1. On moral judgments and the writing of history, see Richard T. Vann, "Historians and Moral Evaluations" (3-30), and James Cracraft, "Implicit Morality" (31-42) inHistory and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History, Issue 43 (December 2004).
2. See, for instance, the following critiques of this tendency: Melvyn Dubofsky, "Not So 'Turbulent Years': Another Look at the American 1930s,"Amerikastudien24 (1979), 5-20; Michael Kazin, "The Agony and Romance of the American Left,"American Historical Review100 (December 1995), 1488-1512; Kazin, "Struggling with Class Struggle: Marxism and the Search for a Synthesis of U.S. Labor History,"Labor History28 (Fall 1987), 497-514.
3. Classic works on the subject include: Charles H. Wesley,Negro Labor in the United States 1850-1925: A Study in American Economic History(New York: Vanguard Press, 1927); Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris,The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement(1931; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1969); Lorenzo J. Greene and Carter G. Woodson,The Negro Wage Earner(New York: Russell & Russell, 1930); Sumner E. Matison, "The Labor Movement and the Negro During Reconstruction,"Journal of Negro History33 (1943), 426-468; Herbert R. Northrup,Organized Labor and the Negro(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944); Herman D. Bloch, "Craft Unions and the Negro in Historical Perspective,"Journal of Negro History43 (1958), 10-33; Bloch, "Labor and the Negro 1866-1910,"Journal of Negro History50 (1965), 163-184. Also see Horace R. Cayton and George S. Mitchell,Black Workers and the New Unions(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939), a work which recognized clearly white racist union practices but which also saw considerable potential in the Congress of Industrial Organizations' early efforts at interracial unionism.
4. August Meier,Negro Thought in America 1880-1915(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), 208.
5. Herbert Gutman, "The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America: The Career and Letters of Richard L. Davis and Something of Their Meaning: 1890-1900," in Gutman,Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History(New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 195. The essay originally appeared inThe Negro and the American Labor Movement,Julius Jacobson, ed. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1968). Subsequent citations to this essay refer to Gutman's collection.