Sunday, Aug 12, 2018 3:00 PM

Location:
Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History
101 Auburn Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30303

In partnership with Atlanta's Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, we're proud to host a talk and book signing featuring local scholar Keri Leigh Merritt. Merritt's research focuses on race and class in U.S. history. Her work on poverty and inequality has garnered multiple awards.

In her first book, "Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South," Merritt analyzes land policy, labor, and legal history to reveal what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton - and thus, slaves - in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete - for jobs or living wages - with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. Merritt examines how these 'masterless' men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war.