Carbonation And Power: Coca-Cola And The Reproduction Of Racialized Labor In Jim Crow Birmingham, Alabama

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Pre-Recorded Video Presentation Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Birmingham was founded in 1873 to be the industrial capital of the New South, built up as it was around rich mineral reserves in Central Alabama. The workforce that propelled Birmingham’s extractive development was majority-Black, most workers having migrated to the city from agrarian plantation settings. This paper takes an assemblage of Coca-Cola bottles recovered from a Black iron ore mining camp, Smythe (~1890-1915), as a starting point for thinking through the role the beverage played in the reproduction of racialized labor in Birmingham. In 1902, Crawford Johnson, Sr. acquired one of Coca-Cola's first exclusive franchises to manufacture and distribute the beverage in Birmingham. The Birmingham Coca-Cola Bottling Company remains the largest privately held Coca-Cola bottling company in the United States. As the stimulant du jour, Coca-Cola fueled Birmingham’s industrial development, providing as it did a cheap source of energy to be extracted as value from Black workers’ laboring bodies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Pre-Recorded Video Presentation Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow