Too often, the drive for upward mobility and the desire to identify with the middle class causes us to discredit the value of blue collar workers, particularly those African Americans who are working class.
Award-winning author and historian Dr. Blair LM Kelley joins host Dr. Mark Anthony Neal to discuss her latest book, "Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class"–– Winner of the 2020 Creative Nonfiction Grant from The Whiting Foundation and the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award. Dr. Kelley is also the first Black woman to serve as the director of the Center for the Study of the American South in its thirty-year history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at UNC.