ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, the activity on the Mississippi river waterfront of New Orleans attracted the interest of countless visitors, who recorded their impressions in numerous travel guides and memoirs. Earlier accounts from the 1940s through to the 1960s provided brief overviews of labour-management relations or highlighted the exceptional character of the New Orleans experience regarding race and labour. Moreover, white workers in the Crescent City demonstrated that they could be as viciously racist as any white Southern mob in the violence they perpetrated against blacks during the 1894-95 waterfront riots. The sources for studying waterfront labour in New Orleans are numerous. Black dock workers too benefited from the Ring's pro-labour stance, even though they tended to vote for Republican or local reform candidates in the late nineteenth century and were effectively disenfranchised by the 1898 Louisiana Constitutional Convention, so long as their alliance with whites held firm.
