—because these directly addressed material deprivation produced by segregation. Labor-oriented struggles, trade union organizing, and tenant movements thus represented class-inflected pathways to challenge racial hierarchy. At the same time, Black middle-class leadership prioritized legal petitioning, institutional building, and appeals to liberal publics, reflecting different positional advantages and risk calculations. These diverse tactics—street protest, litigation, strikes, and consumer boycotts—demonstrated how class shaped both the content and form of resistance to segregation (Du Bois 1935; Foner).
White allies from the working class sometimes joined interracial movements when their material interests aligned with those of Black workers, particularly in urban industrial centers where union solidarity could transcend racial barriers. Nevertheless these coalitions were unstable because elites and conservative institutions frequently undermined them through repression, cooptation, or the strategic offering of racially exclusive benefits to white workers. The civil rights movement’s success in part lay in its ability to forge broad-based coalitions that navigated class differences—mobilizing Black churches, white student activists, labor unions, and sympathetic elites—while converting moral claims into policy victories. Yet the persistence of economic inequality after formal legal change underscores how class-conditioned structures reasserted themselves, producing new forms of racial inequality even after segregation was legally dismantled (Katznelson 2005; Bonilla-Silva 2003).
Conclusion
Class divisions within white and Black communities played a constitutive role in shaping attitudes toward segregation and in determining the strategies that sustained or contested racial separation. Elites across racial lines translated economic imperatives into institutional designs that preserved hierarchical labor markets and social distance, while working-class actors negotiated the tradeoffs between status, material security, and solidarity. Class modified the logic of racial ideology without erasing it: class interests provided motives and mechanisms for both accommodation and resistance, producing a complex political economy of segregation in which law, violence, cultural meaning, and economic structure interlocked. Understanding segregation thus requires an integrated analysis of class and race that treats institutions, cultural frames, and material interests as co-constitutive. Only by attending to these intersections can scholars and policymakers appreciate why segregation proved so durable and why its legacies of inequality remain deeply entangled with class structures in contemporary society.
References
Bonilla-Silva Eduardo. 2003. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield.
Du Bois W. E. B. 1935. Black Reconstruction in America. New York University Press.
Katznelson Ira. 2005. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America. W. W. Norton.
Omi Michael and Winant Howard. 1986. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. Routledge.
Woodward C. Vann. 1955. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Oxford University Press.
Foner Eric. Reconstruction and Its Legacy. Selected works and essays relevant to political economy and race.
Litwack Leon F. 1998. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. Vintage.