Between Labor and Power: Race, Electricity, and Utility Work in the 20th Century United States

Histories of electric power systems in the United States have not seriously engaged with questions of labor, race, and empire. However, the more developed scholarship on civil rights and employment law makes visible their tight interconnection. This talk will critically read the dispersed and incomplete archive of labor in the U.S. electric power industry to understand how the sector’s development defined the relationship between Black utility labor and electric power during the twentieth century. Braiding together utility company archives, newspaper research, and published accounts, this talk will reveal the historical ontology of electric energy as fundamentally racialized and embedded in the imperial expansion of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. This history challenges us to consider contemporary efforts to achieve energy justice through electric intensification not only as a problem of access and affordability for consumers, but also as a problem of workplace justice which must reckon with a long history of exclusion and inequality.