"How does it feel to be a problem?" asked W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk. For many thinkers across the color line, the "Negro problem" was inextricably linked to the concurrent "labor problem," occasioning debates regarding blacks' role in the nation's industrial past, present and future. With blacks freed from the seemingly protective embrace of slavery, many felt that the ostensibly primitive Negro was doomed to expire in the face of unbridled industrial progress. Yet efforts to address the so-called "Negro problem" invariably led to questions regarding the relationship between...