In the fall of 1887, the Knights of Labor, the largest organization of workers in nineteenth-century America, attempted to organize sugar cane workers in and around the town of Thibodaux, Louisiana. The mostly black plantation workers were paid next to nothing and labored long hours in brutal conditions. Worse yet, many worked for bosses that just a few decades earlier had been their slave masters. Although they now had to make contracts with their former slaves, these masters-cum-bosses were still accustomed to exercising unquestioned control over their labor force.

The labor association suddenly challenging the plantation-owners’ authority was first organized in 1869 as “The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor” by a small group of Philadelphia garment workers. The Knights’ Preamble and Declaration of Principles said they had come together “for the purpose of organizing and directing the power of the industrial masses.” The phrase “industrial masses” was meant to communicate a certain egalitarian idea. The Knights believed that all workers, skilled and unskilled, white and black, had the right to defend their interests collectively and, as such, they had a common interest in belonging to a single labor organization. In fact, the Knights were the first national labor association ever to organize black workers together with whites on a mass basis – an effort not meaningfully duplicated in the United States for nearly a century. They aspired to draw disparate groups of workers together under the idea that everyone should have not just higher wages, shorter hours, or better conditions, but full economic independence. A life spent working should not be a life spent working under someone else’s will.