After helping to build the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad in 1870, small numbers of Chinese immigrants began establishing laundry businesses in Alabama’s Birmingham District in the 1880s. Serving a largely white and largely Christian clientele, the Chinese had to contend with open racism. At the same time, African Americans, in particular laundrywomen, viewed the new Chinese laundries as competition. This situation placed them “precariously poised between both white largesse and Black resentment” (67).

In her engaging study, Resident Strangers: Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama, Jennifer Brooks maintains that a similar ambiguity existed for immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe during the new immigration of the 1870s–1910s. Previous narratives focusing on the new immigrants have emphasized their presence and influence in the Northeast and Midwest. Brooks, an associate professor of history at Auburn University, turns our attention to their presence in the New South. Through a deft utilization of immigration and census records, convict records, government reports, company records, local newspapers, and oral histories, this book aims “to restore immigrant laborers from around the world to their place in the New South project, considering not only the campaigns to recruit them to Alabama but especially how various immigrant groups and individuals experienced their sojourns in Alabama” (5).

Resident Strangers revolves around two premises concerning racial fluidity and the broader political economy. The first premise is that, rather than reading as white or Black, Chinese and other new immigrants occupied an ambiguous position, at times supported by the broader culture of white supremacy and at others harmed by it. As Brooks observes, “[I]mmigrant laborers who arrived in Alabama discovered that neither a white appearance, in the case of Europeans, nor reputations for docility and industriousness, in the case of the Chinese, guaranteed protection against the cruelties, injustices, or poor conditions that typically defined working-class life in Alabama” (129). The second premise is the importance of situating the New South in broader regional, national, and international contexts.

Brooks begins the narrative with Reconstruction and white planters’ concern that African Americans would abandon agricultural work in Alabama in search of better lives in other states. In response to these concerns, economic elites supported the immigration of foreign-born workers, preferably of the same stock as the Northern and Western Europeans who had already settled in the Southeast. However, for a variety of reasons, emigration to the South was not attractive to them. Instead, the first immigrant workers who arrived in 1870 were Chinese men brought to build the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad, and the relative few who remained were often launderers. After this initial effort, economic elites focused on recruiting the so-called new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in large numbers. Elites envisioned these new immigrants as a wedge between Black and white southern workers.

The South was unattractive to new immigrants due to the lower wages, poorer working conditions, substandard housing, and xenophobia. Southern elites complained that maps circulating in Europe presented the United States “south of Mason and Dixon’s line [as] painted black,” implying that the region was not fit for white immigrants (132). Referring to the maps, the Commissioner of the Immigration and Industrial Association of Alabama, Ross Smith, complained they “had marked across the face in black letters: ‘The Southland, the land of Snakes, Crocodiles, Negroes, Yellow Fever, and Death; avoid it”’ (131).

Paradoxically, at the same time that African Americans were used as strikebreakers in workplaces organized by Eastern and Southern Europeans in the Midwest and Northeast, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were used against Black labor organizing in the New South. The United Mine Workers (UMW) strike of 1908 is emblematic of the conflict between mine owners, African Americans, and new immigrants. The UMW represented African Americans and new immigrants, and the strike was characterized by violence “between strikers and working miners and between deputies and strikers” (116). African American workers viewed “immigrants as a direct threat to their own livelihoods,” while local elites and newspaper accounts were concerned that immigrants in the UMW, many of whom did not speak English, would be dominated by Black leadership (91). Regional labor recruitment efforts “aimed to suppress Black agency and mobility,” and in the event of failure, “both planters and industrialists imagined that immigrants might replace Blacks entirely” (7).

This book is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on the fluidity of race in the New South. It is admirable that the author places the New South in a broader, national context of U.S. labor history. However, one may ask whether the experiences of the relatively small Birmingham District are reflective of larger patterns in the state as whole, let alone the entire New South. This question would require further research to substantiate.