Posted inArticles Issue 15 2026
About Brian Kelly
Brian Kelly is an award-winning historian of race and labor in the post-emancipation US South, and has published extensively on the problem of racial antagonism and its impact on working-class politics in the US, with studies ranging temporally from labor abolition in the antebellum period through to Reconstruction-era labor militancy and onward to the celebrated 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. This article is drawn from his research for a forthcoming study entitled False Dawn: War and Emancipation in Black-Majority South Carolina.