This study analyzes the role of labour and economic uplift as a means of self-help for African-Americans during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This period was a critical time when Black Americans faced the challenges of emancipation, Jim Crow laws, and the need to establish their social and economic roles in the United States. Utilizing canonical authors of the era, such as Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, alongside periodicals such as Du Bois’s The Crisis and Washington’s The Southern Workman, this research seeks to close the gap in scholarship about the self-help genre as exclusionary of Black authorship in the era of Reconstruction and its aftermath.

As I delved into the writings of these authors in the abstract, I found myself captivated by their exploration of how labor intersected with the quest for social liberation among Black Americans. While methodologies remain a subject of vigorous debate, it became evident that many prominent Black voices of the time considered labor integral to their struggle for equality. This realization inevitably guided my research towards a focused examination of the specific role played by labor in their discourse.