Brian Kelly

Brian Kelly is an American historian and a lecturer in US history, teaching at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. His work is concerned mainly with labor and race in the American South, although much of his most recent scholarship focuses on the formative struggles around slave emancipation during the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era that followed. Kelly came into academia after extended stints in the construction and shipbuilding industries in Boston, where he was involved in labor and anti-racist activism throughout the 1980s and 1990s. After brief periods working construction in Seattle and New York, he was awarded a Crown Fellowship to pursue postgraduate study in US History at Brandeis University. Awarded his doctorate at Brandeis in 1998 for a dissertation supervised by Jacqueline Jones, Kelly has published widely on race and class in the nineteenth and twentieth-century United States, including an award-winning study of working-class interracialism in the Birmingham district (Alabama) coal mines. Kelly's Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921 (University of Illinois Press, 2001, ) won five major book awards, including the HL Mitchell Award, the Frances Butler Simkins Prize from the Southern Historical Association and the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize for the "best and most innovative work in Marxist historiography". Kelly's Alabama study made three main historiographical contributions. It argued that the re-subordination of black labor that followed the defeat of Reconstruction was a key component of the New South modernization project: progress and reaction went hand-in-hand. Countering the trend in labor history toward the explanatory power of 'whiteness', the study aimed to show that the region's most powerful employers (and not white workers) were the main beneficiaries of Jim Crow, and that the most substantial challenge to racism in early twentieth-century Birmingham came not from liberal elites, but from an interracial working-class movement that held together in the face of energetic attempts to divide them. Finally, Kelly discovered in the Birmingham district an emerging black middle class, deeply influenced by Booker T.