Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press

Covering for the Bosses

Joseph B. Atkins Foreword by Stanley Aronowitz

U n i v e r s i t y P r e ss o f M i ss i ss i pp i / J a c k s o n

Covering

for the

Bosses Labor and the

S o u t h e r n P r e ss

www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2008 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2008 ¥ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Atkins, Joseph B. Covering for the bosses : labor and the Southern press / Joseph B. Atkins ; foreword by Stanley Aronowitz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-934110-80-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Labor movement—Press coverage— Southern States—History—20th century. 2. Strikes and lockouts—Press coverage— Southern States—History—20th century. I. Title. PN2888.L27A85 2008 070.4'493378—dc22 2007045597 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To my wife, Suzanne Centenio Atkins, and to my mother, Maria Stoller Atkins, and my late father, Roger Burton Atkins, all of whom helped give me the inspiration and the vision for this book

Contents ix

Foreword by Stanley Aronowitz

xiii

Acknowledgments

3

Chapter 1 Labor, the Southern Press, and the Civil War That Never Ended

19

37

64

86

98

127

142



Chapter 2 Labor in the Old New South Chapter 3 The CIO and Operation Dixie A “Lamp of Democracy” in the South Chapter 4 Labor, Civil Rights, and Memphis Chapter 5 Labor, Race, and the Mississippi Press Chapter 6 The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows Chapter 7 Southern Exposure “A New Style of Southern Journalism” Chapter 8 Pillowtex Says Goodnight

160

176

193

210



Chapter 9 Wal-Mart Conquers the World Chapter 10 Charleston “The First Major Labor Battle of the Twenty-first Century” Chapter 11 Detroit South Chapter 12 Immigrants from a Deeper South

222 Postscript My Hometown From Tobacco and Textiles to an Iglesia on Main Street

viii

225

Notes

249

Index

Contents

Foreword by Stanley Aronowitz

John Sweeney, the leader of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), led a revolt of a gaggle of large unions and was elected American€Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) president in 1995, an unprecedented challenge in modern labor history to a sitting administration. Not since 1908 when an insurgency within the AFL opposed the reelection of its longtime leader, Samuel Gompers, and a group of industrial unions bolted from the AFL in 1935, had labor’s ranks been so divided. The main reason for the division came about because the three€leadÂ� ing metal workers’ unions (Auto, Steel, Machinists), together comprising over 2 million, plus the giant 1.4 million State, County and Municipal Employees, the 1.2 million-member Teamsters (which had recently expeÂ� rienced the victory of a reform slate), the Food and Commercial Workers and its 1.1 million members, the large Service Employees with 1 million members, and some smaller organizations were deeply disturbed by the erosion of organized labor’s economic and political clout. Union membership was declining as manufacturing jobs fled overseas and to the largely nonunion American South and Southwest. The leaders of these unions believed that unless labor made organizing its first priority and transformed what they termed the “service model” of unionism—where full-time representatives spent most of their effort handling grievances and negotiating contracts—into an organizing model, economist Richard Freeman’s prediction that by 2000 the unions would represent only six or seven percent of the private sector labor force would come true. Union leaders representing a majority of the Federation’s thirteen million members were determined, or so it seemed, to reverse the long slide that had begun with the ignominious defeat of the Air Traffic Controllers strike in 1981. As a major step they would devote at ix

least a third of their budgets to organizing. After being elected, Sweeney announced steps to fulfill his pledge: he authorized the founding of an organizing school to attract young idealists to build the labor movement, or more precisely to bring the movement back to the unions, appointed an aggressive, experienced organizing director to work with the affiliates, and sponsored some important organizing campaigns, especially among the working poor. But the AFL-CIO organizing agenda did not spotlight or make an organizing priority of what since the end of World War One has been organized labor’s Achilles heel: the South. Beginning with textiles on the eve of World War Two, the South had become the preferred region of investment in this, the largest manufacturing industry in the United States. By 1960, the bulk of the shoe industry had migrated southward, and a decade later the vaunted Garment and Clothing Workers unions, based largely in the Northeast, especially New York, Philadelphia,€RochÂ� ester, and Baltimore, were beginning to lose their hold over the men’s, women’s, and children’s apparel industries. Simultaneously auto, electriÂ� cal, and steel corporations, the heart of heavy industry, discovered the advantages of the South, among them, states and communities that were pleased to grant tax-free environments and build plants and infrastructure at little or no cost to the corporations—and the core concession: a low-wage labor force working in a union-free environment, buttressed by so-called Right to Work state laws that outlawed the union shop and, perhaps equally important, public officials, ministers, and civic leaders who would be willing to fully support anti-labor policies. Some of these policies have come from the notorious Taft-Hartley amendments to the federal labor relations law; others stem from a series of Supreme Court decisions that grant the employer in organizing situations “free speech” rights to make direct appeals to employees in order to “persuade” them to vote against the union or to shun the entreaties of union organizers. Methods of persuasion include not-so-veiled threats to move the plant overseas if the union came in, firing in-plant union activists, and numerous individual bribes such as promises of pay raises€€or promotions to the natural leaders of the employees. In “company” towns where if you lose your job in the plant there is no alternative but to leave, organizing is an uphill battle at best. To these obstacles must be added the fact that in many instances where, miraculously, workers courageously withstand the almost unbearable pressure from the bosses and select the union as their bargaining representative, obtaining a collective bargaining agreement becomes improbable and in some industries where the union is unable to put pressure on the local management because they have organized the majority of chains of plants elsewhere, impossible. ˘

Foreword

I have space to give a single example of the difficulties unions face in the South. Kannapolis, North Carolina, is the site of what was the largest textile mill in the United States, with five thousand workers. It made the brand name Cannon towels and other products. This plant had been a prime target of a succession of textile unions since the 1920s because it was the symbol of the paternalism that marked much of the textile industry. The employer had successfully resisted union organization for decades because many of the workers considered it benevolent, even as others suffered wage and other forms of discrimination. Even as the union was able to win significant victories at Cone Mills, J. P. Stevens, and other major textile corporations, Cannon Mills stood as a definitive rebuke to union organization and became the model of resistance among other employers in the industry. But years of trying and years of frustration were finally capped by a union victory in a government-supervised election in 1999. The union—Union of Needletrades Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE, formerly the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers)—set about to negotiate a contract and the company agreed to bargain. Within a few years, the plant closed down, a victim of globalizaÂ� tion, particularly the lure of even lower wages in China, some have said. But the word is out all over the South. This, for some, is proof positive that if workers choose to join a union, it will close down. Indeed, UNITE has decided to suspend organizing in manufacturing and since its merger with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union has focused its organizing on hotels, restaurants, laundries, and apparel distributors because these facilities cannot easily move. Yet, even though globalization has finally reached the South, and union and nonunion textile and apparel manufacturers have decided that even the lower wages offered by the South are too expensive, it remains the region of choice for U.S. and global corporations like Toyota, Nissan, General Electric, and many European employers such as Daimler Chrysler. These regard the South as a fertile ground for establishing production facilities because unions in the North of the United States, Europe, and Japan are simply too powerful, and expensive. It would seem that a labor movement seeking to reverse its fortunes would have little choice but to take on the huge task of organizing the South, regardless of the difficult conditions it is bound to face. But while it is true that, from time to time, the metal unions, Teamsters, communications workers, and some others venture forth into the open-shop fortresses of the South, organized labor as a whole continues to look elsewhere for opportunities, even as its membership continues to bleed and real wages drop, in part because the South as well as East Asia and Latin America offer employers significant advantages to shut plants and run away. Foreword

xi

Joe Atkins has written a book that tells the heartbreaking story of labor in the South. It is framed as the story of the way the media has virtually conspired with anti-labor employers to thwart union organizing and to help tilt labor relations in the direction of employers. But in the context of presenting the tale of how journalism has largely forfeited its objectivity, Atkins has managed to provide us with one of the most trenchant and detailed accounts of the fate of workers, the unions, and their communities in the South. Careful to avoid the kind of “reckless” allegations contained in the present preface, it nevertheless effectively makes the case that the slogan “organize (the South) or die” describes the choices that union labor must make. No dispassionate reader—or union partisan—will be able to come away from reading this book without becomÂ� ing€convinced that the South has become, in essence, another country. While it is true that labor’s rights are suffering significantly throughout the United States, the claim that the South is a democracy, at least with respect to workers, is shattered by the impressive evidence contained in Atkins’s nearly exhaustive research. Consider how American electoral politics would have been altered by a strong Southern labor movement. Indeed, in local Southern comÂ� munities€where unions were relatively strong, the political tilt of elected representatives often leans toward workers’ interests. For this reason, as Atkins shows, those in power have deployed every undemocratic tactic, including bald terror, to thwart union organization because large employÂ� ers, politicians, media organizations, and the civic establishments know that their world would be threatened by a strong labor movement. So the stakes are higher than a few dollars an hour or even rights at the workplace. To the economic dimension of unionism must be added the question of political and social power. If we follow the implications of Atkins’s rich and varied narrative, organized labor, in its own interest as well as the interest of Southern labor, needs to open up a new front in the war on terror. For what he shows is that antiunionism in the South is preserved and protected by measures that resemble the actions of antidemocratic governments in Asia and Latin America more than the ideal that America is the land of a free people. The struggle for Southern labor is perhaps the greatest struggle for democracy in our land.

xii

Foreword

Acknowledgments Many people played important roles in bringing Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press to completion, too many to name them all. However, I would like especially to thank the following, and their names come in no certain order: Bill Tapscott, Vivian Centenio, Bill Russell, D. Peters Wilborn Jr., Tony Bartelme, Chris Marston, Robert Shaffer, Martin Fishgold, Tim Shorrock, Chris Kromm, Karen and Michael Sheerer, Nikki Neely, Matt Rahn, Sander and Alice Margolis, Bill Chandler, Ellen Meacham, Jim Lumpp, Michael Atkins, Rachel Atkins, John Atkins, Evi Womble, Elizabeth Payne, Peter J. Roberts of the Southern Labor Archives in Atlanta, Ronnie Martin, Samir Husni, and the University of Mississippi College of Liberal Arts and Department of Journalism. I would also like to thank the book’s reader, Randall Patton, as well as Seetha Srinivasan, Walter Biggins, and the rest of the staff at the University Press of Mississippi.

xiii

Covering for the Bosses

Chapter 1

Labor, the Southern Press, and the Civil War That Never Ended

Ray Smithhart and Robert Bracken, old soldiers of the Southern labor movement, are trading war stories in the conference room of the Mississippi AFL-CIO headquarters on Jackson’s North West Street. This is a long, bumpy stretch of road that runs alongside one of the city’s oldest cemeteries, between crime-and-poverty-haunted neighborhoods to the west and, to the east, an older district of once-genteel homes now in decline. The writer Eudora Welty grew up just a block or so away. They came in from the suburb of Brandon for this May 2004 interview. Smithhart, eighty-seven, lives in a nursing home. Bracken, sixty-six, is retired and lives nearby. Both are battle-scarred veterans full of tales and glad a journalist finally wants to hear them. They tell of fighting beside Medgar Evers and other civil rights leaders during the 1960s, being tailed and jailed by antiunion goons and sheriffs, having guns shoved in their faces, cars filled with bullet holes. They never talked much with reporters because newspapers usually were on the side of the bosses. “They didn’t treat us right at all,” says Smithhart, the dean of Mississippi labor organizers, about the press. “You got the whole community against you, the supervisors, the merchants, the newspapers. You can’t get the message across. What we needed was at least some kind of debate. This would let the employees hear both sides of the issues.”1 Bracken nods and recalls complaining about antilabor coverage to an editor in Mississippi’s Neshoba County in 1972, some eight years after the infamous disappearance and murder of three civil rights workers there. The newspaper was running company propaganda during a local union election. “We told him what we thought about allowing the company to write that crap,” he says, his voice stirring with old, unspent passions. “We let him know how we felt.”



It didn’t do any good, however. The editor’s response was to call the police, and the union went on to lose the election by a handful of votes. “The newspapers just do whatever the local management tells them to do,” Bracken says. Smithhart and Bracken are native Southerners who’ve been called “outside agitators” most of their lives. They’ve always known what they were up against. No place has seen a bloodier or meaner fight waged against organized labor than the U.S. South. This is the region where labor battles left dozens dead in Kentucky and West Virginia in the 1920s and early 1930s; where more than thirty strikers were shot in Marion, North Carolina, in 1929; where seven striking textile workers were shot to death in Honea Path, South Carolina, on September 6, 1934; where Mississippi labor leader Claude Ramsay was so often threatened in the 1960s that he kept a shotgun in his car. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed when he came to Memphis to support a garbage collectors’ strike in 1968. In January 2000, state troopers and local police used helicopters, armored vehicles, patrol boats, and attack dogs against picketing dockworkers with the International Longshoremen’s union in Charleston, South Carolina. Clamor magazine called this the “first major labor battle of the 21st century.”2 This longstanding struggle and its warriors both dead and alive attest to a civil war within the South that never ended, and one of the major combatants in this war has been the Southern press. Newspapers—and they’ve been the role model for broadcast and other media—have with few exceptions been decidedly on the side of management. They fought with the same weapons—fear, race-baiting, communist witch-hunting, patronizing appeals to “Southern” traditions—that business and corporate leaders used to quell union activity. Today they’re the role model for the national media as well, and their weapon of choice is a blanket of silence on labor and labor issues. As Mississippi AFL-CIO president Robert Shaffer once said, “You practically have to get out and march with a protest sign to get their attention.”3 In this book, Ray Smithhart, Robert Bracken, and others get to tell those stories that have gone untold for so long. They are part of the larger story of Southern working people, of a struggle replete with villains and heroes and with broad implications for the nation and for the world, too. The seed of this book was planted long ago in a textile plant in Sanford, North Carolina, where my father, brother, and uncle worked. Located in a nineteenth-century former iron works foundry, the plant produced textile machinery. I worked there nearly every summer in high school and college, rotating from first to second and sometimes the graveyard shift. 

Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended

Everybody worked hard. I remember the plant as a dark, hot, and noisy place where the air was thick with the smell of grease and metal. Huge factory fans kept the summer heat at bay. People talked loud if they wanted to be heard, but mostly they worked. Whether operating a drill press or a lathe, they watched closely what they were doing to avoid injuries. They worked, they sweated, they came home and washed off the grime and grease, and they rested before the next day began. The wages were modest at best. If they became disgruntled, they mostly kept it to themselves. Certainly no union existed to represent them. To my knowledge, none existed in my town. I remember when my father and others at the Sanford plant were sent to work temporarily at a factory the company operated in England. When they got there, they were forced to walk a gauntlet of anger, yelling, and cursing from strikers at the plant. I don’t think my father or the other Southerners had any real idea of what awaited them or that they were being used as “scabs.” A World War II combat veteran with an eighth-grade education, my father returned from England with bitter stories about what he experienced. I held many other blue-collar jobs before the belated launch of my journalism career in my late twenties, but I never forgot the men at that plant. No women worked there. The women, including my mother, worked as seamstresses in a garment factory across town. I never forgot the camaraderie, the laughter, the values, such as the simple determination to work hard and do a good job. My working-class sympathies, reflecting my working-class roots, were firmly established during those years. This book is about such people, the working people of the South, the struggles they faced whenever they tried to organize into unions, and the way the press treated them when they did. I have never been a member of a union, but I have been a working journalist for more than thirty years and a teacher of journalism at a major Southern university for nearly the last twenty of those years. As a journalist with newspapers in North Carolina and Mississippi and with a news service in Washington, D.C., I’ve covered many of the events, trends, and developments that this book describes. The “South” was my beat during my years in Washington. As an academic, I have also closely studied the role my fellow Southern journalists have played in making the South what it is today. Thus the approach taken here is that of a trained observer and an eyewitness, rather than that of a labor historian or even a media scholar. To accomplish the task of this book, I traveled across the South several times, from the Carolinas to Louisiana, as well as beyond the South to places like Chicago, New York, and St. Louis, interviewing along the way workers, journalists, labor organizers, activists, immigrants, business people, and Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended



scholars. I read every book on labor and the South I could get my hands on. I put to the task decades of work as a journalist and a teacher and, not to be forgotten, the education I received operating a drill press during those hot summers in Sanford, North Carolina. The civil war that this book describes has pitted the South’s political, business, religious, and journalistic elite against Southern workers, and one of its effects has been to keep the South the least unionized part of the nation. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports from early in the new millennium, the percentage of workers in unions in the so-called right-to-work states (referring to the Taft-Hartley Act provision allowing prohibition of union closed shops and thus restricting organizing efforts) was 7.4 percent, compared to 15.6 percent in non-right-to-work states. The right-to-work states include all of the South except for the border states of Kentucky and West Virginia. North Carolina had the lowest unionization rate at 3.2 percent, followed by South Carolina at 4.9 percent and Texas at 5.1 percent. Mississippi, where Smithhart and Bracken fought so long, had a unionization rate of 6.6 percent. These states also had the lowest wages—$30,915 in annual average pay, compared to $36,205 in non-right-to-work states. At a conference on “Labor and the Southern Press” that I organized at the University of Mississippi in October 2003, the University of Mississippi professor of management Robert Kirkland Robinson strongly defended Southern business leaders’ opposition to unions, citing the “immutable” laws of economics that insist companies keep labor costs low to remain competitive. Labor unions diminish management control over such costs and also restrain productivity, Robinson said. Of course, organized labor begs to differ, arguing that studies show unionized plants are both competitive and productive because workers feel they have a stake in the company and its performance. What’s not to be argued is that the South’s cheap, nonunionized workforce has been a mainstay in its efforts to attract outside industry. Today’s South is perhaps more racially enlightened than ever before, but it uses the same industrial enticements that lured the textile industry from New England more than eighty years ago. Today, the textile industry has largely packed up and moved to China, where labor is even cheaper. In the summer of 2003, just four years after its workers voted in a union, textile giant Pillowtex shut down sixteen plants and eliminated 7,650 jobs across the South. The departure of textiles is part of an out-migration of manufacturing jobs across the South and also the nation. North Carolina lost 138,000 jobs between 1994 and 2003, more than a third of them since 2001, and 52 percent of them in the textile industry.4 Mississippi, perennially one 

Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended

of the poorest of all states, lost 260 manufacturing plants between 2002 and 2004. Despite such losses, millions of Latin American laborers, many undocumented, are arriving to work in the fields, on construction sites, and in the remaining factories in the South. Like scalawags meeting carpetbaggers on the road out of Atlanta 140 years ago, the textile industry ironically is leaving at the same time U.S. and foreign automakers are arriving to take advantage of huge tax incentives, proximity to U.S. markets, and, of course, what is for them cheap labor. The region New York Times writer Peter Applebome once called the “bad job capital of America” is no longer the isolated backwater that still seemed a separate nation within a nation as recently as the 1960s. Today the South is an economic and political bellwether whose native sons occupied the White House through the 1990s and into the first decade of the millennium, whose conservative, pro-business politics have become the nation’s, whose tax breaks, lucrative incentives packages, limited regulation, low wages, and right-to-work laws have become part of the global strategies of international corporations—whether homegrown such as Wal-Mart or foreign such as Nissan and BMW. When the Nissan Corporation announced in November 2000 that it was coming to Mississippi, the news media led the cheering across the state. The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, the state’s largest newspaper, proclaimed “Nissan Ushers In New Industry” on the front page of its November 10, 2000, edition, accompanied by photographs of Governor Ronnie Musgrove and Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn and sidebars with headlines such as this: “Resident: ‘It’s a Blessing from God.’”5 The Memphis Commercial Appeal, still the paper of choice with many readers in northern Mississippi, headlined its front-page story: “It’s for Real: Nissan Tells Miss.: Plant, Prosperity Will Follow.”6 Indeed, with Nissan’s decision to build a $1.4 billion, 5,300-employee plant in Canton, Mississippi, the state joined what has been called “Detroit South,” the automaking corridor that now stretches from the BMW plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to the GM plant in Shreveport, Louisiana, and continuing as far west as the Toyota plant in San Antonio, Texas. Mississippi paid dearly to be a part of the corridor: a $363 million incentives package that included a host of state and federal tax breaks along with local, state, and federal commitments for road and highway construction, property acquisition, site preparation, water and sewer lines, training programs, and rail improvements. Tax revenues to the state weren’t expected to exceed this investment for at least seven years. Other states also paid dearly. Kentucky spent $150 million to get its Toyota plant in 1988. South Carolina paid $150 million for its BMW plant Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended



in 1992. Alabama upped the ante to $250 million for its Mercedes plant in 1993 and then to $234 million for a Hyundai plant in 2002. As in Mississippi, the newspaper press led the cheers. “Hyundai Era Begins” and “Hyundai Finds a Warm-Weather Home” were typical headlines in the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser in April 2002.7 Yet the incentives packages likely were not the only factor—and perhaps not even the key factor—in the decision to move to the U.S. South. As the Chapel Hill, North Carolina–based MDC organization states in its landmark 1986 study, Shadows in the Sunbelt: “there is substantial evidence that tax breaks do not significantly affect plant location decisions.”8 The incentives packages are icing on the cake. The cake is a region of low wages and low unionization that is also close to lucrative U.S. markets and thus allows corporations to save on shipping costs. Foreign-owned plants like the BMW plant in South Carolina can pay their workers less than a third of what their workers at home earn. As the crusading North Carolina–based magazine Southern Exposure has reported, “Labor advocates on both sides of the border . . . fear that foreign firms aim to make the low-wage, lean Southern workplace a model for all their operations, driving down the power and protection of workers world-wide.”9 The “new era” ushered in by Nissan and other automakers shows many of the markings of an old story in the South that has its roots in the post-Reconstruction era, when boosters such as the Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady first touted the region to outside investors as a place with accommodating politicians, good climate, a capital-starved economy, and, above all, a “plentiful supply of cheap labor.”10 Like Henry Grady, Mississippi in 2000 saw itself as part of yet another “New South” and its generous incentives package, the largest ever offered an automaker by a Southern state, as a necessary means to securing thousands of new, comparatively high-paying (for the South), skilled jobs that would prove to the world the state and region can compete on a global scale. Henry Grady’s more immediate successors ultimately saw his dream foiled by Northern industrialists who drained the South of its resources and kept it, in effect, a colony within the nation. As the writers of Who Built America?, the mammoth 1992 work published as part of the historian Herbert G. Gutman’s American Social History Project, put it: “Outside investors called the shots in large southern enterprises, squeezing profits from the region as one might juice from an orange and leaving behind depleted resources, destitute people, and a dependent economy.”11 No one necessarily envisions such an end from the more recent investments by Nissan, Toyota, Mercedes, Hyundai, and General Motors in the South. Thousands of jobs have been created, with better wages and 

Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended

benefits than Southerners have known in the past. Each new plant has resulted in spin-off investments. At the end of 2003, the Nissan plant in Canton had resulted in thirty-two Nissan suppliers constructing facilities in the state. Yet, hidden in the subtext of this unfolding story are costs that don’t get as much fanfare as the promise of jobs. For example, Alabama’s $250 million incentives package to Mercedes in 1993 included major tax loopholes—changes in the state tax code known as the “Mercedes Law”— that other companies subsequently demanded, leading to a loss of billions in state revenue.12 The long-term implications of the tax and the incentives offered the automaker remain uncertain. However, the state faced such a huge budget deficit by 2003 that Republican governor Bob Riley tried unsuccessfully to eliminate it with a proposed $1.2 billion—the largest in state history—tax increase. Job safety is another issue not getting much play in the Southern press. Injuries at Nissan have been common—in 2001 they were twice the average at the Big Three automakers—and workers have complained that the line speeds are too fast and dangerous—a charge that invokes memories of the despised “stretch-out” in the Southern textile industry of the 1920s and 1930s.13 A “stretch out”—the Southern version of the “speed-up” started by Henry Ford at his plants in the first decades of the twentieth century—forced workers to double, triple, and sometimes even quadruple their workload at often breakneck speeds. Overriding these underplayed aspects of the story, however, is the simple fact that Nissan, as well as the other foreign and domestic automakers in Detroit South, invested in the region for much the same reason as the outside investors of the late 1800s and early 1900s: cheap, nonunionized workers. In 1896, an adult in North Carolina earned half or at the most two-thirds what his Massachusetts counterpart earned. One of four North Carolina cotton mill workers that year was a child earning just 40 percent what a child laborer earned in Massachusetts. These kinds of disparities are why much of the textile industry had relocated to the South by the 1920s. This is again why the “Sunbelt” South gained more than a million manufacturing jobs in the 1970s when the North and Midwest lost two million.14 The South’s deal to the automakers is the same “Faustian bargain”—a term used by Applebome and others—that the region has always made with outside investors. This is how Applebome further describes it: “Ship us your jobs, any jobs, and we’ll work for less than workers in the North would, and without unions.”15 Even granting the South’s much-touted cost-of-living advantages, the region continues to be the poorest and most underpaid in the nation. A study by the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended



Policy showed that 30 percent of families in the rural South claimed the earned income tax credit—a refund of federal payroll taxes available to the working poor—as the new century was still dawning in 2001.16 The sociologist, writer, and former labor organizer Stanley Aronowitz has noted that Nissan was paying its Smyrna, Tennessee, workers $3.50 less an hour than the industry’s $17.50 average wage in the mid-1990s, but “workers who had never seen a pay envelope much above legal minimum found $14 an hour and plenty of overtime a fortune.” And, he added, “they would not risk their jobs by joining a union.”17 The Jackson Clarion-Ledger provided an update of Aronowitz’s assertion in its interview with Nissan-Canton worker Anita Barnes in February 2004. The mother of two and a former $8.95-per-hour assembly line worker at Sanderson Farms’ poultry company predicted she would be earning $21 an hour at Nissan by 2005. “I don’t have to worry about asking my mom for money anymore,” Barnes told the newspaper. The article goes on to say that workers like Barnes are why “the United Auto Workers will have difficulty breaking through the virtual fence around foreign automakers’ Southern operations.”18 Nowhere is the “virtual fence” more evident than at Nissan, whose CEO Carlos Ghosn has made it clear that his Southern plants will not hire UAW members. In a speech that was required listening for Nissan employees on the day before a union vote at the company’s plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, Ghosn said, “I cannot emphasize enough how important your decision is to the future of our plant. . . . It is without reservation to say that bringing a union into Smyrna could result in making Smyrna not competitive, which is not in your best interest or Nissan’s. For this reason, I urge you to vote for your future and for your opportunities at Nissan.”19 Needless to say, the workers voted down the union. Known as “le cost killer” in France, Ghosn has held top executive positions with Michelin, Renault, and Nissan, slashing an estimated 25,000 jobs and shutting down four major plants along the way as he streamlined operations and revitalized ailing companies. Today in Mississippi, as also in Japan, he is a corporate superhero, much like Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom before his fall from grace. In its front-page story of the official dedication of the Nissan plant in Canton on May 28, 2003, the Clarion-Ledger ran a photograph of Ghosn’s smiling face among hundreds of cheering Nissan employees—many of them black. The headline beneath the photograph read: “Plant Opens with a Roar.” In all the coverage of Nissan, the Clarion-Ledger or other Mississippi media have rarely explored Ghosn’s reputation as “le cost killer” or his antiunion attitudes. More typical has been this editorial from the Mississippi Press in Pascagoula: “A potentially golden new era for Mis10

Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended

sissippi dawned this week with the opening of the new Nissan plant in Canton . . . The reasons for what amount to a fundamental change in American industry are simple. Most Southern states are right-to-work states. For strike-weary management, tired of the strongly unionized North, that’s an attraction to be sure.”20 This editorial seemed totally oblivious to the fact that the number of labor strikes in the country reached a fifty-year low in 1996 and has continued to decline since that year. The New York Times’s Applebome has called the South “American labor’s Waterloo, the nut that never cracked.”21 The South’s resistance to organized labor was born in its poverty and desperation after the Civil War, its plentiful labor supply as the region shifted from its agrarian roots toward industrialization, the feudalistic subservience of its masses to an economic and political elite, a plantation mindset described eloquently by W. J. Cash, author of the landmark 1941 study, The Mind of the South. First on the plantation and later in the mills, the Southern elite saw itself as “the saviors of the South,” a manifestation “of the old amiable relationship between master and man,” Cash wrote. “The men in control of the mills clung stoutly to the notion that merely by operating them on any terms they entitled themselves to the complete gratefulness of workman and public, and to be regarded as leading patriots of the South.” Thus when textile mill workers struck in the Carolinas in 1929 and later in 1934, “the masters of the mills, businessmen in general, planters, the farmers in the fields, faced it with hot-eyed anger and determination to have none of it in Dixie.” As for the press, Cash wrote, the “most powerful newspaper in North Carolina”—he doesn’t identify the newspaper—editorialized “that, since the Communists wanted to destroy the existing government, they were not entitled to protection under its laws. And immediately afterward, overt violence broke out in Gastonia.”22 The mindset toward the Southern worker can be seen in this excerpt from a 1903 promotional booklet issued by the Southern Industrial Association of my hometown of Sanford, North Carolina, and reprinted in a special edition of the Sanford Herald in 1986: “We have an abundance of labor . . . of a very desirable kind. There are no labor agitators or labor organizations, and the labor here is of a peaceful, sober and industrious character, and on account of the low cost of living in the south, the mild climate, cheap fuel, vegetables, etc., labor can be had here of almost every class at about one-half the usual wages paid in the northern states. The industries here are inadequate to give employment to our abundance of labor.”23 Who were these Southern workers? Let’s turn to the legendary Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill for a description of the typical “poor white trash” Southern mill worker in the early decades of the twentieth century. Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended

11

“One had to see them, the listless men and women, dozens of them for every job open, shabby and gaunt, their feet sometimes wrapped in guano sacks. Illiterate, ill-fed, and sick of hookworm or worse, they waited patiently, hopefully. It made a person’s mouth taste salty to see them, already degraded, being pushed down a bit deeper.”24 No events are more significant in the history of labor in the South than the 1929 and 1934 strikes at textile mills in the Carolinas and neighboring Southern states. By the late 1920s this region had become the heart of the nation’s textile industry, employing 300,000 of the nation’s 1.1 million textile workers.25 These workers were overwhelmingly white—the cotton mill was generally off-limits to black workers—and usually came from poor farms and rural backwaters. In the Southern textile mill culture, whole families worked at the mill and lived in company houses—a plantation-style culture. The children went to mill-subsidized schools, and the family attended mill-subsidized churches. Labor historian Irving Bernstein notes that Southern textile workers earned less than 30 cents an hour—or $12.83 a week, compared to $19.16 a week in New England—and worked twelve-hour days in filthy, unsafe conditions “amid a terrible din of machinery in temperatures near 85 degrees.”26 As a result of the efforts of the United Textile Workers, the communist National Textile Workers, and other organizations, the workers began major strikes in March 1929 at German-owned mills that had been granted ten-year tax exemptions in Elizabethton, Tennessee. By April the strikes had spread to giant Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, and later to Marion, North Carolina. Violent confrontations with state and local authorities led to the wounding of dozens of strikers and several deaths, including legendary labor minstrel Ella May Wiggins and Gastonia police chief O. F. Aderholt. A full-page ad in the Gastonia Gazette at the time declared the purpose of the strike as “overthrowing this Government and destroying property and to kill, kill, kill.” The ad was bought by a group calling itself the “citizens of Gaston County.” The “inflammatory” editorials of the Gastonia paper were later cited in a trial on the shootings. As Bernstein wrote, “the Loray mill, the Gastonia Gazette, and the town authorities were determined to destroy the Communists, above all, (labor organizer Fred E.) Beal.”27 Five years later the textile industry was rocked again with a general strike that idled 180,000 workers in the South and 400,000 nationwide.28 Seven striking workers were shot to death in Honea Path, South Carolina, an event depicted vividly in the landmark documentary The Uprising of ’34 by George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock. As one female striker said in the film, “we began to feel we could be a part of a 12

Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended

great movement.” But, as another striker put it, “they’d murder to kill a union,” and they did.29 In his account of Honea Path today and in 1934 in the book Dixie Rising, Applebome notes how six decades after the strike South Carolina public television refused to air The Uprising of ’34—in part due to opposition from companies like Michelin, which has a plant in South Carolina and was then under Carlos Ghosn’s leadership. Applebome also interviewed Fred T. Moore, a veteran former state legislator who edited the Honea Path Chronicle from 1945 to 1981. Moore boasted of never making “‘a single mention’” of the strike “‘in all the years I ran the paper, and I don’t see why anyone would mention it now. There are too many bad memories, too many people it could hurt.’”30 From the Depression-era textile strikes to the “Operation Dixie” campaign by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to unionize the South in the late 1940s to the civil rights era and even today, most Southern editors have shared such views. In his monograph “Anti-Communism, Race, and Structuration: Newspaper Coverage of the Labor and Desegregation Movements in the South, 1932–40 and 1953–61,” Frank D. Durham of the University of Iowa showed how newspapers across Tennessee waged war with the Christian socialist, pro-labor “Highlander” movement from the 1930s through the 1950s with typical headlines such as this one in the October 15, 1939, issue of the Nashville Tennessean: “School Spreads Communist Doctrines in State.”31 When the CIO tried to organize a local plant in Grenada, Mississippi, in 1946, the local newspaper joined a phalanx of opposition. “City officials, church leaders, professional men, bankers, and the press set up a citizens’ committee which identified the CIO with communism, world government, poll tax repeal and brutality,” wrote the former University of Mississippi historian James W. Silver in his acclaimed book, Mississippi: The Closed Society. The Grenada Sentinal-Star warned in one editorial that if “the majority (of workers) favor surrendering their rights to the CIO, it is believed by many that the Industry will cease operation.” The campaign succeeded in killing the union.32 In the 1930s and beyond, Peter Applebome has written, “it wasn’t just race that had Southern Democrats worried. Much of the New Deal’s pro-labor policies worried them even more.”33 The Republican takeover of Congress in 1946, coming the same year as “Operation Dixie,” set the stage for the antiunion Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. This allowed conservative Southern Democrats to push through “right-to-work” laws across the region, effectively killing many union efforts. When South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond and other Southern political leaders staged their “Dixiecrat” revolt against the national Democratic Party in 1948, Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended

13

they declared war on the CIO in the same breath they pledged to fight racial integration. Seven years later, a virtual “Who’s Who” of Southern politics—including Thurmond, U.S. senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi, Congressman Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, former Mississippi governor Fielding Wright, and Congressman F. Edward Hebert of Louisiana—met at the posh Peabody Hotel in Memphis as the newly formed Federation for Constitutional Government to develop what Eastland later described as a strategy to “fight the Supreme Court, fight the CIO, fight the NAACP, and fight all conscienceless pressure groups who are attempting our destruction.”34 Unions and racial integration were inextricably linked in the minds of segregationist journalists as well as segregationist politicians in the South during the civil rights era. In a 1964 column, arch-conservative Tom Ethridge of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger railed against “the leftist line of Walter Reuther, top labor fuehrer” and noted that “a major objective of the Reuther-dominated AFL-CIO is an intensive drive to register as many negroes as possible in Southern states.”35 The traditionally more moderate Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal in Tupelo had this to say in an October 5, 1965, editorial: “Our area can keep up this growth record if we continue to turn back the frantic efforts of unions to move in and take over our plants. But if we turn to unionism and the tension and friction and violence which so often accompanies it, our area can quickly find itself losing jobs instead of gaining them. For all around us is clear and visible evidence of how the union takeover of a town can halt its industrial growth in spite of what previously had looked like unlimited community growth.”36 More recently, in August 2002, the Tupelo newspaper’s coverage of unionization efforts at the local Cooper Tire plant showed the same antipathy toward organized labor. The coverage featured minimal input from union sources but plenty of prominent comments from management. On August 19, 2002, the newspaper ran a full-page advertisement paid for by “Concerned Citizens of Northeast Mississippi” that urged workers in huge, boldfaced print to “vote no to union at cooper tire.” The ad painted a picture of “absentee union bosses” who “run organizing campaigns, to call strikes, to pay for political activities, to finance elaborate meetings in plush resorts” yet who “have no place, no ability and serve no useful purpose in the day-to-day lives of employees.”37 Some Southern journalists have resisted the antiunionism that has generally characterized newspapers in the region. Frank Durham notes in his study of coverage of the Highlander movement that some non-Tennessee reporters and columnists such as Allen Rankin of the Montgomery (Ala.) Journal were critical of the “witch hunt” that Senator James O. Eastland 14

Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended

conducted against the organization in congressional hearings in 1954.38 W. J. Cash says the Raleigh News and Observer and the Greensboro Daily News in North Carolina “took up the cause of the strikers” after violence broke out in Gastonia in 1929, although he adds they did it “cautiously.”39 Two of the best-known Southern journalists during the civil rights era—Pulitzer Prize winners Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution and Hodding Carter of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi— wrote sympathetically about courageous women in the labor movement. In his 1959 book, The South and the Southerner, McGill devoted a chapter to “Industry and Labor’s Search for a New South” and focused on the career of Virginia aristocrat Lucy Randolph Mason, who became a CIO organizer in the South in the late 1930s. “Many a Southern newspaper editor, author of fiery anti-CIO editorials, found himself tongue-tied and humble as Miss Lucy corrected his published errors and exposed with carefully researched facts his ignorance of his own town’s economics.”40 In 1937, Carter, then the editor of the Delta Star in Greenville, editorialized against a mob of women who had run the International Ladies Garment Workers Union organizer Ida Sledge (a Memphis aristocrat) out of Tupelo. “Running people out of town is not only illegal, but it is downright stupid and ineffectual,” Carter wrote. Yet Carter, who came to Greenville after many pitched battles with populist Huey Long’s political machine in Louisiana, made it clear that he was not a friend of unions or of the CIO, whose efforts would only “redouble . . . in Mississippi” as a result of the Tupelo mob.41 None of these journalists, however, approach the work of Southern Exposure magazine, which was established in 1973 as the flagship publication of the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, North Carolina. Driven by a strong sense of social justice, this crusading magazine has provided more in-depth, investigative coverage of workers and the labor movement in the South than any other publication in the history of the region. Its work continues today under editor Chris Kromm, who talked about the challenges of labor in the South at the “Labor and the Southern Press” conference at the University of Mississippi in October 2003. Throughout the history of the South, “the press saw itself as an ally of the business structure,” Kromm said. Yet, despite “the myth of the outside agitator, labor is as Southern as kudzu and barbecue.”42 In Dixie Rising, Peter Applebome described at length how the South’s growing influence over the nation as a whole has reached the point that “to understand America, you have to understand the South.”43 As evident in the global strategies of Nissan, Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, and other foreign-owned companies today, that influence now extends beyond American shores. Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended

15

This was seen coming as early as 1981, when corporate consultant Richard A. Beaumont wrote this in his essay Working in the South: “Because the South represents the last area where you can escape the so-called insidious union movement, foreign employers have it clearly in mind that the South is the place to move to. . . . It’s incredible but it’s true that I will sit in the office of a large chemical company somewhere in Germany and the guy will tell me with a straight face the trouble with American employers is that they are antiunion and that they don’t understand their social responsibilities. Five minutes later he’s saying, ‘Now, when I go to the South, how do I operate on a nonunion basis?’”44 The flight toward low-wage, compliant, unorganized workers is a global phenomenon. The South has seen this in the emigration of its textile industry and the immigration of foreign automakers. At the aforementioned 2003 conference on labor and the Southern press, the journalist Takehiko Nomura noted that thousands of Japanese companies have shipped their factories to low-wage China in recent years. Meanwhile, the Japanese press continues its role as cheerleaders for corporate Japan and corporate leaders like Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn. “He made it easier for companies to get rid of the security base (of employees), promotions, lifelong employment,” Nomura said. Yet “the Japanese cannot get enough of him. He’s a comic-book hero.”45 It’s no small irony that the automobile industry is at the heart of the South’s new evolving role in the global economy. The automobile has long been a symbol of modern manufacturing, the impetus for the development of the assembly line, mass production, mass consumption, and post–World War II prosperity. The South’s love affair with the automobile is obvious at the Daytona 500 and at Talladega, in the drag strips that have dotted the landscape since World War II, in movies like Thunder Road and Smokey and the Bandit. The automobile represented mobility and freedom for farm-bound Southerners and non-Southerners alike, but it also often brought a new kind of servitude for the workers who produced it. By the same token, no labor organization has been more important to the rise of the worker movement and recognition of worker rights in the United States than the United Auto Workers (UAW), and no individual more important than the UAW’s legendary leader, Walter Reuther, a man vilified as a “labor fuehrer” in the Southern press but praised by writer Stanley Aronowitz as “the last great figure of social unionism in America,” a man whose impassioned speeches on behalf of workers “sounded like poetry.”46 At the height of Reuther’s career in the 1950s, his archenemy was none other than U.S. senator Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican whose 1964 presidential bid would help galvanize the rise of Republicanism in the South. Goldwater said Reuther and the UAW “are a more 16

Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended

dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do to America.”47 Reuther, whose organization today is waging an uphill struggle to gain a foothold in “Detroit South,” was a lifelong champion of civil rights who stood with Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Reuther also marched with King in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. King himself was to recognize the importance of and need for a strong labor movement in the South. His last battle was for striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, a battle bitterly opposed by the Memphis press. King believed the struggle for workers’ rights—both black and white—would be the next stage of the civil rights movement. “We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate with the daily basic necessities of life,” King said.48 Back in 1946, Sidney Hillman, the longtime leader of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, described the South as a “venture into unplowed fields.”49 At the October 2003 conference, the Mississippi AFL-CIO president Robert Shaffer said this about Mississippi, but he could have easily said it about the South as a whole: “It’s a fight everyday of your life in the movement in this state.”50 What is a union other than workers asserting their right as human beings to join together in search of a fair wage, decent working conditions, equitable treatment? How is it that a region whose leaders and whose press have fought so long and hard against that right should now be a model for the nation and beyond? Robert Shaffer’s daily struggle has become the daily struggle of workers everywhere, and their fight is as much with the press as it is with their bosses. Rather than offer a comprehensive study of the labor movement in the South, this book points to pivotal moments in that long, tortured history that show just how determined the region’s leadership—and this includes the press—has been in fighting organized labor, and how determined workers have been to keep pushing for their rights despite defeat after defeat. The book also assesses the modern South—from its emanation as “Sunbelt South” to its latest identity as “Detroit South”—and its significance in national and global economic strategies as well as its long-established impact on national politics. The region’s significance on the global stage can be seen in places like Charleston, South Carolina, the birthplace of the Civil War and also the city where twenty-first-century workers first demanded a voice in the new Global South. Charleston, in many ways, embodies the South of yesterday, today, and perhaps tomorrow. Some explanation may be necessary at this point on the use of the terms “Southern” and “press.” At the previously mentioned October 2003 Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended

17

conference, the keynote speaker Peter Applebome of the New York Times remarked that both terms are somewhat antiquated today. Given the “Southernization” of the nation as a whole, does the “South” itself really even exist anymore? Furthermore, how can the term “press” still be applied to the multifaceted world of today’s global media? My response is this book. The story told here is proof positive of the existence of the “South”—in the amazing continuity of attitudes among many of its leaders, stretching back to the days of slavery, their obeisance to capital and its quest for the cheapest labor possible, and in the never-ending struggle for justice on behalf of the region’s laboring people. That is the story of the South, and it is ongoing. As for the term “press,” my focus has been by and large on newspapers and magazines. However, still clinging to that term are old notions synonymous with what I believe to be the heart and soul of journalism, whether print or broadcast. “Media” can mean all kinds of things other than journalism. Not so with the “press.” Within that word lie the long history and tradition of hard-working, hard-hitting, sometimes hard-drinking rebels and radicals—from Thomas Paine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Hodding Carter in Greenville, Mississippi—who saw a purpose and mission in their work, knew it to be essential to democracy, and used it to help those getting a raw deal. In the South, as elsewhere, they were always the exception to the rule, and thus the term “press” not only speaks to the ideals but also to the failures to live up to them. In the South’s ongoing civil war, the failures sadly outnumber the successes, but they don’t extinguish the validity of the ideals.

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Labor, Southern Press, the Civil War That Never Ended

Chapter 2

labor in the old new south

In the little northeastern Mississippi town of Nettleton in the early 1980s, the Tapscott family was going through the many rooms and countless closets of the century-old, long-vacant home of my late wife Marilyn’s four never-married great-aunts, the last of whom—Aunt Cam (for Camille)— had recently died in a nearby nursing home at the age of ninety-eight. Known as “The Hotel,” the rambling former boardinghouse was about to fall prey to the wrecking ball, and members of the family wanted to see what remained to be salvaged. Many of the rooms had long been emptied of furniture and other belongings. However, in a hidden closet behind one of the stairwells, we found a treasure trove. Inside were stacks of yellowed, decaying newspapers, magazines, political posters, and postcards dating back to the last century, all apparently the personal collection of one of the family’s most prominent—and notorious—members, former U.S. congressman John Rankin, a New Deal–era populist, raging segregationist and anticommunist, and erstwhile chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. Rankin had at times stayed at The Hotel. Knowing my political and historical interests, the Tapscotts handed the stacks over to me, the newest member of the family, and told me to do with them what I thought best. A quarter century later, those newspapers—original edition after original edition of turn-of-the-century Populist Party leader, twotime presidential candidate, and former U.S. senator Thomas E. Watson’s Jeffersonian—proved invaluable in my research for this chapter, which provides a rough sketch of the history of labor and the press in the South from the Reconstruction era to the eve of World War II. First and foremost was the labor manifesto that appeared in the July 30, 1908, edition of the Jeffersonian, an Atlanta-based weekly published by Watson. This declaration by one of Georgia’s most prominent politicians

19

and journalists would be as unthinkable in most Southern newspapers today as it was in Watson’s own day. “We believe in the right of those who labor to organize for their mutual protection and benefit, and pledge the efforts of the People’s party to preserve this right inviolate. We condemn the recent attempt to destroy the power of trade unions through the unjust use of Federal injunction, substituting government by injunction for free government.” The full-page “People’s Party Platform” published in the Jeffersonian goes on to “demand the abolition of child labor,” “oppose the use of convict labor in competition with free labor,” “favor the eight hour workday, and legislation protecting the lives and limbs of workingmen through the use of safety appliances,” and attack the “criminal carelessness” that allowed “thousands of miners” to lose their lives “to increase the dividends of stockholders.”1 Contrast this with the fiery editorials of Major Fred Sullens, editor and part owner of the Jackson Daily News in Jackson, Mississippi, from 1907 to 1957. As for putting limits on the workday, he wrote this in 1916: “The fellow who is always talking about an eight-hour day is too infernally lazy to work at all if stern necessity did not force him to do so.”2 Over his career, Sullens of Mississippi would call for government regulations to protect railroad companies from organized labor, the elimination of the right to strike, repeal of the 1935 Wagner Act that gave federal protection to the right to organize, and the arrest and imprisonment of strikers who take part in “sit-ins” such as during the 1937 strike at General Motors. Sullens saw the killing of three labor organizers in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1919 as a proper rebuke of what he considered Bolshevism. He called the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and CIO leader John L. Lewis “Public Enemy No. I,” a “pig-eyed” man “far more dangerous than Scarface Al Capone,” and he warned CIO organizers in Mississippi that they faced “bloodshed.”3 Sullens, whose caustic, vitriol-filled editorials are legendary in Mississippi, expressed what was essentially the prevalent view among Southern editors toward organized labor, albeit with more fire and brimstone than most. Starting his editorial career at the end of the Populist era and a year before Watson published the “People’s Party Platform,” Sullens would prove to be as bitter an enemy of blacks as he was of labor organizers. In his opposition to unions, however, he was simply following the lead of the post–Civil War Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady and other procapital promoters of industrial development in the South. Labor unions were an impediment to the progress they envisioned. Watson was the exception. In many ways, the trajectory of his long and tumultuous career brings out in bold relief the fate of the early labor movement in the South. Remembered today as one of the most notorious 20

Labor in the Old New South

of the racist political demagogues who once stalked the South, Watson served in the Georgia state legislature and in both the U.S. House and Senate, but his most memorable role was as a leader of the Populists, or People’s Party, a movement that began in the early 1890s and essentially died in 1908, a movement which history records as the greatest challenge that ever faced oligarchical rule in the South. Watson was a politician-editor who in 1892 urged white working Southerners to join together with their black counterparts in standing up to the industrial-political forces aligned against them. “You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both.”4 After wagonloads of black voters were paid off to cast their lot with the Democratic Party in the 1892 election and the Democratic upstaging of the Populists in subsequent elections, Watson turned bitter, angry, and deeply racist. By 1913, he was claiming blacks “simply have no comprehension of virtue, honesty, truth, gratitude and principle,” that white Southerners “have to lynch (the black man) occasionally, and flog him, now and then, to keep him from blaspheming the Almighty, by his conduct, on account of his smell and his color.”5 In his final years, he continued to rail against the moneyed interests but his passion became blinded by hatred of blacks, Jews, and Catholics. The model for post-Reconstruction editors in the South was the Atlanta Constitution’s Henry Grady, who worked tirelessly to promote a “New South” amid the social and economic devastation left by the Civil War. Grady traveled across the country preaching a Phoenix-like South that will rise from its ashes, overcoming its legacies of racism and slavery, and take advantage of its plentiful natural resources and raw materials, and, above all, its seemingly endless supply of pliable workers willing to work hard and cheap. Other prominent editors such as Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal joined him in rallying Northern investors to look to the South. They also reassured a nervous native planter class that the coming of industry would not supplant their own major role in the New South’s economy. As a result of Grady’s clarion call, “the businessman as hero became a new part of the folklore of the South in this era,” the historian Charles Reagan Wilson writes in the monumental Encylopedia of Southern Culture. “Businessmen were typically self-made men from the middle class. The lumber, tobacco, textile, furniture, iron and steel, and mining industries expanded in the 1880s, generating wealth and a new privileged class.” On the political end of the spectrum were the “lawyer-politicians . . . powerful figures in the New South, dominating courthouse rings, monopolizing public offices, and supervising public expenditures.”6 Labor in the Old New South

21

The champions of the New South—whether editors, industrialists, or the so-called Bourbon politicians—weren’t just motivated by love of the region, according to the historian Francis Butler Simpkins: “Behind their fine phrases was the desire for private gain. As their first move, Bourbon politicians furnished the prestige of great names; merchants and bankers supplied the money. . . . Northern businessmen, a sort of second generation of carpetbaggers, invaded every Southern state in search of profits, offering the gospel of material prosperity.”7 Northern industrialists and investors indeed heeded Grady’s call, taking advantage of a flattened economy and political upheaval, and established for decades to come what the historian C. Vann Woodward and the economist Gavin Wright have both termed a “colonial economy” in the South. While agriculture remained a dominant force, relative new industries muscled their way into the picture. The growth of railroads led to the development and expansion of coal, iron, and steel industries in the border states of Kentucky and West Virginia as well as in the Deep South state of Alabama. The gradual relocation of the New England textile industry to the Carolinas and points farther south began in the 1880s and continued through the 1920s. The North largely financed these industries. Tobacco production was the only truly Southern-owned growth industry. “The South was predominantly a debtor region,” note the authors of Who Built America, a 1992 social history of the nation. “Northern, and to a lesser extent European, capital . . . bankrolled the growth of southern industry. . . . These outside investors placed their own profits before the region’s welfare. They set up low-profit and low-wage operations that extracted raw materials or crudely processed products.”8 Actually, similar exploitation was happening in other regions of post– Civil War America, contributing to widespread discontent among workers, small businessmen, and farmers. This discontent, along with an economic downturn in the early 1890s, contributed to the development of the nation’s first bona fide labor movement and to popular revolts in the West and South like the Grange movement, the Farmers’ Alliance, and finally the Populist uprising. The Populists were the strongest third-party movement in the country’s history, electing more than fifty members of Congress in 1890 and gaining seats in state legislatures across the South. By fusing with Republicans, they even managed a takeover of both houses of North Carolina’s legislature in 1894. However, the movement ran out of steam by the turn of the century after becoming sidetracked by endless debates over gold versus silver as a standard of currency. More important, they faced the unyielding opposition of bankers, planters, industrialists, and merchants, and saw the appropriation of many of their key issues by the Democratic 22

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Party. Another factor in their demise was racism. Southern Populists worried that splitting the white Democratic vote might open the gates to resurgent blacks. Even in their heyday, Populists faced virulent attacks—from journalists as well as vigilantes—that would be a dark precursor of what awaited Southern labor organizers in the years to come. Populists were shot at, chased out of their churches, “driven from their homes, and refused credit because of their beliefs,” C. Vann Woodward has written. “The worst slander, however, was the product of editors and politicians who believed that any means was justified by the end they had in view. When a responsible editor wrote that ‘The South . . . is threatened with anarchy and communism (because of) the direful teachings of Thomas E. Watson,’ there were thousands who believed him literally.”9 In the aftermath of the Populist uprising, Bourbon Democracy resumed largely unchallenged control. Southern legislatures inaugurated Jim Crow with poll taxes, literacy tests, and other laws that not only disenfranchised blacks but also many poor whites. Mississippi and South Carolina led the charge for Jim Crow. As sharecropping and tenant farming became staples of agrarian life in the turn-of-the-century South, the mill village became the urban version of the plantation in the industrialized New South. Just as they had done on the farm, children labored in the mills along with their parents and grandparents. From farm to mill village, the same oligarchy that had fought and defeated the Populists resumed its now-largely unchallenged rule, and a sense of defeatism settled over all the lowly of the South, the sharecroppers, tenants, and millworkers, both black and white. Frank Tannenbaum, in his book Darker Phases of the New South, described it this way: “Once a mill-worker, always a mill-worker. Not only you, but your children and children’s children, forever and ever.”10 This defeatism undoubtedly contributed to the stereotype of the Southern worker, an image that writers, journalists, and photojournalists helped make as one of the region’s most enduring. The image is starkest of the poor white. Isolated in the rural areas of the agricultural South before his move to factory and town, he was the product of a society that didn’t value, even feared, education of the masses, a society that didn’t invest in roads or other infrastructure that might have reduced his sense of isolation from and distrust of the outside world. His religion reflected his world, and his was a God concerned with the individual soul rather than the social gospel preached by Jesus. Here is how W. J. Cash describes the poor white in his classic The Mind of the South: “The whole pack of them exhibited, in varying measure, a distinctive physical character—a striking lankness of frame and slackness Labor in the Old New South

23

of muscle in association with a shambling gait, a boniness and misshapeliness of head and feature, a peculiar sallow swartness, or alternatively a not less peculiar and a not less sallow faded-out colorlessness of skin and hair.”11 A more complex picture of these Southerners emerges out of the multiauthored 1987 text Like a Family: The Making of the Southern Cotton Mill World, in which oral historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and her coauthors describe a people who were indeed poor but also “bound by ties of obligation and neighborliness, (who) created communities where social and economic relations melded and values were widely shared.” They “found dignity in manual work” and believed “cooperation rather than competition” constituted the worthy life.12 The labor historian Gary Fink and others have challenged the prevailing notions of the passive Southern worker and cited examples to prove that they could be as militant and rebellious as their counterparts in the industrialized North and Midwest. Still, Fink concedes the durability of the stereotype. “They were seen as New South lumpens all too willingly placing their fates in the hands of a heavenly father while pledging allegiance to an earthly patron, trading their economics and political independence for a seat at the table of industrial paternalism.”13 In a 1988 essay, writer, minister, and civil rights activist Will D. Campbell traced his own heritage to the “rednecks, woolhats, peckerwoods, po’ whites” who’ve become the South’s most enduring object of derision and also hatred. “Historically they, too, were the victims of time, of seeds they did not plant, and the harvest of which has been thrust upon them.”14 In many ways, the Southern “lumpen” were similar to the Italian and Polish immigrants who were streaming into the workforce of the Northeast and Midwest in the late 1800s. Southerners shared the heritage of a feudalistic society, the subordination, paternalism, long hours of work, and a sense of the “inevitability of social domination,” writes the sociologist and former labor organizer Stanley Aronowitz in his book, False Promises.15 Aronowitz notes the striking similarities in the Catholicism of the Sicilians and Poles to the Pentecostalism of the Southerners—a deeplying mysticism, the authority of the priest or preacher, the emulation of Jesus’ suffering, the importance of humility over success. Yet once again the oral historians who wrote Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World complicate this view in their depiction of the rebellious nature of early Pentecostalism in the South between 1910 and 1930. Although “the relationship between many mill churches and mills was symbiotic and reciprocal”—with Baptist and Methodist churches preaching subservience in exchange for mill owners’ financial support—the early Pentecostal, Church of God, and other churches of the 24

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“maverick denominations” made clear that “the millhands’ faith was not that of the owners,” preached an Old Testament God who brought down a fiery vengeance on the heads of those who subjugated God’s people, who “reminded manufacturers that they were not the unquestioned masters of the world they had created.”16 Thus, many mill owners deeply distrusted these “Holy Rollers” and actively discouraged their presence among millworkers. Race was often a handy weapon. Poor white workers in the South were pitted against even poorer black workers—exacerbating racial antagonisms—by a paternalistic ruling class that found blacks useful as strike-breaking scabs or paid-for votes when they were not convenient scapegoats for the frustration poor whites felt about their lot in Southern society. An example of this unequal alliance can be seen in the Populist demise that so embittered Tom Watson. The roots of the alliance can be traced to the antebellum South, where even under the shadow of slavery aristocratic Southerners took paternalistic care of “their” blacks while poor whites were left to fend for themselves. “The blacks were partners, albeit subservient ones, in the alliance because they were still useful to the gentry,” Will D. Campbell has written. “But the poor white was not even needed.”17 As agrarian movements such as the Grange, the Farmers’ Alliance, and Populism gained momentum, a national labor movement was also emerging out of the handful of craft unions that had predated the Civil War. Reflecting the growing industrialization and urbanization taking place in the nation, the movement was led by the Knights of Labor, an organization founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1869 and which grew from a secretive, ritual-laden order into a union that welcomed both unskilled as well as skilled workers, including women and blacks. The Knights made considerable progress in the South, organizing coal miners, turpentine workers, and dockworkers, many of them black. Its racially integrated convention in Richmond, Virginia, in 1886 incurred the wrath of the local and regional press. In the wake of the convention, “the two words ‘nigger’ and ‘Knight’ (are) almost synonymous terms,” one Southern editorialist groused.18 The Knights held their ground and worked closely together with such organizations as the New Orleans– based Central Trades and Labor Assembly, which claimed a biracial membership of up to ten thousand. However, the same year the Knights convened in Richmond would bring the death blow to their future. This was the infamous Haymarket Affair in Chicago, when a bomb was thrown during a post–May Day labor gathering at Haymarket Square, killing eleven people and leading to a severe crackdown on labor activity and the turning of public opinion Labor in the Old New South

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against unions. Although the Knights would continue to exist for a time, even growing in numbers among black Southerners, the Haymarket Affair prompted the creation of another, more conservative, craft-oriented organization that would eventually take the helm of the nation’s labor movement, the American Federation of Labor. The seeds planted by the Knights of Labor in the South would produce fruit, however, laying the foundation for the emergence of the United Mine Workers of America in 1890. The UMWA adopted the Knights’ inclusiveness toward the unskilled as well as blacks. The mineworkers would eventually affiliate with both the Knights and the new AFL. Ironically, the future UMWA leader John L. Lewis would decades later lead the Congress of Industrial Organizations in breaking away from the AFL and incorporating the Knights’ openness toward unskilled workers. Working conditions in the Appalachian coal mines proved to be fertile soil for labor unrest. Miners not only endured low wages but also dangerous conditions, competition from convict labor, and the company town, which, like its counterpart in the textile industry, bound workers to lives nearly completely controlled by the company. Coal miners staged one out of every three labor strikes that took place in the South between 1887 and 1894. Their struggles became the stuff of legend. So did leaders like Mother Jones, who lived to be one hundred years old and fought for miners’ rights from West Virginia to Alabama. Many thousands were inspired by her motto: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” However, most miners wouldn’t achieve true union representation until the Great Depression. Another legacy of the Populists and the Knights of Labor would be the organizing of lumber and sawmill workers of Louisiana and Texas and one of the most dramatic labor struggles of the early twentieth century. Working for 75 cents to $1.50 a day in backbreaking, unsafe conditions that allowed 125 deaths and nearly 17,000 accidents in the year 1919 alone, thousands of these black and white Southerners organized under the banner of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers, which in 1912 affiliated with the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). A militant organization that called for “one big union” of all workers, the IWW—also known as the “Wobblies”—was founded in 1905 by the miner and former cowboy William “Big Bill” Haywood, socialist Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, and others frustrated by the AFL’s conservatism and its mollycoddling of big industry. In Louisiana and Texas, the IWW helped the Brotherhood wage a heroic fight against a lumber trust, the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association, that would eventually prove too powerful to defeat. Articulating the cause of the Brotherhood was the Mississippi-born, Louisiana-bred revolutionary journalist Covington Hall, whose newspa26

Labor in the Old New South

per Lumberjack bore witness to a struggle that would bring black and white workers together, garner the support of the local communities and local newspapers, and inspire enough national attention to bring IWW leader Haywood to Alexandria, Louisiana, in 1912, where he gave a rousing speech encouraging the movement to remain biracial in its demand for social justice. The lumber barons hired detectives to infiltrate the union, hauled in strike breakers, imposed lockouts and layoffs, and closed mills where the union was strong. During a rally in the mill town of Grabow, Louisiana, in July 1912, company vigilantes began shooting at participants, and union men fired back. According to the historian Jim Green, a ten-minute gun battle ensued, leaving four dead and forty more wounded, including women and children. Union leaders were arrested and charged with murder, but a jury subsequently found them innocent. The heavy-handed tactics of the lumber barons ultimately led to the demise of the movement in 1913. Yet, Green writes, the workers gained better wages and shorter working hours. Moreover, their heroic stand belies “the conventional stereotypes of passive, racially divided Southern workers . . . (and) leaves an important legacy to the modern struggle against a corporate elite that still exploits the South’s people and resources.”19 Posing another challenge to the stereotype of the passive Southern worker was the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills strike in Atlanta in 1914 and 1915, an event that in some ways was a precursor to the bloody Carolina textile wars of 1929 and 1934. Tired of low wages, hard and unsafe working conditions, overcrowded factory housing, the high cost of living in Atlanta, and the strict antiunionism practiced by mill owner Jacob Elsas, workers went on a prolonged strike that Gary Fink has compared to the IWW’s dramatic “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1917. The “City Too Busy to Hate” was rife with intrigue and conflicting passions in the second decade of the new century. The dominant symbol of New South business progressivism, thanks in part to Henry Grady, Atlanta was also a center of union activity with a higher unionization rate among its workers than in the nation as a whole (12.4 percent in 1920, compared to the national rate of 12.2 percent). Grady had died in 1889, but the Atlanta Constitution remained the “primary organ of New South boosterism,” according to Fink.20 In the spirit of that boosterism, industrial disputes often didn’t get covered. Southern factory workers had contradictory feelings about the changes taking place in their lives. In one sense, the textile mill rescued them from the isolation, loneliness, and economic dead-end that farm life had become. However, many grew to resent the utter dependence industrialism had forced on them, the total control exerted by their new overseers Labor in the Old New South

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over every aspect of their lives. These conflicting feelings reflected the upheaval in the Southern economy as it embraced industrialism and loosened its dependence on agriculture. In Atlanta, anti-Semitism contributed to a fetid atmosphere. Shortly before the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill strike, the city had been up in arms over the 1913 murder and mutilation of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, the daughter of Marietta tenant farmers who had left the farm to work in a factory with their children. Mary worked ten hours a day at twelve cents an hour at a pencil factory managed by Leo Frank, a Jew from New York whose uncle owned controlling interest in the factory. Frank would be charged and convicted of her murder in one of the most notorious trials in the history of the South. In some ways, it was also a trial of Henry Grady’s New South. Scholars today believe that her brutal murder was likely committed by janitor Jim Conley, a self-confessed liar whose courtroom testimony led to Frank’s conviction. In a strange twist of fate in the race-haunted South, an all-white jury believed the black janitor and convicted the New York Jew, who was later abducted from jail and hung by a group of vigilantes from Marietta. The most famous of the Fulton millworkers, “Fiddlin’” John Carson, who would go on to become country music’s first major recording star, penned a tune, “Ballad of Mary Phagan,” that voiced the deep anti-Semitism gripping Atlanta in the 1910s. Many Fulton millworkers likely saw in Jacob Elsas what they had come to hate in Leo Frank. Elsas reacted harshly to the strike at his plant. He evicted strikers from factory housing, hired spies to infiltrate their ranks, and waged a publicity campaign that questioned the morality of strike leaders. The strikers gained the sympathy of local political and religious leaders and even area newspapers, but slumping economic conditions in the textile industry as well as Elsas’s hardnosed defiance ultimately caused the strike to fail. Balladeer Carson provides a good example of how working-class resentment against industrial overseers had spread from the farm and to the factory. Carson, whose career embodied a Southern-style mix of ethnic prejudice and righteous indignation against injustice, voiced that resentment in another of his tunes, “The Farmer,” which he recorded in 1923. The farmer is the man that feeds them all . . . They’ll take him by the hand, lead him through the land Then the merchant he’s the man that gets it all.

Balladeers like Carson were the poets of the early labor movement in the South, filling the same kind of role that the legendary songwriting 28

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organizer Joe Hill did for the IWW. The textile strikes of 1929 and 1934 would also produce poetry and songs like “We Shall Overcome”—later to become the anthem of the civil rights movement—as well as a singing martyr, Ella Mae Wiggins. These strikes were arguably the most dramatic in Southern working-class history. As the labor historian Irving Bernstein has written, they “put in relief the great labor issues that were to absorb the entire nation in the thirties.”21 Millworkers in North Carolina in 1929 labored seventy-two hours a week at fifteen to twenty-five cents an hour. Entire families worked the looms, including children, frequently enduring the dreaded “stretch-out” that forced them toward nearly impossible production levels. They knew they weren’t at the very bottom since blacks were either banned from the mills or worked in the most menial jobs there. They also knew that in every other sense their whiteness brought them nothing. Their absentee bosses lived in the North or in foreign countries like Germany. The bosses of the 1920s used the latest technology and put to practice the theories of Frederick W. Taylor in maximizing the output of their workers with little regard to the impact on workers’ lives. As John Egerton has written, “In the boardrooms of the North, where Yankee money did most of the talking, Republican lenders and Bourbon borrowers made the decisions that perpetuated the colonial status of the South.”22 The revolt against the colonial overseers began at the Harriet Mill in Henderson, North Carolina, on August 4, 1927, a strike by eight hundred workers that ended in defeat by the end of the month. The next major strike took place in April 1929 at the German-owned American Bemberg and American Glanzstoff mills in Elizabethton, Tennessee, both of which enjoyed lucrative ten-year tax exemptions. Women led the strike, which led to a tentative unwritten agreement that was later rejected by top management. Leaders with the United Textile Workers were kidnapped, threatened, and run out of the state. State and local authorities ultimately broke the strike after sending in eight hundred police and deputies at the request and with the financial assistance of company owners. Hundreds of strikers were arrested, and dozens convicted. A thousand workers were blacklisted from working at the firms again. Truly the summer of 1929 was the “long, hot summer” of the Southern labor movement. The earlier skirmishes were a prelude to the landmark battle that took place at the giant Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, in the summer of 1929. Owned by the Rhode Island–based Manville-Jenckes Corporation, the mill employed 3,500 workers under grueling conditions that included the “stretch-out” as well as major wage cuts. The communist-backed National Textile Workers Union sent former Wobbly Fred Beal to organize. The workers went on strike—which the Labor in the Old New South

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AFL opposed—in April 1929, setting the stage for a standoff that pitted workers not only against the company but also the community and, in particular, the Gastonia Gazette, which was relentless in its opposition to the union. “The time is at hand for every American to do his duty,” the newspaper warned after accusing strikers of trying to overthrow the government.23 A mob attacked union headquarters. North Carolina governor O. Max Gardner sent in the National Guard. As with the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills strike, the workers had their minstrel, Ella May Wiggins, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of five who would serenade the families in the tent colony they established after being evicted from company housing. A confrontation occurred June 7 that led to gunfire and the killing of Gastonia police chief O. F. Aderholt. Four other officers and a striker were also shot. Another mob destroyed the tent colony. A court trial of Beal and other strike leaders in August had to be moved to another venue, in part because of the fiery editorials of the Gastonia Gazette. On September 14, Wiggins was shot and killed by vigilantes en route to a meeting of the National Textile Workers Union. “Lord a-mercy, they done shot and killed me” were her much-quoted last words. Some fifty people witnessed the shooting, yet the five men later charged with the crime were all acquitted. Beal and the other strike leaders were convicted, however, and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. As Beal and the others fought in Gastonia, another strike took place at the Baldwin and Clinchfield mills in Marion, North Carolina, where workers decided they’d had enough of twelve-hour work shifts and wages of eight to ten dollars a week, not to mention the stretch-out, unsanitary conditions at the workplace, and humiliating rules such as the requirement that new workers work their first thirty days without pay. Seven strikers were killed when violence broke out between workers and local and state law authorities on October 2, 1929. Other battles were fought in Danville, Virginia, and elsewhere in the South over the next few years, but the final major struggle took place in the General Textile Strike of 1934. An estimated 180,000 Southern millworkers went on strike that year, and they were joined by more than 200,000 non-Southern workers. The nadir was reached when seven millworkers were shot and killed in Honea Path, South Carolina, on September 6, 1934. Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge responded to the strikes in his state by rounding up workers and sending them to prison camps. As with the earlier battles, the bloodshed failed to bring victory to the striking millworkers in 1934. The ignorance, isolation, poverty, intense individualism, and suspiciousness of outsiders of the Southern millworker have been traditionally 30

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cited as key contributors to his failure to organize. Yet, as more recent scholarship shows, these factors don’t take into account his strong sense of family, community, justice. The might and power of the mill owner, “pathologically opposed to collective bargaining,” was the bigger factor in this failure, as Bernstein says. Furthermore, the political establishment, the church, and the press, which “arrayed themselves in almost solid phalanx alongside the mill owners,” played their important roles in making sure unions stayed out of the textile mills.24 Mother Jones, the Irish-born “Miners’ Angel” who fought a half century for coal miners and workers in general, spent many her formative years in the South, campaigning for striking miners from Alabama to what she called “medieval” West Virginia. Some forty-five years before Republican U.S. senator Barry Goldwater labeled Walter Reuther “the most dangerous” man in the nation, a West Virginia prosecutor called Mother Jones “the most dangerous woman in America” because when “she crooks her finger, 20,000 contented men lay down their tools and walk out.”25 Mother Jones, who got her first taste of working-class consciousness living in Memphis with her union activist husband, saw the United Mine Workers rise to become the nation’s leading union by 1920, boasting 500,000 members in an industry workforce of 640,000. By the time of her death in 1930, however, the movement had shriveled to a shell of its former self with only 84,000 members, the victim of overcapacity and slumping prices, but, above all, the belligerently antiunion operators of the Southern coal fields, the local and federal militia, and the thugs, spies, and strike breakers they used to maintain their rule. Of course, the press, as Mother Jones once said, “groveled at the feet” of industry leaders and thus played an important role, too, in keeping workers from organizing. As a symbol of the mineworkers’ struggle, Mother Jones was herself a target of the operators and their minions. Her work on behalf of West Virginia miners during a violent strike in 1912 and 1913 led to a conviction for conspiring to commit murder and twenty-year prison sentence in 1913. Later released at the order of the governor, she went straight to Colorado to fight for miners there. She never let any of it get the best of her. “I’m not afraid of the press or the militia,” she told workers. “I would fight God Almighty himself if he didn’t play square with me.”26 Coal miners took that same spirit into the many labor battles they fought from the time of the Civil War to the Great Depression. They met the same kind of intransigence that textile workers met in the Carolinas. However, due in part to the dynamic leadership of organizers such as Mother Jones and the United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis, they eventually were able to gain a significant foothold after a long and bloody struggle. Labor in the Old New South

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Coal miners had as tough a lot in life as did their counterparts in the cotton mills. They typically earned two dollars a day for their dangerous, backbreaking work. A typical day was twelve hours. They lived in company-owned houses, shopped at company-owned stores, and on Sundays went to company-financed churches, just as Carolina cotton millworkers did. That was the system in the oligarchic South, which resisted both reforms and unions with equal fury. Two tragedies in 1911 provide painful insight into just how different the South was from the rest of the country. The nation experienced one of its most horrible industrial disasters on March 25, 1911, when a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company on New York City’s Lower East Side. The fire killed 146 workers, most of them young Italian or Jewish women still in their teens, who were forced to either jump to their deaths from nine stories up or be consumed by flames. “I learned a new sound—a more horrible sound than description can picture,” the United Press reporter William G. Shepherd wrote in his compelling eyewitness account. “It was the thud of a speeding, living body on a stone sidewalk.”27 After investigators found that the workers had been unable to open locked or jammed doors, a widespread reform movement led to the creation of a city Bureau of Fire Investigation and state Factory Investigation Commission that endorsed tighter codes and restrictions. The movement spread to other states as well. Hardly a ripple was felt in Alabama, however. On April 28, 1911, just two weeks after the Triangle disaster, 128 convict miners, most of them black, lost their lives in an explosion at the Banner coal mine outside Birmingham. A federal investigation indicated that excessive levels of methane gas in the mines were a likely factor. Dismissing such claims, however, was a state investigative commission that put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the miners themselves. Business and political leaders also locked arms to squelch a subsequent effort to end convict leasing in the state. With pro-business Republican presidents in the White House during the decade of the 1920s, unions in the Appalachian coal fields—like unions everywhere—faced an entrenched, government-sanctioned opposition that decimated their ranks. The decade began with bitter and bloody battles in West Virginia, near the Kentucky and Virginia borders. Fifteen people died in Matewan, West Virginia, as a result of a notorious fight between strikers and the local sheriff’s department in August 1921. A nationwide strike followed the next year, but nonunion Southern companies and strike-breaking Southern workers helped cripple it, a pattern that would continue in subsequent strikes during the decade. With the Depression looming over the nation in 1931, another major confronta32

Labor in the Old New South

tion occurred in Harlan County, Kentucky, where four were killed during the so-called Battle of Evarts. It was this battle and the subsequent trial of labor organizers on murder charges that gave Harlan County its reputation as a “dark and bloody ground” and inspired the union anthem “Which Side Are You On?” by Florence Reece, whose husband, Sam, was a union organizer.28 A dramatic change in political leadership in Washington was necessary to revive the struggling labor movement. Franklin Delano Roosevelt provided not only a change but also a revolution that redefined the role of the federal government in dealing with the greatest economic crisis in the nation’s history. Roosevelt began his life in politics as a rather standoffish, somewhat arrogant child of privilege not particularly concerned about social reforms. However, as his longtime labor secretary Frances Perkins once observed, those traits were “washed out of him by life, experience, punishment, and his capacity to grow.”29 It wasn’t only the ravages of poliomyelitis that deepened FDR’s sensibilities. His family on his mother’s side had long-held financial interests in the Kentucky coal fields and specifically in Harlan County. The Battle of Evarts in 1931 showed Roosevelt that “it was people like the Delanos— estate-building, laissez-faire capitalists—who were largely responsible for the plight of what he called ‘the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.’”30 Roosevelt’s election as president in 1932 brought an end to labor’s long decline, and nowhere was the movement’s rejuvenation clearer than in the coal mines and with the rise of the United Mine Workers. Between 1933 and 1935, UMW membership rose from 84,000 to 541,000, including major increases in the South as well as elsewhere in the country.31 Indeed, the union-hostile South was to play an important role in the labor movement in the 1930s. The struggle to organize textile workers in the Carolinas may have failed, but it also put a spotlight on conditions in the industry and region as well as belied the stereotype of the passive Southern worker. An autoworkers’ sit-down strike near Atlanta, Georgia, in 1936 served as a prelude to the historic Flint, Michigan, sit-down strike in 1937 that resulted in General Motors and Chrysler recognizing the United Auto Workers. The most woe-begotten of Southern workers—sharecroppers and tenant farmers—were organized into the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU) in Arkansas in the summer of 1934. The STFU eventually claimed a membership of 25,000 spread across a half dozen Southern states. It led a strike of 5,000 workers in 1935 that brought better wages for the lowest of low-pay workers in the South. Roosevelt’s New Deal juggernaut established the 40-hour work week as federal law and set a minimum wage of 31½ cents an hour. The Wagner Labor in the Old New South

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Act of 1935 firmly established workers’ rights to organize. Roosevelt initially enjoyed the support of Southern politicians, including even the bombastic racist Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi as well as economic and social progressives like Claude Pepper of Florida, Maury Maverick of Texas, and Lister Hill and Hugo Black, both of Alabama. Trouble signs were on the horizon even during his first term, however, as Louisiana “Kingfish” and potential presidential rival Huey P. Long filibustered FDR initiatives such as Social Security. Long’s attacks came from the left—a call for even more radical social policy. By Roosevelt’s second term, the Southern barons on the right—the standard-bearers of what John Egerton calls the South’s “Holy Trinity” of Religion, Business, and White Supremacy—were locking arms against him. Southern pols had been a key but always unlikely part of the Roosevelt coalition, which also included labor leaders, minority groups, small farmers, and the urban poor. These pols represented the Southern oligarchy, not the people at large, and they depended on the rural isolation, religious conservatism, and political passivity of voters in the region to maintain their power. Voter turnout ranged from as low as 10 percent to an average of less than 30 percent in the South. Yet the Southern people clearly liked FDR. He received 75 percent of the Southern vote in the 1936 election. Buoyed by such popular support, Roosevelt went after some of his staunchest critics, launching campaigns against the Byrd machine in Virginia and U.S. senators Walter George of Georgia and “Cotton” Ed Smith of South Carolina. These campaigns failed, however, for the Southerners were too entrenched. At the state level, governors Eugene Talmadge of Georgia and Hugh White of Mississippi charted their own essentially anti–New Deal course through the Depression. In 1936, White pushed through his landmark “Balance Agriculture With Industry” program, an effort to lure industry through tax incentives and promises of low wages and low unionization. The program eventually became a model for the entire South. “The South was squarely in the center of the spreading opposition to the New Deal,” Egerton writes. “Even as they voted for relief and recovery programs, Southern members of Congress saw to it that pay scales remained lower in the South than elsewhere, and lower for blacks than whites—all in the interest of perpetuating the cheap-labor/white supremacy status quo.”32 Roosevelt gained an intimate knowledge of the South and Southerners during his many extended stays at Warm Springs, Georgia, whose mineral waters helped him deal with the ravages of polio. He knew the poverty and sympathized with the struggles of the region he declared to be “the nation’s number one economic problem” in 1938. 34

Labor in the Old New South

Indeed, the South of the 1930s was a feudalistic land of 30 million peasants—9 million of them black—under the yoke of a powerful oligarchy that ruled from Virginia to Texas. V. O. Key once compared these oligarchs to “the Dutch in the East Indies” and “the British in India.”33 More than half of the nation’s workers earning less than 30 cents an hour hailed from the South. The typical Southern worker was paid about $315 a year, just half the national average. It was no coincidence that only 10 percent of Southern workers were unionized in 1940, compared to 21.5 percent nationwide. Roosevelt’s death in 1945 also sounded the death knell of the coalition that had once supported him. Conservative Southern Democrats worked with the new Republican leadership in Congress to pass the antiunion Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, overcoming a veto by President Harry Truman. The act set the stage for the passage of “right-to-work” laws across the South prohibiting the closed shop and making union organizing more difficult. In the 1948 presidential campaign, Southern Democrats bolted further to form the Dixiecrat Party under the ticket of Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Fielding Wright of Mississippi. The new party vowed to wage war against both racial integration and organized labor with equal fervor. Throughout these struggles much of the South’s press and most of its leading intellectuals were either hostile to workers’ rights, unsympathetic, or simply missing in action. Somehow they failed to see the miserable living and working conditions that pushed miners and their families to militancy, conditions that Mother Jones called “medieval” and which included malnutrition and disease, the natural outgrowth of living in unsanitary company shacks whose walls were lined with newspapers to keep out the cold, a poverty and oppression as deep as the nation had ever seen. During the fierce battles between workers and coal operators in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1931, the local newspaper editor and Red Cross administrator Herndon Evans acknowledged that he screened applicants for Red Cross assistance to make sure they weren’t strikers.34 The Appalachian writer Harry M. Caudill said the press was simply a part of the power structure. “The operators, their lawyers and a large segment of the press raised the hysterical cry that the workers were Communists whose demands were written for them in the Kremlin.”35 The typical attitude can be heard in the words of Fred Moore, editor of the Honea Path Chronicle in Honea Path, South Carolina, from 1945 to 1981. Asked by the New York Times writer Peter Applebome about the tragic deaths of seven striking millworkers in his town in 1934, Moore boasted of never mentioning the strike once in his newspaper. “There’s Labor in the Old New South

35

not a lot of unions around here, and there’s not gonna be.”36 As John Egerton has noted, Southern publishers and editors by nature tended to identify with the ruling oligarchy—whether in the coal fields of Kentucky, the cotton fields of Mississippi, or the cotton mills of the Carolinas. “By temperament and status and force of habit, Southern publishers were privileged lords of the press,” he writes in his landmark Speak Now against the Day. “The prevalent tone and substance of Southern news and editorial columns tended to reinforce and confirm, not challenge, the authority of pillar institutions such as the church, the university, the Democratic Party—and, of course, the press itself.”37 When the progressive Southern Conference on Human Welfare took place in Birmingham, Alabama, in November 1938, leading political figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt and U.S. senator Claude Pepper of Florida attended, as well as labor leaders such as Lucy Randolph Mason and H. L. Mitchell. However, prominent journalists Ralph McGill and Virginius Dabney boycotted it because they feared communists would be in attendance. Other “progressive” journalists like Hodding Carter Jr. and W. J. Cash also decided to stay home. Southern workers had few friends among the region’s intelligentsia, even though the 1920s were a period of intellectual ferment in the South as a result of Baltimore scribe H. L. Mencken’s charge that the South was a “Sahara of the Bozart” (Beaux Arts). Nowhere was this ferment stronger than among the so-called Fugitives, also known as the Agrarians, poets and writers like Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom, who were based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and published their manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, in 1930. They, too, protested the industrialized “New South,” but what they called for was a return to the region’s agrarian values and character. Theirs was an essentially conservative, paternalistic revolt with limited sympathy for working-class Southerners whose move from farm to factory hadn’t changed the inherent vulnerability to the whim and will of overseers that they had known in both the Old and the New South. John Egerton noted that these workers had “no investigative reporters” as well as “no government regulators . . . no powerful labor unions” to bring light to or champion their plight.38 Southern editors won Pulitzers in the 1920s and early 1930s for exposing the Ku Klux Klan or corruption in local government. However, with few exceptions, their hard-hitting, progressive-minded journalism didn’t extend to economic inequities and the living conditions of Southern working people. That was largely left to non-Southern writers like Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson, who spent time with textile workers in the Carolinas and coal miners in Kentucky and described their lives in passionate, crusading essays, stories, and novels. 36

Labor in the Old New South

Chapter 3

the cio and operation dixie A “Lamp of Democracy” in the South

Clarice Kidder sits across from me, ladylike, her hair nicely coiffed, her voice soft but clear, a sense of dignity about her. At sixty-eight, she’s a lean woman, a legacy of her childhood as one of nine children in a sharecropping family in the Arkansas Delta. “You eat beans and potatoes seven days a week, you don’t put much meat on your bones,” she explains about the life she later escaped. “We were all skinny.”1 It’s the summer of 2006 and we’re talking in the home of her neighbor, my mother-in-law, in Helena, Arkansas, a once-booming river town that is today a poster child community of Delta poverty and decline. Growing up in a “typical sharecropper” house with no indoor plumbing, no electricity, and only three bedrooms for eleven people, Clarice was in the fields picking cotton before the new wore off her first doll. “At three years of age, you got your first cotton sack. You’d go out and get the cotton first thing in the morning—when it had dew on it—so it’d weigh more. I’d go with Mama. Mine was a twenty-five-pound sack and hers was a onehundred-pound sack. “I’d fill mine up and put it in hers. I remember she would have the baby sleeping on that sack, and she’d be pregnant with the next one.” I’m listening to her and thinking back to a world as far away as the one in the faded black-and-white photos of my long-dead grandfather, a time when sharecroppers worked the land while landowners “furnished” seed, lodging, and lifelong debt. “When you’d go to school, you’d go in overalls and a flannel shirt and brown high-top shoes—I had cardboard in mine because the soles had worn out,” Clarice Kidder recalls. “You’d take your lunch in a brown paper sack. I remember looking at the other kids and they would have good clothes. They would bring light bread and you would bring biscuits, and you’d realize something ain’t even. You’re not

37

ashamed, but many times I’d throw my lunch away because I didn’t want them to see me eating biscuits and salt-meat. Of course, if they made fun of you, you were tough enough to take care of yourself. . . . I could just about beat up any boy in school.” Clarice Kidder’s family offers a good illustration of the obstacles that faced labor organizers in the South during the first half of the twentieth century. While she and other family members may have been imbued with a sense of “something ain’t even” in their world, the forces arrayed against change—poverty, rural isolation, inadequate education, an entrenched power structure—made it difficult for them to envision a different kind of life or society. Thus, efforts to bring such Southerners together to better their lot were often doomed. Yet the South has always been a place for dreamers and visionaries. Whether prompted by religious beliefs or simply a sense of social justice, they led marches, protests, and strikes that shook the South between the late 1930s and early 1950s. They often failed, but their efforts ultimately nourished the soil that would in time produce the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Change would come, even if many of these earlier warriors didn’t live to see it. Dorothy Day, the radical journalist and cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement, once talked about the difference between planting and harvesting in the cause for social justice. “Unless the seed fall into the earth and die, there is no harvest. And why must we see results? Our work is to sow. Another generation will be reaping the harvest.”2 This chapter provides a glimpse of the South during the time when the seeds of social justice were planted. It begins with the story of a Southern woman much different from Clarice Kidder, a woman born into a family of social status on the other side of the South. Yet all her life she was driven by a vision to better the lot of people like Clarice Kidder’s family. Lucy Randolph Mason hardly looked the part of key labor operative for what E. H. “Boss” Crump of Memphis once called the “nigger-loving communist” Congress of Industrial Organizations.3 The white-haired, bespectacled spinster daughter of an Episcopalian minister, prim and proper in her dark, conservative suits, was the quintessential Virginia aristocrat. Her lineage included eighteenth-century statesman George Mason, author of the model for the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, as well as the first U.S. Supreme Court chief justice, John Marshall, and, yes, Confederate general Robert E. Lee, too. Yet “Miss Lucy” was chosen by top CIO leaders John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman to be their “troubleshooter and roving ambassador” in the union-hostile South, first in 1937 when she was fifty-five and the 38

The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

fledgling CIO made its first concerted effort to organize millions of textile, tobacco, and other industrial workers in the South. She was sixty-four when the CIO launched its last major effort, the historic campaign known as “Operation Dixie.”4 “Many a tough sheriff in a small town that had a CIO organizer in jail looked up to see a small lady in a dark suit, wearing a little white-trimmed black hat on gray hair, come smiling into his office,” Atlanta Constitution editor and columnist Ralph McGill wrote in his autobiography, The South and the Southerner. “Some, legend has it, swallowed their cuds of chewing tobacco on hearing that she was with the CIO and had come to talk about civil rights.”5 Mason, a journalist and pamphleteer as well as an organizer, was like the organization she represented: a mixture of wide-eyed idealism and tough, streetwise realism. The CIO in 1937 was still a division within the more conservative, trade union-oriented American Federation of Labor. It had formed two years earlier to broaden the labor movement to include automobile, steel, and other mass-production industries. The mid-1930s were dramatic times in the movement—including the historic sit-down strikes by United Auto Workers members at General Motors in Flint, Michigan, in 1936 and 1937, and the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel Company in Chicago. In 1938, the CIO finally split from the AFL and became an independent federation under the leadership of John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers. Building on ideas of earlier groups such as the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World, the CIO incorporated a vision of “one big union” that included the unskilled and mass production workers as well as the craft unionists who were the heart and soul of the AFL. What gave birth to the CIO was a bloody, no-holds-barred fistfight on the floor of the AFL’s convention in Atlantic City in October 1935. Frustrated by the AFL leadership’s refusal to adopt his vision of a broader, more inclusive movement, the UMW president Lewis physically confronted staunch conservative William L. Hutcheson of the Carpenters’ Brotherhood during a heated debate. Hutcheson called Lewis a “bastard,” and the two broke into a fight that sent both men sprawling on the floor amid chairs and tables and shocked delegates.6 The hulking Hutcheson got up and left the scene with a bloody nose, while the scrappy, barrelchested, bushy-browed, Shakespeare-quoting UMW leader straightened his tie and lit up his cigar. Hutcheson biographer Maxwell C. Raddock said Lewis’s attack was “premeditated and deliberate” and hardly a spontaneous emotional reaction to anything said that day: “The blow Lewis landed on Hutcheson’s jaw was timed with the careful precision of a choreographer pirouetting his dancing partner on stage.”7 The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

39

Hutcheson actually won the day as the AFL delegates voted overwhelmingly to reject Lewis’s call to open membership to millions of unorganized industrial workers. However, on the day after the convention, Lewis met with David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Philip Murray of the United Mine Workers, Max Zaritsky of the Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers, Charles P. Howard of the Typographical Workers, Tom McMahon of the Textile Workers, and others and formed the Committee for Industrial Organization, which for the time being remained within the AFL but which three years later would break free and become the independent Congress of Industrial Organizations. “John L. Lewis had lost the battle, but not the war,” wrote Jean Gould and Lorena Hickok in their biography of Walter Reuther, the legendary leader of the United Auto Workers and also the CIO in its last years as an independent organization. “His CIO was destined to become the most militant and effective labor organization in the country. Without its early leadership and help, millions of workmen in automobiles, steel, and other mass-production industries probably would have been delayed for years in building the unions they so badly wanted and needed.”8 Lewis said the CIO’s goal was to “encourage and promote organization of the workers in the mass production and unorganized industries of the nation.”9 The organization was quickly accused by the AFL’s executive council, however, of “fostering, maintaining and supporting . . . insurrection.”10 By 1937 the CIO claimed a membership of 3.7 million—exceeding not only its Knights of Labor ancestors but also the non-CIO-affiliated AFL unions—and was already showing an intense interest in the South. One of its charter members, Tom McMahon, had worked hard to organize workers in the Southern textile industry, which in 1937 reported only one written union contract. In the Southern campaign it launched that same year, the CIO spent $2 million to organize workers in textiles and other industries. “The 1937 drive was undoubtedly the best-planned textile organizing campaign ever undertaken,” wrote former U.S. secretary of labor F. Ray Marshall in his landmark history, Labor in the South. In the campaign, CIO leaders agreed to try first to establish credibility and “respectability” by avoiding strikes and other confrontational measures but also to “project an image of strength and confidence in order to overcome the textile workers’ fears that the union was too weak to oppose management successfully.”11 The task was formidable: organizing a South locked within a Jim Crow racial caste system, dominated by agriculture and the powerful interests

40

The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

that controlled agriculture, and haunted by a religious fundamentalism that instilled fatalism and passivity before the political powers-that-be. The memories of the dismal failures of efforts to organize textile workers in Honea Path, South Carolina, Gastonia, North Carolina, and elsewhere in the late 1920s and early 1930s were painfully fresh. The textile strikes in 1934 in Georgia even led anti–New Deal governor Eugene “Wild Man from Sugar Creek” Talmadge to make a declaration of martial law and establish barbed-wire “concentration camps” for strikers.12 Lucy Randolph Mason, deeply religious and convinced that social justice was central to the Christian faith, set up headquarters in Atlanta and from there traveled across the region as an evangelist for organized labor. “Even with my intimate knowledge of the South, I did not know of the misunderstanding and hostility to the CIO and TWOC (Textile Workers Organizing Committee) in this section,” she wrote John L. Lewis.13 “Driving thousands of miles a year in her black Chevrolet coupe, she prepared the way for organizers to land safely in countless small towns and mill villages,” John Egerton wrote. “She could converse as easily with preachers, editors, sheriffs, and mill workers as with exploited workers, strikers, and the unemployed.”14 She was surprised by intense opposition she often faced in the press. She complained she couldn’t find a single editor in Georgia who could be trusted not to work against her and the CIO. “I do not know of a state in the South so devoid of a progressive paper as Georgia.” She blamed the press for a “conspiracy of silence” in the denial of basic human rights rampant in the “Fascist” South, which was employing its “domination of the Negro” as a model to “repeat the pattern for organized labor.”15 The virulent antilabor attitudes within Southern newsrooms at the time can be seen in the extreme in the writings of Major Fred Sullens, editor of the Jackson Daily News in Jackson, Mississippi. Sullens called for “stern methods of suppression” during the auto and steel strikes of 1937, and in 1940 he proclaimed that John L. Lewis was “a Communist in principle if not by profession” and “the difference between CIOism and Communism is exactly no difference at all.”16 Occasionally, Lucy Mason succeeded in finding a sympathetic ear. Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh (North Carolina) News & Observer, was an example. Another was Grover Hall of the Montgomery Advertiser. However, for the most part, even such Southern “liberals” as Virginius Dabney, editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, had difficulty embracing organized labor, particularly in its more activist manifestation as the CIO. In his biography of Mason, John A. Salmond wrote that Mason and fellow Virginian Dabney had been “old friend(s)” but he found her labor activism

The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

41

“impossible to take.”17 Although Dabney would later defend her against attacks that she was disloyal to her Southern ancestors, the journalist felt she was too extreme in her support of labor. Mason found most religious leaders equally as hostile. Many of them dependent financially on the mill owners, they preached a paternalism that gave God dominion over heaven and the mill owner dominion over the earthly life of his workers. Their attitude reflected a Calvinistic outlook that had been preached from Southern pulpits since before the Civil War. Just as it had served the interests of the plantation owners before the war, it now served the interests of the mill owners and other captains of industry. “I myself heard more or less definitely expressed in North Carolina . . . the conviction that God has called one man to be rich and master, another to be poor and servant, and that men did well to accept what had been given them,” W. J. Cash wrote in his 1941 classic The Mind of the South. “Heaven apportions its rewards in exact relationship to the merit and goodness of the recipient . . . both the mill-owners and their workmen were already getting what they deserved.” The very idea of unions and workers united together to take a stand for their rights was a violation of the deeply held Southern conviction “of the moral right, now of the prescriptive right, of the captains of the upper orders to tell the people what to do and think.”18 Mason wrote hundreds of letters to ministers across the region, visited their homes, churches, and councils. Some confessed that their negative impressions of the CIO and unions in general were simply due to what they read in the newspapers. She gained ground with these. Others, however, were like the minister she encountered in 1946 during the CIO’s “Operation Dixie” campaign. “Preacher Jones” was a mill village minister who declared from the pulpit that CIO members were bound for hell and that his congregation would have to “decide between the church and the union.”19 In her autobiography To Win These Rights, Mason recalls dramatically her personal meeting with Preacher Jones: The preacher dropped his bull-like head and hunching forward said to me: “You don’t believe in no kind of religion—you believe in a social religion and that ain’t Christianity . . . .” I, too, leaned forward and asked earnestly, but politely: “Then you don’t believe in the teachings of Jesus? . . . You can’t believe in what Jesus taught if you do not have a social religion. His whole life, His teachings, and His death were all part of a great social religion. Jesus said the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself was second only to the commandment to love God with all one’s heart, mind and soul.”20

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The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

Despite some initial successes, the CIO’s 1937 campaign ultimately faltered as resistance among employers in the South stiffened, particularly in the wake of New Deal agencies and measures that pressured them to raise wages like the Works Progress Administration, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, and the short-lived National Industrial Recovery Act. According to the economist Gavin Wright, Southerners accounted for more than half the U.S. workers making less than 30 cents an hour in 1939, the year the federal government established a new minimum wage of 31½ cents an hour. Furthermore, WPA jobs were paying twice the wages offered on most Southern farms.21 Labor organizers and union sympathizers were kidnapped and beaten by mobs and vigilantes as the press, church, and political establishment stood by. Organizers were jailed and run out of town by local sheriffs and police. Some, such as Memphis dockworker and union activist Robert Cotton in 1941, mysteriously disappeared and were never heard from again. Many, like Cotton, were black. Local law enforcement refused to pursue the cases. Memphis, Tennessee, was particularly dangerous territory for CIO organizers. E. H. “Boss” Crump ruled the city with such an iron fist that he became the power broker for the entire state of Tennessee during a long career that stretched from his first election as mayor in 1909 to his death in 1954. While relatively tolerant of the conservative AFL, Crump despised the CIO. Crump’s city, a violent, rough-and-tumble river town with a murder rate seven times the national average when he took over, remained during his rule a place that “was not safe for a CIO representative,” Lucy Randolph Mason once wrote. “Organizers from outside who were bold enough to carry the union message to unorganized workers in Memphis paid for it dearly.”22 The CIO’s southern campaign in 1937 bore fruit, however. Some 20 percent of the textile industry’s 350,000 industry workers in the South were organized by 1939. Perhaps more important, the campaign proved the CIO’s commitment to organizing blacks as well as whites. This goal reflected realism as well as idealism. For example, 12,000 of Alabama’s 22,000 coal miners in 1935 were black. Similar proportions could be found in the state’s iron, iron ore, and steel industries as well. In resolutions adopted at its first convention in 1938, the CIO declared its goal “to bring about the effective organization of the working men and women of America regardless of race, creed, color or nationality.”23 “CIO policy recognized no racial boundaries,” wrote labor historian Salmond in the biography Miss Lucy of the CIO, “and its organizers moved aggressively to cut through lines of prejudice and fear on both sides in order to bring black workers into its swelling ranks. . . . Given the region’s The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

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unique social structure, the problems confronting southern organizers were extraordinarily difficult.”24 The CIO’s 1937 venture into the South wasn’t without precedent. The AFL had launched southern organizing campaigns as early as the 1890s, again in the 1920s, and once more in 1930. The region’s power elite resisted these efforts with the intransigence and skill of Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson of the Confederacy in the early years of the Civil War. However, the war for social justice in the South didn’t always constitute an invasion from outside. The seeds of a modern-day movement not only for workers’ rights but also for racial and other human rights were planted by Southerners themselves with the so-called Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, in 1932, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in Tyronza, Arkansas, in 1934, and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1938. Once lambasted by fiery evangelist Billy Sunday as a “cancer” that was “trying to create a world revolution for the benefit of red Russia and communistic ideals,” Highlander was born humbly enough with the decision of a wealthy-but-progressive Memphis belle named Lilian Johnson to lease a small school and two hundred acres of land in Monteagle to seminarian Myles Horton, the son of sharecroppers, and his friend Don West, the son of Georgia mountain farmers.25 As a student at the Union Theological Seminary, Horton learned at the feet of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, philosopher John Dewey, and social reformer Jane Addams. Visits to the famous folk schools of Denmark imbued him with a sense of mission in his own U.S. South. West, also a student of theology and the Danish schools, would leave Highlander after just six months and go on to cut a somewhat dashing figure in the Southern underground as a motorcycle-driving radical poet and “phantom revolutionary,” in the words of historian John Egerton.26 At Highlander, however, the two men envisioned a school in poverty-stricken Grundy County and east Tennessee that would train poor Southerners to be more in control of their own lives and thus help lay the foundation for a new and better South. In his own description of the school for the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Horton said he and West worked “to develop leadership for democracy in labor unions and community organizations struggling for justice and social change.”27 Horton and West were driven by a Christian vision similar to that of Lucy Randolph Mason—and quite in contrast to the highly individualistic, Calvinist fundamentalism of “Preacher Jones.” However, the Highlander founders’ Christianity was also socialistic in its root and this would contribute to the school’s troubles. 44

The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

Communism and socialism were polarizing terms in the 1930s. To many white Southerners, they were terms that incorporated direct challenges to the racial status quo in the region. The tone for the decade was set in the 1931 “Scottsboro Boys” case, in which nine young black men were accused of raping two white women aboard a Southern Railway freight train in Alabama. Defended in part by Communist Party members, five of the nine eventually served long prison terms despite what historians consider bogus evidence. The case became an indictment of the racist South to outsiders while rankling many Southerners as yet another reason to circle the wagons. Highlander courageously came into being in such a climate with an early and clear mission to support organized labor. In the year of its founding, 1932, Horton was arrested and called a “Communist” in the Knoxville newspaper for his work helping striking miners at the Fentress Coal Company in the company town of Wilder, Tennessee. Highlander essentially became a labor school, training organizers and offering courses, seminars, and workshops in labor history and writing. It frequently allied itself with striking miners and mill workers, and in 1937 was awarded a contract from the CIO as the organization’s official labor school. It won tax-exempt status from the federal government the same year. Over the next two decades, Highlander would attract staffers like James Dombrowski, a Tampa, Florida, native, fellow Christian-socialist seminarian, and veteran activist of the 1929 textile strikes, as well as students such as Rosa Parks, whose heroic refusal to go to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 would galvanize the civil rights movement. Among the lecturers who came to speak at Highlander was Martin Luther King Jr. Noted activists Aubrey Williams and Virginia Durr were key supporters. Lucy Randolph Mason served on the organization’s executive council. However, Highlander always generated controversy, and it was vilified in the Tennessee press. The media scholar Frank Durham has charted the decades-long campaign against Highlander that was waged in the Nashville Tennessean, the Knoxville News-Sentinel, the Knoxville Journal, the Chattanooga Times, and other publications. The Tennessean ran a six-day series on Highlander in October 1939 that “included fabricated reportage and accusations of Communist activity (that) would prove to be a watershed event for the widespread Southern perception of Highlander as a ‘center of communism.’” The series began with this page-one Sunday headline: “Using Grundy County as Laboratory, School Spreads Communist Doctrines in State.”28 Such coverage contributed to intense public pressure on the organization. Amid the anticommunist purges of the late 1940s, the CIO withdrew The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

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its support of Highlander. U.S. senator James O. Eastland, DemocratMississippi, conducted hearings in 1954 to determine whether Highlander leaders were part of a network of communist subversive activity in the South. The organization lost its tax-exempt status in 1957, the same year Eastland resumed more hearings into Highlander. The state of Tennessee began its own investigation in 1959 and in 1960 shut the school down on unrelated minor charges that it had sold alcohol illegally and made mistakes in the initial 1932 filing of its charter. In order to survive, Highlander reinvented itself in 1962 as a research center and relocated to New Market, Tennessee, north of Knoxville, where it devoted its energies to the civil rights movement, student activism, and working with the poor in Appalachia. It continues to exist today. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared in 1938—the year Clarice Kidder was born—that “it is my conviction that the South presents right now the nation’s number one economic problem,” one of the places in the South that he likely had in mind was the woe-begotten Arkansas Delta, the birthplace of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union.29 Roosevelt’s famous declaration was a response to the 1938 report of the President’s Commission on the Economic Conditions of the South, which deplored the living and working conditions of the South’s nearly two million tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Some estimates of the South’s tenant farm population range as high as ten million but also include family members. Largely an outgrowth of a post–Civil War South bereft of slaves to do the hard work of planting, plowing, and picking, tenant farming and sharecropping were part of a feudal system of peonage that linked the “New South” to such societies as Czarist Russia and Medieval Europe. The tenant farmer and sharecropper both worked land that didn’t belong to them. The tenant farmer paid rent for the land—either in cash or out of his harvest—but otherwise was responsible for his own needs. The sharecropper was a tenant farmer much more dependent on and under the control of the landlord, who took a share of the sharecropper’s harvest in exchange for providing everything from hoe to seed as well as a place to live and food to eat. Both tenant farmer and sharecropper, bound to debt, land, and landowner, constituted essentially a peasant class. According to the labor historian F. Ray Marshall, more than half the cropland in the South was harvested by tenant farmers and sharecroppers at the dawn of the Great Depression.30 Sixty-six percent of tenant farmers and 50 percent of sharecroppers were white. “The tenant farmer in the South is trying to hold to a spinning world,” the novelist and journalist Erskine Caldwell wrote in 1937. “He knows he can’t buy land of his own from the profits of sharecropping. He knows just 46

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as well that he cannot save until he earns, and that he cannot earn much more than a bare living from sterile, barren land. He does well, under the circumstances, to hold on at all.”31 Media attention—most of it national—made the living and working conditions of these farmers a national scandal. These conditions were highlighted in a “March of Time” film documentary and in investigative newspaper articles and commentary in the New York Times as well as closer-to-home newspapers such as the Montgomery Advertiser and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “Depressions and booms, good times and bad times have affected them (tenant farmers) little—nor has the advance of civilization,” reported the Montgomery Advertiser, under the enlightened editorship of Pulitzer Prize–winning Grover C. Hall Sr. from 1926 to 1941. “Poverty, disease, illiteracy have been their companions.”32 The books of Erskine Caldwell and the photography of Margaret Bourke-White and Dorothea Lange also vividly depicted the lives of Southern tenant farmers and sharecroppers working their depleted, eroded soil. Caldwell and Bourke-White’s 1937 book You Have Seen Their Faces became a landmark—and controversial, given Caldwell’s use of fictional quotes with the photographs—literary event that paved the way to other classic, documentary-style works such as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans in 1941. In the book, Caldwell, world famous for his novels Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre, described a forty-seven-year-old Georgia sharecropper named John Sanford who tried to manage a household of ten people in a four-room farmhouse on a twenty-acre farm. “Three times a day the family eats cornbread and molasses,” Caldwell wrote. “Sanford has never made any money. . . . He has sharecropped for twenty-seven years, on seven or eight tenant farms, but there has hardly ever been enough to buy food and clothes for the family. He raises four acres of corn each year, half of it going to the landlord, and half being ground into meal to make the cornbread with.”33 Nowhere were the tenant farmers more destitute than in the Arkansas Delta. When Virginia-born social activist Howard Kester, author of The Plight of the Share-Cropper, traveled to the region, he found people “clothed in rags as soon as they came into the world and (who) remained in them until they left it.”34 Sharecropping families were crowded into wooden shotgun shacks with no plumbing and sometimes not even an outhouse. Kester biographer Robert F. Martin said the social reformer found a people so downtrodden and half-starved that they had to scour the woods and creek beds for snakes and wild roots to eat and firewood to keep warm and use for cooking. Kester once shared a meal at a sharecropper home The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

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and “when the food was served, he recognized the meat placed before him as dog food. Realizing that his host was offering the best he had and not wishing to embarrass or offend him, he ate it.”35 Tenant farming contributed to racial antagonism even though the conditions of both races were equally deplorable. The white landlords often preferred leasing to blacks rather than whites. “The landowner in the rich plantation country wants a man who can be subjected to his will by means of fear and intimidation,” Caldwell wrote in You Have Seen Their Faces. “The Negro tenant farmer is a descendant of the slave. . . . Every white face he sees is a reminder of his brother’s mutilation, burning, and death at the stake. He has no recourse at law, because he is denied the right of trial before his peers. The Negro tenant on a plantation is still a slave.”36 With his own frequent displacement off the plantation and “into the eroded and depleted hill country,” the white tenant farmer grew resentful and bitter. “In a land that has long gloried in the supremacy of the white race, he directed his resentment against the black man,” Caldwell continued. “He became bestial. He released his pent-up emotions by lynching the black man in order to witness the mental and physical suffering of another human being.”37 Caldwell’s John Sanford himself felt resentment against black sharecroppers. “He wanted to know why it was that a landlord would give a Negro sharecropper the best land, taking it away from a white sharecropper if necessary. He wanted to know, finally, why all the white sharecroppers in the country did not get together and run all the Negroes out.”38 Proving that the road to hell can indeed be paved with good intentions, the Roosevelt administration made an earnest effort to alleviate conditions on the farm with the passage of the Agriculture Adjustment Act (AAA) in 1933. The result, however, was more misery for tenant farmers and ultimately the creation of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. Under this act, the federal government sought to raise cotton prices by actually paying farmers to idle as much as one-fourth of their crop. The inducement would be federal payments set according to the projected yields on each acre. Although intended to increase income for tenant farmers as well as landowners, the AAA failed to monitor how federal checks were distributed and who was in control of the distribution. Landlords used loopholes in the legislation to direct the payments to themselves while evicting tenants no longer needed to farm idle land. Many tenant farmers were replaced by wage laborers who had no claim to payments under the provisions of the AAA. In this way, the AAA—along with growing mechanization on the farm—actually contributed to the eventual decline of tenant farming. 48

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Out of the deepening desperation in the lives of tenant farmers and sharecroppers was born the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in Tyronza, Arkansas, in July 1934, when sharecropper-turned-socialist H. L. Mitchell and politically minded gas station operator Clay East met with a racially mixed group of recently evicted tenant farmers and decided they needed to organize. Mitchell and East wanted an organization that was socialist—as espoused in the works of Upton Sinclair, Jack London, and Oskar Ameringer—and biracial. They weren’t the first to see the need or the opportunity for organized labor in such desperate conditions. As early as 1928, the communist World Congress of the Comintern called for a concentrated effort to recruit workers in the U.S. South, particularly in the so-called Black Belt regions that include the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta. A result of that call was the Sharecroppers’ Union of Alabama in 1931, which tried to link with the STFU in a general strike in 1935. This was the first of many efforts by the communists to absorb or take over the STFU. Backed by Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others, the STFU took part in the 1935 general strike. STFU strikers marched, sang the union anthem “We Shall Not Be Moved,” faced down gun-toting “night riders” and other vigilantes, red-faced sheriffs, and angry preachers, and succeeded in nearly completely shutting down farm work in several Arkansas counties. Several landlords finally agreed to wage hikes, and the STFU pronounced it a victory. Strikes the next year provoked again a sharp and violent reaction. Strikers were beaten and even killed, and government troops were called in to end the confrontation. Still, by 1937, the STFU had a membership of over thirty thousand—it claimed as many as fifty thousand—in Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, and elsewhere. In her evocative 1993 essay on STFU organizer Myrtle Lawrence, the historian Elizabeth Anne Payne described the intense religious fervor that characterized union meetings in the late 1930s. Sixty percent of STFU organizers were Baptist preachers, she said. “By the time Myrtle joined in 1936, the STFU’s meetings and organizational life had come to resemble a southern evangelical revival more than a labor organization. Meetings followed the pattern of religious revivals with fiery sermons, passionate exhortations, and emotional hymns. Women . . . gave testimony about the power of the STFU in Holiness style, witnessing that the Holy Spirit could instantly transform lives through the union.”39 The STFU was a “quasi-religious movement through which thousands of people, as families, protested what they perceived as government’s participation in breaking the covenant between those who owned the land and those who worked it.”40 In this and other ways, the STFU was in The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

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clear violation of key tenets in Marxist philosophy. The strong religious convictions and sense of family among STFU members are rejected in classic Marxism. Furthermore, these tenant farmers and sharecroppers were essentially rural peasants—the lowest of the low—and not the urban proletariat envisioned by Marx as the vanguard of the revolution. “It is the wage-workers who are destined to be the dynamic political actors in the maturity and in the decline of capitalism,” the sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote in The Marxists. “Intellectually, that is the heart of Marxism.”41 Ironically, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and especially the communist victory in China in 1949 were both essentially peasant revolutions. Still, the communists had their eye on the STFU from the outset, seeking to establish influence directly or indirectly through such organizations as the radical Commonwealth Labor College in Mena, Arkansas, a labor school that flew the hammer and sickle over its campus and whose alumni included later arch-segregationist Arkansas governor Orval Faubus. In 1937, Mitchell’s desire to see the STFU become part of the ascendant CIO overcame his inherent skepticism about communism. After losing an effort to win an independent affiliation within the CIO, Mitchell agreed to allow his union to become part of the CIO-affiliatedbut-communist-led United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA). This alienated key supporters like Howard Kester. Subsequent moves by communist leaders to make fundamental changes within the STFU as well as sow divisions between black and white members—troubled Mitchell so much that he led his union back out of UCAPAWA and the CIO just two years later. After an unsuccessful attempt to join the AFL in 1940, the STFU succeeded in affiliating with the comparatively conservative organization in 1946 as the National Farm Labor Union. In its new manifestation, the union would do groundbreaking work in helping migrant workers in California and in the Northeast. However, its dynamic role in the Southern labor movement had largely come to an end. Birmingham, Alabama, the “Pittsburgh” of the South in the 1930s, was the perfect setting for a regionwide meeting of liberals and radicals to assess the report from the Roosevelt administration on economic conditions in the South and the president’s assertion that the South was “the nation’s Number 1 economic problem.” By Southern standards, the city was large—a half million population—and it had long claimed to be the region’s industrial center, home to steel mills, coal mines, furnaces, and plants. Built out of farmland in the years after the Civil War, Birmingham was a brawling, blue-collar city run by the “Big Mules” of the steel, coal, railroad, and pig iron industries, men who had grown rich with the help of the state’s convict leasing system and other forms of cheap labor. 50

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The city’s potential to become a true “Pittsburgh” or even to live up to its namesake in England, however, was never fully realized. Northern steel magnates such as Andrew Carnegie in the late 1800s had recognized Birmingham as a threat to their own interests and thus forced railroad companies to use the “Pittsburgh-plus” system of charging higher rates to Southerners than to Northerners in transporting steel. In this and other ways, the city retained a colonial status. Many of its “Big Mules” were actually absentee landlords and thus more interested in exploitation than local development or progress. Nowhere in the South was the labor movement stronger. Birmingham was even home to a communist newspaper, Southern Worker. The United Mine Workers boasted close to twenty thousand members in Birmingham and central/northern Alabama. Half of the city’s more than one thousand cast-iron workers—70 percent of them black—were unionized. However, when the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers tried to organize the eight thousand ore workers—most of them black—in Birmingham in 1933 and 1934, it was met with violent resistance. As F. Ray Marshall reported in his landmark Labor in the South, “two Negro strikers were killed, many others were injured, and Negro homes were bombed or burned.”42 The Republic Steel plant in Birmingham began firing union activists in 1934 when workers there voted 281-to-8 to join the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. What followed was a three-year strike marked by violence and intimidation. Into this picture stepped a legendary figure in the Southern labor movement, Joe Gelders. A physicist, college professor, songwriter, labor activist, and alleged communist, Gelders threw himself into the fray, accusing Republic Steel not only of framing union members but also of playing a role in beatings and other crimes. He even penned a union song, “The Ballad of John Catchings,” about a real-life iron and steel worker who spent months in jail on an unsubstantiated charge of intent to murder. The song would later be among the ballads in a 1977 album by noted labor folk singer Joe Glazer. Gelders, Jewish, scion of an elite Birmingham family as well as a professor at the University of Alabama, left Birmingham for New York for a while but then returned to serve as the Southern secretary of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. After Gelders’s return, an incident occurred that would affect the rest of his life. On September 23, 1936, Gelders was kidnapped by three men who stripped, beat, and flogged him mercilessly, causing permanent damage to his chest area. Newspapers across the state strongly condemned the attackers, and the governor offered a reward for their arrests, but no one ever paid for the crime. The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

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While Gelders’s injuries would eventually contribute to his death at the relatively young age of fifty-two in 1950, he would still play a crucial role in the labor movement in the South by helping to organize the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in 1938. Enraged by what he had experienced personally and what John Catchings and other workers had suffered at the hands of the “Big Mules,” Gelder proposed to his friend and fellow labor activist Lucy Randolph Mason the idea of a conference that would bring together the South’s liberals and radicals to address the civil liberties of workers and all Southerners as well as take up the challenge in FDR’s statement that the South was “the nation’s number one economic problem.” Using her personal connections with the First Lady, Mason arranged a meeting between Gelders and the president and his wife. The Roosevelts endorsed the idea, and Gelders returned to Birmingham to lay the foundation for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. The conference was convened on November 20, 1938, at Birmingham’s municipal auditorium. It was a unique gathering that sought to engage Southern intellectuals, activists, and political leaders not only on race and social inequalities but also on the horrific conditions of Southern workers. As John Egerton described the first session, “upwards of fifteen hundred delegates from thirteen states, progressive sons and daughters of the Mother South” came together, some “dressed as if for church or the theater,” others “in their ill-fitting Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes,” and still others in “simple print dresses and faded bib overalls and brogans.”43 They included both white and black. The list of participants was impressive. Eleanor Roosevelt came. So did Alabama governor Bibb Graves. U.S. Supreme Court justice Hugo Black was there, and so were U.S. senators John H. Bankhead and Lister Hill of Alabama and Claude Pepper of Florida. South Carolina governorelect Burnet R. Maybank and former Texas congressman Maury Maverick came. Barry Bingham and Mark Ethridge of the Louisville Courier-Journal came, as well as noted journalist and Birmingham native John Temple Graves. Of course, labor and social activists came—Lucy Randolph Mason, H. L. Mitchell, Howard Kester, Myles Horton, Jim Dombrowski, Virginia Durr, Mollie Dowd of the Women’s Trade Union League, Manuel Garcia of the Cigar Makers Union in Tampa, Florida. Even noted scholars like C. Vann Woodward and Gunnar Myrdal were there. The major black institutions were represented by the likes of F. D. Patterson of Tuskegee and Charles S. Johnson of Fisk. Mason and others made sure the CIO was a major and active force within the sessions and that the plight of the Southern worker was central to the conference’s mission. 52

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As the discussions got underway on topics ranging from farm tenancy to the poll tax, the conference received full coverage in the Birmingham newspapers and “favorable editorial comment as well,” Egerton wrote. “Like the delegates themselves, the papers seemed to take the Report on Economic Conditions of the South as an accurate summary that called for a constructive and cooperative response from within the region.”44 The wide-ranging issues and diverse participants encouraged Lucy Randolph Mason, who later had this to say in a letter to North Carolina educator and first conference chairman Frank Graham: “For years I have known that the South cannot be saved by its middle class liberals alone, that they must make common cause with labor, the dispossessed on the land and the Negro. At last we have had a conference considering human welfare which combined all of these elements. . . . This is the basis of progress in democracy, economic justice and social values in the South.”45 The discussions grew heated, however, as speakers attacked big business, “class warfare,” colonialism, racial inequalities, the U.S. House for Un-American Activities Committee, and the failures of the press.46 These stands as well as the racial integration in the early sessions were bound to provoke a reaction, and they did. Birmingham police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, later to become infamous in the 1963 fire-hosing of civil rights activists, stepped in to enforce the city’s segregation laws after the first two integrated sessions of the SCHW. “Negroes and whites would not segregate together,” Connor announced in a famous malaproprism.47 Conference participants bowed to the local laws but also vowed that future meetings of the SCHW would be integrated. The racial diversity of the sessions prompted the Raleigh (North Carolina) News & Observer to call the conference a “tragic mistake” that was bound “to divide the South.”48 However, the role of radicals like Joe Gelders and the suspicion of communist involvement proved even greater hurdles for the SCHW. Many of the region’s most progressive and award-winning journalists opted not to attend because of such fears. Prominent names missing from the list of attendees included Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, Virginius Dabney of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Hodding Carter of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, Gerald W. Johnson, W. J. Cash, and Lillian Smith. Activists like Howard Kester and Francis Pickens Miller of the Southern Policy Committee, a think-tank devoted to issues affecting the South, had mixed feelings about the conference. “Who is in control of this conference?” a worried Miller asked Kester in a letter.49 As the conference continued its meetings over the following years, divisions arose. Conference leaders split over the issue of whether to condemn the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland. Yet, through the efforts The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

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of Lucy Randolph Mason, the SCHW joined with the CIO in supporting Roosevelt’s successful bid for a fourth term in 1944. As the war came to an end and the roots of a new cold war began to take hold, the SCHW came increasingly under the scrutiny of anticommunists and Southern conservatives of all stripes. Theodore Bilbo, the notorious racist U.S. senator from Mississippi, characterized in the extreme many of the attitudes that would finally bring an end to the work of the SCHW. The SCHW, Bilbo said two years before its demise in 1948, was an “un-American, negro social equality, communistic, mongrel outfit.”50 In 1946, the SCHW would shift its educational wing into the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), leaving the SCHW to focus on political activities. Bowing to pressures to purge itself of communist influence, the CIO would end its relationship with the SCHW in 1946. It was a bitter breakup in which the director of the CIO’s “Operation Dixie,” Van Bittner, would attack the SCHW as an organization “living off the CIO.”51 The CIO had been the key financial backer of SCHW activities. Mason would cut her own ties to the SCHW the next year. The conference finally disbanded altogether in November 1948, its ten-year anniversary. It remained subject to attacks even after its death, however. Investigators with U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunt in the 1950s would brand the SCHW as “Communist tainted.”52 U.S. senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi would also hold hearings in New Orleans in 1954 to determine whether the SCHW, the SCEF, and their leaders and supporters had been or were part of an active communist network in the South. In its ten-year existence, the conference would take many stands for progress in the South. It endorsed workers’ rights to join unions, repeal of the poll tax, antilynching laws, federal assistance to public education, and more equitable and fair economic policies in the region. It set up voter registration drives, opposed racial discrimination, and called for the creation of a Fair Employment Practices Committee. For many, it still represented what Lucy Randolph Mason once called “the best instrument for creating a democratic South.”53 The South was poised to become once again a major battlefield at the end of World War II. This time the fight would be over the souls and minds of Southern workers. Organized labor was at the apex of its strength in the U.S. workforce. Nearly 40 percent of workers were organized across the country. In some major northeastern cities, three out of every five households included a union member. At the beginning of the decade of the 1940s, the percentage of unionization in the South was less than half the national percentage. However, significant gains had been made during the war, when more than eight hundred thousand Southerners got their first union cards. Successful drives had taken place among 54

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tobacco industry workers and in shipbuilding and other coastal industries. A third of the South’s new union members were black. One of the reasons for the failure of the CIO’s 1937 campaign was the region’s lack of industrialization. However, war helped produce an economic boom in the region, sprinkling military bases and defense industry plants from Virginia to Texas. The industrial workforce in the South grew 50 percent to a total of 2.4 million between 1940 and 1945. Even by 1940, “the economic underpinnings and social glue that had kept the regional economy isolated were no longer present,” economist Gavin Wright has written.54 Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution agreed. “The Second World War supplied a new start. . . . The old Confederate South then began to enter the first stages of modern industrialization.”55 Indeed, the South was changing. Tenant farming and sharecropping were on the decline, while mechanization on the farm was on the rise. The out-migration of blacks from the South that had begun in the 1910s was continuing. Many poor whites were also leaving the Deep South and Appalachia to go to work in the auto industry in Detroit and elsewhere in the North. The South lost more than 1.5 million blacks and nearly 900,000 whites between 1940 and 1950 alone. This loss of cheap workers, accompanied by growth in industry, even led to cries of a labor shortage in the South in the 1940s, undermining one of the staples that Southern boosters since the time of Henry Grady had promoted: the South’s plentiful supply of cheap labor. An FDR-pushed agreement between labor and management to suspend strikes and lockouts during the war had been by and large observed although strikes did occur in the mining and railroad industries, and unions complained of employers taking advantage of the pledge by holding down wages. The agreement did not survive Roosevelt’s death in 1945, however. A strike wave in 1945 and 1946 jolted the auto, steel, coal, railroad, and other industries as millions of workers across the country marched in picket lines. The strikes reflected a restless workforce and nation as well as the return of millions of GIs who had just defeated the fascist enemy and now expected their hard-won democracy at home to provide a decent job and a better life. Thus, CIO president Philip Murray’s optimism in 1946 when he picked up the challenge by CIO Political Action Committee founder and director Sidney Hillman to “venture into unplowed fields” and launched “Operation Dixie.”56 Murray called the campaign “the most important drive of its kind ever undertaken by any labor organization in the history of the country.”57 Inaugurated in May 1946 at the same time the AFL launched its own organizing effort in the South, the CIO’s Operation Dixie was a twelve-state The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

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campaign that targeted textiles, oil, lumber, and other industries. Organizing the recalcitrant textile industry was a key goal given the losing battles of the late 1920s and mid-1930s. The South was home to 80 percent of the textile industry, yet only about 20 percent of the region’s textile workers were organized. The CIO pledged two hundred organizers and one million dollars toward Operation Dixie, four times the AFL’s initial pledge to its campaign. In an effort to immunize the campaign from AFL charges of communist influence, 85 percent of director Van Bittner’s regionwide staff were Southern. Top organizers and leaders included Lucy Randolph Mason, George Baldanzi of the Textile Workers Union of America, staunch anticommunist and former Memphis Press-Scimitar reporter Pete Swim of the American Newspaper Guild, and former North Carolina newspaper reporter Daniel Powell, who was director of the CIO’s Southern Political Action Committee. From the outset, the CIO campaign incorporated an idealism and scope that was missing from the “parochial . . . localistic,” red-baiting, and at times racially exclusive AFL’s campaign.58 The AFL effort targeted a million unorganized workers in the region but lasted only a little over a year before it was abandoned. The CIO’s Murray called Operation Dixie a “civil rights crusade” that would reach across the racial divide in the South. At a meeting in New Orleans in 1946, CIO leaders pledged to fight racial discrimination.59 This was to be a campaign to light the “lamp of democracy”—as a NAACP journalist once called it—that the CIO represented in the South.60 From the outset, the CIO faced fierce competition and opposition from the AFL, which played into the cold war fears of communism that would ultimately undermine Operation Dixie. AFL secretary-treasurer and later president George Meany attacked the CIO as an organization that “has openly followed the Communist line and is following it today.”61 At the end of World War II, labor’s two major umbrella organizations were a close-if-not-even match in their fight for the hearts of American workers. In 1946, the AFL claimed a national membership of 7.1 million, compared to the CIO’s 6.3 million. In the bloody fight that followed, the CIO managed a few early victories but would ultimately lose the war by the time Operation Dixie ended in 1953. By 1954, one year before the two organizations merged, AFL membership had reached 10.2 million. The CIO, crippled by its own cold war–inspired purging, had been reduced to 4.6 million members. The 1940s began with the CIO losing a key battle to the AFL at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company plant in Memphis. With three thousand workers, it was the largest unorganized rubber plant in the nation, a prime example of the so-called runaway plants that had come South specif56

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ically to avoid unions and keep wages low. In the spirit of the Mississippispawned “Balance Agriculture with Industry” tax-giveaway program popular with politicians across the South, “Boss” Crump’s political machine in Memphis had lured the plant to Memphis in 1937 with promises of low taxes, cheap water, cheap fire and police protection, and no unions. The fight between AFL and CIO unions for a foothold in the plant was fierce and mean. Most of the Firestone workers were white, and AFL organizers used the race card against the racially inclusive “nigger unionism” of the CIO.62 The labor historian Michael Honey has written extensively about the brutal beatings of organizers, police intimidation, and intense race baiting that marked the campaign. The election and the subsequent Crump-led crackdown in the black community prompted the Southern Negro Youth Congress to complain that Memphis was on the verge of becoming “an American fascist stronghold.” When the union election was held in December 1940, the Crump-backed AFL rubber workers defeated the CIO by a vote of 1,008 to 805. “The Firestone campaign highlighted the racial dilemma of the CIO in the South,” Honey wrote. “The CIO seemed doomed on the racial question no matter what it did.”63 As Operation Dixie began its march across the South in 1946, however, the CIO was able to score a major victory over the AFL at the Masonite Corporation plant in the southeast Mississippi town of Laurel. In its first major victory in Mississippi, the CIO gained 3,500 new members, winning a head-to-head fight with the AFL in an 812-to-637 vote at the woodworking plant. The victory was made possible by strong black support for the CIO. The CIO victory in Laurel would later gain the praise of Hodding Carter, noted publisher and editor of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi. “CIO union contracts have added more than five million dollars to Laurel’s annual payrolls. There is much more business activity in Laurel than in other cities of the same size in my area. And particularly I know there is more newspaper advertising carried in the local paper in Laurel than in these other cities.”64 The CIO would have a more difficult time that same year in the north-central Mississippi town of Grenada, where its effort to unionize the Grenada Industries Company, a textile plant, faced the locked-arm opposition of the company, local politicians, church leaders, and newspapers. “It is generally assumed that the CIO is shot through with Communism, and I do not like Communism,” the editor of the Grenada County Weekly wrote in his November 21, 1946, edition. “I do not like to take orders from Washington, much less Moscow.” A group of ministers in New Albany—a town roughly sixty miles northeast of Grenada—expressed similar sentiments in a letter published in the Grenada Daily Sentinel-Star. “We . . . are The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

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in sympathy with the principle of organizing labor for the betterment of the working man. But neither we, nor our denominations, endorse the particular labor organization known as the CIO, which we deem communistic and un-American in spirit.”65 The CIO lost the campaign in Grenada by a 297-to-122 vote. Although the CIO would boast of adding 800 locals and 400,000 members in the first eighteen months of Operation Dixie, the campaign would soon find that the experience in Grenada was more the rule than the experience in Laurel. As in Grenada, the forces against it across the region and nation were formidable and included the entire power structure of industry, politicians, religion, and press. The political and, in some ways, unlikely coalition of liberals, immigrants, labor, big city machines, and Southerners that made Roosevelt the most successful politician in the history of the country had already begun to fray in the late 1930s as Southern politicians increasingly found themselves at odds with other coalition members, especially labor and the new legions of blacks who were abandoning their Civil War–era allegiance to the Republican Party. Roosevelt had even gone into the South to try to defeat or undermine the strength of some of the more strident anti-New Deal Southerners in Congress, such as Harry Byrd of Virginia, Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina, and Walter George of Georgia. New Deal initiatives had established a minimum wage and put pressure on Southern employers to increase the paltry wages they paid workers. The Fair Employment Practices Commission, FDR’s long overdue bow to black worker unrest, required federal and government contract employers to observe equal treatment of the races. Attacked by northeast Mississippi arch-segregationist congressman John Rankin as “the beginning of a communist dictatorship,” the FEPC owed its existence in large part to A. Philip Randolph, the black Floridaborn labor leader and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters who threatened Roosevelt with a fifty-thousand-person march on Washington if the president didn’t take a definitive stand against racism in the workplace.66 The U.S. Supreme Court further exacerbated the frustrations of white Southern politicians in the 1940s by ruling against the Democratic “white primary” and the poll tax in federal elections that had kept both black and poor whites away from the polls since Reconstruction. Then in 1947, Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, setting the stage for the “Dixiecrat” revolt from the Democratic Party the next year. As divisions within the post-FDR Democratic Party deepened, Republicans managed to gain control of both the U.S. Senate and House in 1946. 58

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Conservative Southern Democrats were only too happy when the GOP majority passed and overcame a presidential veto of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the polar opposite of the pro-labor 1935 Wagner Labor Relations Act. Taft-Hartley was classic cold war legislation, forcing union leaders to sign what were essentially loyalty oaths assuring the nation they were not communists. It undermined labor solidarity by prohibiting secondary strikes. More important, it opened the door to states to adopt what antilabor forces called right-to-work legislation prohibiting the so-called closed shop, a mainstay of organizing, and thus allow workers at a work site to benefit from union members’ hard-fought gains without joining the union or taking any of the risks. Every Southern state except Louisiana would adopt right-to-work laws in the following years. Even Louisiana would join the pack in 1976 with its own right-to-work law. “The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act and the failure of Operation Dixie signaled the end of labor’s challenge to the basic hegemony of American capitalism,” write the authors of the social history Who Built America?â•›67 In 1948, six thousand white States’ Rights Democrats, better known as the Dixiecrats, convened in Birmingham, Alabama, a decade after the first gathering of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and declared war on what Dixiecrat presidential hopeful Strom Thurmond of South Carolina in a subsequent speech would call “the radicals, the subversives, and the Reds” that had infected the Democratic Party.68 The campaign, which would win Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina in the 1948 election, made clear that racial integration and communism were inextricably linked, a linkage that many white Southerners had already made and extended to the CIO as well. At the outset of the CIO’s Operation Dixie, William H. Lewis, a guest editorial writer for the Rome, Georgia, News-Tribune, blasted the campaign as a “Red Revolution.” It was a view that fit well not only with NewsTribune’s philosophy but with the typical slate of editorial stands taken by most Southern newspapers: opposition to the CIO, anticommunism, racial segregation and white supremacy, dogged defense of the South, and support of practically any measure that aided the region’s industrialization.69 As pressure built on the CIO to succumb to the juggernaut of cold war hysteria that was taking hold of the nation’s psyche in the late 1940s, CIO secretary-treasurer and first president of the United Electrical Workers James B. Carey may have best summed up the ultimate cause of the demise of the CIO and its Operation Dixie. “In World War II we joined the Communists to defeat Fascism. Now we’ll join the Fascists to defeat Communism.”70 Labor historian Michael Honey, an astute critic of CIO shortcomings, says Operation Dixie was already sputtering by the end of 1946 although The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

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the campaign wouldn’t officially wrap up until 1953. It had failed to make significant inroads in the textile industry—always considered the key to success—and one of its top leaders, George Baldanzi of the Textile Workers Union of America, even defected to the AFL in 1949, taking twentyfive thousand workers with him. The percentage of Southern unionized textile workers dropped from 20 percent prior to Operation Dixie to only 15 percent by 1952. The significance of this failure can be seen in the words of Operation Dixie director Van Bittner in 1948. “When you organize the textile industry of the South . . . you have practically all industries in the South under the banner of the CIO.”71 Plaguing the campaign were lack of sufficient funding and an overly centralized command structure, but, even more important, the relentless attacks against it and claims that it was a front for the Communist Party. Organization leaders responded by an internal purging that ultimately gutted Operation Dixie and the CIO as a whole. The organization severed its ties with Highlander and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Highly activist unions like the Fur and Leather Workers Union and the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union were expelled. By the end of the purging, the CIO had rid itself of nearly one million members “for their belief that unions should be run by and for the membership and not by cold-war cliques for the benefit of big business,” as labor historians Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais wrote in 1955. “The expelled unions were the soul of the CIO. Since their explusion it has been a body without a spirit. They were the CIO’s fighters and pioneers.”72 Within Operation Dixie, Bittner made sure that communists and leftists were locked out, while vocal anticommunists like Pete Swim of the American Newspaper Guild took leadership roles. The campaign became increasingly sensitive to right-wing attacks that associated racial integration with communism. “Operation Dixie’s virtual banning of blacks, women, and suspected Communists, as well as an air of suspicion directed at white racial liberals outside the CIO, crippled the movement for change in the South,” Michael Honey has written.73 With the CIO and Operation Dixie on the defensive, hard-core rightwing elements became more aggressive. Organizations like the Southern States Industrial Council and arch-conservative religious publications like Trumpet and the textile manufacturers-backed Militant Truth joined with the Memphis Commercial Appeal and other mainstream newspapers in spreading a deepening fear of communism and condemnation of suspected fellow travelers like the CIO. Militant Truth was a publication whose advertisers included noted anti-Semites and at one point sympathizers with the fascist German-American Bund.

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The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy”

When a sermon by rising young evangelist Billy Graham appeared in Militant Truth, lending the anti-CIO propaganda sheet an air of credibility it didn’t deserve, CIO operative Lucy Randolph Mason demanded an audience with the author of the sermon. Graham met with her and insisted he was unaware of the publication or its printing of his sermon, but he declined to take the matter further. By the end of the day, the AFL had ironically gained while the CIO had slipped. As F. Ray Marshall has chronicled, the AFL’s percentage of Southern union members grew from 62 percent in 1939 to 64 percent in 1953, while the CIO’s fell from 23 to 20 percent in the same time span.74 With this failure went the hopes and dreams of intellectuals such as V. O. Key that labor, and particularly the CIO, might be the catalyst to a real change in the demagogic and racist politics that had so long plagued the South. The failure of Operation Dixie has been a cause of division among modern-day labor historians. Michael Honey and others in the so-called school of “New Southern Labor History” contend the CIO should have defied its enemies and made better use of communist-led unions such as the UCAPAWA since these were the backbone of committed organizing activism within the CIO. Others argue that the forces of history weighed too heavily on the CIO to give Operation Dixie any kind of real chance at success. For example, Robert H. Zieger has noted that the anticommunism of CIO Southern PAC director Daniel Powell “was part of a coherent worldview that saw the Soviet Union as an enemy of liberal values and saw those in the United States and in the labor movement who collaborated with communists as misguided ethically and futile practically.”75 Father Charles Owen Rice, the formidable labor priest and columnist from Pittsburgh and an active anticommunist during the cold war, looked back with considerable regret at his own virulence in a column published in Labor History in the summer of 1989. The communists, he wrote, indeed “made a contribution . . . where the building of the CIO was concerned, and the rebuilding of the AFL, for that matter. They provided the skilled organizers who were determined and idealistic and almost invariably very hard working. . . . “Their loyalty was first to the Communist Party and secondarily to the trade union movement. . . . They were unwavering in their support of the Soviet Union, including Josef Stalin, and took direction from that quarter.” Still, “they, committed Communists as they were, did more good than harm,” Rice wrote. “The Communist episode was a sad business: wonderful,

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idealistic people, deceiving, crafty but noble—and eventually so often destroyed along with what they had exhausted and broken themselves to build.”76 Yet another perspective on labor’s postwar troubles in the South is offered by labor historian Timothy J. Minchin. In his 1997 work, What Do We Need a Union For? The TWUA in the South, 1945–55, Minchin makes the case that the post–World War II prosperity textile workers and other Southerners enjoyed in comparison to their lives before the war was even more important than race, anticommunism, and the Taft-Hartley Act in Operation Dixie’s failure. Just as the war provided a huge boost to the textile industry—the key industry targeted by Operation Dixie—by demanding expanded production for uniforms and other military needs, the postwar era unleashed a “massive pent-up civilian demand for textiles,” Minchin writes. As a result of this as well as other factors, textile workers in the South saw their wages rise from 42 to 86 cents per hour between 1941 and 1946.77 Rising wages and the use of the installment plan in making payments on large-ticket purchases enabled many Southern workers for the first time to buy their own homes. “It was this universal change in living standards that made it very difficult for the union to sell its message in the South, for workers perceived that their standard of living would continue to rise without their having to take the considerable risk of joining a union,” Minchin writes. Furthermore, the “unprecedented profits” experienced by the textile industry during the war “caused both (workers and management) to abandon prewar concepts and to move toward a new relationship with one another—a relationship that had profound consequences for unionization prospects.”78 For example, the old paternalism of the mill village faded as workers bought their own homes. As industry leaders tried to forestall the spread of unionism by matching union wages in nonunion plants, workers gave employers, not unions, the credit. Many of these same factors were also to play a role in the failure of the general strike called by the Textile Workers Union of America in 1951, which briefly idled forty thousand workers in seven states across the South but ultimately faltered in face of a united front by industry leaders. Among those who urged national leaders to broaden the labor movement’s appeal beyond economic advantages to questions of simple human dignity and treatment at the workplace was Lucy Randolph Mason. Had more listened perhaps the movement might have been more successful.

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Although her cause faltered and finally fell, Lucy Randolph Mason’s work on behalf of the CIO in the South made her a national figure. She was heralded in Business Week, New Republic, and other publications with articles headlined “Send for Miss Lucy” and “Southern Blueblood for the CIO.”79 She retired from her labor activities in 1953, the same year as Operation Dixie came to an official close. Even amid the ashes of Operation Dixie, however, she could write this in her 1952 autobiography To Win These Rights: “I believe the CIO unions are doing more to unite the South with the rest of the United States than any other single organization. Regional prejudices have been worn at the edges by the impact of new ideas, new personalities, union papers, state, regional, and national gatherings, and most of all by belonging to a national or international union. . . . The wall has begun to crumble. While many forces have worked toward this end, the union movement has been at the forefront, drawing the energies of a once prejudiced people into a joint endeavor that overcomes every barrier.”80

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Chapter 4

labor, civil rights, and memphis

The seeds of the civil rights movement that rocked the South in the 1950s and 1960s were planted long before by workers and labor organizers in the Southern textile mills and coal mines, by labor leaders like John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther of the CIO, and, of course, A. Phillip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Also planting those seeds were the activists who participated in Highlander, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and the CIO’s Operation Dixie. Some scholars believe labor could have done much more in support of the civil rights movement, however, and that the best hopes of a close relationship died with Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968. Others insist the relationship between labor and civil rights has always been and continues to be vital, and they gathered in Memphis in July 2006 to publicly proclaim it. Memphis looms large in this chapter, which explores the relationship between labor and civil rights, and their treatment by the press, both during the movement and today. King saw in Memphis the “beginning of the Washington movement,” his “Poor People’s Campaign” to broaden the agenda of the civil rights movement and force the nation to address the needs of working people of all colors. This was to become what Nation magazine would much later call “a dream deferred.”1 Both the civil rights and labor movements in the South have deep roots in Memphis. It was in Memphis a century before King’s crusade that the legendary Mother Jones got her first exposure to the labor movement, the point of departure for a long career of fighting on behalf of coal miners and rest of the lowliest in American society. In 1932 wealthy Memphian Lilian Johnson reached across class divisions to prepare the soil for what would become the Highlander labor school, a groundbreaking experiment in social change. The CIO Southern Political Action Committee director 64

Daniel Powell and Southern Exposure magazine co-founder Bob Hall spent formative years of their lives in Memphis. Even today that city remains a battlefield in a war among labor historians over the question of whether organized labor was truly the partner of civil rights that it should have been, a question that itself goes to the heart of labor’s own sense of self and mission. The Reverend J. Herbert Nelson stood at the pulpit of the New Sardis Baptist Church in southeast Memphis and surveyed the crowd of two hundred or more Bible-thumping preachers like himself, Catholic worker priests, church choir members, labor organizers, immigrant workers, politicians, and gray-bearded veterans of the civil rights movement who had come to preach, sing, pray, and hammer out a grassroots strategy for a new people’s movement in the South. It was July 2006, and what he saw before him was the possible realization of Martin Luther King’s decadesold dream of a united civil and labor rights crusade. This was the vision that the Reverend Nelson N. Johnson of Greensboro, North Carolina, and others shared in founding the Southern Faith, Labor, and Community Alliance (SFLCA), an organization now holding its first region-wide conference after months of state-to-state networking, planning, and preparation. “The South has been one of the greatest purveyors of death and destruction,” Nelson intoned, his voice rich with the same cadences and timbre of King, Jesse Jackson, the long line of Holy Ghost–filled black preachers stretching back to the Great Awakening of 1800. “We come here to join in the struggle. People are being mistreated on their jobs, getting injured on their jobs, and being cut from their health care, individuals on temporary work and who’ll never have any kind of retirement income, people who work forty, fifty, sixty hours a week and don’t make enough money to put aside to help their children go to college. That’s our congregation.”2 Coming on the heels of an intensive five-day labor school, the conference was billed as “Resurrection in Memphis,” and it was as much old-fashioned tent revival as labor conference. Si Kahn, one-time Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activist, longtime balladeer and labor organizer for Southern textile and mine workers, rallied the crowd with “What Will I Leave Behind” and a haunting version of “I Ain’t Chopping Cotton Anymore.” Slaughterhouse worker Edward Morrison testified about his organizing work at the giant Smithfield Packing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, where black and Latino workers are “getting injured left and right” while management is “dividing the cultures,” where “the African-American and the Hispanic cultures are at war with each other because of plant propaganda.”3 Labor, Civil Rights, and Memphis

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Mexican-born immigrant worker Juan Montes, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “I AM A MAN,” the words that became the motto of the Memphis sanitation strikers in 1968, told of organizers’ perseverance in the face of fear, intimidation, and discrimination in the poultry industry in North Carolina. Montes was a leader in a decadelong struggle by Guatemalan and Mexican workers to organize and win a union contract with the Case Farms poultry plant in Morganton, North Carolina, in the 1990s. Workers did organize but failed to win a contract. “Rich people only worry about money, and when you affect their pockets, that’s the only way to get their attention.”4 Nelson recalled King’s march on behalf of city sanitation workers just before he was assassinated in Memphis in 1968. “Dr. King talked about a brokering in, an expectation from the corporate powers. Although thirtyeight years later, that plan still needs to be implemented by the Southern Faith, Labor, and Community Alliance.” King’s spirit was invoked constantly during the conference, and participants were frequently reminded of his many exhortations for labor rights. “What does it profit a man to be able to integrate a lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger or a cup of coffee?” King asked in his speech to Memphis sanitation workers March 18, 1968. The culmination of the conference, as well as the labor school and months of meetings in North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Georgia that had preceded it, was a labor “action” and protest at the Quebecor World printing plant in the Memphis suburb of Olive Branch, Mississippi. Canada-based Quebecor is the world’s second-largest printing company. The firm’s Olive Branch operation, which employs 320 workers, has resisted organizing efforts by the Teamsters’ union for years. The union maintains that the plant is rife with health and safety violations, intimidation against workers sympathetic to the union, and also racism. Three-fourths of the plant’s workers are black, while only 14 percent of its management is black. In February 2006, workers found a teddy bear in union colors hanging from a pole in a mock lynching. At the July protest, Nelson and other delegates entered the plant to request a meeting with management to discuss the grievances. Management refused to meet and referred the delegation to the corporation’s media relations office in Canada. “We went in there and we were not intimidated,” Nelson said as he returned to the crowd of 250 protestors outside. “The man who met us at the door looked intimidated, however.”5 Stopping a moment, he looked over the protestors’ heads toward the busy traffic along the road in front of the plant. Drivers and passengers in trucks and cars honked and waved. “Listen to the people passing by in their trucks and cars, honking their horns in support of what 66

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we’re doing. Those workers inside know we’re out here, too, standing up for them.” The protesters responded with shouts of solidarity and lifted signs proclaiming “Mock Lynchings Are No Joke” and “Mississippi Workers Demand Respect.” As they turned back to Nelson, he stopped again and called their attention to something that was missing from the protest, something that also had been missing during the labor school and even the three-day “Resurrection in Memphis” conference. “Look around you,” he said. “There’s no media here. They were coming, but they were called to cover two more murders in Memphis. . . . Already a hundred this year. . . . They went to cover death, but here we are—life.” Just as they had throughout the labor school and conference, Memphis’s largest newspaper, the Commercial Appeal, as well as the city’s television and radio stations had opted not to cover the conference. A half century before, on the other side of Memphis, in the plush, historic downtown hotel known as the Peabody, another important meeting took place that would also call for a united front in the fight for the soul of the South. However, this was an altogether different kind of gathering. Unlike the SFLCA conference of July 2006, the purpose of the meeting of the so-called Federation for Constitutional Government in December 1955 was to declare war on racial integrationists, labor unions, and anyone else who challenged the ruling oligarchy of the South. The meeting was closed to the press, but it would receive local and national press attention. The Commercial Appeal reporter James Gunter poked around and learned that the meeting was a regionwide call to arms for leaders of the South. His page-one story was headlined “Federation for Constitutional Government Is Designed to Build Up Effective Force against Integration.”6 The New York Times reporter Anthony Lewis followed up with a page-one story in his newspaper. With its famous lobby, marble floors and colonnades, balconies, stained-glass windows, Travertine fountain, the richly textured mood of Moorish Spain and the Italian Renaissance envisioned by its original designers in 1869 preserved in its restoration in the late 1970s, the Peabody today seems far removed from the passion and drama that reporter Gunter witnessed there in the last days of 1955. Ironically, six years later, a decision to open the hotel’s doors to black patrons would hasten a decline that had begun in the late 1950s and ultimately lead to foreclosure in 1965. The hotel reopened in 1981 at the completion of a six-year, $25 million restoration project. The mid-1950s were tense times in the Deep South. In May 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools illegal with its Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education ruling. Two months later, Labor, Civil Rights, and Memphis

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roughly one hundred people—farmers, small businessmen, lawyers, dentists, and the town mayor—met at City Hall in Indianola, Mississippi, to form the first of the Citizens Councils that would multiply across the South to fight integration. In August 1955, two white men brutally murdered black teenager Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, and a month later an all-white jury found both innocent. They would later confess to the crime for a fee offered by a magazine writer. And, in the same month as the gathering at the Peabody, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began. Writer James Dickerson describes the Peabody gathering in his 1998 book Dixie’s Dirty Secret: “What Gunter saw that afternoon astonished him. Political leaders from twelve Southern states were at the hotel. It was the largest gathering of its kind since before the Civil War. . . . What emerged from the newspaper coverage of the Memphis meeting was a portrait of the most vehement collection of right-wing activists in the nation.”7 Although fighting racial integration in the South was the emotional draw that brought the members of the Federation for Constitutional Government together, deeper underlying motives also existed, and they had more to do with the economic implications of integration and its inherent challenge to the Southern status quo. The leaders who met at the Peabody were wealthy men of power, in both political and business circles. The chairman was National Association of Manufacturers director John U. Barr of New Orleans, whose resume included helping to organize the antiNew Deal, antiunion Southern States Industrial Council in the 1930s as well as the Dixiecrat convention in 1948. Another leader was Judge Leander Perez, the notoriously racist and anti-Semitic political boss of oil-andsulfur rich Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, a one-time Huey Long crony and Dixiecrat, and the founder of the Louisiana Citizens Council. This is how crusading journalist Robert Sherrill once described Perez, a dandyish man who would ride the fields of his parish on horseback dressed like a South American caudillo: “Proud, arrogant, boastful, a crafty publicist of his often-imagined deeds of anarchy, Judge Perez looks the part of the backwater tyrant that he is. He has a blockish body, a boomish voice, a sweeping pompadour, a cast-iron mouth, a ready but humorless laugh, a limitless capacity to harangue, a bottomless fund of spite and grudge.”8 Yet neither Barr nor Perez enjoyed quite the status of the undisputed spiritual leader of the two-day meeting in Memphis: gruff, cigar-chomping U.S. senator James O. “Big Jim” Eastland, who after his takeover of the powerful chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1956 would boast about filling his pockets full of dead civil rights bills. Eastland, the wealthy owner of a 5,800-acre plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippi, was a political boss in Mississippi whose machine-style politics doled out patronage and collected IOUs from Memphis to New Orleans. 68

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Eastland described the Federation for Constitutional Government to the New York Times as “a people’s organization to fight the Supreme Court, fight the CIO, fight the NAACP, and fight all conscienceless pressure groups who are attempting our destruction. It will fight those organizations who attempt with much success to socialize industry and the great medical profession of this country.”9 A month before the Peabody Hotel meeting, Eastland had issued a statement calling for the creation of a regional commission to defend the South from “the rising crescendo of vicious propaganda (that is) inspired and financed by Communist front and race-minded groups.”10 The Peabody meeting was truly a Who’s Who of Southern defiance: U.S. senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the 1948 Dixiecrat presidential candidate; former Mississippi governor Fielding Wright, who had run on the Dixiecrat ticket as vice presidential candidate; South Carolina congressman Mendel Rivers; Louisiana congressman F. Edward Hebert; Mississippi house speaker Walter Sillers; former Georgia governor and future U.S. senator Herman Talmadge; and Judge Tom Brady of Brookhaven, Mississippi, who had gained national notoriety for his “Black Monday” speech condemning the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling and calling on white Southerners to “die, if necessary, for our sacred principles.”11 Thus, in a certain way, the Peabody became the birthplace of organized resistance to the civil rights movement in the South. Yet the leaders of the Federation for Constitutional Government had more on their minds than race. In his book Gothic Politics in the Deep South, Robert Sherrill put it this way: “It was not the NAACP’s later racial emphasis but the CIO and the specter of socialized production and medical care that then inspired the greatest fears.”12 These were politicians and businessmen who feared economic upheaval and challenge to the established order of the South that had made them rich. While certainly resentful of the social upheaval promised by Brown vs. Board of Education, these men knew that the nation’s high court had also handed them a powerful weapon, one they could use to align the Southern worker masses with them in a common cause: the fight against racial integration. The byproduct—or, more accurately, the true spoils—of a victory in that fight would be the preservation of the economic status quo. This is what the historian Alan Draper has termed “Southern Democracy,” defined by “its one-party system, its restricted electorate, its preoccupation with race, and its issueless campaigns combined to produce a conservative politics that extended into national political life.”13 Here is how the Southern historian T. Harry Williams once described the philosophy of the Bourbons and Dixiecrats who fought so long to preserve Southern Democracy: “They believed in economical government, Labor, Civil Rights, and Memphis

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the type that furnished few services and collected few taxes. They thought that government should not interfere in social matters or regulate affairs. They preached the industrialization of the South through the importation of Yankee capital and the advantages of close cooperation with the industrial East. They were often of the planter class and they acted and talked like traditional southerners, but they were hardly in the old agrarian tradition.”14 At one point during the Peabody meeting, chairman Barr predicted that the federation’s work would eventually spread far beyond its Southern base. “We have found supporters all over the nation,” he told the Commercial Appeal’s Gunter.15 From the vantage point of the Reverend J. Herbert Nelson a halfcentury later, Barr’s prediction seemed to have indeed come true. The economic views of the old Southern oligarchy had become those of the nation’s leaders in 2006. Thus the challenge had grown even greater. “At the core of the work is the redemptive law of God,” Nelson said, “that every human being ought to be respected, treated with dignity. We have a right to determine that somebody is going to treat our people with respect.”16 In one of the regional meetings that preceded the 2006 Memphis conference, Reverend Nelson told members and supporters of the Southern Faith, Labor, and Community Alliance, “We’re going to Memphis because there is no better place.”17 Few places resonate with black Southerners and especially veterans of the civil rights movement more than the city on the bluffs of the Mississippi River, where blacks made their first escape from the cotton fields and back-breaking indentured servitude of the Mississippi Delta, where Beale Street became known as the “Harlem of the South” for its blues wailers and black entrepreneurs, where the longtime political boss E. H. Crump became the subject of one of the first written blues songs, “Mr. Crump,” later renamed “The Memphis Blues,” in 1909. Crump had hired black band leader W. C. Handy to pen a song that would help win black votes in a campaign that was also focused on “cleaning up” Beale Street, the main street of the city’s black community. Handy delivered a song that made blues history but also poked fun at Crump—“Mr. Crump don’ ’low no easy riders here.” Crump’s dependence on black support made Memphis one of the few Southern cities where blacks were enfranchised, but enfranchisement under Crump was a double-edged sword that meant unquestioned support for the machine. Thus Memphis became known as a “citadel of Southern paternalism.”18 By 1940, stirrings within the black community for greater autonomy along with the CIO campaign to organize the giant Firestone Tire and Rubber Company plant in Memphis exposed “Mr. Crump” as more dicta70

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tor than paternalistic overseer. In a virtual putsch for total control of the city, Crump and police commissioner Joe Boyle launched what Michael Honey has called a “Reign of Terror” in Memphis that included wholesale arrests, beatings, police raids, and unprovoked street confrontations of blacks by city police. Black union activists like Robert Cotton mysteriously disappeared. The campaign succeeded in demoralizing the black community, keeping the CIO out of the Firestone plant, and preserving Crump’s stronghold on Memphis until his death in 1954. Both of Memphis’s two major newspapers, the Commercial Appeal and the Press-Scimitar, fought with Crump through much of his reign. The Commercial Appeal, which dates back to 1841, was staunchly secessionist during the Civil War. In the 1890s, the newspaper attacked black journalist Ida B. Wells for her relentless, Memphis-based crusade against lynching. “The black wretch . . . should be . . . burned at the stake,” the newspaper once editorialized.19 Although the Commercial Appeal won a Pulitzer Prize in the 1920s for its fight against the Ku Klux Klan, the newspaper was so staunchly opposed to the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union during the Great Depression that it earned the sobriquet “Voice of the Arkansas planter.”20 Its daily cartoon, “Hambone’s Meditation,” depicting a poor black man and his musings about life, was deeply resented in the black community as condescending and racist. Like archconservative Jackson Daily News editor Major Frederick Sullens’s wars with the racist populist Theodore Bilbo in Mississippi, the Commercial Appeal indeed fought with Boss Crump but never with the tenacity and progressive-mindedness of its smaller counterpart, the Memphis Press-Scimitar. A newspaper founded in 1880 by a troop leader under Confederate General and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest during the Civil War, the Press-Scimitar established itself early as a more progressive voice than the Commercial Appeal, even though both would be part of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain much of their joint history. Edward T. Leech, editor of an early emanation of the Press-Scimitar called the Memphis Press, went to jail for writing an anti-Crump editorial. Known as the Press-Scimitar after 1926, the newspaper gave favorable coverage to the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in the 1930s and voiced strong support for anti-Crump gubernatorial candidate Gordon Browning and U.S. Senate candidate Estes Kefauver in the hyper-heated elections of 1948. Both won, giving Crump the greatest defeat of his long career. Crusading editor Edward J. Meeman was widely known as a champion of the rights of black people during his long tenure at the Press-Scimitar from 1931 to 1962. The newspaper published its last issue October 31, 1983. The newsrooms of both the Commercial Appeal and the Press-Scimitar became unionized under the Newspaper Guild in 1936, although with a Labor, Civil Rights, and Memphis

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distinctly Southern flavor. From the late 1930s into the 1940s, Guild leaders from Memphis would play a leading national role within the union and in the CIO in efforts to purge integrationists, communists, and other leftists. The vow of defiance by the Federation for Constitutional Government at the Peabody Hotel in December 1955 was indeed followed by a war that spread across the entire South—from the federal troops forced to guard blacks integrating Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957; the violence meeting the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Freedom Riders in Anniston, Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi, in 1960 and 1961; the death and destruction accompanying James Meredith’s entry at the University of Mississippi in 1962; and the attack of Bull Connor’s police dogs on demonstrators in Birmingham in 1963 to the brutal murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in the “long, hot summer” of 1964. Just as Memphis was spared destruction in the Civil War due to its early capture by Union forces in 1862, only to be ravaged by the yellow fever epidemics of the 1870s, the city avoided much of the violence and confrontation of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet it would become the scene of perhaps the movement’s greatest tragedy when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated there on April 4, 1968. Both Memphis newspapers, as well as the city they served, would be put to the supreme test during and after the city sanitation workers strike that began February 12, 1968, and which ended twelve days after King’s assassination. During the most heated years of the civil rights movement, Memphis prided itself on its quiet progress in integrating lunch counters, buses, and movie theaters. The tradition of black enfranchisement dating back to the early Crump years may have helped Memphis avoid the bloody confrontations that Birmingham and other cities suffered. A biracial commission that included Commercial Appeal editor Frank Ahlgren and Press-Scimitar editor Charles Schneider worked hard to keep peace while accommodating the demands of black citizens for equal and fair treatment in public facilities. Memphis even sent a black man, A. W. Willis Jr., to the state legislature in 1964. Underlying the peace, however, was a festering resentment against the economic disparity between the two races. Fueling the resentment was the 1967 mayoral election of hard-line segregationist Henry Loeb, a one-time American Legion leader and longtime cold war enthusiast who had previously served as mayor from 1959 to 1963. That resentment boiled over in January 1968 when twenty-two black sanitation workers were sent home due to bad weather. White employ72

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ees were allowed to work and receive a full day’s pay. An offer to pay the complaining black workers two hours’ pay merely rubbed salt in the wound. When a trash compactor crushed to death two black sanitation workers a couple days later, the die was cast. In their strike against the city, black sanitation workers demanded better pay and safer, more equitable working conditions, recognition of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) as their union, and a “dues checkoff” system allowing payroll deduction of union dues. They wanted time and a half for overtime beyond eight hours of work per day plus a general pay raise for laborers from $1.80 to $2.35 an hour. The wages of crew chiefs who drove trucks would go from $2.10 to $3 an hour. At the time, sanitation workers in Memphis earned an average $4,368 a year, compared to $6,424 in New York City. The comparison is interesting in view of the fact that sanitation workers in New York City were also on strike in February 1968. The Memphis strike began on February 12, 1968, with most of the city’s thirteen hundred sanitation workers refusing to report for duty, bringing trash pickup nearly to a halt. Loeb’s response was a threat to bring in new workers and refusal to negotiate with the AFSCME. Loeb’s hard-line stand against the strike found support as far away as Nashville, where members of the state senate introduced bills to outlaw the labor action by making it a felony for government workers to strike if the public health and welfare were affected. After a call for a citywide boycott by union leaders and the NAACP, strikers and supporters marched down Main Street on February 23. The city issued an injunction against demonstrations the next day, but more marches and demonstration followed, as well as arrests and fines by the city police. More than ten thousand strike supporters rallied on March 14 even as the city newspapers declared the strike a failure because scabs were now driving half of the city’s 180 sanitation trucks. Another rally took place on March 18 during which civil rights leader and strike supporter Martin Luther King Jr. called for a major march and work stoppage throughout the city. “You’re commanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor,” King told the crowd that day. “For the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician. All labor has worth. You are doing another thing. You are reminding, not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages.” King told the crowd that the Memphis strike was “the beginning of the Washington movement” in which thousands would assemble in the nation’s capital in April to address “the question of jobs or income.” This Labor, Civil Rights, and Memphis

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was to be the “Poor People’s Campaign” in which the civil rights movement would enter a “second phase” to “demand redress of . . . grievances by the United States government and secure at least jobs or income for all,” and in doing so galvanize blacks as well as “millions of non-Negro poor: Indians, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Appalachian whites, and others.”21 The campaign, facing a hostile press and also rocked by the assassination of Robert Kennedy, would come to an end a little more than two months after King’s death. Labor historian Michael Honey says the 1968 strike—and King’s participation—raised the ante in the civil rights movement and brought it to a new dimension, particularly in view of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. “Civil rights laws had already been passed, changes had been made,” he told the Commercial Appeal in a January 1, 2000, retrospective on the strike. “But this overall problem of economic justice—that all started with those sanitation workers.”22 Honey believes that “the interconnections between labor and civil rights crystallized in Memphis” in 1956 when black workers at the Firestone plant successfully sued the company and their own union for their segregationist practices. He also believes that the subsequent sanitation strike in 1968 “opened the way to unionization of the working poor in government jobs across the country, a major area in which unions have expanded for the past thirty-plus years.”23 With King in the lead, some five thousand sanitation workers marched on March 28, 1968. They wore what the Commercial Appeal decades later described as “their Sunday Best because they believed in the righteousness of their cause.”24 They also carried the “I AM A MAN” signs that became a symbol of the “dignity of labor” that King had proclaimed on March 18. Violence erupted, however, as police moved in forcefully with nightsticks, tear gas, and even gunfire. Police killed sixteen-year-old Larry Payne in an alleged looting incident. Nearly four thousand National Guardsmen were ordered to the city the same day, and a 7 p.m. curfew was imposed by the state legislature. Both President Lyndon B. Johnson and AFL-CIO president George Meany made offers to intervene, but Loeb refused. After a second major speech on April 3 during which he delivered the famous words “I’ve been to the Mountaintop,” King prepared for another major march. The next day, however, he was assassinated by James Earl Ray as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, approximately one mile south of the Peabody. “No matter how much we try, from now on until there is no longer any written history, Memphis will be known as the place where Martin Luther King was crucified,” said the Reverend James Lawson, a strike leader who had invited King to Memphis and whose name became so 74

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incendiary that the Commercial Appeal banned it from its pages.25 These words by Lawson are now on display at the National Civil Rights Museum, which is located in what was once the Lorraine Motel. On April 16, twelve days after King’s murder, union leaders announced that an agreement had been reached with the city. The Loeb administration agreed to recognize the union and allow a dues checkoff system as well as a pay raise and more fair and equitable promotions. The sanitation strike, despite the intransigence of city and state officials, and the opposition of the mainstream press, ended with a victory for the workers and martyrdom for Martin Luther King Jr. Media exposure played a major role in the success of the civil rights movement to gain equality for blacks in the U.S. South. As the media philosopher Claude-Jean Bertrand once wrote, “human society cannot improve, cannot function properly, may not even be able to survive, if the media do not do their job well.”26 Reporters such as Claude Sitton of the New York Times, Simeon Booker of Jet magazine, and Dan Rather of CBS, and photojournalists such as Ernest Withers removed the anonymity and blanket of silence that had covered up day-to-day injustice in the Jim Crow South and confronted the American public with it in their living rooms. The Saturday Evening Post told its readers “The Deep South Says Never: The Hard Facts About Integration” in its June 15, 1957, cover story.27 In April 1961, a Saturday Evening Post article titled “Public Schools Died Here” told how Virginia’s “rock-solid segregationists” had killed public education in Prince Edward County.28 Less than two years later, Look magazine ran an article titled “Birmingham: I Saw a City Die.”29 In his pamphlet Turning Point: The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, the noted activist Frank R. Parker wrote that the murderous complicity of law enforcement officials with the Ku Klux Klan in suppressing the rights of blacks might have continued if the media had not cast a spotlight on crimes such as the killing of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964. “Their highly publicized deaths . . . shook the national conscience and stood as a monument to the horrifying depths to which segregationists were willing to go.”30 The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project was launched in part to call attention to Southern injustice. Freedom Summer became “the top news story that season, second only to the 1964 presidential campaign,” Parker wrote. “The state was flooded with reporters, and many white Americans outside the South discovered the civil rights movement that year.” The historian Neil McMillen agreed. “Quite literally, (Freedom Summer’s) triumph may be measured in column inches of newsprint and running Labor, Civil Rights, and Memphis

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feet of video tape. It provided summer-long, nationwide exposure of the iniquities of white supremacy in the deepest of Deep South states.”31 Perhaps Gay Talese in The Kingdom and the Power, a monumental history of the New York Times published in 1969, best sums up the impact of the media in the civil rights movement. “Even Faulkner, had he lived, would have experienced difficulty in trying to defend the South after the scene in Selma had been filmed on television and had been played again and again on the home screen in millions of living rooms: the sight of a charging wedge of troopers with billy clubs and gas grenades crashing into a procession of Negroes, the odd sound of plastic helmets and wood beating against flesh, clop, cluck, clap, the cries of Negroes falling to the highway, the cheers of white locals watching on the other side of the road, the hoof clicks of nervous horses mounted by a sheriff’s posse anxious to get into the act, the ticking of television cameras. Soon, from all over America, thousands of sympathizers, black and white, were bound for Selma.”32 After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the media gradually turned away from civil rights to the growing involvement in and public unrest over the Vietnam War. The change in media attention paralleled King’s increasing focus on the economic disparities of American life and the need for a broad-based attack on poverty and worker rights. Even today, when media look back at King’s legacy, they rarely cite this latter phase of his life’s work. “Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King’s birthday, we get perfunctory news reports about ‘the slain civil rights leader,’” write Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). “The remarkable thing about this annual review of King’s life is that several years—his last years—are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole. “In the early 1960s, when King focused on his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. . . . But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965 King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without ‘human rights’—including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.”33 It was in the last of those “last years” that King came to Memphis. Like Memphis itself, the editors at the Commercial Appeal and PressScimitar felt they had kept their heads largely above the fray during the civil rights battles across the South in the early to mid-1960s, particularly in comparison to the blatantly racist and rabble-rousing histrionics in the two major newspapers of Mississippi, the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News. When California-born, Mississippi-bred white supremacist 76

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Byron De La Beckwith was charged with the June 12, 1963, murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, the Clarion-Ledger headlined the story “Californian Is Charged with Murder of Evers.” The Jackson Daily News editorialized on June 20, 1964, that the bill destined to become the Civil Rights Act less than two weeks later would “signal the disgraceful beginning of the end of individual constitutional rights.”34 “Terrible, terrible,” the noted Mississippi civil rights activist Aaron Henry once said of the Jackson newspapers during the 1960s. “The Jackson press led the image of terribleness.”35 In contrast, the Commercial Appeal in Memphis could point to its 1923 Pulitzer Prize for “meritorious public service” in crusading against the Ku Klux Klan, an award that ironically included praise for the “Hambone’s Meditations” cartoon later criticized by black Memphians as racist. The Memphis Press-Scimitar only had to cite the name of Edward J. Meeman, editor from 1931 to 1962 and a widely recognized champion of black rights. Yet the sanitation strike of 1968 and Martin Luther King’s involvement proved to many black Memphians that the newspapers weren’t that different from their sister papers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South. Blacks picketed both newspapers within a week after the end of the sanitation strike to protest the coverage. They launched a boycott asking fellow blacks not to buy the newspapers or advertise in them, and they passed out handbills across the city describing their complaints. In an April 26, 1968, article titled “Hurt Pride in Memphis,” Time magazine quotes strike leader James Lawson as saying, “They are racist newspapers. They have attacked and vilified Martin Luther King. They have to share responsibility for his death.” Time goes on to editorialize that “the strike . . . caught the papers off guard. Memphis, as they boasted perhaps too often, had never had a serious racial disturbance. Partly because of this, the papers were rattled when it finally occurred.” The newspapers emphasized violence in their stories and downplayed the racial aspects of the issue even though most of the workers were black, the magazine said.36 The Commercial Appeal even refused to use Lawson’s name in its coverage. Editorially the Commercial Appeal was virulently opposed to the strike. A review of its editorials and cartoons in February, March, and April 1968 reveals a steady drumbeat of attacks on the strikers, resentment against Martin Luther King’s intervention, and bitter defensiveness in light of the fact that New York City was also undergoing a garbage worker strike at the time. On the day after the strike began, a Commercial Appeal editorial headlined “Memphis’ Wildcat Garbage ‘Strike’” called the labor action “a shallow attempt at blackmail . . . a wildcat walkout by a wildcat union” that poses Labor, Civil Rights, and Memphis

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“a threat against public health and well-being by individuals who have chosen to stay away from work without either official or legal sanction.”37 Two days later, the Commercial Appeal called on the city to hire scabs “to prevent danger to the health of those unable to protect themselves.” Ultimately, the newspaper said, greater mechanization will be the solution for a city “caught in this bind because it has tried to provide employment to unskilled workers on a large scale.”38 The next day, the Commercial Appeal praised Mayor Loeb for taking the “right course” in opposing the strikers and their “bluster, swagger and insolence.” Since “reason has not worked in dealing with this wildcat strike . . . strong measures have had to be taken.”39 On Sunday, February 18, the newspaper decided that “Memphis Is Being Used” by “political figures and civil rights leaders” whose “sordid approach is a disservice to the entire city, to its government, and to the absent workers themselves.”40 Political cartoons reflected the same views as the editorials. A cartoon that appeared on February 23 was particularly offensive and a cause for protest by black Memphians. It depicted a black man sitting on top of a trash can amid piles of garbage with fumes rising in the air. In the fumes were the words “Threat of Anarchy.”41 Another cartoon showed a garbage can with a book titled “Law and Order” jammed into the top of it.42 Yet another showed piles of uncollected garbage and an overfilled trash can with a box stuffed into it proclaiming “Piling Up! This City’s Resentment.”43 These editorials and cartoons set the tone for much of the rest of February and March, and often stood in sharp contrast to the clearly opposing views among some letter writers and various citizens groups who hoped for an equitable resolution that recognized the strikers’ legitimate grievances. One union-supporting letter writer, the Reverend C. O. Basinger, called the Commercial Appeal a “scabbing, strike-breaking prone newspaper” that has “repeatedly attempted to induce public opinion through the falsification of facts, through slanting, by innuendo, and every other technique.”44 On March 8, the newspaper reported that a group of eighteen “fashionably dressed” Memphis housewives met with the mayor to tell him that sixteen of them “did not agree with the stand he has taken on the strike” and the other two felt the issues weren’t worth “racial turmoil.”45 After King’s assassination on April 4, the pages of the newspapers filled with stories of subsequent looting and arson in the streets of Memphis and riots in Washington, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore. However, when President Johnson declared April 7 a national day of mourning, the Commercial Appeal called for a “return to normal public activity” and urged “a God-fearing, God-loving Memphis” to “make its churches and 78

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pulpits the focal points.” As for the sanitation strike, the newspaper editorialized with a newfound sense of diplomacy, “once more we say that both union leaders and city officials must bring their principles into alignment.”46 Michael Honey has argued that the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and subsequent dismantling of the Poor People’s Campaign essentially ended hopes of a joint, ongoing civil and labor rights movement. A leader of the so-called New Southern Labor History, Honey lays much of the blame for labor’s failures in the South to organized labor itself, claiming it failed to engage Southern blacks sufficiently and make a real and sustainable commitment to civil rights. The purging of Communists, radicals, and many blacks as well from the CIO in the 1940s sapped Operation Dixie of its potential, Honey maintains, and organized labor’s later compromises and missed opportunities—such as the AFL-CIO’s failure to give an official endorsement to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom— forced blacks to look to their own leaders and organizations in the fight for civil rights. In his research, Honey has focused on Memphis to make his case, charting the history of the city’s dealings with race and labor through much of the twentieth century. In the conclusion of his book Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers, Honey quotes a black worker with the Firestone plant in Memphis, Josh Tools, who sums up, in many ways, the central theme of the New Southern Labor History: “I tell you when both of us get in a ditch together and stay long enough, we’ll find the means to get out together, and the CIO was that. But once they got it set up and got that thing working, the white leadership just wasn’t going to support you in job equality or equal pay. . . . Black workers always supported the union, but the union never made a concerted effort to eliminate discrimination.”47 Ironically, the civil rights era was a period of labor growth in the South, a phenomenon that paralleled the region’s industrial growth. According to the labor historian Alan Draper, union membership in the South grew by 142,000 between 1953 and 1966—a span of time roughly stretching from Brown vs. Board of Education to the Selma march—while non-Southern unions lost 815,000 members.48 Yet within this growth in the Southern labor movement was a bitter struggle, many aspects of which bolster Honey’s view. Opposition to the racial integrationist views of state and national AFL-CIO leaders led to countless disaffiliations of Southern union locals, draining the budgets and political clout of the state federations. Many Southern unionists also belonged to the Ku Klux Klan as well as to the “white” Citizens Councils. Among these was Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard and United Rubber Workers member Robert Shelton. When civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo Labor, Civil Rights, and Memphis

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was murdered in Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1965, two of the suspected Klansmen belonged to the United Steel Workers.49 Union members in the South, after all, were subject to the same prejudices and passions as other whites in the region. As crusading journalist I. F. Stone wrote after Liuzzo’s killing, “Klansmen may have pulled the trigger, but the bullet, the gun and the hate were supplied by the South. In a fundamental sense the South is guilty.”50 For all his segregationist bluster, Alabama governor George Wallace had bona fide credentials as a supporter of labor, including opposition to the state’s right-to-work law and a record of support for progressive tax policies. Even when his race-driven politics cost him the support of the state AFL-CIO, he still had the hearts of many of the rank-and-file. He later used this support as a presidential candidate in 1964 when he took his blue-collar campaign to Milwaukee’s Serbian Memorial Hall. At the rally, a polka band played “Dixie” and Polish-American and other ethnic workers applauded him wildly as a sixty-two-foot roll was unveiled bearing the names of 1,734 union supporters in Alabama.51 In a December 14, 2004, interview with the author, Citizens Council founder Robert B. “Tut” Patterson spoke about union involvement in his organization. “Our leader in St. Louis was in a labor union,” said Patterson, eighty-three, relaxing in the office of his Itta Bena, Mississippi, home, surrounded by paintings of Robert E. Lee and various Civil War battles. “They [union members] felt exactly as I did about the states having their own rights. Very fine people, conservative.” Of course, “We resented [UAW and former CIO leader] Walter Reuther, who was a member of the NAACP, and others like him, and their contributions to the civil rights revolution,” he added. “They were part of the problem, trying to take away from the people who built this nation.”52 A supporter of the 1963 March on Washington, Reuther stood with Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where he proclaimed, “Let this be the beginning of that great crusade to mobilize the moral conscience of America—from Michigan to Mississippi.”53 Reuther stands in contradiction to Honey’s thesis and as one example of the contrasting view of Southern labor and civil rights history held by historians such as Alan Draper. Draper points to the courageous leadership of Southerners such as Claude Ramsay of the Mississippi AFL-CIO, Victor Bussie of the Louisiana AFL-CIO, and Barney Weeks of the Alabama AFL-CIO who stood up for the civil rights of black Americans in the face of cross-burning Klansmen as well as their own angry membership. “The greatest weakness of the new southern labor history is its failure to appreciate the paralyzing dilemma that confronted organizers and labor 80

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leaders who recognized the costs of segregation but were constrained by a membership and region that were determined to defend it,” Draper writes in Conflict of Interest: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954–1968. “The new southern labor history may dismiss this constraint, but union leaders ignored it at their peril. By their failure to appreciate the depth of and commitment to white supremacy, the new southern labor historians ultimately blame the victim.”54 Louisiana’s labor patriarch, Victor Bussie, certainly knew of the challenge leaders like himself faced during the civil rights movement. The trained firefighter who led the state AFL-CIO from 1956 to 1997 saw his federation lose 40 percent of its membership because of his strong stand for civil rights. “We lost the Civil War 100 years ago,” Bussie told disgruntled, heckling union members at the Labor Day banquet in New Orleans on August 29, 1963, the day after the March on Washington. “I thank God we did lose it.”55 Bussie, a master lobbyist and political infighter who was successful in keeping a right-to-work law off the Louisiana books until 1976, received numerous death threats for his efforts. His house was even bombed while he and his wife slept in the back. “I had made a speech that same night against the Klan,” the eighty-seven-year-old Bussie said during an interview with the author in February 2006. “They caught them, but I wouldn’t file charges.”56 When Bussie learned that one of the men had a young wife and two-year-old child, he decided to give them a stern warning instead of pursuing charges. “Blacks had as much right to public facilities as we had. I went before the membership and told them they had to integrate. I told them exactly how I felt. You had nothing to do with the way you were born. You could’ve been black. That’s the way I feel. They’d ask me, ‘You want your daughter to marry a black man?’ I said, ‘That’ll be her choice and not mine.’ Then they said I was a communist. I said I’m not a communist. I don’t associate with them. . . . They thought everything was going to come to an end if they [blacks] get civil rights.” In retrospect, Bussie said, the passions of the 1960s aren’t all that different from what they are in the twenty-first century. “They’ve always been wise to pick an issue to get the electorate mad, instead of what they ought to be thinking about.” As for the racist political leaders of the day, such as the members of the Federation for Constitutional Government, Bussie said he often told colleagues the following: “I had rather walk with [John F.] Kennedy to the brink of hell than walk across the street with Leander Perez. He was a nasty, obscene man.” Mississippi labor organizers like Ray Smithhart and Danny Forsyth also knew firsthand about the “paralyzing dilemma” facing unions in the Labor, Civil Rights, and Memphis

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South during the 1960s. Antiunion goons tried to run Smithhart down on a dark road in Ripley, Mississippi, in 1962, firing two hundred pellets into his car. He reported it to the local sheriff, who waved him away and told him labor organizers ought to expect such treatment.57 Smithhart, the grandson of a Confederate veteran, a lifelong Baptist, and first secretary-treasurer of the state AFL-CIO, was called an “outside agitator” and, of course, a communist. He was thrown in jail in Amory, Mississippi, for distributing union handbills. A Port Gibson, Mississippi, police chief, “shaking and trembling with his hand on his gun,” threatened jail, saying “no one would hear” from him again if he didn’t leave town, Smithhart once recalled in correspondence with the author. As president of a United Rubber Workers local in the 1950s, Smithhart led a delegation to urge Jackson, Mississippi, mayor Allen C. Thompson to hire black police officers and truck drivers for the city. Thompson refused. Smithhart protested when a local company layoff affected a senior black employee but not less senior white workers. He got in trouble with his own plant supervisor for drinking out of the “colored” water fountains. “I had to watch every move I made,” he said. “I knew they were trying to get something on me so they could fire me.” In 1957, Smithhart became the first secretary-treasurer of the state AFL-CIO and soon set about forging a close relationship between labor and civil rights. Smithhart befriended civil rights activist Medgar Evers and introduced him to state AFL-CIO president Claude Ramsay, who would work with Evers closely until the activist was slain in 1963. “All people need their civil rights,” said Smithhart, who died in April 2005. “I would not let the anti-union forces intimidate me. I stood my ground, and they did not like it.” Danny Forsyth is another veteran of the labor and civil rights struggles who worked as an organizer for textile workers in North Carolina and Mississippi in the 1960s and 1970s. During a classroom lecture at the University of Mississippi in October 2004, he recalled taking affidavits in a union-plant dispute near the Mississippi Delta town of Cleveland one evening in the mid-1960s. “The [National Labor Relations] Board agent said, ‘Have you looked outside the window?’ I looked and saw four Klansmen sitting a car, fully clothed and everything. When the final witness was finished, the agent asked me if I had protection. He gave me a pistol, and we left. They came in behind us. We ran a hundred miles an hour across the cotton fields . . . then took the long way back. When you organize you know all the backroads. There’s not a county road in Mississippi I don’t know. We cut through the back trail and ran into them, and I said, ‘Here we go again.’ These were all gravel roads. I was very concerned. We created such a 82

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smokescreen of dust. We both bailed in a cotton field and let the car run on out in the field. They got out within 1,000 yards behind us. They had flashlights out and started shooting out across the field. I was laying on my belly in that cold field. They finally gave up. I didn’t know how we’d done it. We finally got out of there. I didn’t sleep any that night.”58 What Bussie, Smithhart, Forsyth, and others faced in the South during the civil rights movement was not only robed Klansmen. They faced also a solid phalanx of opposition, an entrenched power structure that included all branches and levels of government, law enforcement, the pulpit, and the press. As the historian James W. Silver once said about Mississippi, the South was more or less a “closed society” with a ruling oligarchy bound and determined to take advantage of every means—from the gavel of the Senate Judiciary Committee to the guns and burning crosses of the Ku Klux Klan—to resist not only racial integration but any and all challenge to the oligarchy’s power and authority. V. O. Key’s dream in 1949 of Southern industrial workers eventually serving as a catalyst to a realignment of Southern politics away from its race-haunted past never materialized because the power-controlling oligarchy was too strong. As Victor Bussie indicated, the challenges facing organized labor today in the U.S. South aren’t that different from what they were a half-century before, and they’re not that different from what labor is facing in the nation as a whole. In some ways, the challenges are even more formidable. The gains of the civil rights movement—the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965—re-enfranchised black Southerners and finally put lie to the “separate-but-equal” mythology of Plessy vs. Ferguson. However, Southern schools largely remain segregated—public schools are predominantly black, and private schools predominantly white—and blacks continue to be among the poorest of Southerners. As for labor, “right to work” remains the law of the land and increasingly the attitude of the nation as a whole as witnessed in the fall of organized labor to its lowest ebb since the 1920s, a decline that took it from representing onethird of the workforce after World War II to roughly 13 percent today. Southern politicians of all stripes today give plenty of lip service to civil rights. Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, once the head of the national Republican Party, could never use the openly racist language of a Leander Perez or Theodore Bilbo and get away with it, even in the Deep South. However, he proudly wears a pin bearing the state flag with its Confederate insignia on his lapel. The white churches that either openly resisted racial integration or whose stony silence spoke volumes to the marching protesters of Selma and Birmingham no longer endorse the legality of racial separation from the pulpit, yet most of them remain racially segregated. Labor, Civil Rights, and Memphis

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As for newspapers and other media, the Clarion-Ledger, once called “perhaps the most racist major newspaper in the country,” and its sister paper, the Jackson Daily News, declared on September 26, 1982, that “we were wrong, wrong, wrong” on civil rights and that “finally, we’re moving beyond our lost causes.”59 Just seven months later, the Clarion-Ledger would win a Pulitzer Prize for its support of public education in the state. Much of the Southern media now, like everywhere else, is corporate owned. Powerful newspaper families like the Hedermans in Mississippi and the Daniels in North Carolina have handed over the keys to companies like Gannett, McClatchy, and E. W. Scripps. Yet, labor’s struggle continues, and usually with as little sympathy from the press and other media as it found with the Hedermans. Yesterday’s sins of anger and defiance have been replaced by today’s sins of omission. The Commercial Appeal in Memphis didn’t attack the gathering of the Southern Faith, Labor and Community Alliance in July 2006 like it did Martin Luther King Jr. and the sanitation strike of 1968, the event that largely inspired the SFLCA’s meeting. The newspaper simply ignored it. It’s an old truism in labor. Unless workers go on strike or file a major protest—such as the black workers at the Delta Pride catfish plants in Indianola, Mississippi, in 1990 or the black and Latino workers at the Smithfield Packing pork-processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, in 2006, the media are usually too busy to show up. That’s why Memphis newspaper readers and television news watchers were unaware of the peaceful march and protest at Quebecor in the summer of 2006. Memphis today is a city with a black mayor, black council members, and 61 percent black population. The civil rights movement has left its mark. But the city also has a 21 percent poverty rate, and most of the poor are black. Between January 1 and June 15 of 2006, eighty-seven murders were committed in the city, and sixty-five of them were “black on black.”60 “The South has been anti-union, a statement of fact,” said Commercial Appeal managing editor Otis Sanford, who is black, at a conference on labor and the Southern press organized by the author at the University of Mississippi in October 2003. “If Mississippi is the cesspool of organized labor, Tennessee is the plunger. As for the sanitation strike, Martin Luther King came to help a group that was the lowest of the low. The newspaper was a supporter of the establishment. It had a paternalistic attitude. ‘We know what’s best for you.’”61 Sanford, a veteran journalist and Newspaper Guild member, said he has been on both sides of the table in management-labor discussions. “Now, in some respects, the labor movement has somewhat of a public relations problem. The masses feel as if things are not nearly as bad as 84

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they were forty years ago. Most media try to do a balanced job, a fair job, but I don’t think you have people on the staffs [of newspapers] who have the expertise. Until you do a little better job of winning the PR war, the sentiment of the populace is going to be toward management.” As a part of management, Sanford has more recently sat on the opposite side of the table from the union he used to represent. Sitting alongside him is notorious Nashville-based union-busting attorney Michael Zinser, hired by the Commercial Appeal in its lengthy battle with members of the Newspaper Guild of Memphis who are on its staff. The issues have ranged from outsourcing to merit pay raises. In all fairness, the Commercial Appeal didn’t treat the SFLCA much differently than the national mainstream media do the labor movement in general. At the national convention of the AFL-CIO in Chicago in July 2005, long reams of articles were devoted to the major split in the AFLCIO that led the Teamsters and other unions to break away and form their own Change to Win Coalition. What got lost in the extensive coverage of that split were the AFL-CIO’s unanimously passed resolutions guaranteeing racial diversity among the membership and leadership from top to bottom, committing the organization to annual reviews to ensure compliance. Other resolutions included a call to declare a national holiday in honor of the late leader of the United Farm Workers, Cesar Chavez. As the resolutions passed, speaker after speaker spoke of the vital need for a continued commitment to both labor and civil rights for people of all colors. “In 1961, when Martin Luther King addressed the . . . convention of the AFL-CIO, he said that our needs are identical with labor’s needs,” the NAACP chairman and longtime civil rights activist Julian Bond told the convention. “The labor hater and the race baiter are twin heads of the same creature. Numerous reports show blacks are more likely to support unions. Today black families that once could not get a union card, now they’re disproportionately represented. That card means health insurance, better pensions. We know that labor will stand with us when we fight for renewal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”62 Fine, inspiring words that marked the irony of history as well as the undeniable progress both labor and civil rights have made in their long struggle together. Bond’s words also spoke to the challenges ahead, but few reporters in the giant hall of the Navy Pier in Chicago that day were taking notes.

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Chapter 5

labor, race, and the mississippi press

Claude Ramsay, the crusty, barrel-chested president of the Mississippi AFL-CIO from 1959 to 1986, delivered a stem-winder of a speech at the University of Mississippi in 1966—a time when the fires of the civil rights struggle were still burning—that included a snapshot history of the labor movement, a discussion of the twin legacies of Samuel Gompers and Eugene Debs, and a withering analysis of how the state’s political and business leaders had failed working Mississippians. His best shots, however, came in a blistering indictment of the Mississippi press. “The press in Mississippi has to be rated as the worst in the nation,” Ramsay told his audience. “This is especially true as far as the Hederman papers in Jackson are concerned. The Jackson Daily News and Clarion-Ledger have probably done more to retard this state than any other single institution. These papers have for years kept the ‘race issue’ alive and have added more fuel to the flames of racial hatred.”1 Reaching deep into a well of frustration, Ramsay let loose with the kind of fiery tirade that Mother Jones and William “Big Bill” Haywood would have applauded. “Several of their columnists should be in mental institutions for they would have to be mentally unbalanced to write some of the rot that they do. Organized labor has received special treatment from these papers. A good high school debate topic would be ‘Resolved, that the Hederman press hates Organized Labor more than it does the Negro.’” The Hederman family-owned newspapers in Jackson reflected the attitudes of most of the press as well as the political, business, and religious leadership in Mississippi toward labor and race. In Jackson it had been that way ever since Major Fred Sullens, the fiercely anti-union editor of the Daily News through the first half of the century, began writing editorials in 1907. The attitudes didn’t change when Sullens passed the baton to writers like Jimmy Ward of the Jackson Daily News. No less a fire-eater 86

was his counterpart at the Clarion-Ledger, columnist Tom Ethridge, who called CIO and United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther a “leftist” and a “fuehrer.” The newspapers tagged Ramsay a communist sympathizer and berated him for trying to link labor with racial integration. A line on an old ballad of the International Workers of the World says, “You ain’t done nothing if you ain’t been called a Red.” Certainly Claude Ramsay was called “red” and worse during his tenure as Mississippi’s top labor leader. He was attacked in the media, denounced on the floor of the state house of representatives. A former Klansman once admitted that he’d been contracted to kill Ramsay. “They’d call me up and threaten me,” Ramsay told the author during a 1981 interview. “I kept a double-barreled shotgun on the floorboard of my car, and I told them I’d take at least two of them with me.”2 Ramsay faced a solid phalanx of opposition to his efforts in both the labor and civil rights movements. Nowhere was the opposition stronger than in the state press. When the United Rubber Workers tried to organize Southbridge Plastics in Corinth in 1964, the Daily Corinthian had this to say in a November 9, 1964, editorial headlined “Let’s Send Them Packing!”: “Their only concern is with the increased dues they rake in whenever a new plant is unionized. . . . Harassment of management and costly shutdowns will be a probability. Naturally companies looking southward to escape such harassment will not give Corinth a second glance. . . . A NO vote for unions is a YES vote for industry and progress.” A similar view was expressed by the Tupelo Daily Journal during a 1965 organizing effort at Monroe Manufacturing Company in nearby Aberdeen. After comforting readers that “no union can have (an employee) fired from his job for not belonging to (a union)” and warning against “men like Martin Luther King” who criticize plants for moving to the South to avoid unions, the newspaper had this to say in its August 12, 1965, editorial: “For once a union gets a hold on any plant, every eligible worker therein will be forced to join it, pay dues to it, and make himself subject to its fines and authority, including possible ouster from his job if he disobeys its rules. . . . We have learned by contrasting our development with that of less progressive similar areas that the only way we can continue to provide more and better jobs for our people is to keep unions out.” As Mississippi’s top labor leader, Ramsay spent as much time fighting the racist, anti-union Mississippi media as he did segregationist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Citizens Councils. In many ways, the major milestones of his career are marked by his relationship with the media. Even as he fought the powerful Hederman newspapers in Jackson, he also befriended two of Mississippi’s most courageous journalists, Ira B. Harkey Labor, Race, and the Mississippi Press

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of the Pascagoula Chronicle and Hazel Brannon Smith of the Lexington Advertiser, who both won Pulitzer prizes for their fight against racial injustice. Perhaps the major turning point in Ramsay’s career was his landmark struggle with the racist WLBT television station in Jackson in the 1960s and his joint effort with the state NAACP to get its license suspended. This stand cost him substantial support among fellow union members, many of whom were secretly members of the Klan or of Citizens Councils. It was one of the several times in Ramsay’s life that he would describe with a favorite expression of his: “All hell broke loose.” Organized labor’s struggle in the “unplowed fields” of the South—to use Amalgamated Clothing Workers leader Sidney Hillman’s term from 1946—was never more intense than during the civil rights era from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. The leaders of the state AFL-CIO federations in the South—men like Ramsay in Mississippi, Victor Bussie in Louisiana, Barney Weeks in Alabama, Sinway Young in South Carolina, Bill Becker in Arkansas—found themselves on the front lines. By and large they stood with their national leadership on the side of racial justice and black voter registration as well as the national Democratic Party. On the other side were the Klan, the Citizens Councils, and the region’s power brokers, and also many of labor’s own rank-and-file. Nowhere were the battle lines drawn more clearly than in Mississippi, a state that “manifests in accentuated form the darker political strains that run throughout the South,” according to V. O. Key. Ramsay considered Mississippi organized labor’s final frontier. This is how AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education (COPE) area director Daniel Powell described the state in 1964: “The Mississippi situation is the most discouraging in the nation. The fear that blankets the state is unbelievable. Without Ramsay and (state AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Thomas) Knight, the Mississippi State Council would be almost certain to collapse in a few months.”3 A rural state bordered by two large metropolitan areas—Memphis and New Orleans—but with only one city exceeding 100,000 population within its borders, Mississippi in the 1960s remained in many ways a feudalistic society ruled by an oligarchy that ranged from the political elite of the cotton-rich Delta to the business and religious establishment of the capital city of Jackson. An anchor of this oligarchy was the Hederman family, whose considerable holdings included Mississippi’s only two newspapers with a statewide circulation. The Hedermans were also faithful members of Jackson’s First Baptist Church, whose official sanction they enjoyed. Ironically, Ramsay himself was a distant relative of the state’s most notorious racist, the former governor and U.S. senator Theodore Bilbo. The future labor leader was a native of the town of Ocean Springs on 88

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Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. After high school and a year of junior college in the 1930s, Ramsay worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps camps and later with Pascagoula’s International Paper plant, where he got his first exposure to labor unions. The AFL’s United Paperworkers union was organizing the plant at the time. Ramsay was in the military in Germany at the end of World War II, serving with black as well as white soldiers and gaining an experience he later credited with bringing about his racial enlightenment. After his return to Mississippi, he became an active unionist, shop steward, later president of his local, and a supporter of Harry Truman for president in defiance of the Dixiecrat wave sweeping the South. For the rest of his life, he would call himself a “Franklin Roosevelt-Harry Trumantype Democrat.” Ramsay’s political awakening in Germany was in sharp contrast to the political changes taking place not only in Mississippi but across the nation. Republicans took control of both houses of Congress in 1946, and Republican congressman Fred Hartley of New Jersey expressed the views of many of them when he said, “labor unions were coddled, nursed, and pampered” under Roosevelt.4 In 1947, Congress overcame a presidential veto in passing the Taft-Hartley Act, reversing many of the gains labor had made under the Wagner Act of 1935. In the presidential election of 1948, governors Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Fielding Wright of Mississippi took the helm of the new Dixiecrat Party, the vanguard of a movement that formed as a reaction against President Truman’s civil rights policies but also against labor and the Congress of Industrial Organization’s landmark “Operation Dixie” effort to organize the South. The movement actually can trace its roots further back to the 1938 congressional elections when Roosevelt tried unsuccessfully to purge Congress of the conservative Southern Democrats who were resisting his latest New Deal initiatives. As detailed in Ramsay’s 1966 speech at the University of Mississippi, often referred to as Ole Miss, an anti-union movement had been gaining momentum in Mississippi since 1936, the year after the Wagner Act, when Governor Hugh White launched his Balance Agriculture with Industry (BAWI) initiative, a program later adopted by other Southern states that uses tax exemptions as well as government grants and loans to encourage investment by outside industry. However, key components of the BAWI recruitment packages also included low wages, a docile workforce, and a union-hostile political and economic climate. Ramsay called BAWI “state socialism (that) undermines the free enterprise system for it eliminates the risk of capital investment . . . a bonanza (for) the employer who is interested in running away from an organized Labor, Race, and the Mississippi Press

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work force.” To make it work, he said, “the business community along with the local newspaper usually carries the fight” to keep unions out.5 Mississippi’s attitudes toward labor—that is, white labor—prior to 1936 were surprisingly favorable even though the state operated under an 1890 constitution that was generally hostile toward industrialization. When an estimated fifteen hundred shop craft workers went on strike in McComb in 1911, “public opinion . . . was overwhelmingly in support of the strikers,” wrote Mississippi State University management professor Donald C. Mosley in his chapter on labor in A History of Mississippi: Volume II. “The local newspaper supported them, and the local stores allowed the strikers credit until their own position was threatened.” Until the mid1930s, Mosley wrote, “political leadership unquestionably favored the laboring man (other than the Negro).”6 However, BAWI, Taft-Hartley, the Dixiecrat revolt, and finally the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling to end racially segregated public schools had dramatically changed the landscape by the time Claude Ramsay took over the presidency of the Mississippi AFL-CIO in 1959. The next half-dozen years would prove Ramsay’s crucible, his ultimate test as a labor leader and civil rights advocate in the South’s most intransigently segregated state. Ross Barnett’s election as governor in 1959 was a glorious victory for the arch-segregationist Citizens Councils, an organization of community leaders termed by critics as the “Uptown Klan” and one that would become a major nemesis for Ramsay. Barnett, whose first speech as governor-elect was at the Citizens Councils statewide meeting in Jackson, quickly repaid his benefactors by pushing through a right-to-work amendment to the state constitution on June 7, 1960. In fact, labor had been a major issue of the 1959 gubernatorial race with Barnett and fellow Democratic candidate Carroll Gartin accusing each other of being sympathetic to unions while a salivating Mississippi press corps reported every charge. For example, on August 14, 1959, this headline ran in the Clarion-Ledger: “Barnett Says CIO’s Label Is on Gartin.” The next day the Vicksburg Evening Post proclaimed: “Barnett Admits Attending Teamsters Meet in Jackson.” On August 16, the Jackson Daily News headlined a follow-up story this way: “Barnett met Hoffa’s men, says Gartin.” In the last story, Gartin, the state’s lieutenant governor, calls Barnett a “tool of labor.” The issue of race, however, would quickly loom even larger over Mississippi. On May 25, 1961, the first Freedom Riders arrived in Jackson, welcomed by an utterly hostile press and a political establishment willing to use force to prevent a change in what Barnett would call Mississippi’s “customs (and) heritage.”7 Sixteen months later, two men would be 90

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killed and dozens others wounded when the federal government forced James Meredith’s enrollment as the first black student at the University of Mississippi. Less than a year after the Ole Miss riot, Mississippi NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was killed by an assassin outside his Jackson home. Evers had been a close associate of Ramsay ever since the two were introduced by state AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Ray Smithhart. Ironically, one of Ramsay’s early major battles with the segregrationists put him on the side of a crusading newspaper editor against many of his own rank-and-file union members who’d joined a group of racist vigilantes known as the Jackson County Emergency Unit. Organized by Sheriff James Ira Grimsley as a posse to oppose black student James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi on September 30, 1962, the unit came under a blistering editorial attack by Ira B. Harkey, editor of the local Pascagoula Chronicle. Harkey, who died at the age of eighty-eight in October 2006, was a native of New Orleans and outspoken opponent of Barnett and segregation. He was a fiery and eloquent crusader who wrote in the editor-owner tradition of Henry Watterson of the Louisville (Kentucky) Courier-Journal and later George Seldes of In Fact. Several Southern journalists distinguished themselves as voices for reason during the civil rights movement—Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, Hodding Carter Jr. of the Delta DemocratTimes, Harry Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette—but none were as committed and outspokenly in support of racial integration as Harkey. “He was Mississippi’s most incendiary voice, an in-your-face editor who infuriated the white power structure,” wrote David L. Bennett in the 2001 collection of essays, The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement.8 Harkey received death threats. A cross was burned in his front yard; windows were shot out at his newspaper. An advertising boycott was launched to run him out of business. He pointed his finger directly at the so-called Emergency Unit, calling it “a terrorist group.” Sheriff Grimsley, a man Harkey would later describe as a “bloated, hard-drinking semiliterate ruffian,” denied culpability, but the attacks continued.9 Other newspapers in the state called him a “Quisling” and traitor to Mississippi traditions. Here’s a taste of Harkey’s editorial eloquence: “A terrorist group has been organized in your county. Its first targets are this newspaper and any white persons designated by the group’s ‘action committee’ as ‘niggerlovers.’ This group has been given a quasi-official status because it was sponsored by the chief law enforcement officer of your county. It will attack the Chronicle . . . through threats, intimidation and, ultimately, destruction. . . . We are under no illusion that anybody here cares what happens to Ira Harkey. But think long on this: what happens to him can happen to you. You may be next.”10 Labor, Race, and the Mississippi Press

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Not one of “Jackson County’s 54,317 persons” came to Harkey’s defense except Claude Ramsay, the editor recalled in his 1967 autobiography, The Smell of Burning Crosses. Ramsay, aware that union members were part of the campaign against Harkey, called a special meeting of the Pascagoula Metal Trades Council to denounce their actions and stand up for what Harkey himself would describe as “the only pro-union newspaper in a large part of the South.” “We are fortunate in this county in that we have a daily newspaper friendly to our cause,” Ramsay told the union members at the giant Ingalls Shipbuilding in Jackson County. “Our enemies have initiated a movement in our midst designed to destroy this friend.” Ramsay said the turmoil in Jackson County and Mississippi was a threat to their own jobs. “A racial disturbance can cause this company to lose future contracts. It necessarily follows that this in turn would mean the jobs of many of our members.”11 Harkey ran the text of Ramsay’s speech as a front-page editorial. In a March 22, 2005, interview with the author, Harkey recalled Ramsay’s act. “Claude was the nerviest guy when he made that talk. It was very important to me to have him say that, the first person of any standing to come out in my favor, I mean the bravest guy.” Local law enforcements was as fiercely anti-labor as it was anti-integration, Harkey said. “The labor guys coming into the state were framed with a whiskey deal. The police would put a whiskey bottle in their car, and they’d be arrested. Labor people were hated.”12 The state federation found itself in the middle of the battle again in the 1963 gubernatorial election. Its endorsement of Republican Rubel Phillips for governor in 1963—motivated largely by the conviction that a viable two-party system would open the doors to change in Mississippi—made it a handy target for the winning candidate, Paul Johnson, who called Ramsay a “false prophet” with a “tendency toward integration.” It was a time when Mississippi “seethed with defiance,” Alan Draper has written.13 Disaffiliations by major union locals from the state federation over the race question were taking their toll. Membership had dropped from 24,000 in 1960 to 20,000 in 1962, fueling a $900-a-month budget deficit. Ramsay even considered not running for reelection as president in 1963. He felt neglected by the national office. This can be seen in his February 13, 1964, letter to Stanton Smith, AFL-CIO coordinator of state and local central bodies: “I am damn well fed up with being shot at continually by the White Councils while these people sit on the side lines.”14 The year 1964, as Ramsay would put it, was when “all hell broke loose.” In April the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party—known as the Loyalists—formed as a biracial challenge to the established and segre92

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gated party leadership—known as the Regulars—for delegate seats in the August 1964 Democratic National Convention. Civil rights activists proclaimed “Freedom Summer 1964,” and the segregationists underground in Mississippi declared war, launching an insurgency that would result in an estimated eighty beatings, thirty-five church burnings, thirty bombings of homes and other buildings, and more than one thousand arrests. A nadir was reached in June with the brutal killings of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi. This was also the year Ramsay joined a petition filed by the United Church of Christ, the state NAACP, and the Reverend Robert L. T. Smith of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) asking the Federal Communications Commission to deny the license of the state’s most notoriously racist television station, the Jackson-based NBC-affiliate WLBT. No other decision Ramsay ever made brought him more criticism and controversy. WLBT’s racism was well established. The FCC had delayed its license for a year in 1958 as a result of its reportage. Four years later, a formal inquiry was launched into its coverage of Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi. Ramsay was also keenly aware of the station’s anti-labor views. “They were very much anti-black and anti-labor,” he told oral historian Orley B. Caudill of the University of Southern Mississippi in 1981.15 In his 1966 speech at Ole Miss, he described WLBT as a “station (that) had been dominated by the Citizens Council and other ‘right-wing’ influences. The station facilities were continually being used as a propaganda outlet for these extremists. Network programs were preempted at the convenience of the station and during the Meredith affair the manager of the station actually went on the air to stir the people into revolt.”16 The station censored programs that featured prominent blacks such as Medgar Evers and NAACP general counsel and future U.S. Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. Yet WLBT was quick to preempt a program to show right-wing activists such as former general Edwin A. Walker. Ramsay’s biggest problem with WLBT was its virulent opposition to organized labor. In 1962, the station, aided and abetted by the Jackson papers, waged what journalist Bill Barton called “a terrific propaganda barrage against unionization” during an organizing effort by the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America at the Storkline Corporation, Jackson’s largest company with sixteen hundred employees.17 On March 21, 1962, the night before the election at the plant, WLBT ran an editorial listing the criminal convictions of several union officials and examples of other companies with better pay and benefits than unionrepresented companies. The editorial went on to say: “Employees stand to Labor, Race, and the Mississippi Press

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lose a great deal if they vote for representation. First, we don’t understand why anyone would want to be represented by the union in question . . . . Although we are outsiders, we can’t help but express the opinion that we hope that Storkline workers reject the union in tomorrow’s voting . . . for their benefit and the good of Jackson.” Ramsay believed the editorial was a key factor in the union losing the election. “They were brainwashing people,” he told Caudill. “They were opposed to everything that we were all about.”18 The historian Robert S. McElvaine said WLBT expressed views held by most of the Mississippi media. “With few exceptions, Mississippi’s disseminators of the news opposed unionization and integration with equal vigor,” he wrote in an essay on Ramsay in the 1981 volume, Southern Workers and Their Unions: 1880–1975. Major newspapers and other media outlets “divided their venom between both unions and blacks, though clearly reserving the larger portion for the latter.”19 After joining the petition to deny WLBT’s license, Ramsay told Caudill, “All hell broke loose. . . . You talk about problems! This is when I really began to get them.”20 Ramsay was denounced by local unions and on the floor of the state legislature by state senator Bill Jones of Brookhaven and others. More than a dozen union locals, many of them from his native Gulf Coast, disaffiliated from the state federation. Other union locals and councils pledged support for WLBT. On their joint Sunday, April 26, edition, the Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News ran an article headlined: “Ramsay Rapped in Try to Link Union, Mixers.” The article noted that the national AFL-CIO had “called on the United Nations to seat Red China” and quoted an American Legion official who claimed Ramsay “‘at one time tried to get an injunction to prevent the . . . Legion from showing an anti-communist film in the state.’” Ramsay fired back a letter to Clarion-Ledger executive editor Purser Hewitt on May 5, 1964, demanding a retraction for the “false and defamatory” statement that he tried to prevent such a film from being shown. However, the labor leader also tried publicly to defuse the revolt building within his own organization by clarifying that his support of the petition was solely due to WLBT’s antilabor views. “This matter of obscuring all issues with the ‘race question’ is not going to work this time around,” he said in an April 26 statement to the Associated Press and United Press International. He later wrote the FCC that his complaints against WLBT were not prompted by racial concerns. In a 1978 interview with McElvaine, Ramsay explained his backtracking. “I was trying to recover some of my lost ground . . . I was trying to live to fight another day, is what it added up to.”21 Indeed, Ramsay wouldn’t have to wait long to “fight another day.” On May 25, 1964, he opened the 94

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Mississippi AFL-CIO Convention with a challenge to delegates to decide whether they or outsiders like “the John Birchers, the White Citizens’ Council,” and he added, “the NAACP” were going to run the organization. He invited pro–civil rights speakers like Hazel Brannon Smith of the Lexington Advertiser and Father Louis Twomey of the industrial relations program at Loyola University in New Orleans to the podium. For the only time in his tenure at the Mississippi AFL-CIO he was challenged for the presidency. His opponent was the International Union of Electrical Workers Local 792 president R. N. Thomas of Jackson, a supporter of WLBT and the white supremacist accused and later convicted of the murder of Medgar Evers, Byron de la Beckwith. Ramsay won the election easily with a 12,870 to 3,004 vote. Ramsay’s troubles would continue, however. He received death threats, harassing phone calls, continuing disaffiliations from the state federation. “Every time that I would pick up the paper somebody was denouncing me, some union,” he told Caudill.22 Ramsay wasn’t alone. Other union leaders, including Ottis Mathews of Laurel, were beaten and whipped for taking a stand against segregation and racial injustice. In the 1964 and 1968 presidential elections, Ramsay worked hard to keep a Democrat in the White House but also found himself embroiled in the sharp divisions within the party in the state. The biracial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the established Regular Democrats for delegate seats at the conventions, putting Ramsay and other progressivebut-practical-minded activists in the middle. Republican Barry Goldwater carried 87 percent of the vote in Mississippi in 1964, and George Wallace carried the state with 63.5 percent of the vote in 1968. “I never worked harder and accomplished less in my life,” Ramsay would lament at one point.23 However, he did see some of the fruit of his labors ripen. WLBT would eventually stop its anti-labor harassment, leading Ramsay to drop his petition. Finally, in 1970, the station lost its license and was subsequently reorganized with blacks placed in leadership positions. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act would contribute to significant changes in Mississippi. Ramsay would live to see a viable two-party system emerge in the state as well as a new black political leadership that indeed aligned itself with labor on most major issues. He considered both necessary to the future of labor in Mississippi. Ramsay made a prediction to the activist and later Mississippi NAACP president Aaron Henry during the height of their struggle against the political and economic oligarchy running their state. “These people are going to make peace with the black people in this state—they are going to make peace with you—before they make peace with me. . . . All you want is a seat at the table, but I want some of their money. They realize Labor, Race, and the Mississippi Press

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that there has to be good relations, race relations, in this state for business to prosper.”24 Ramsay’s prediction—recalled in interviews of Ramsay for the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage in 1981—came true. As blacks began to win political races in local and state government, Ramsay still found the door more often closed than open. When the state’s business establishment decided to embrace Henry and other civil rights leaders in forming a joint board to promote progressive leadership, Ramsay found his name removed from its members. In his interview with Caudill, he conjectured that Mississippi industrialist and church leader Owen Cooper was the reason. Cooper, later championed in the Clarion-Ledger as a “longtime advocate for progressive state and social policy,” was likely upset because of an organizing effort at one of his plants, Ramsay said.25 Like Cooper, Tupelo’s Daily Journal and its publisher George McLean are remembered today as voices of moderation and progress during the civil rights era in Mississippi. McLean, a strong supporter of community development, believed the segregationist dogma in the state was ultimately detrimental to its development. He was hailed as a champion of equal opportunity for both blacks and whites, and his newspaper was praised as a “beacon of progressive thinking” by crusading columnist Bill Minor’s own Jackson Capital Reporter. “I was considered a radical in my native state,” McLean recalled in a 1981 article in Appalachian Views. “Many people were correctly accusing me of being more interested in poor people, including black people, than in the upper classes.”26 Yet the Daily Journal was every bit as stridently anti-union as the Jackson press. It also wielded a great deal of influence in north Mississippi. Ramsay talked about that influence in his 1966 speech at Ole Miss. “For a number of years a business group has been organized there to screen prospective employees. If the worker expresses any sympathy toward organized labor, he doesn’t get a job. When and if an organizing campaign gets underway, he is visited by the banker, the merchant or anyone else who he may be in debt to. The Tupelo Journal takes over in due process. I would venture to say that fifty percent of the editorial space in this newspaper has been devoted to fighting the labor movement in the last ten years.”27 McLean died in 1983. His newspaper, today called the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, remains a predictable opponent of organizing efforts at local plants just as it steadfastly supports public education and biracial good will.

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Today, even Ramsay’s old nemesis, the Clarion-Ledger, is a voice for progress in the state. Purchased by the Gannett newspaper chain in 1982, the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News later merged into one newspaper under the former’s name. The state’s leading newspaper rejected the racism of its past and would even win a Pulitzer Prize for its support of new public education initiatives. Ramsay would live long enough to see Mississippi turn a corner from its old racist ways. The state would elect black mayors, supervisors, legislators, and congressmen. The labor leader would witness his state federation grow to a membership of approximately 135,000. And when he died in January 1986, the then-still existent Jackson Daily News would join those paying homage to the labor leader. “The gruff, cigar-chewing Ramsay was a champion for the underdog, for minorities, for the workers, for political change within the Democratic Party, with which he was affiliated,” the Daily News editorialized. “Mississippi is a better state because of Ramsay. He may be gone, but his impact remains.”28

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Chapter 6

the sunbelt south and its shadows

The “Sunbelt South” is only the latest reincarnation of a region that has been proclaiming itself renewed, redeemed, and reconstructed since the Civil War. Henry Grady of the Atlanta Constitution introduced the first “New South” in 1886. Political analyst Kevin Phillips became his spiritual descendant when he announced the arrival of the “Sun Belt” in 1969. Meanwhile, with each new emanation, a long lineage of writers, scholars, and musicians lamented the disappearance of the South they once knew and loved. Yet the South somehow has always remained as resilient, stubborn, frustrating, hated, and beloved as it was when Sherman marched through Georgia. The fact that the region has indeed changed is evident in the absence of the “For Colored Only” signs at rest stops and service stations. The oligarchies that have ruled its politics and economy have changed, too, yet oligarchical rule remains even in the new New South. The racehaunted Old South was class haunted as well as race haunted, and even as it works today to reconcile its racial divisions, the class divisions remain strong. The old economic staples of low wages, a plentiful and compliant workforce, and a strong government-business-media alliance against unions remain as true in the modern-day Dixie as they were in the South that Henry Grady knew. “The one incentive (to industry) that most clearly separates the South from the North is state right-to-work laws,” sociologist Thomas A. Lyson has written.1 The historian James Cobb put it much more bluntly. “By the end of the 1970s antiunionism had supplanted racism as the South’s most respectable prejudice.”2 This chapter explores the “Sunbelt South” from a variety of angles. The first is from the viewpoint of one of the top business editors in the region, ironically an erstwhile “insurgent” labor organizer whose days as a young man were spent fighting against much of what the Sunbelt would 98

come to represent. From the vista of this single individual the chapter then shifts to his city, Atlanta, the self-anointed capital of the Sunbelt South. From “the city too busy to hate” the chapter goes on to look at the region as a whole—the post–World War II changes brought about by the federal infusion of billions of dollars for military bases and contracts as well as the construction of super highways, the emerging identification of the region as arbiter of the nation’s economy and politics, and finally the Southernization of the nation itself. Less than two decades after the Sunbelt South’s christening, deep shadows could be seen across the horizon—the lingering backwardness and poverty of its rural regions, the legacies of its failure to invest in itself and in the social welfare of its people, the cash-starved budgets of its local and state governments whose overseers were too often willing to trade in their community’s future for short-term gain, the veritable sea of Old South problems surrounding the Sunbelt’s few islands of prosperity. Henry Unger is uncertain about the interview. He asks me more than once what my purpose is. He wants to know how I got his name. I explain as best I can that I want to talk about the Sunbelt South but also about labor unions. We settle into a nondescript office in a corner of the expansive newsroom of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Outside along Marietta Street, among downtown’s gleaming skyscrapers, the morning commuters are arriving in legions and busily making their way to their offices. Unger is the newspaper’s deputy business editor, a native New Yorker who has worked there for the past sixteen years. He oversees a staff of thirty reporters and editors, the business and economics team of the JournalConstitution’s five-hundred-member news operation. He carries at lot of compressed energy in his short, somewhat stocky, fifty-five-year-old frame. The years in the South have softened the clipped accent from the old days in Queens, and they’ve cooled the embers of his youthful passion, too. That long-ago passion was the American labor movement. He marched and boycotted with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, organized for the Teamsters in Long Island, campaigned with the left-wing United Electrical Workers (UEW) in the Carolinas and Florida. He cut his teeth in journalism with the old Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, a “wall-towall unionized” outfit. “The ten years I spent in the labor movement were the most important learning and shaping experience of my life,” he tells me. “You cut through a lot of baloney as an outside organizer. You’re blind to the internal workings of the plant, so you have to rely on everyone telling you what’s going on internally. You learn how to listen, be perceptive, analyze. I found that extremely valuable in making me a better reporter.”3 The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows

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As he warms to the topic, I begin to see a bit of the old flame rekindling in his eyes. He goes on to tell some war stories, something both journalists and labor organizers love to do. In the mid-1970s, at the height of the South’s newfound identity as the Sunbelt, the UEW sent him to fight for workers at the “runaway plants” that had gone to the region to escape the unions up North. The arrival of those plants—Westinghouse, General Electric, and others—were what helped make the South part of the “Sunbelt,” a nebulous term that can be applied to an area stretching from the southeastern Atlantic Coast all the way to southern California. Unger was an insurgent, a revolutionary, in that Sunbelt world. He helped score union victories at plants in Tampa, Florida, and in Charleston, South Carolina. The GE plant in Charleston “was organized . . . by four votes,” he recalls. “I still remember, 353 to 349. We even got Klan members to join with African American workers.” However, the Tampa and Charleston plants eventually shut down, and other hard-fought battles in Greenville, South Carolina, and in Wilmington, Charlotte, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, eventually ended in bruising, wounding losses. “It was hard to organize in the heart of the Piedmont.” The experience—and the losses—changed the direction of Henry Unger’s life. “My life has been involved with the class struggle. I got a lot of battle scars. . . . The labor movement is very personal, a very personal and emotional experience. I got tired of banging my head against the wall.” He never gave up his belief “that the average person needs an organization to represent themselves against a monolithic corporation,” but he became a journalist who preferred to avoid the labor beat. “I kind of tried not to cover labor. My standards were so high. I knew it from the inside, every nuance. From an emotional standpoint, it was better to cover everything but labor.” So today Unger is second-in-command of the business section of one of the premier newspapers of the South, in a city that has long considered itself the unofficial capital of the South and all things Southern, the region’s financial and economic center. Yet as Unger coordinates coverage of this city and beyond, his staff doesn’t include a single labor reporter. The closest to it is the lone reporter who covers “workplace” issues, a beat that might occasionally include labor disputes such as the ongoing union-management struggles within Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is like most newspapers today. The labor beat simply no longer exists. Yet, it wasn’t always that way in Atlanta. This was a city that bedeviled the stereotype of the antiunion South. In the early 1900s, nearly 50 percent of its voting population held union cards. One of those union-card 100

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holders was four-time mayor James G. Woodward, a printer by trade. The historic 1937 sit-down strike at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, actually got its start at GM’s branch assembly plant in Atlanta’s Lakewood area in November 1936. Of course, times have changed. The Lakewood plant shut down in the early 1990s. GM’s Hapeville plant on the southern rim of the Atlanta metro area is set to close in 2008. In some ways, the modern-day Sunbelt Atlanta is now the very antithesis of unionism. Its major home-based corporations—Home Depot, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines—have become symbols of antiunionism. Home Depot has virtually no unions. Its 1996 Orientation Handbook states that its employees “are much better off remaining union-free rather than dealing with third-party outsiders.”4 Coca-Cola has been called a “virulently antiunion company” and one that stands as “perhaps the quintessential symbol of the US-dominated global economy.”5 It is also the target of a “Campaign to Stop Killer Coke” as well as hosts of similar efforts around the globe due to its alleged role as a coconspirator with paramilitary gunmen in Latin America in the killing of union organizers. Delta Air Lines has been waging an ongoing battle with its union employees for years, a struggle that included the elimination of sixteen thousand jobs between 2001 and 2003, and the company’s filing for bankruptcy in September 2005. The missing labor beat on the business staff of the Atlanta JournalConstitution simply “reflects the decline of the labor movement,” Unger says. “All my adult life the labor movement has been in decline, from one out of every three workers at the end of World War II to one out of ten now. The level of interest of readers beyond the occasional trend pieces would not be there. . . . I can’t think of a time in sixteen years here when someone said, ‘You need to cover more labor.’” He says the labor movement itself is partly to blame because it “hasn’t been smart enough to come up with new strategies. . . . to see ten years from now (and ask) what is our economy going to be.” Of course, Unger concedes, “capital is a lot more powerful than labor.” He walks to a large map of the world on the wall. “If you organize a Wal-Mart in Atlanta, you’re not going to bring a $320 billion company to a contract. How do you go about talking to a Wal-Mart or a Home Depot?” He points to China on the map. “You’re here in Atlanta, and they’re over there and saying, ‘What’s going on in China?’ You’re in an uphill battle that’s going to get a lot more uphill.” He stares at the map quietly for a few moments and shakes his head. “The movement is on its knees right now and such a nonentity, and it’s so sad.” A hint of the old anger builds in his voice as he goes to talk about how the labor movement’s decline has made life more difficult for all The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows

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working-class Americans. Health care and retirement plans have diminished in proportion to labor’s loss of clout. “Forty million people with no health insurance in the richest country in the world!” says the old revolutionary, turning to me, his voice a pitch higher now. “We’re going backwards!” After the interview, I walk back out onto Marietta and down to the beautiful Omni Hotel, which is part of the CNN Center and thus part of the swirling world of business and high finance that Atlanta’s long line of boosters—from journalist Henry Grady to former mayor William B. Hartsfield to CNN founder Ted Turner and architect John Portman—always envisioned. Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Delta Air Lines, and CNN share a city with international businesses and investors from as far away as Germany, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Greece, as well as with the Atlanta Braves major league baseball team, the Atlanta Falcons professional football team, and the Atlanta Hawks professional basketball team. Atlanta boasts a metropolitan area population of over five million, rows of multi-milliondollar homes in exclusive neighborhoods like Buckhead, and, of course, the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, officially the world’s busiest with between 80 million and 90 million passengers a year. Yet Atlanta’s sunny fortunes have always come with scattered clouds hovering overhead. In the mid-1980s, Inc. magazine ranked Atlanta as one of the nation’s ten fastest-growing cities in terms of job generation, new business start-ups, and new companies. Still it was outpaced by five other Sunbelt cities—Austin, Orlando, Dallas-Forth Worth, San Antonio, and Raleigh-Durham—bringing into question its self-proclaimed leadership role. Atlanta hosted the 1988 Democratic Convention and the 1996 World Olympics. Between 1995 and 2000 it ranked as the most popular destination in the nation for the generation known as the “Gen-Xers.” By the summer of 2006, it claimed a $150 billion economy, more than 2.25 million jobs, a median household income of nearly $52,000 with the average Atlanta house priced at $135,300. Yet white flight and suburban resistance to annexation have kept its inner-city population under 500,000, significantly smaller than other Southern cities like Memphis, Nashville, and Jacksonville. For all its glitter, Atlanta has long been a high-crime city. The Drug Enforcement Administration named it the “East Coast hub” for distribution of high-grade methamphetamine in January 2006.6 An audit report in 2004 revealed that the city faked its crime data—suppressing or altering police reports to indicate a lower crime rate—to attract the 1996 Olympics. This faking of data continued to as late as 2002, when more than twenty-two thousand crime reports were found to be missing. The Olympics themselves, of course, were marred by a deadly bombing that took place on July 27, 1996, killing one and injuring more than one hundred 102

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people. After a media frenzy helped transform Centennial Olympic Park security guard Richard Jewell from hero to suspect, the bombing was determined to have been set by antiabortion terrorist Eric Rudolph. Atlanta has been reinventing itself ever since it rose phoenix-like from the ashes left by the troops of Union general William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864. After the Civil War, Atlanta became the centerpiece of Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady’s vision of a “New South” that would replace slavery, ruins, and the old plantation with a profound devotion to industry and a workforce that had “fallen in love with work.”7 “I want to say to General Sherman, who is considered an able man in our parts, though some people think he is a kind of careless man about fire, that we have raised a brave and beautiful city,” Grady said in his famous “New South Speech” to the New England Society in New York City on December 21, 1886. Sherman was in the audience. A band had just finished playing “Marching through Georgia.” “We have let economy take root and spread among us as rank as the crabgrass which sprung from Sherman’s cavalry camps.”8 Textiles, coal, railroads, and other industries would heed Grady’s call, being particularly attracted by his assurances that workers in the South were patriotic, loyal, and unlikely to be attracted to radical doctrines. Less than a decade after Grady’s “New South” speech, Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute came to Atlanta—at the invitation of Constitution publisher Clark Howell Jr.—and made his own mark in the history of U.S. oratory with the speech known as the “Atlanta Compromise.” To resounding cheers, he sang the praises of accepting one’s lot in life, and he assured his audience of industrialists that the Negro would rather have a job than a union card. Wined and dined by the nation’s leading businessmen, Washington would help secure his circumscribed vision for his fellow blacks in the Jim Crow South. Although a chamber of commerce-sponsored campaign known as “Forward Atlanta” helped bring in eight hundred new businesses in the 1920s, the city still lagged behind other Southern cities like New Orleans, Birmingham, and Memphis until it found its greatest promoter ever, Mayor William B. Hartsfield. With Atlanta’s famous airport as his bestknown namesake today, Hartsfield dominated the city’s politics from 1936 to 1962. Working closely with Coca-Cola executive Robert Woodruff and other industrial leaders, Hartsfield was Atlanta’s P. T. Barnum. Capitalizing on the huge, worldwide success of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and the subsequent Metro Goldwyn Mayer movie in 1939, he made sure the world premier would be at Atlanta’s Loew’s Grand Theatre, complete with hoop-skirted usherettes and movie stars Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh smiling for the cameras. The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows

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However, luring investment was even more important than bringing Hollywood to Atlanta. As Hartsfield once told a Newsweek reporter, “We roll a red carpet out for every damn Yankee who comes in here with two strong hands and some money.”9 With the strong support of influential journalist Ralph McGill, Hartsfield pushed and promoted his city at the same time he solidified his political base. Late in his career, as the South stirred toward open revolt in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954, Hartsfield declared that Atlanta was “a city too busy to hate,” a phrase that stuck and became the city’s everlasting motto. The journalist McGill provided his own definition of Atlanta in an article he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post. Atlanta, he said, is simply the “showcase city of the South.”10 A second “Forward Atlanta” promotion campaign in the 1960s helped propel Atlanta’s fortunes during the height of the civil rights movement. At the beginning of the 1970s, as the movement subsided and the South began to see itself as the Sunbelt, or at least its eastern half, Atlanta stepped forward to lead the march into the sun, promoting itself relentlessly to investors and tourists while boasting of its comparative calm during all the struggles of the previous decade and pointing with pride to the late Martin Luther King Jr. as a native son. Eventually it would “revel in its reputation as a mecca for black accomplishment,” wrote Atlanta JournalConstitution columnist Cynthia Tucker, who is black. (Once two separately owned newspapers, the Journal and the Constitution both came under the same ownership when Journal owner James Cox bought the Constitution in 1950. The Journal ceased publication in 2001, and the Constitution became the Journal-Constitution.)11 “In my childhood, Atlanta and Birmingham were vying for the crown of the Deep South,” wrote Look magazine senior editor George B. Leonard in 1965. Leonard grew up in Atlanta. “Atlanta, cleverly enough, became ‘the city too busy to hate.’ Birmingham stayed with tired ways, and paid for them. Today, you have only to spend five minutes in the airports of each city and another five minutes driving around the downtown areas; you won’t even need statistics to know who leads.”12 Yet for all the bluster a deep racial divide haunted Atlanta just as it did the rest of the South, and it does so today. The city’s population is 61 percent black while the metropolitan area is just 29 percent black. In 1988, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution won a Pulitzer Prize for its series of stories on the practice of “redlining,” detailing how the city’s banks and savings and loan companies routinely discriminated against blacks in their lending practices. In his 2006 book White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, Kevin M. Kruse describes at length the white flight to the Atlanta suburbs that came in the wake of the Brown vs. Board of Education 104

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ruling and other civil rights–related actions by the federal government, laying the foundation of the rise of the GOP and its frequently racially tinged politics in the South. Back at city hall, blacks have played a dominant role since the election of Maynard Jackson Jr. as mayor in 1973. Like Jackson, all of his successors in the mayor’s office have been black. When one of them, Bill Campbell, was convicted of tax evasion in March 2006, columnist Tucker felt compelled to remind her readers that white politicians also commit crimes. Campbell’s tenure was from 1994 to 2002, during which time Atlanta secured the Olympics but also hid the truth about its crime rate. His successor, Shirley Franklin, has continued the role of mayor as booster with her $8.5 million “Brand Atlanta” campaign. It has gotten mixed reviews, particularly after her 2005 designation of the hip-hop tune The ATL as the city’s new anthem. Its ambiguous lyrics—“Get ’em up, get ’em up, get ’em up, let’s go”—produced this response by Atlanta television host Dick Williams: ‘Get ’em up,’ he told the Los Angeles Times is “not a good line for a city with a high crime rate.”13 Hidden costs have come with all the boosterism, self-promotion, and obeisance to commerce and industry. Atlanta today is remarkably bereft of historical landmarks for a city in the history-obsessed South, particularly when compared to cities like Savannah, Charleston, New Orleans, and Memphis. Thus the disappointment of foreign journalists covering the 1996 Olympics when they found themselves in “a vast complex of modern office buildings, shopping malls, planned unit developments, and expressways” with hardly a trace of the “moon-lit and magnolia-scented” South they’d hoped to find.14 One of the rare historical structures in the city, the Tudor Revival building where author Margaret Mitchell wrote her famous novel, might have been itself gone with the wind had it not been for the German automaker Daimler-Benz, which purchased and renovated it in the 1990s. This is the Atlanta that Henry Unger came to in 1990—the capital of the “Sunbelt South,” a city still eager to move beyond the hidebound traditions and deadly passions that had so long tarnished the South’s image and dampened its economic potential, a city already positioning itself as an international capital able to host an Olympics. Like Unger himself, Atlanta had old scars from battles past, but it wanted to move on to a new and better future. Atlanta in 1990 was also preparing to help usher in the era of Newt Gingrich, who rose out of the Atlanta suburbs to offer a “Contract With America” and eventually become the powerful speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. In many ways, however, this was a contract with corporate America, for it glorified commerce and industry as the true ruling forces of modern American society even as it The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows

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depended on the support of religious-minded middle-class voters who had little in common with corporate America but who felt the contract also promised traditional “family values” such as opposition to abortion and homosexuality. Thus, a split personality characterized “Sunbelt” Atlanta, and it is perhaps best exemplified in the silly, genderless, ill-defined, hard-to-describe mascot of the 1996 Olympics. Known as “Izzy,” short for “Whatizit?” the mascot was once described by Southern Exposure magazine as emblematic of Atlanta itself, a place of “ambiguous identity” whose “defining feature has been its ability to morph, to reconfigure itself into an amenable locale for global capital.”15 Atlanta deserved the title of capital city of the Sunbelt South for the region itself was a morphed reconfiguration of its old, sometimes hard-to-define self. After all the struggles of the civil rights movement, the martyr’s blood spilled by fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, Medgar Evers in 1963, Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner in 1964, Viola Gregg Liuzzo in 1965, and finally Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the South was ripe for another “new” version of itself that it could show the nation and world, even if its unreconstructed, race-and-class-haunted old self still lurked in the shadows. The upheaval-weary South in the 1970s was much like Scarlett O’Hara after the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Rhett Butler’s departure. “With the spirit of her people who would not know defeat, even when it stared them in the face, she raised her chin,” Margaret Mitchell wrote in the final passage of Gone with the Wind. “She could get Rhett back. She knew she could. There had never been a man she couldn’t get, once she set her mind to it. . . . ‘Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.’”16 Actually, a new South was being born even as its old self was fighting the losing battle for racial segregation. Federal investment in military bases and highways in the region, population shifts, the spread of airconditioning, favorable economic conditions, and the old perennial industry lure of a cheap, nonunionized workforce helped set the stage for the latest New South that would be christened by Republican strategist and political analyst Kevin Phillips in his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority. Employing the term “Sun Belt” for the first time, Phillips correctly prophesized a major shift in power politics in the country that would follow population shifts toward the South and the West. The traditional conservatism in these regions would color national politics for decades to come. Six years later, another book, The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment, by journalist Kirkpatrick Sale, would broaden the concept and describe a “Southern Rim” stretching from the 106

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southeastern Atlantic Coast to southern California that would become the nation’s new economic heartland. Of course, such predictions were heartily welcomed by Henry Grady’s descendants. Newspaper editors, politicians, and chamber of commerce executives knew economic success was the best way to dispel the stillvibrant images that the world had of Emmett Till’s bloated and mutilated face, Bull Connor’s attack dogs, the Red Man–chewing sheriff’s mocking grin at the court hearing into the deaths of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, and, of course, Martin Luther King’s dead body on the balcony outside Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Yet what kind of South would rise this time from the ashes of the old? This was the perennial question Southern intellectuals asked whenever the South they knew was dying, whether it was after the Civil War, Reconstruction, industrialization efforts in the first decades of the twentieth century, or the Jim Crow era. In his intellectual history, Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain, Fred Hobson charts the battle between the “school of remembrance” and “school of shame and guilt” waged by scholars, sociologists, historians, and journalists since the Civil War as they tried to come to terms with their region’s tortured history and sense of identity. On one side were the writers and poets such as the “Fugitives”—Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom—who from their home base at Vanderbilt University in Nashville called for a return to an old South rooted in its rural, agrarian, agricultural traditions. Their ideas were collected in the 1930 book I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. They share an intellectual lineage that ranges from Thomas Jefferson to the Civil War–era fire-eater editorialist Edmund Ruffin to the twentieth-century Mississippi Delta aristocrat and author William Alexander Percy. In many ways, theirs is a conservative and paternalistic philosophy that avoids the nettlesome inequalities of class and race inherent in those agrarian traditions. Their solution to the troubles of the toilers in the textile mills and garment factories is a return to the farms which those toilers fled. “The dignity of personality is gone as soon as the man from the farm enters the factory door,” Ransom once wrote.17 On the other side of the debate were hard-edged critics like novelist Erskine Caldwell, whose half-starved, lust-driven Tobacco Road degenerates are the legacy of the oligarchical rule and greed in the South. Another was Lillian Smith, who wrote the classic 1964 critique of racial and economic injustice, Killers of the Dream, and who saw too much corruption and moral depravity in those roots and traditions to wax nostalgic. These writers were in a tradition that included Civil War–era writer Hinton Rowan Helper of North Carolina and perhaps even colonial-era writer The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows

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William Byrd II, an antislavery, plantation-owning slaveholder in Virginia best known for his Caldwell-like depictions of the laziness and shiftlessness of poor whites in neighboring North Carolina. Whether apologists or critics, however, these intellectuals and writers, by and large, argued out of love and devotion to a South they found resonant with meaning and substance. Yet what place would such a battle of ideas have in a Sunbelt South that was essentially ahistorical, a new New South unmoored from passions other than the passion for money, a kind of surreal version of what Henry Grady of the Atlanta Constitution and Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal envisioned after the Civil War: a South every bit as industrialized, materialistic, and money obsessed as the North. “What had been the South—poor, violent, pessimistic, tragic, and mysterious—was christened in the 1970s . . . the Sun Belt—successful, optimistic, prosperous, and bland,” Hobson writes. “The Sun Belt, of course, was not precisely the South. Rather the Sun Belt was one that in some respects had been lifted out of the Northeast and placed in that geographical area designated the South—with an extension all the way across the ‘southern’ rim to the Pacific. It was a land of aerospace, oil, agribusiness, real estate, military installations, and leisure, according to its press agents; its inhabitants, like its values, tended to be transplanted Northern as much as Southern; and its goals had little in common with those of Jefferson or Edmund Ruffin or Will Percy. The Sun Belt was slick and polished, airconditioned and comfortable, corporate and wealthy.”18 The sociologist Rupert Vance put it this way: “The dominant psychology of the South is no longer agrarian; it is Chamber of Commerce.”19 Perhaps the most prophetic vision of this New South came from the region’s greatest writer, William Faulkner, whose novels of the 1940s and 1950s depict the emergence of the crass, aggressive, acquisitive, greed-driven Snopes clan as it grabs the reins of lordship from the old, decayed, and morally diminished aristocracy. In the 1940 novel The Hamlet, Faulkner describes the arrival in town one day of Flem Snopes, a horse thief’s son with an uncanny sense of business as well as Sunbelt-like flair for promotion and advertising. “A little while before sundown the men lounging about the gallery of the store saw, coming up the road from the south, a covered wagon drawn by mules and followed by a considerable string of obviously alive objects which in the leveling sun resembled vari-sized and -colored tatters torn at random from large billboards—circus posters, say—attached to the rear of the wagon and inherent with its own separate and collective motion, like the tail of a kite.

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‘What in the hell is that?’ one said. ‘It’s a circus,’ Quick said. . . . ‘Hell fire,’ the first man—his name was Freeman—said. ‘It’s Flem Snopes.’ ... ‘Howdy, Flem,’ Quick said. . . .’Starting you a circus?’”20

Faulkner saw the Sunbelt South coming in 1940. But one can say its roots go even further back to the depths of the Great Depression when Mississippi governor Hugh White inaugurated Sunbelt-style industrial recruitment packages with his Balance Agriculture with Industry program in 1936. White’s BAWI, modeled in part on the state of Kentucky’s offer of property tax exemptions to manufacturers in 1917, featured tax-free municipal bonds to help companies acquire land and build plants. Other enticements included a largely union-free workforce with local and state governments ready and willing to aid and abet efforts to prevent unionization. Within a decade 14 percent of Mississippi’s industrial workers were employed at BAWI-lured companies. Other Southern states followed Mississippi’s lead, offering expanded incentives packages that included a host of tax breaks and outright gifts of land and services. Between 1958 and 1961, the states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, and Kentucky lost an estimated $140 million in potential revenues due to tax exemptions granted industries. The effects of these strategies were acknowledged by labor historians Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais in their 1955 book, Labor’s Untold Story. “Millions of unorganized workers in the South dragged down the entire American wage scale as Northern industry increasingly ran away to that haven of the open shop and low pay. . . . The run-away plant movement—the moving of plants and jobs to non-unionized, low-wage areas—has become the accepted policy of big business.”21 Of course, most of the companies getting these tax breaks and other state-sanctioned freebies were in the textile, poultry, and other low-wage industries, which liked the fact that BAWI programs generally included no provision for a minimum wage. In Mississippi, the only new companies attracted by BAWI that offered better-than-average wages were the Armstrong Tire and Rubber Plant in Natchez and Ingalls Shipyard in Pascagoula. Thomas A. Lyson, in his Two Sides to the Sunbelt: The Growing Divergence between the Rural and Urban South, calls the South’s once-omnipresent textile industry and its low-wage jobs “a prime example of the misguided strategy for industrial development.” Labeling the strategies to attract such jobs as “de facto industrial policies,” Lyson says that “the primary concern The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows

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of de facto policymakers is with creating as many jobs as possible. Whether these jobs are white collar or blue collar, high wage or low wage, dead-end or on a promotion track is overshadowed by the overwhelming desire to report job numbers.”22 In fact, low-wage industries often conspired with politicians to keep out companies that might raise wage levels and the spectre of unions. Lyson cites the example of Greenville/Spartanburg, South Carolina, textile magnate Eugene Stone, who actively discouraged officials with the Mazda Motor Company from pursuing its interests in locating a plant in the area in the mid-1980s. After Mazda decided to locate instead in Michigan, a newsletter from the local development association had this to say: “The Mazda plant would have had a long-term chilling effect on Spartanburg’s orderly growth. An auto plant, employing over 3,000 cardcarrying, hymn-singing members of the UAW would, in our opinion, bring to an abrupt halt future industrial prospects.”23 These “de facto” notions can also be seen in a front-page story in the June 10, 1954, edition of the Statesman, a weekly newspaper in Hapeville, Georgia, that also served as an organ for Governor and later U.S. senator Herman Talmadge. Headlined “South’s Better Labor Cited as Magnet to Northern Industry,” the article quotes the Cotton Manufacturers Association of Georgia president T. M. Forbes as saying Southern workers “are intelligent and independent in their thinking and their innate individualism makes regimentation of any kind objectionable.” Forbes went on to point a finger at the “restrictive state laws, high taxes and high power and fuel costs” in the Northeast as reasons why the textile industry left. However, as the story headline indicated, the key reason why the industry found its true home in the South can be seen in the code words Forbes used in place of antiunionism: “independent,” “individualism,” and “regimentation.”24 Soldiers returning to the South from the battlefields of World War II were the first to signal a dissatisfaction with the old order of things in the South, and for a time they threatened to shake up the region’s old prewar oligarchy of planters, politicians, and manufacturers. So-called GI Revolts spread across the region, challenging the political establishment in New Orleans, Hot Springs, Augusta, and elsewhere. As detailed in historian Bruce J. Schulman’s From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, these GI reformers had seen the world and were impatient with the home-front oligarchy’s unwillingness to invest in public education, highways, or other governmental services as well as their jealous hold on the local industrial base. These veterans helped usher in what Schulman calls a “new Whiggery” that pushed “civic improvements and aggressive public relations, designed to lure industry.”25 They brought down the Maestri political machine in 110

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New Orleans, and they helped elect one of their own, “Big Jim” Folsom, governor of Alabama in 1946. “The Old Guard continued to hold sway through most of the postwar South,” Schulman said. “The G.I. revolts signaled, however, the emergence of a new breed of southern politician.” In the shifting political and economic landscape of the post–World War II South, the old “regional political economy” could no longer solely define or determine the course of the future. “Into this chaotic landscape . . . stepped the new Whigs, southern politicians who numbered economic development as their first priority and who looked to the federal government to underwrite the effort.”26 The “new breed” tapped into one of the South’s oldest traditions in its efforts to bring about change: a love of all things military that dated back to the forts and encampments dotting its landscape in the colonial era. Both the Old Guard and the new breed saw military spending as the most tolerable form of federal intervention, one that could boost the economy without threatening to undermine other traditions such as antiunionism and racial segregation. Defense Department spending in the South tended to lift wages but also discourage unionization. Military contracts encouraged automation and mass production, putting jobs at a premium and thus making them more difficult to unionize. These factors made defense spending particularly welcome at a time when the labor movement across the country was at its greatest strength. “The South emerged from the war . . . with fewer sharecroppers but more pipe-fitters and welders, with less plowing and hoeing but more mowing and sowing, with less rural isolation and more urban sophistication, with nearly a million people in the ranks of organized labor and a growing movement for antiunion laws,” the historian George B. Tindall writes in his book, The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945.27 Although military bases had desegregated by the early 1950s, the fact that the same Southern politicians pork-barreling defense contracts into their districts were also among the region’s leading segregationists indicates they saw no great threat from the Pentagon to racial conditions in the region as a whole. This would be particularly important as the nonmilitary branches of the federal government helped the civil rights movement gather steam in the 1950s and 1960s. From Franklin D. Roosevelt’s last years as president to and beyond Georgia native and one-time navy engineer Jimmy Carter’s term in the late 1970s, the White House worked hand in hand with House Armed Services powerhouses like Carl Vinson of Georgia, Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, and F. Edward Hebert of Louisiana, and Senate Armed Services Committee chairs like Richard Russell of Georgia, John Stennis of The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows

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Mississippi, and later Sam Nunn of Georgia, in militarizing the Southern economy. Rivers was so successful in bringing military bases and defense contracts to Charleston that his predecessor as House Armed Services Committee chair, Carl Vinson, famously joked, “You put anything else down there in your district, Mendel, it’s gonna sink.”28 “No federal spending was more desirable, no tune was sweeter to southern ears, than defense-related programs,” Schulman writes. “In short, military spending, understood broadly, offered development without political reform and social change.”29 With its congenial climate and plentiful open land, the South had always been a good fit for the military. In World War II alone, the federal government pumped nearly $4.5 billion into the Southern military industrial complex, more than a third of the amount spent across the nation as a whole. The South’s share of prime military contracts grew from 7.6 percent in 1951 to 24.2 percent in 1980. By the mid-1980s, the nation’s top 10 recipients of Defense Department dollars included seven states in the South. As the South militarized and industrialized, it moved farther and farther away from its agrarian roots. The region lost 3.3 million farm jobs between 1940 and 1970. Agricultural employment, which accounted for more than a third of the regionwide workforce in 1940, had dropped to less than 5 percent by 1970. Mechanization on the farm was a significant factor in these changes. Farms also became increasingly larger due to the capital needed to purchase the big harvesting machines that replaced manual labor. Between 1900 and 1973, the number of operating cotton gins in the South dropped from 32,000 to less than 3,000. Another post–World War II development also became very significant to the economic transformation of the South: the construction of thousands of miles of roads and highways that would end the rural isolation of millions of Southerners and better connect the region with the nation as a whole. This was long overdue, a desperate need eloquently articulated by Louisiana’s Huey Long in his famous “Tears of Evangeline” speech decades before. Given at the very oak tree in south Louisiana where Evangeline awaited her lover in Longfellow’s famous poem, Long asked, “Where are the roads and the highways that you send your money to build, that are no nearer now than ever before?”30 Long knew the answer to his question, and he acted on it. As governor and later U.S. senator in the early 1930s, the populist dynamo wrested power from the sugar refiners, lumber industrialists, the Standard Oil Company, and the “Old Regular” political machine in New Orleans that had kept the state “in the mud,” illiterate, and poor.31 When he became 112

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governor of Louisiana in 1929, the state only had 331 miles of road under concrete or asphalt. By the end of his term, Louisiana boasted more than 2,301 paved roads. Across the region, however, leaders looked to Uncle Sam to pump the dollars needed to lift it out of the mud-bound backwaters. The federalaid highway programs of 1941 and 1944 offered federal matching funds to build roads. In 1956, with a strong push from Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson, Congress approved a new formula giving the federal government responsibility for up to 90 percent of the costs of major new super highways. Between 1940 and 1960, the South saw its share of the nation’s federal highway dollars grow from 27.6 percent to 31.1 percent while the federal portion of all highway dollars spent within the South more than doubled. As Schulman further details, Uncle Sam paved more roads in the South in the late 1950s than the region had done for itself between 1789 and 1930. Major highways like I-95, I-85, I-40, I-65, I-75, and I-20 stretched across the region and beyond, connecting rural areas with metropolitan centers, and the South with the Northeast and Midwest. “Isolated rural enclaves that were once inaccessible to all but the most determined industrialists, became tethered to the business and financial centers of the region by ribbons of asphalt and concrete,” says Lyson in Two Sides to the Sunbelt.32 Ironically, as tight as the South’s political leaders could be when it came to funding social programs for the poor and needy, they were more than willing to come up with matching cash for highways. Once committed to federally aided construction, the Old Confederacy, by and large, outpaced the rest of the nation in its highway expenditures. Even Mississippi, long the nation’s poorest state, spent twice the national level. Yet public welfare expenditures in Mississippi and its sister states continued to lag behind the national average. When Huey Long gave his “Evangeline” speech, he talked about more than roads. “Where are the schools that you have waited for your children to have, that have never come? . . . Where are the institutions to care for the sick and disabled?”33 Evangeline would still be weeping for those unfulfilled needs at the dawning of the Sunbelt South. The year after the “long, hot summer” of death and defiance in Neshoba County, Mississippi, when three civil rights workers were abducted and brutally murdered, Look magazine devoted its entire November 16, 1965, edition to “The Fast-Changing South” with a lengthy subtitle on its cover telling of “Its Booming Business . . . Its Boiling Politics . . . Its Courage and Its Cowardice . . . Its Unsung Resorts and Why It May Solve Its Racial Problems Sooner Than the North or West.” The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows

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George B. Leonard, Look’s Atlanta-bred senior editor who planned the special issue, summed up “the mind and soul of the South” with poetic flair in a final essay. Today, great forces hammer at the walls. They strike harder in the Southern states than elsewhere in the nation. They are fast changing the South, its mind and soul no less than its landscape. These forces may be described in four main categories: the demands of prosperitydriven Southern businessmen, the effects of mass communications and transportation, the prod of Federal law and the human presence of the nonviolent freedom movement. The South bursts with economic potential. It has natural resources, more than enough water and a lot of economic elbow room. Starting poor, its economy is growing faster than that of any other region. As it grows, many Southerners are going to get rich. The new businessmen of the South are like children at Christmas. Their eyes glisten with visions of the sugarplums that are, at last, within their grasp. They cannot get enough of their new toys; national public relations and advertising, business-supported culture, razzle-dazzle promotions, big investments of local capital, new hookups with national and world markets. These buoyant men take you to the tops of tall buildings, and, with a sweep of the hand, offer you The Future. It may be too bold to suggest that most Southern communities will follow Atlanta and weld a pragmatic alliance of white aristocrats, business and professional leaders and Negroes against racists. In any case, Southern businessmen are certain to act . . . to end whatever about their region is most immoral—and least conducive to prosperity.34

In the coming years, national magazines and newspapers would join with Look in a chorus of praise for a South that was resurrecting itself from the ashes of prejudice and violence and taking its rightful place in the sun. The New York Times ran a five-part series on the Sunbelt South in early 1976, the same year that former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter would rise from relative obscurity to become the first Deep South politician to win the presidency of the United States since Zachary Taylor in 1848. The Times series “gave respectability and publicity to the ‘sunbelt’ concept,” wrote the historian Carl Abbott, “analyzing the region’s economic and demographic patterns, its urban growth and environmental problems, and its political tendencies. There again the underlying concern was to explain the economic and financial problems of New York City and the Northeast.”35 114

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Other publications heralding this new Sunbelt South included the Wall Street Journal and magazines such as National Journal, Saturday Review, Business Week, and Fortune. As Look did in 1965, Time magazine offered readers a full special edition on the South after Carter won the Democratic nomination. The South’s own journalists also joined the choir. Few were more influential than the Atlanta Constitution’s Ralph McGill, whose columns and editorials championed change even as they expressed concern for the effects of growing industrialization on the environment as well as for the fact that many of the new plants in the region were under absentee ownership. With economic progress, “the national image of the South inevitably began to change,” McGill wrote. “Even more important, the region’s image of itself was changing. Progress by bulldozer came South of the MasonDixon line. Expressways, skyscrapers, generating and atomic plants, factories, ever-extending suburbs, began to obliterate the Old South, or to bypass it in back eddies of rural, small-town life.” What was emerging, McGill said, was “a South at last breaking out of the cocoon of its past.”36 Just when the South began “breaking out of the cocoon” is as hard to determine as the actual borders of what constitutes the “Sunbelt.” Some writers place the heart of the Sunbelt era between the recessions of 1974–75 and 1982. Others see dawn breaking around 1960 with the setting of the sun coming in the late 1980s or early 1990s. As seen above, the antecedents for this new version of the South date back to World War II and even earlier, while elements of the region’s Sunbelt identity remain today. Certainly the heyday of media-spawned publicity about the Sunbelt South was in the 1970s and 1980s. National and global economic forces helped put a spotlight on Southern economic growth and potential in the 1970s. Oil, gas, and timber prices were inflated, benefiting a region where those industries are important. The deregulation of currencies around the globe prompted multinational corporations to look for investment opportunities in places where labor and resources were less expensive. While the profit margins of U.S. companies declined, the economies of Europe and Japan grew. This growth fed foreign investment in the South, where the cost of doing business was the best buy in a nation that remained the world’s greatest marketplace. These were the factors that brought Michelin and BMW to South Carolina. Nissan came to Tennessee in 1980, and eight years later Toyota set up operations in Kentucky. U.S. companies also looked southward. Between 1975 and 1980, GM opened eight new plants in the Deep South. Houston, Texas, became home to approximately one hundred large companies and many more smaller operations in the 1970s. Although state governments in the South The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows

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paid heavily in incentives packages to get many of these companies, the region’s own homegrown industries played a minimal role in the economic growth taking place around them. Northern employers paid the wages of seven out of every ten jobs gained in the South between 1969 and 1976. By the late 1990s, foreign-based employers provided one out of every eight manufacturing jobs in the South. “The South, once thought of as an economic backwater, was quickly emerging as a vital lynchpin in the global economy,” wrote Southern Exposure editor Chris Kromm in a 1998 edition of the magazine devoted to “The Globalization Game.” “The South has become a favorite home for global businesses seeking low costs and access to American prosperity.”37 Kromm goes on to quote an eastern North Carolina community activist after a meeting with German labor leaders. “‘The bosses of German companies want labor relations like the U.S. has. We could tell German workers from first-hand experience that this means the companies control the relationship.”38 Even in its rural areas, the South gained approximately one million new manufacturing jobs in the 1960s and 1970s. Wages and salaries for those jobs grew 23 percent between 1969 and 1979, compared to a 4 percent growth nationwide. By 1993, more than 50 percent of the new jobs created in the nation were in the South. Per capita income in the region grew from 60 percent of the national average in 1960 to close to 90 percent in 1980. The number of poor Southerners fell from eleven million in 1969 and to ten million in 1979, dropping from 40 percent to 36.6 percent of the nation’s poor population. Thus the South was “transformed from the nation’s number one economic outhouse . . . into its main engine of economic growth,” wrote Peter Applebome in his book, Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture. “In fact, if the eleven states of the Confederacy were a separate country, it would have the world’s fourth-largest economy.”39 Demographics played an important role in these changes. The population of the Old Confederacy plus Kentucky grew by 20 million between 1970 and 1990, a 40 percent growth rate that was double the national average. Significantly, this growth included a net in-migration of more than 250,000 blacks from the North between 1977 and 1987, a marked reversal of Old South trends. Like the Ireland of old, the South had traditionally been a departure point for its native-born seeking a better life. Between 1910 and 1960, the South lost 4.5 million blacks to Chicago, Detroit, and other big, industrialized cities in the Midwest and Northeast. An even larger number of poor and working-class white Southerners emigrated during the same period. 116

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Detroit was home to at least 30,000 white Southern expatriates by 1970. “Over the years, the rest of the nation has Ping-Ponged between views of the South as a hellhole of poverty, torment, and depravity and as an American Eden of tradition, strength, and grace,” Applebome writes.40 In attracting industry and people to the South, nothing was more highly touted by political, economic, and media leaders than high technology, the crown jewel of Sunbelt growth. High tech evoked the future and provided proof positive that the modern South need no longer feel inferior, that the region could hold its own against California’s Silicon Valley or the R&D (research and development) centers of the Ivy League. In the late 1950s North Carolina governor Luther Hodges commissioned what would become the Research Triangle, a high-tech center that would capitalize on its proximity to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University in Durham, and North Carolina State University in Raleigh. After getting its first contract from the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1960s, the Research Triangle Institute and Park went on to host the largest concentration of Ph.D.s in the world, a center of intellectual activity that ranged from IBM engineers and National Environmental Research Center scientists to internationally known thinkers and intellectuals such as French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Another major high-tech hub was in Huntsville, Alabama, a nondescript textile town that transformed into a major aerospace center and home base of the Redstone Missile Arsenal and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, a place where engineers and scientists helped boost the local population from roughly 14,000 in 1950 to 160,000 by the mid-1980s. Among those new residents was the noted German rocket engineer Werner Von Braun, the developer of the Nazis’ V-2 rocket. In Huntsville, Von Braun directed missile research and was instrumental in developing the nation’s space program. Other high-tech hubs in the South included Houston, Texas, with its $60 million Johnson Space Center; Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with its Atomic Energy Commission Complex; Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the Kennedy Space Center was based; and Atlanta, which boasted an Advanced Technology Development Center. With their mix of military-and-private-funded research, these hightech hubs certainly raised the profile of a modern-day, forward-thinking South. However, they failed to be major job producers for the population as a whole. “The regional, indeed national, consensus that high-tech research facilities guaranteed future growth obscured their immediate economic impact,” Schulman observed. “Research jobs offered little to the region’s legion of poor, low-skill workers in traditional industries. They even exacerbated the region’s traditional inequality by creating a The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows

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two-tiered employment system with elite professionals at one end and low paid production and clerical positions at the other. . . . Whatever its future prospects, high-tech industry has provided very little employment in the South.”41 Paralleling the Sunbelt South’s economic growth was the shift in its political landscape, marked by the trading of allegiances from the Democratic to the Republican Party. With its transformation from an agrarian to a more urbanized and suburbanized region, its industrial growth and accompanying demographic changes, the South became a pacesetter, rather than political backwater, ironically without inherently altering the basic conservatism of its political, business, religious, and media leaders. In place of the loud, rabble-rousing, race-driven politics of the past, Southern politicians assumed a sleek, new veneer of sophistication more at home in corporate boardrooms than at political rallies on the courthouse lawn. Of course, appeals to the South’s basic religiosity—and accompanying attacks on gays, abortionists, welfare cheats, and “Brie-and-Chablis” Democrats—were also necessary to broaden the base beyond CEOs and members of the local chamber of commerce. “Growth of industry throughout the region gave more southerners a feeling for the traditional philosophy of the Republican Party,” the political historian Monroe Billington wrote. “Industrial development attracted many northern business executives and managers to the South, and in innumerable instances they helped provide new leadership for the Republican Party.”42 Lost in this transition was a lot of the color of the old politics of the South. “Modern campaigns require presentable candidates who can discuss issues, events, and personalities in a conversational style . . . as opposed to a fiery, stem-winding stump speech,” write Earl and Merle Black in Politics and Society in the South.43 The return of the South as a major player on the national stage wasn’t without precedent. Earl and Merle Black, in their 1992 book The Vital South, describe how Southern politicians from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson created the Democratic Party and steered the national political discourse before slavery, the Civil War, and Jim Crow cast the region into the political backwaters. During the Sunbelt era, the South merely resumed its once-dominant role. “As the largest and usually most cohesive region in the nation, the South often controls the votes that influence which parties dominate the executive and legislative branches of the national government,” the Black brothers wrote. “Today, one looks at the South and sees America. There is abundant reason to pay close attention to future political developments in the South, for it now shapes the trends and sets the pace of national political outcomes and processes.”44 118

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The seeds of the modern-day transition from a solidly Democratic South to a nearly solidly Republican South—a transformation that was key to the Republican Party’s eventual domination of national politics— can be seen as early as the 1928 presidential election, when five states in the South broke ranks and voted for Republican Herbert Hoover and against the “wet” and Catholic Democratic nominee, Al Smith. President Harry Truman’s push for civil rights legislation in 1947, a recognition of the growing importance of the Northern black vote, contributed to the next major fracture in the Solid South. Southern Democrats bolted the following year when the national party adopted Truman’s proposals as part of its platform at the 1948 Democratic convention in Philadelphia. As a band played “Dixie,” Southern delegates marched out of the convention hall to form the so-called States’ Rights Party, better known as the Dixiecrats. Under a ticket featuring South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond for president and Mississippi governor Fielding Wright for vice president, the Dixiecrats knew they couldn’t win the election outright but hoped they could carry enough votes to swing the decision to the U.S. House of Representatives, where they could shape the outcome to suit their interests. The plan failed, but they carried the electoral votes of South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, plus a lone elector in Tennessee. “We took the South out of the Democratic Party and made it respectful to vote otherwise,” Thurmond told the author in an interview in 1988. “The South was a slave to the Democratic Party. . . . I think the fight was worthwhile. The South would still be in the bag for the Democratic Party otherwise.”45 Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower would continue GOP inroads into the South by winning Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas in his successful bid for the presidency in 1952. He took those states again plus Louisiana four years later in winning his reelection bid. Thurmond would lead the way for a nearly full-fledged white Southern conversion to the Republican Party when he switched parties in 1964 to campaign for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. He helped Goldwater carry Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. The winner of that election was ironically a Southerner, Texas Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson, who would carry on the work of his slain predecessor, John F. Kennedy, by launching a “War on Poverty,” which Thomas A. Lyson called “the last concerted effort” to address “the deficiencies in human capital and welfare delivery in areas such as the rural South.”46 A 1967 report by Johnson’s advisory commission on the issue called rural poverty a “national disgrace” and specifically pointed to the rural The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows

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South as “one vast poverty area.”47 However, Johnson’s concern for the poor, his “Great Society” initiatives to put a larger federal imprint on education, welfare, and other programs, and especially his signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act ultimately would seal the fate of his party in his native region and inspire the “Southern Strategy” of Republican Richard Nixon in 1968 to take the South from the Democrats. Johnson saw the handwriting on the wall when he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party,” he said on that day.48 Nixon, competing not only with the Democrats but also with the thirdparty candidacy of Alabama populist and segregationist George Wallace, touted a platform that included opposition to mandated busing to desegregate public schools and a call for a more conservative U.S. Supreme Court. He won every state in the South except Texas. Four years later, with the wounded Wallace out of the picture, Nixon carried not only every Southern state but also every state in the nation except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. The victory of Georgia Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976—he took every Southern state except Virginia—brought about a temporary return to the Democratic fold for the South. “Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976 was a kind of symbiotic ratification of the changes in the South,” wrote Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa in The Almanac of American Politics, 1982.49 However, the South rejected Carter when he ran for reelection in 1980. Only Georgia stood by its native son, plus the border states of West Virginia and Maryland. The South overwhelmingly preferred Republican Ronald Reagan, and his victory that year marked an early triumph of Sunbelt politics. Reagan’s “New Federalism” of tax cuts, pro-business policies, reduced regulation, reduced federal spending on domestic social programs, and increased defense spending was ol’ time gospel to Southern conservatives. They would help assure Reagan and his successor George Bush continued Republican ascendancy over the South. Both would carry the entire region in the next two presidential elections, Reagan in 1984 and Bush in 1988. Like Carter before him, Arkansas Democrat Bill Clinton would reclaim some Southern ground in his presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996, winning four Southern states in each of those elections. However, he would also preside over the ultimate and climactic victory of Sunbelt politics when Republicans took both houses of Congress in the midterm elections of 1994, a revolution engineered by the quintessential Sunbelt politician, Newt Gingrich of Georgia.

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Gingrich, a congressman from the Atlanta suburbs, would go on to serve as U.S. House speaker from 1995 to 1999 and fill the role of Republican counterweight to President Clinton in the highly partisan political wars of the 1990s. Thus Southerners led both of the warring sides during that decade, and both had cut their teeth in the Sunbelt South. With his party in charge of Congress, Gingrich, a Pennsylvania native, called for a “Contract with America” that reflected the Sunbelt world of his constituents in the wealthy northern Atlanta suburbs of Fulton and Cobb counties. The contract called for welfare reform, term limits on members of Congress, tougher anti-crime laws, and a balanced federal budget. Gingrich’s Sixth Congressional District embodied all the major trends of the Sunbelt: mostly white, solidly Republican, heavily populated by Northern transplants, contemptuous of the black-controlled politics of nearby Atlanta, generally opposed to government spending yet heavily dependent on the federal largesse that had made one of its largest employers, the Lockheed Martin Aerospace Systems Company, so successful over the years. In Atlanta, on May 15, 1986, former governors William Winter of Mississippi and A. Linwood Holton of Virginia released a report by the private, nonprofit, North Carolina–based research institute MDC, Inc., that signaled the end to the legend of Sunbelt prosperity. “Much has been made of the rapidly expanding economy of our fabled ‘Sunbelt,’” the report began. “Indeed . . . cities like Austin, Atlanta, Jackson, Charlotte, Houston, and Raleigh have experienced impressive booms. Yet this explosive urban growth has masked the growing difficulties of the rural South. . . . In short, while we live in the Sunbelt, there is a dark cloud hanging over many of our rural neighbors.”50 The report detailed the sharp decline in the textile and apparel industries that decades before had overtaken the agriculturally based economies of the rural South. The report, only sixteen pages long, described the deleterious effects of the “buffalo hunt” for industry that had begun with Mississippi’s “Balance Agriculture With Industry” program in 1936 and spread across the South over the next several decades, as community after community, desperate for jobs, offered potential industrial investors incentives packages replete with tax breaks that drained revenues from revenue-starved local governments and that mainly appealed to “laborintensive industries . . . most interested in low wages and low rates of unionization.” Many of those “rural communities are now mired in economic stagnation” with cities increasingly “becoming magnets for those displaced

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from the country,” threatening the entire South “with both decaying rural and inner-city communities” and “creating a massive financial drain on the region’s resources.” Finally, the report concluded, “the trends also threaten abstract, eternal values that have cemented the South’s identity and made it worth preserving,” such as “tradition and family . . . our feelings for our fellowman, our awe of nature, and our sense of place to the routines of rural community life and our connections to the land. States in the South must tend to our roots, or in the end, risk our values.”51 States must do more to encourage local entrepreneurship and focus on median per-capita income and other broader indicators of success rather than merely numbers of jobs, the report said. Deeper investments in education, local infrastructure development, transportation, and rural development must be made to improve quality of life. That same year, the Southern Growth Policies Board, chaired by Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, issued a similar report by its Commission on the Future of the South called “Halfway Home and a Long Way to Go.” “The decade’s widely publicized new jobs at higher pay have been largely claimed by educated, urban, middle-class Southerners,” this report said. “Millions of us—approximately the same number as in 1965—still struggle in poverty. . . . Too many workers in obsolete jobs are not being retrained for the next century’s technical and service careers.”52 Poverty was back on the rise in the South in 1980s after the decline that had been reported in the previous decade. The South needed to pledge itself to “nationally competitive education,” “a flexible, globally competitive work force,” and “pragmatic leaders with a global vision,” the SGPB’s report said.53 Plenty of statistics were available to back up the report’s claims. In the first half of the 1980s alone, the South lost more than 110,000 textile and apparel jobs. Georgia was a microcosm. While manufacturing employment in Atlanta grew 17 percent, the rest of Georgia saw a 3.3 percent decline. In fact, three out of every four new jobs created in the early to mid-1980s were in Atlanta. Across the region, 80 percent of job growth took place in metropolitan areas. Despite all the Sunbelt hoopla, eight of the nation’s eleven most poverty-stricken states were in the South. Not coincidentally, six of the bottom ten states in spending on education were in the South. North Carolina, the region’s most industrialized state, provided a striking example of the contradictions of the Sunbelt South. For all the state’s investment in the high-tech Research Triangle Park and the rapid growth of cities such as Charlotte and Raleigh, the state’s workers were the lowest paid and also least unionized in the nation in 1980. 122

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External factors contributed to the growing shadows over the Sunbelt South. The boom in oil prices that fueled its growth in the 1970s had reversed by the 1980s, plunging some parishes in oil-rich Louisiana into Depression-era unemployment levels. Interest rates rose as commodity prices fell. However, perhaps even more important, the “New Federalism” and its appropriation of the Sunbelt politics of tax cuts, industry deregulation, and curtailed federal spending on domestic programs had a dramatic impact on a South that was always much more dependent on federal largesse than it ever liked to admit. Just as the press had heralded the arrival of the Sunbelt South, it was quick to announce the setting of the sun. The September 20, 1986, edition of the National Journal featured a story headlined “The Two Souths.” The magazine ran a similar story in November that year titled “A Tale of Two Souths.” A national story by the Associated Press in November 1986 featured economist Gavin Wright’s criticism of the South’s dependence on the “rootless business” that had followed the lure of docile, nonunionized workers into the region, investing little or nothing in its infrastructure or culture, and eventually moved on to the Pacific Rim and other places where wages were even lower. Wright said these businesses were similar to antebellum slave owners who moved at will around the South without establishing roots in any particular place.54 A front-page story in the January 15, 1987, edition of the Wall Street Journal was headlined the “Split-Level South: Sun Belt’s Economy Booms in Many Cities but Rural Regions Lag.” The Orlando (Florida) Sentinel distributed a story nationally the next month announcing that the “Sun Belt may soon disappear on horizon.”55 In November 1987, Los Angeles Times reporter David Treadwell wrote an in-depth piece headlined “Sun Belt Promise Fading in Depressed Rural South: Small Towns Decay as Cities Prosper.”56 The fall/winter 1987 edition of Southern Exposure magazine featured excerpts from a seven-part series by the Virginian-Pilot business reporter Steven Beschloss under the headline “Prosperity’s Broken Promise.” Beschloss traveled four thousand miles and conducted 150 interviews to find a few “winners” but many more “losers” in a region that had severed “its dependence on agriculture” only to link “itself to another unreliable master,” Northern-owned companies more than willing to move to Mexico or Asia in search of even cheaper labor.57 What the politicians and newspapers saw was the life that many Southern workers had been living ever since the Sunbelt was christened. As a reporter and free-lance writer, I myself interviewed a number of them in the late 1980s and later again in the early 1990s, by which time the South had entered what historian James C. Cobb referred to as the “post-Sunbelt.” The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows

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“It’s worse than it used to be,” seventy-six-year-old illiterate former sharecropper Willie Hightower told me at his rural Gibson, Georgia, home in January 1988. “They can’t make nothing on the farm. Can’t hardly make a living.”58 Meanwhile, a hundred miles away in northwest Atlanta, home designer and builder Judy Mozen oversaw her crew put the finishing touches on a 7,000-square-foot, twenty-room, $1.975 million mansion. “This area . . . is going through a renaissance,” her field superintendent, Karl McPherson, told me. “A disproportionate amount of wealthy people are moving into this area.”59 Black newspaper publisher and political leader Carol Zippert of Eutaw, Alabama, told me in 1993 that the Sunbelt South had the same racial divisions and inequities as the Old South. The only difference was the race issue was simply submerged under the more palatable politics of fiscal conservatism. “The whites in the mansions hold economic power because of the land,” she said. “When we try to raise ad valorem taxes, they flood the media with ads, put pressure on the politicians. We don’t have economic power.”60 Blacks like Willie Hightower were largely left out of the Sunbelt prosperity. Even as the region as a whole reached 88 percent of the national average per capita income in the late 1980s, its black workers were earning an average of $3,200 a year, roughly 30 percent of the national average. As for Hightower, he and his seventy-seven-year-old wife depended on a monthly $560 check from Social Security to survive. The Sunbelt South was “largely a fabrication,” George Tindall told the Orlando Sentinel. “It conjures up a land of milk and honey in a region with a per-capita income way below the national average.”61 “Despite a widespread perception of the Sunbelt South as a newly prosperous paradise, in terms of absolute statistics rather than growth momentum the South of the 1980s remained as the nation’s number one economic problem,” James Cobb said. “Cheap nonunion labor continued to be the South’s major attraction to industry. . . . Emphasis on cheap labor undermined efforts to recruit better-paying industries that would not only bid up wages but enhance the prospects for unionizing southern workers. . . . The self-satisfaction of the Sunbelt South’s boosters ignored the numerous economic disparities within the region.”62 A 1986 study by the Southern Labor Institute in Atlanta backs Cobb’s argument. In the ten-year period from 1975 to 1984, four of the top nine states in job growth were in the South, yet eight of the bottom eleven states in personal income growth were also in the South. From the last decade of the twentieth century into the first decade of the twenty-first century, the White House itself was proof of the South’s 124

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preeminence in the nation’s politics. Arkansas Democrat Bill Clinton’s two terms as president were followed by Texas Republican George W. Bush’s two terms. The Republican control of Congress during most of those years owed much to the South’s GOP conversion. In both the White House and Congress the politics of the Sunbelt ruled: low taxes, minimal regulation, and limited spending on infrastructure and social programs. Even Democrat Bill Clinton, with his appropriation of conservative positions on economic and social issues such as free trade and welfare reform, reflected a Sunbelt view of the world shared by Republicans despite their partisan battles with him. Yet the dark underside of the Sunbelt South that was exposed in 1986 continued to exist in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In 2002 MDC, Inc., issued an update of its 1986 report titled “Shadows in the Sunbelt Revisited.” It confirmed that two Souths continued to exist: one urban, suburban, and prosperous; the other poor, rural, and struggling. “So much of what it takes to build a strong economy and a better life for Southerners—highways and schools, and more—is financed by revenues collected and distributed by the states. When one section of a state flounders, the state as a whole suffers; when one community thrives, the whole state benefits. . . . The South will continue rising together, or not at all.”63 The North Carolina–based Southern Growth Policies Board issued its own report in June 2006, bemoaning the South’s stagnant investment in itself and calling for a deeper commitment to research and development, education, and local entrepreneurship. What a sense of déjà vu the board must have felt as its members voiced the same recommendations that were made in the landmark reports of 1986. In between the issuance of these two reports, in February 2005, a conference on “New Strategies for Southern Progress” was held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, bringing together many of the region’s political and intellectual leaders in an effort to assess the South and possibly chart its future. On the table were issues ranging from tax policy and suburban growth to the global economy and even religious values in the “changing face of the South.” Nowhere on the agenda was a discussion of what James Cobb called “the South’s major attraction to industry.” Even the South’s most enlightened political and economic leaders today remain reluctant to take on what Cobb called the region’s “most respectable prejudice.” Leah D. Totten, a member of the MDC Research Committee, said in a 2003 interview that the think-tank prefers to put more emphasis on the need for better leadership in the South than in the need for more unionization. “Organized labor has never been our thing,” she said.64 The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows

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Yet, cheap, nonunion labor continues to be the “thing” that primarily attracts new industry in the post-Sunbelt South. The arrival of Nissan and Toyota bear witness to this, as does this August 16, 2005, headline in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal in Tupelo, Mississippi: “State touts low ranking in business cost: On this list, being near the bottom is good news for economic development leaders.” The front-page, top-of-the-fold article goes on to describe Mississippi’s ranking by the Milken Institute as the “sixth least costly state to do business.” Among the reasons why Mississippi achieved this ranking were “employee wages” and “tax burden.”65 Let’s go to James Cobb once again to get a final word on the Sunbelt South. He is the historian who has perhaps followed Sunbelt development the closest. Looking at Hurricane Katrina and its devastating impact on Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama in the summer of 2005, as well as the dismal failure of government at all levels to respond, Cobb offered up this observation: “At the very least, Hurricane Katrina put the lie to a generation’s worth of ballyhoo about the newfound prosperity of the Sunbelt South. It showed us not only the impoverished and immobile masses of New Orleans, but the shack-dwelling, hand-to-mouth lives of thousands of others within the three-state swath of its hellish destruction. Here the disaster laid bare the shackling legacy of generations of pursuing industry through promises of low-wage, nonunion labor and minimal taxation and the correspondingly inadequate investment in public education, health and social welfare in the South.”66

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Chapter 7

southern exposure “A New Style of Southern Journalism”

The first thing I thought about when I drove up to the modest twostory, red brick building on Chapel Hill Road in Durham, North Carolina, was Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s comment when he visited the equally unimposing headquarters of the Al Jazeera network in Doha, Qatar. “All this noise from this matchbox?”1 It’s an easy-to-miss building just southwest of the renovated and gentrified tobacco warehouses of downtown Durham and due south of the gothic magnificence of the Duke University campus. However, from its cluttered second-floor offices comes a rare voice for the voiceless in the U.S. South, the progressive, independent Institute for Southern Studies and its flagship magazine, Southern Exposure. For more than three decades, the magazine, fortified with extensive research, analysis, and documentation provided by its staff and the institute, has railed against corporate excesses and plutocratic rule in the South, and no other publication in the entire region has been more committed and vigilant in its support of the labor movement. Although its circulation is small—some five thousand paid sales per issue—its reach is far, and its admirers many. Among its many awards are the Sidney Hillman Award for courageous reporting on racial injustice and the George Polk Award for Magazine Writing. I had long been one of its admirers—from my reporting desks at newspapers in nearby Raleigh and Sanford as well as when I later moved on to other jobs at mainstream news organizations in Mississippi and Washington, D.C. When I got the opportunity to work with Southern Exposure and its post–Hurricane Katrina Web magazine, Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch, as a contributing writer, editor, and adviser in 2005 and 2006, it was the fulfillment of a long-held dream. This was a groundbreaking project that made sure the sufferings of the Gulf Coast people and government failures to help them were reported and remembered. 127

Southern Exposure was the one outfit in the South that consistently sought out the experiences and views of working-class people—white, black, Latino, Asian—on the issues that mattered to them, an outfit that recognized the South and the nation aren’t only divided by race but also by class. A quarterly that sometimes hangs on by its bootstraps and which can be awfully hard to find on a newsstand, Southern Exposure has a central mission—social justice in the South—but it also embraces the totality of the region, and its pages are as rich with oral history, poetry, fiction, folk lyrics, art, and photographs as they are with polemics, statistical analyses, and a dead-on advocacy journalism that brims with all the passion—if not the soapbox oratory—of a Thomas Paine and William Lloyd Garrison. I’m not without criticism. Southern Exposure’s lack of attention to such simple formalities as properly dating its early editions can be maddening to a researcher. Its uninhibited devotion to oral history, admirable as it is, can sometimes make for tough reading even if page after page is highly worthy. I certainly don’t agree with everything in its pages, and neither do its editors. However, what makes Southern Exposure compelling is its vision of journalism, one embodied in the critique of mainstream media offered in its “Focus on the Media” edition in 1975. Calling for a “reordering (of) the South and the nation,” the magazine promised to push “beyond traditional liberal journalism to a more activist role.” As for its beat, the South, the magazine had this to say: “This region has its share of problems, but rather than moralize about them, we’d like to identify them and help people engineer their removal. On the other hand, there is much in our culture that could be expanded, refined, deepened—and we’d like to illuminate these features, whether historical or current, so they can be celebrated, enjoyed, and used.” The South lacks “a tradition of unions, civic associations, sociallyactive churches, foundations, or universities which give voices to the dissidents in the community.” The traditional family-owned newspaper in the small-town and big-town South occasionally offered “a modicum of critical reflection,” and sometimes produced stellar journalists like Ralph McGill in Atlanta, Virginius Dabney in Richmond, and many others who became expatriates from the region. However, Southern Exposure, the magazine’s editors promised their readers, was offering “a new style of southern journalism” that would break the silence on dissidence.2 Bear in mind, this was a time in which the South was finally emerging from its darkest resistance to the civil rights movement and enjoying its christening as the “Sunbelt South,” yet another “New South” that would shed the skin of the region’s old, dark, viperous self. Southern Exposure would put the lie to this New South just as powerfully as crusading 128

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Memphis journalist Ida B. Wells did with her exposés of lynching in Henry Grady’s New South of the late 1800s. Also bear in mind that a cultural divide existed in the early 1970s between many liberals and working-class people. For all the talk about liberation and freedom in the great rebellion of the Baby Boom generation in the 1960s, union card-holding Joe Six-Pack hardly fit in with the longhaired, draft card-burning sons and daughters of the American middle class who were at the forefront of that rebellion. Unlike most of its peers in the underground or alternative press, Southern Exposure openly embraced and exalted working-class people and the labor movement. What followed over the three decades after its beginnings in the early 1970s ranged from courageous exposés of the South’s humiliating and self-defeating obeisance to industry to meticulously researched analyses of the unholy alliance of the region’s political, business, media, religious, and even intellectual leaders against efforts to provide a true and enduring lift to the lives of working-class Southerners. For the first time, brownlung victims from the Carolina textile mills and black lung-suffering coal miners from Kentucky and West Virginia had a dependable and consistent platform from which they could be heard. From that platform came in-depth, fact-filled, no-holds-barred profiles of industry magnates like poultry king Frank Perdue, profiles that were immune from the threats of advertisers and local chambers of commerce. Readers could find longoverdue portraits of bona fide but little-known Southern heroes like the pot-bellied, mustachioed community organizer Ernie Cortes, a disciple of social reformer Saul Alinsky and founder of the nationally recognized Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) group in San Antonio, Texas. Doing the good work of this “new style of southern journalism” was a perennially tiny staff along with the efforts of contributing idealists, acolytes, and drifters. Southern Exposure was a sort of Dixie version of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement. Both, as Tennessee Williams would put it, depended greatly on the “kindness of strangers.” The kindness Southern Exposure received, and continues to receive, included grants, fundraisers, and gifts from individuals, foundations, and other “sustainers.” “What we lack in money, we make up for through reliance on a community of supporters,” the magazine editorialized in 1975. “That after all is the basis upon which we like to do things.”3 Bob Hall and Joseph “Chip” Hughes are enjoying the chance to talk about their old days at Southern Exposure, battles won and lost, battles still being fought. Hall had the original vision to create the magazine and served as its general editor. Hughes was one of its earliest editors and Southern Exposure: “New Style of Southern Journalism”

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writers. We’re in Hughes’s office at the Research Triangle Park, where he directs worker education and training programs with the National Institute of Environmental Health Services. Hall came over from nearby Carrboro, where he co-directs a “good government” project called Democracy North Carolina. We sit around a large table with current Southern Exposure editor and Institute for Southern Studies director Chris Kromm. Outside the office windows are parking lots, piney woods, and plenty of sunshine. Inside are lots of memories. “I didn’t really want to cover government that much,” remembers Hall, sixty-one, lean, serious in demeanor but with a wry smile that frequently appears behind a graying mustache that was much darker in the photographs I’ve seen of him from the early 1970s. “We thought the conflict was between people and corporations, and the government was in between as a kind of referee. If you get the people to rally against the corporations enough, the government would respond on behalf of the people instead of the corporations.”4 Kromm had explained this view further in an earlier conversation. “Bob was very interested in a lot of research about corporate players. It wasn’t just about the corporate entity. He wanted to take this a step further, reporting about impact . . . the whole web of corporate, political . . . players, the whole power structure, the union-busting, the role that county commissioners, chambers of commerce, and other sorts of players had in making sure the company stayed union-free.” An example of this can be seen in the analysis of the textile giant J. P. Stevens and Company that Hall and fellow writers Jim Overton and Bob Arnold provided in the magazine’s “Packaging the New South” edition in 1978. The package of stories provides a breakdown of five generations of leadership by the Stevens family, its relationship with the military as a customer and through family connections such as one-time secretary of the army Bob Stevens, and the company’s “clubby” ties to a network of Wall Street banks and brokerage firms—ranging from Goldman Sachs to J. P. Morgan and Company. Another example is Southern Exposure’s exposé on “Greenville’s Experiment: The Non-Union Culture” in the “Behind Closed Doors” edition of spring 1979. A lengthy, chart-filled article by writer Michael E. Russell reveals the “Leadership Greenville” program of the Greenville, South Carolina, Chamber of Commerce as nothing more than a “smoke screen for the Chamber’s anti-union efforts and a means to co-opt those who might otherwise offer progressive leadership.”5 Accompanying the article is a “Wheel of Fortune” showing the “corporate interlocks” that undergird the chamber’s efforts. The investigative work belies the chamber’s self-proclaimed status as the “most progressive organization in the 130

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community.” One chamber-sponsored “employees” course indoctrinated participants with its theme of “profit is needed, government regulation is bad, and unions are outside interference.” After completing such a course, Russell writes, “employees come away from the session with a complete understanding of management’s world view, without ever exploring what their own self-interest might involve in the ‘free-enterprise system.’”6 At the time, Greenville was “the textile capital of the world as a result of aggressive recruiting to bring the textile barons to Greenville,” Kromm said at a 2003 conference on labor and the press at the University of Mississippi. “They saw the media very openly as an ally in that entire process.”7 Indeed, the local Greenville newspaper was an active participant in the program. These kinds of exposés were at the heart of what Chip Hughes always saw as Southern Exposure’s mission. Hughes, fifty-four, both grayer and leaner than he was in his early staff photographs, is a quick-witted man with an easy smile and ready laugh, but his radical vision in the 1970s was all seriousness: telling the truth about the Sunbelt South. “There were counter ideas buzzing around. Putting a counter vision together, that was kind of the key. Then you came back to the question of labor, a different kind of South, a South left behind, exploited, an impoverished South.”8 A one-time seminary student, Hall came out of Columbia University in 1970 with a master’s in the sociology of religion, moved to Atlanta— “It was the capital of the South”—and joined the fledgling Institute for Southern Studies that activists Sue Thrasher, Howard Romaine, and Julian Bond had started there.9 Two years later, Hall initiated the idea of a flagship journal for the institute with a memo now recognized as the magazine’s founding document. The new journal, which along with the institute would re-locate to North Carolina within a few years, “would be a means for reaching new people, for developing an audience and constituency for our ideas and for the Institute,” Hall wrote in that fall 1972 memo. “I think such a journal would also help us develop a broader analysis of the South and the movement in the South since it would (p)ut us closer in touch both with the issues and the people.”10 Kromm, who joined Southern Exposure in 1997 after years of grassroots activism and work with Nation magazine and other publications, said the magazine’s formula for good writing was simple. “Southern Exposure didn’t want the detached writing of the mainstream press but neither the soapbox type of writing you find in much of the partisan press.”11 Hughes, who came to the South after getting a degree in philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, joined the institute in 1972 and edited the magazine’s first edition. Soon he became Southern Exposure: “New Style of Southern Journalism”

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one of its leading writers on labor and health issues. “I was a turnedon student radical cutting loose from my Yankee suburban past and on the run from my corporate professional future,” Hughes wrote in the magazine’s ten-year anniversary edition. The South was “the internal colony where the contradictions were more clear and the enemy more overt and dastardly.” At Southern Exposure, Hughes wrote in that issue, “we were just driven by the vision of presenting an alternative perception of the South to its people. We knew it was the one that lived on in the sharecroppers’ shacks, coal miners’ shanties and cotton mill workers’ villages.”12 It was the South of the “coal miners’ shanties” that helped galvanize both the institute and Southern Exposure as a vehicle for change as well as a venue for ideas and information. In one of its earliest battles, the institute became an active partner in an effort to oppose a new rate increase by the Georgia Power Company in Atlanta. Working with local construction unions, the institute “did all this analysis . . . put together an alliance of labor, environment, the whole thing,” Hall recalls. “That was a kind of a corporate campaign.”13 A “corporate campaign” involves a multifaceted effort that can include exposing the network of corporate and community connections an anti-union company has; confronting major investors and shareholders—sometimes with delegations at shareholders’ meetings or on Wall Street for face-toface meetings—with the company’s practices and tactics; and employing other means such as national boycotts to get media attention. This kind of organizing campaign was honed and developed in the successful effort that finally led to the unionization of the virulently anti-union J. P. Stevens textile plants in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, in 1974 and in the subsequent six-year struggle to get a contract. The Georgia Power campaign got the attention of the United Mine Workers of America, which was waging its own battle against the North Carolina–based Duke Power Company in North Carolina. Duke’s wholly owned subsidiary, the Eastover Mining Company, owned the Brookside Mine in Harlan County, Kentucky, where miners had gone on strike seeking UMWA representation (their previous union, the Southern Labor Union, was essentially in bed with the company) and to protest low wages and a dismal safety record that had given Brookside an accident rate three times the national average. This was the dispute that would be immortalized in the Academy Award–winning 1976 documentary by Barbara Kopple, Harlan County USA. It also took place on the hallowed grounds of some of the most historic and important labor battles in the history of the border South. Struggles between miners and coal operators led to the deaths of eleven 132

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miners in the 1930s and to coal miner wife Florence Reece’s 1931 composition of one of the nation’s great labor anthems, “Which Side Are You On?” with its withering denouncement of Harlan County sheriff J. H. Blair and his band of thugs and scabs. They say in Harlan County There are no neutrals there You’ll either be a union man Or a thug for J. H. Blair Which side are you on? Which side are you on?↜14

As it did with Georgia Power, the institute went to work providing research data in building the case against Duke Power. It also helped bring the issue back to the utility’s home base in North Carolina. “We learned so much,” Hall says. “We kept learning, doing these charts, found out ratepayers were paying an extra million dollars a week, or a million dollars a day—I can’t remember. They were wasting it because they wouldn’t sign this contract, and here they were going in for this rate increase. The mine workers took out these big ads.” “They needed the media,” Hughes points out. “That kind of opened our eyes, literally,” Hall says with a nod.15 They learned Duke Power had a proposal pending before the state utilities commission to raise rates by 17 percent. Newspapers in North Carolina began taking up the issue, and striking miners even traveled to New York to bring the issue home to brokers and investors on Wall Street. In its labor edition of 1976, Here Comes a Wind: Labor on the Move, the magazine reported at length about the Brookside Mine strike, providing the oral histories of miners, organizers, and activists, and putting the story in the context of the long and tortured history of the miners’ struggles in “Bloody Harlan” as well as across the rest of Kentucky and West Virginia. Along with these struggles was the bitter infighting within the United Mine Workers of America, including UMWA president Tony Boyle’s 1974 conviction for complicity in the killings of political opponent Jock Yablonsky and his family on New Year’s Eve 1969, and the subsequent rise of the “Miners for Democracy” movement. Boyle was replaced at the head of the UMWA in 1972 by Arnold Miller, who won with great promises of reform but had to deal with a divided union and the Boyle legacy of violence and corruption. The Brookside Mine strike reached its own bloody nadir when miner Lawrence Jones was shot and killed by a Duke Power employee. Eventually, Southern Exposure: “New Style of Southern Journalism”

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however, Duke Power was forced to bargain, and the miners won the strike along with UMWA representation and improved safety measures. “The union would not have won the strike at Brookside without the benefit of public relations,” the UMWA research director and author Tom Bethell wrote in Southern Exposure in 1976. “Eastover Mining could have withstood the union for a long time. . . . Duke could and was subjected to a barrage of propaganda in the newspapers of North and South Carolina about conditions at Brookside, conditions that gave the lie to Duke’s carefully nurtured image as ‘your friendly neighborhood power company.’”16 In the same issue of the magazine, Hall wrote that the publicity was “no accident.” A “sophisticated union strategy” along with help from supporters like the institute worked successfully to bring the real story of the strike to the press and subsequently to the people.17 For Hall and others at the institute, the Brookside Mine victory opened the door to still other campaigns. “It was like one thing right after the other,” Hall says. “Folks at the textile workers’ union came out to our office and said, ‘We need your help.’”18 The Brookside Mine strike, along with other events such as the successful miners’ strike at the Pittston Coal Company in Virginia in 1989 and 1990, provided needed inspiration for the labor movement in the Appalachian coal fields in the second half of the twentieth century. Brookside also showed the power of the press and publicity in pushing for change. “As long as the strike continued, there would be citizens’ commissions holding hearings, reporters asking awkward questions, embarrassments on the evening news, full-page ads over the breakfast table,” Bethell wrote.19 However, the victory at Brookside failed to spread to other mines in the area, and the issues that raged in Harlan County and elsewhere in mining country in those years continue even today. In May 2006, five miners were killed in Harlan County, which has no unionized mines today. Five months earlier, the nation was riveted by news of the deaths of twelve miners in the Sago mine in West Virginia. These victims were among more than thirty miners killed in mining disasters in the first half of 2006. Cutbacks in safety regulations and budget cuts in federal oversight are believed to have been factors in these deaths. “The cozy relationship between the [Bush] Administration and the coal industry . . . sweetened with campaign dollars” has been ignored by “the mainstream media,” Nation magazine reported in its June 12, 2006, edition.20 “It is still going on,” Chip Hughes says as we wrap up our interview session. “How do you become an organizer now? That is the challenge. What we were dealing with back then was corporate hegemony. Now you have to build partnerships, coalitions, play in all these different areas, and get to be good at it. I don’t know that we are training people 134

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to do that. . . . It is almost like we need to return to a sort of a more guerrilla approach.”21 Prompted as it was by the research and revelations provided by the institute and the UMWA, the mainstream media coverage that helped Brookside miners achieve victory was the exception rather than the rule in most Southern journalism. Throughout the region’s history, Chris Kromm said at the 2003 conference on labor and the press at the University of Mississippi, “the press saw itself as an ally of the business structure.”22 Indeed, as in the case with the Greenville Chamber of Commerce’s “Leadership Greenville” program, when the publisher is part of the power structure, the local newspaper reporters are hardly going to be encouraged to challenge a status quo that serves the boss’s best interests. Challenging the status quo traditionally has fallen to the tiny handful of alternative newspapers and magazines that have dotted the landscape of the South and its border states over the past century or more. They include the German Populist newspaper Der Anzeiger in Texas and Ida B. Wells’s Memphis Free Speech in the 1890s, and Oskar Ameringer’s socialist weekly American Guardian in Oklahoma in the early twentieth century. More recent examples would include institute cofounder Howard Romaine’s Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta in the 1960s and crusading Mississippi journalist Bill Minor’s weekly Capitol Reporter in the 1970s. Most rarely lived long enough to establish themselves as a fixture on the landscape. A perfect contrast between the mainstream press and the crusading journalists relegated to “alternative” status can be seen in Catholic Worker cofounder Dorothy Day’s visit to Memphis in the mid-1930s. Day and French vagabond poet Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker newspaper in New York City in 1933 as the flagship of a movement that would include “houses of hospitality” for the poor and homeless as well as communal farms, all imbued with a philosophy of communitarianism and a deeply held commitment to the traditions of Catholic social teaching. The first issue of the Catholic Worker dealt with the treatment of black labor on the levees in the South. The newspaper’s third issue focused on child labor and the Carolina textile mill strikes. Day traveled to Memphis in 1936 to get a first-hand look at the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and its struggles to improve workers’ lives in the area. “During that trip I saw men, women, and children herded into little churches and wayside stations, camped out in tents, their household goods heaped about them, not one settlement but many—farmers with no land to farm, housewives with no homes,” she wrote. “I saw children ill, one old man dead in bed and not yet buried, mothers weeping with hunger Southern Exposure: “New Style of Southern Journalism”

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and cold. I saw bullet holes in the frame churches, and their benches and pulpits smashed up and windows broken. Men had been kidnapped and beaten; men had been shot and wounded. The month after I left, one of the organizers was killed by a member of a masked band of vigilantes who were fighting the Tenant Farmers’ Union.”23 Day telegrammed a plea for help to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who in turn contacted the Tennessee governor. The governor was unmoved, and so was the Memphis Commercial Appeal, which editorialized against outsiders like Day “who came to criticize.” “The Commercial Appeal’s reactions was as one might expect from that paper in those days,” writes Day’s biographer, William D. Miller, “because it usually stood for Southern Bourbon traditionalism on all fronts.”24 Southern Exposure is in the tradition of publications like the Catholic Worker. Although one is a magazine and the other a newspaper, striking similarities exist. Both Day and Bob Hall started their careers distributing leaflets. Religious conviction was a driving force in both their lives. Both depended greatly on volunteer help and embraced a journalism that reached beyond the mainstream press’s self-imposed restraints of the inverted pyramid and so-called objectivity. Objectivity in journalism has roots going back to the penny press of the early 1800s. It was part of an economic strategy to reach as broad an audience as possible with a fact-based, nonjudgmental, nonalienating style, and it was part and parcel to the press’s gradual transformation of readers from citizens into consumers. In his 2004 book Framed: Labor and the Corporate Media, Christopher R. Martin writes at length about objectivity and its effect of allowing market values to dominate and overwhelm class issues. “The goal of objective news writing is to separate fact from value or emotion, reduce (or inflate) events into a story with two ‘sides,’ and use quotes as pure ‘data’ without any reporter interpretation. . . . As an economic strategy, objective style journalism is successful (and) discourse about class is limited.”25 However, objectivity has “built-in biases” that include a tendency to favor “official” sources, a preference for the status quo as well as for reporting on events “rather than processes.” “While they would rarely acknowledge it, news workers make conscious choices,” Martin writes. “The news hides behind a veil of objectivity, but tells stories that generally serve the core dominant values of U.S. capitalist society—including those of their own profit-maximizing corporate owners.”26 For these reasons, the mainstream media in the United States practices “the least truly adversarial journalism of any Western nation,” a journalism of “mountainous smugness (and) unthinking reverence for free markets and global trade,” noted for “its unquestioning embrace of the advertised life and its refusal to consider alternatives to the corporate 136

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order,” writes Thomas Frank in his essay, “Triangulation Nation.” “It is presumptuous to believe too strongly in anything, insists the voice of the great middle, because by doing so we risk visiting bad feelings and exclusion on those who might disagree. The path to salvation is clear: Journalists must become better democrats by becoming better businessmen.”27 In this market-driven world, the press is subsumed under the everexpanding umbrella of media, a “mammoth anti-democratic oligopoly that is far more responsive to its owners, big shareholders and good buddies in the government than it is to the rest of us, the people of this country,” writes New York University culture and communications professor and author Mark Crispin Miller in Nation magazine.28 In the corporate media and politics, too, the working class—both as a term and as part of American society—has largely disappeared from modern-day discourse. Both mainstream journalists and politicians treat the working class and the middle class as indivisible despite a mountain of evidence that this is no longer valid when middle class can also include the comparatively wealthy. “The working class is American culture’s great lost continent,” writes William Deresiewicz in the American Scholar. Even when class issues are clearly at or close to the heart of a national story, such as in the case of Hurricane Katrina and its victims in New Orleans and on the Mississippi and Alabama Gulf Coast in 2005, “race becomes a surrogate for class, which is to say, a way of not thinking about it at all. . . . When we see a working-class black, we see a poor person—and when we’re shown a working-class white, we don’t think anything at all.”29 Market values have never ranked high on the list of priorities of the journalists for the alternative press. Their values are more likely in tune with the crusading journalism of McClure’s magazine and the great muckraking writers of the early twentieth century, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and Ray Stannard Baker. These were journalists who saw in their work the opportunity to do what the great alternative newspaper of the 1940s, PM, tried to do: take a stand “‘against the people who push other people around.’”30 This is a journalism fueled by the same passion for justice and identity with working people that can be seen in the writings of Abraham Cahan of the Forward and the so-called sweatshop writers in the Yiddish-speaking immigrant world of late-nineteenth-century New York City. Consider these lines from poet Morris Rosenfeld, a veteran of the garment industry sweatshops: I work, and I work, without rhyme, without reason— Produce, and produce, and produce without end. For what? and for whom? I don’t know, I don’t wonder —since when can a whirling machine comprehend?↜31 Southern Exposure: “New Style of Southern Journalism”

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An important element in the “alternative” tradition is press criticism, something the mainstream press generally is reluctant to provide even in a nation where most of the media is controlled by a dozen major corporations, where daily newspaper monopolies enjoy 20–40 percent profit margins and fewer than sixty cities have more than one daily newspaper. Here Southern Exposure also steps forward, offering critiques and analyses in the spirit of legendary critics such as George Seldes and A. J. Liebling but also recognizing good, investigatory mainstream journalism with its annual “Best of the Press” awards. The magazine began its in-depth probes of Southern media in 1975 with its “Focus on the Media” edition, and followed with subsequent editions in 1992 and 1997 that tracked the growing corporatization and concentration of media ownership in the region. In the 1997 edition, Southern Media Monopolized, writers Ron Nixon and Jordan Green look at the McClatchy Newspaper group’s 1996 purchase of the Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer, which had been owned by the Daniels family since 1894. The purchase marked yet another milestone in the decline of family-owned newspapers, a phenomenon seen across the nation as well as the South. Nixon and Green cited a wide range of views on this development. Veteran newspaper editor Gil Thelan defended corporate ownership as a way to reduce “regional prejudices and predilections.” Media critic David Kirsh, however, expressed concern about the “rapid decline in the number of independent avenues by which people can have access to the media, which is necessary for democracy.”32 Southern Exposure research data showed that between 1975 and 1997 the number of chain-owned daily newspapers in the South grew from 218 to 344, accounting for 84 percent of all dailies. In television, media chains controlled 40 percent of all TV stations in 1997. Among the chains with major investments in the South were Canadian-based Hollinger International, Virginia-based Media General, and northern Virginia-based Gannett. Here’s a glance at the largest of these chains, Gannett, and some of its holding in the South: the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and the Hattiesburg American in Mississippi; the Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama; the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, Arkansas; the Nashville Tennessean in Tennessee; the Shreveport Times and the Monroe News-Star in Louisiana; the Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky; the El Paso Times in Texas; three major newspapers in Florida; plus newspapers in every other state of the old Confederacy. Gannett, the nation’s largest chain and owner of USA Today, is singled out by media critic Thomas Frank as “precisely where those concerned about the future of journalism should be looking.” Frank calls Gannett “the perfect synthesis of cultural populism and corporate predation,” 138

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where a seemingly communitarian, non-elitist front masks an often ruthless bottom-line obsession and fierce antagonism to unions.33 The best illustration is the bitter fight the Gannett-owned Detroit News and KnightRidder-owned Detroit Free Press—separate papers but managed together under a joint-operating agreement—waged against the Newspaper Guild and Teamsters unions in the mid-1990s. Protesting the replacement of cost-of-living pay raises with a so-called merit pay system and the replacement of union jobs with nonunion positions, members went on strike on July 13, 1995, only to be quickly replaced with scabs brought in by the bus- and planeload from the corporations’ many other news operations. The strike continued for nineteen months, costing the newspapers nearly $200 million and dropping circulation by 35 percent, but the two giant chains held out, firing more than one hundred workers in the process, and ultimately made Wall Street happy. Stock values for both Gannett and Knight-Ridder rose more than 40 percent. In June 1997, a federal judge ruled that the newspapers had engaged in unfair labor practices and ordered them to rehire two thousand striking workers. Gannett and Knight-Ridder simply ignored the ruling, however, and years later hundreds of workers remained locked out of their jobs. The strike received only limited coverage in the national media. In a column in the January/February 1997 edition of Quill, the magazine of the national Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), the president of the SPJ’s Detroit Metropolitan Chapter, Marsha Stopa, conceded that her organization simply preferred to stay out of the fray. “Maybe keeping our head in the sand until storms and strikes blow over isn’t a bad tactic after all.”34 I should mention here that I worked for Gannett news organization for nine years and continue to publish columns in Gannett-owned newspapers. I was never pressured to write negatively about unions as a reporter, and my columns have consistently supported workers’ right to organize over the years. Yet I’ve also witnessed firsthand the frequent reluctance of business writers at these and other newspapers to address labor issues, their penchant for seeing the world through management’s eyes, a viewpoint that automatically casts labor as the “other.” I also witnessed—and was guilty of—a lack of consciousness of the history of labor struggles in this country and region and its relevance to the issues of the day. Thomas Frank has noted the irony that the Detroit newspaper strike took place in “arguably the most pro-union city in the country,” and he has lamented the conversion of journalists “from being the hard-boiled cynics of Ben Hecht and Frank Capra to docile and interchangeable content providers as likely to identify their interests with newspaper management as they are with pressmen.”35 Southern Exposure: “New Style of Southern Journalism”

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Frank’s invoking of history and of historical perceptions of journalists is pertinent. History often ceases to exist in the corporate world if it’s troublesome to corporate ends. The replacement workers who took the jobs away from the strikers and the national reporters who ignored the story failed to see the significance of such a major showdown between workers and management in a city that symbolizes the labor movement’s historic role as a major force in American society, the city of Walter Reuther, the United Auto Workers, and their valiant struggle to give workers a voice in modern-day mass production. “This emerging journalism is often as oblivious to the realities of place as it is to those of class,” Frank writes.36 Chris Kromm talked at length in 2003 about Southern Exposure’s commitment to history, and specifically oral history. This commitment—in the tradition of oral historians such as Studs Terkel and Stetson Kennedy—can be seen in edition after edition, where the personal stories of coal miners, mill workers, poultry workers, civil rights activists, immigrants, hurricane victims, and labor strike veterans are told for the first time. “You look at these oral histories and to a person, the first thing that they say was, ‘No one has asked my story before,’” Kromm said. “When you read these oral histories, and you allow the workers to talk in their own voice, it’s so quickly dispelled, so many of the myths. . . . For example, when you hear these workers talking firsthand about their struggles and why they so passionately cared about having a voice on the job and at their work . . . it was clear that you could dispel the myth that outside agitators caused it (strikes, labor unrest, etc.). These weren’t imported ideas. These were ideas that workers held deeply in and of themselves. That was one of the most effective things about oral history. You could counter some of these myths.”37 The magazine’s philosophy of history is best seen in the back-ofthe-cover page editorial of its “No More Moanin’: Voices of Southern Struggle” edition in 1974, a compilation of historical research, photographs, and oral histories from some of the most compelling chapters of the South’s labor history. These included the strike at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union of the 1930s, the UAW sitdown strike in Atlanta in 1936, and the coal mining battles in East Tennessee in the 1890s and 1930s. “It is not the history that is found in text books or definitive theoretical works,” the editors wrote. “It represents a search for that part of southern history that is usually ignored or distorted, the history of people fighting for the right to lead decent and productive lives.”38 In their essay on the 1936 UAW strike in Atlanta, Neill Herring and Sue Thrasher note how the “standard” historical work by author Sidney Fine on that strike depends largely on the papers of one UAW board 140

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member rather than on the firsthand accounts of workers at the plant. The result is a skewed perspective that undervalues the fact that “the decision to stop work was a collective one,” not the result of an order from on high. Herring and Thrasher’s research and interviews finally give credit to the workers, where it’s due. “Fine’s . . . unfortunate reliance on the single account of a figure who seems to have been somewhat removed from the center of action . . . is typical of the errors which have contributed to making academic history what it is today: an ideological commodity, baggaged with apologetics and bloodless inaccuracies.”39 Writing accurately about labor and workers forces the historian to see the world from different perspectives. “The labor movement, perhaps more than any other institution in our society, is a thing of flesh and bones, demanding a history of people, not individual leaders,” Herring and Thrasher write. “History from the bottom up.”40 The failure of the mainstream press—of many historians—to keep the public aware of this kind of history and its significance to the events and issues of today is perhaps one reason why media critics decry the current state of journalism in the United States. “The US press has never been as bad as it is now,” writes Mark Crispin Miller.41 This is what William Deresiewicz means when he says the working class has become “American culture’s great lost continent.” This reflects the decline of organized labor in American society, he says. Working people once “had their own voices, their own cultural institutions, their own sense of who they were and what they did,” Deresiewicz writes. “In short, they weren’t dependent on the middle class to define them. People used to speak of the ‘dignity of labor,’ and the phrase meant that being a worker was something to be proud of, that the working class saw itself as something more than a collection of people who couldn’t make it, that it had its own traditions and values, constituted its own community.”42 In the value system of working people, family and place are very important, Deresiewicz says. They respect the person who doesn’t pity himself, boast, or expect more than he’s due. Unlike many in the middle and upper classes today, they’re not insulated from people of different colors and from different cultures, and thus they’ve had to learn tolerance in ways the better-off only practice in theory. And they’re able to share those values and their experiences with the rest of the nation because of publications like Southern Exposure. Thus their stories and their history remain alive and well, informing us in ways that the mainstream media must still learn.

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Chapter 8

pillowtex says goodnight

I was a green reporter, in my rookie year as a late-blooming journalist, when I stumbled onto a story that would haunt me for the next thirty years. My newspaper was the Sanford Herald in the textiles-and-tobacco county seat of Lee County, North Carolina. “Go to Harnett County and come back with at least two stories,” my editor told me. The assignment was no cinch. Neighboring Harnett County was a rural backwater, a tobacco road of farms and pine forests with a handful of tiny, nondescript towns dotting its landscape. But off I went, driving aimlessly up and down two-lane highways and country roads in my nine-year-old, two-door, yellow 1968 Ford Fairlane with the missing rear-view mirror, recapped tires, and passenger side door that wouldn’t open. As the midday sun bore down that June 1977, I saw a sign ahead telling me I was about to enter Erwin, “Denim Capital of the World.” What I found was a classic “mill town” of 3,800 souls that, like the old mining song Sixteen Tons says, were “owed to the company store” of Burlington Industries, at the time the world’s largest textile company with 88,000 workers at 149 plants around the country and beyond. Burlington’s two plants in Erwin were a hulking presence, casting their giant shadows over streets with names like Denim Drive and Burlington Avenue, over the tiny downtown of a dozen or so shops, over the minds and spirits of the families of the 1,200 millworkers who made the 70 million yards of denim that came out of Erwin each year. Then I found a modest building close to downtown that proclaimed itself the local chapter of the “Carolina Brown Lung Association.” This, I would learn, was the one lonely spot in all of Erwin that wasn’t, and couldn’t be, controlled by Burlington Industries. “They should have told us,” Linnie Bass said, her bespectacled face drawn and serious, each breath short and precious, as she described the 142

disease that she and other millworkers had incurred from decades of breathing in cotton dust at the Burlington plants. Rather than tell her the truth of her condition, the company doctor “would tell you to stop smoking, whether you smoked or not.” “We were just dollar bills to them, not humans,” added Eva Bradshaw, a fellow sufferer of the disease known as byssinosis, or brown lung. “I guess they’re waiting for us to die.”1 Their friend Talbert Faircloth sat nearby but didn’t say much. He was saving his breath. I learned, however, that the $2,500 he’d received in a company profit-sharing program for his twenty-seven years of service had been devoured by medical bills. They were among a handful of former workers who were fighting for their just due, for respect, for their lives, after giving the best of their days to the mill. Bass left Burlington after twenty years with a total disability and three-fifths of her breathing capacity destroyed. Bradshaw’s forty-one years at the mill brought her eight major operations and an income that consisted solely of a monthly $218 Social Security check. Burlington officials liked to boast publicly of the company’s medical screenings and studies, yet it failed workers like Bass, Bradshaw, and Faircloth, rewarding their decades of labor with years of resistance to pleas for compensation and justice in the fight against their disease. In 1988 Burlington sold its Erwin mills to a Canadian firm. Fifteen years later, the company was in bankruptcy and finally sold to financier Wilbur Ross. I lost track of Linnie Bass, Eva Bradshaw, Talbert Faircloth, and their struggles, but I never forgot them. Their stories are so much like the other millworker stories I’ve encountered over the years of my life, lots of little Davids throwing rocks at industrial Goliaths, giants that perhaps eventually fell but only after much-too-much suffering and much too late to help those they trampled along the way. I grew up with workers like them. My brother and I worked in textile plants as teenagers. My father worked in a mill that made textile machine parts. My mother was a seamstress in a garment factory. I got a stark reminder of those roots and experiences when I traveled through North Carolina doing research for this book in the summer of 2003. “pillowtex folds; 7,650 go jobless” blared the top-of-the-fold, front-page headline in the Charlotte Observer’s July 31, 2003, edition. “Pillowtex Goes Bust, Cuts 5,500 N.C. Jobs” was the front-page headline in Raleigh’s News & Observer that same day. From its perch just twenty-five miles southwest of textile giant Pillowtex’s base and Pentagon-sized mill in Kannapolis, the Charlotte Observer’s coverage was the more intense. Its pages were replete with tales of heartbreak, photographs of stunned millworkers, editorials, analyses, multiple sidebars, detailed charts and Pillowtex Says Goodnight

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graphs, a Q&A column, and emergency assistance information. Yet they contained hardly more than passing mention of the historic twenty-fiveyear struggle by workers at the Kannapolis mill to form a union and the victory that had come just four years before in 1999. It was the largest industrial union victory in the history of the South yet already forgotten by the region’s journalists. Danny Forsyth also has memories of Carolina millworkers. He was a labor organizer with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union of America (ACTWU)—later to be reconfigured into the Union of Needletrades Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE)—in the long battle to establish a union at the mill in Kannapolis, a town of roughly forty thousand. Now in his sixth decade of life, Forsyth spends his time in his workshop and in the gardens around his rural home near Water Valley, Mississippi, but he’s ever ready to pull out his boxes of clippings from the bittersweet war in the town whose Greek name means “City of Looms.” Founded by James W. Cannon in 1906 and run by his son Charles A. Cannon after 1921, Cannon Mills was sold to California real-estate tycoon David Murdock in 1982. Four years later, Murdock sold it to the Eden, North Carolina–based Fieldcrest Mills, which then sold it to the Dallas, Texas-based Pillowtex Corporation in 1997. Six years later, on July 30, 2003—just four years after the UNITE victory—Pillowtex announced its total liquidation and the largest permanent layoff in North Carolina history. When the company gates finally shut, nearly sixty-five hundred workers, more than three thousand in Kannapolis alone, at sixteen plants in North Carolina and other states were left jobless and without a clue of what their futures may hold. “Charlie Cannon ran that town,” he says about Charles “Mr. Charlie” Cannon, who ran the company from 1921 until his death in 1971. “He was the Boss Crump of Kannapolis, North Carolina.”2 To compare an industrial leader to the notorious E. H. “Boss” Crump, the political ruler of Memphis, Tennessee, for the first half of the twentieth century, is no overstatement. According to Forsyth, “The company owned everything—fire, police, housing, the newspaper, too. He built Cannon Village [the downtown area]. When he died, it was like the death of the century. Everything was Mr. Charlie’s. . . . Charlie drove those people hard. If you got fired, you lost your home, too. They’d have the stretch-out. If you’re running looms, that machine can run so many thousands of yards. A mechanic can change them to make them run faster. The workload went from four to nine machines [per worker] with each machine going faster. Ladies in their sixties running from machine to machine to keep threads moving 144

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in all the machines. When their . . . shift is done, cotton dust in all their hair, they’re totally exhausted.” Charles Cannon was the epitome of the paternalistic overseer. He ruled Kannapolis with the kind of raw power no mayor can muster. His red brick mill—at 5.8 million square feet, the equivalent of ninety acres— towered over the town, much like Burlington Mills in Erwin, and over the 1,600 millworker houses he and his father built and rented for twentyfive to forty dollars a month. After World War II, Charles Cannon even built “G.I. town” for 150 veterans returning to mill work. The rent was five dollars every two weeks. In exchange for a job and cheap rent, Cannon expected hard work, total loyalty, and absolutely no unions. After Cannon died, Forsyth says, “the family sold the business, (and) Corporate America stepped in.” The culture of Cannon-style paternalism was replaced by the feral Wall Street–style capitalism of absentee ownership with even fiercer demands of worker obeisance and absolute intransigence on the question of labor unions. Whether fighting against Cannon or his successors, labor organizers like Forsyth faced a community-wide network of opposition in making their case with workers inside the plant gates. This network included local and regional newspapers. “The company would invite them to the boardroom, but nobody of any power would be present, just human resources people to dole out press releases. The press as a whole never went to those gates, never talked to those workers, had no idea of what kinds of problems these people had, didn’t cover the kinds of things that needed to be covered. If they had, that would have given the community a better idea of what was going on.” The newspapers “were like the company, always putting the best spin on everything. They were towing 90 percent of the company line. They never covered the true story. The true story was how those people were being pressed. . . . There were times you’d get so frustrated by what you know was true and what you saw in print.” I returned to North Carolina in the summer of 2006 and this time traveled to Kannapolis to get a look at things three years after the fall of Pillowtex. My first stop was to see Kathy Nelson, editor of the Independent Tribune. Owned by the Media General chain since the late 1990s, the twenty-two-thousand-circulation daily newspaper is located in a strip mall in what was once a Harris Teeter grocery store. Nelson runs a staff of twenty-one who cover both Kannapolis and the neighboring town of Concord, where 640 workers lost their jobs when Pillowtex shut down in 2003. Although she arrived in Kannapolis nine months after the big shut down, she’s a veteran of the trials and tribulations of the textile industry. She worked as a business reporter much of Pillowtex Says Goodnight

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the nineties in Spartanburg, South Carolina, which saw a giant BMW automobile plant replace the jobs lost at the local textile mills in 1992. “The first couple of mill closings . . . devastated them (the workers), but then BMW was in the wings. The lintheads became motorheads. Here there was nothing like BMW for them.”3 Textiles, which makes the fabric, yarn, and other materials needed for clothes and other products, is not only the South’s oldest industry but also the nation’s. It suffered the erosion of more than 200,000 jobs between 1994 and 2003. The apparel industry, which makes the clothes from the material produced in textile mills, lost an additional 500,000 jobs. U.S. trade policies, highlighted by the Agency for International Development (AID) program in the 1980s and 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, and subsequent agreements, opened the doors wide to cheap imports from foreign countries. China now provides 80 percent of the clothes worn in the United States. As a result of AID and similar federal programs, U.S. textile plants have moved to the Caribbean and other regions to take advantage of low wages and often sweatshop conditions. These policies have been particularly devastating to the South, which at the turn of the twenty-first century produced about 75 percent of the textiles made in the United States and provided two out of every three of the 1.2 million jobs in the textiles and apparel industries. One-third of all U.S. textile and apparel jobs vanished between 2001 and 2004. In response to the Pillowtex shutdown, the U.S. Government offered $13 million in job training and job search services plus $7.6 million to assist with health insurance premiums. However, for many it was too little too late. “A lot of Kannapolis workers were not re-trainable,” Nelson said. “Some don’t even have driver’s licenses, have never even been to Charlotte. The public transportation here is not very good. So now the mill is closed, and you are fifty years old. . . . When I got here, people were still wandering around dazed. . . . It was a mentality. Some people said it was the end of the world.”4 The average age of the Pillowtex worker in North Carolina was fortysix with more than thirteen years of service at the company at an annual wage of $22,610, or about $11 an hour. At least 40 percent of them never finished high school or earned their GED. Studies show those lucky enough to find another job typically experienced a 40 percent drop in income.5 A year after the closing, 92 percent of them still could not find affordable health insurance. One in ten had gotten eviction or foreclosure notices on their homes. “It’s been terrible,” Charles Morris, fifty-six, who worked thirty-six years in Pillowtex’s maintenance department, told the USA Today reporter

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Barbara Hagenbaugh one year after the company shutdown. “I’ve job searched, but I haven’t been able to find anything.”6 Ed Hosack, who established LifeBuilder Ministries to help former Pillowtex workers like himself find other jobs, and the Reverend Richard Rhoades of Kimball Memorial Lutheran Church near the plant site shared a similar worry about the displaced workers. “The worst problem is when they become invisible,” Hosack told Hagenbaugh. “These are proud people,” Rhoades said. “They are not used to asking for help. . . . My fear is that they will be forgotten.”7 One thing is for sure, Kathy Nelson said. “A new day has dawned. It’s not going to be anything like it used to be.”8 Her point became clear as I drove around the city, whose population grew from 28,000 to 45,000 between 1950 and 1990 but slipped to 38,000 by 2003. Kannapolis seems to be bustling with shopping centers and shopping malls along either side of Interstate 85, thick, bumper-to-bumper traffic, hardly a whiff of the sense of depression that must have hung in the air in July 2003. The unemployment rate in Cabarrus County—where Kannapolis and Concord are located—is just 3.3 percent, compared to 10.3 percent right after the layoff. Like everywhere in America these days, the town is full of people providing services rather than making things, although a Perdue poultry plant is located in nearby Concord. A lot of the money from those service and chicken-processing jobs went to North Carolina’s new lottery. Cabarrus County residents spent $4 million on the lottery in the first three months after its opening on March 30, 2006. Meanwhile, applications for health care assistance at the Cabarrus County Department of Social Services rose from 17,509 in March 2004 to 20,509 in May 2006. This is also NASCAR country with the Lowe’s Motor Speedway located in Concord. This nearly half-century-old track has hosted three NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series and two NASCAR Busch Series races. Racing legend Dale Earnhardt Sr. was a Kannapolis native, and his son Dale Earnhardt Jr. was born in Concord. Both won the Daytona 500 and many other races. Kannapolis and Concord are virtual shrines to NASCAR racing with museums, speed parks, speedways, race shops, festivals, and a nine-foot-tall, nine-hundred-pound bronze statue of the late Dale Earnhardt Sr. located on Main Street in downtown Kannapolis. The “new day” in Kannapolis is clearly evident just off Cannon Village, the downtown area that Charles Cannon’s wife, Ruth Louise Coltrane, had redesigned into a Williamsburg Colonial style in 1937, at the site where Pillowtex’s Plant 1 once stood. Rising from the rubble of that plant is the new North Carolina Research Campus, a billion-dollar biotechnology complex that is the brainchild of a previous owner of the

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textile plant, California billionaire David Murdock, who also is the owner of the Dole Food Company. “The most exciting part of this project is to be able to create sustainable, better-paying jobs for the people of Kannapolis and the region,” Murdock said at the unveiling of his plans in September 2005. “New discoveries will be made that will further my goal of teaching people about proper health, nutrition, and wellness.”9 In the shadow of the old mill’s still-remaining smokestacks, the complex—also called a “biopolis”—will include a 350,000-square-foot Core Laboratory; the Dole Research Institute for nutrition, fruits, and vegetables; and a 50,000-square-foot medicine facility to study health care issues and the relationship between nutrition and the brain, and their connections to obesity and cancer. Also planned are teaching facilities and an incubator for startup companies. The facility will even include a math-and-science high school for girls. Participating in the project are the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Charlotte, Duke University, North Carolina State University, and Rowan-Cabarrus Community College. Estimates for the number of jobs that the complex will create range from hundreds to tens of thousands. However, how many of those jobs will go to former Pillowtex workers remains unclear. As discussed in chapter 6, blue-collar workers don’t generally benefit greatly from high-tech and research developments. The historian Bruce J. Schulman has found that high-tech projects can even exacerbate “the region’s traditional inequality by creating a two-tiered employment system with elite professionals at one end and low paid production and clerical positions at the other.”10 Murdock, who kept his substantial real-estate holdings in downtown Kannapolis when he sold Cannon Mills to Fieldcrest Mills in 1986, has now resumed the mantel of dominance in the town that Charlie Cannon once enjoyed. However, his return was a bittersweet one for many Kannapolis residents, who remembered that when he sold the company in 1986 he took with him millions of dollars from its pension fund. Only after a lawsuit and fierce, up-and-down legal battle with ACTWU was Murdock forced to an out-of-court agreement to return $1 million of the funds. In a compelling 1991 profile of Murdock, the Atlanta Constitution reporter Joe Drape described how Murdock terminated the Cannon Mills pension fund and pocketed up to $39 million of it as excess assets. Murdock “bought . . . Cannon Mills, and raided the $102 million pension pool . . . used at least $37 million of it to take over another company, then invested the rest in a California insurance company called Executive Life.”11 Executive Life later collapsed as a result of its dependency on the 148

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high-risk, high-yield investments known in the 1980s as junk bonds. That failure led to the loss of an estimated $1 billion from the pension funds of more than 80,000 working people and helped spawn a nationwide insurance crisis. “People either love him or hate him,” Kathy Nelson said. “They ask, ‘Why did he come back?’ When he came back to make the announcement about the high-tech development, some people were shaking his hand. Others kept their arms crossed. He owns half of Kannapolis. His son is here. He owns Cannon Village.”12 Murdock’s return has received mainly cheers from local and state officials as well as the press. “To have a billionaire interested in your city is a wonderful thing,” Kannapolis city manager Mike Legg told the Associated Press.13 The University of North Carolina president Molly Broad had this to say: “We cannot overstate the significance of the University’s embarking—in partnership with Dole and David Murdock—on a project of this magnitude, scale, and potential.”14 With such lavish praise and enthusiasm comes a willingness to ignore or forget history, and the local and state press hasn’t pushed to remind people of it, either. A ninth-grade dropout and personal friend of the late president Ronald Reagan, Murdock, now in his eighties, built a fortune from real-estate investments in the Los Angeles area and later became, in the eyes of some, the quintessential corporate raider of the 1980s, expanding his holdings to become a major player in the insurance, textiles, and international fruit, vegetables, and other food products industries. Murdock purchased Dole Food Company in 1985. According to ACTWU, he used the pension money he took with him from Kannapolis to buy control of Dole’s parent company, Castle & Cooke of San Francisco. When Murdock took over Cannon Mills in 1982, “he was the model for the ’80s takeover artist, slashing the work force by 700, cutting wages up to 30 percent, updating production methods, and forcing mandatory retirements,” Drape wrote in his profile. “On one day—‘Black Friday’ employees called it—some mill hands were given an hour to leave the premises.”15 Today Murdock asserts that his “goal” in building a “biopolis” in Kannapolis is “teaching people about proper health, nutrition, and wellness.” However, his company, Dole Food Company, has hardly been a model of those values in its dealings abroad. Dole has been accused of widespread use of the dangerous pesticide Nemagon in the spraying of fruit trees in Nicaragua and other Latin American, African, and Asian countries, leading to cancer, sterility, kidney and skin diseases, and birth deformities among workers and their families. In its May 23, 2005, edition, the magazine In These Times reported that Dole, Chiquita, and other U.S.-based companies Pillowtex Says Goodnight

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continued to use Nemagon in Latin America and the Philippines long after it was banned in the United States. In These Times writer Nicolas Bérubé said Dole—formerly known as the Standard Fruit Company—was still using Nemagon in the Philippines in the late 1980s. “Tens of thousands of workers continued to be exposed,” Bérubé wrote.16 Dole was the only major multinational company in the regions to refuse to join an agreement in 1997 giving $41.5 million to some twentysix thousand workers. Five years later, a Nicaraguan tribunal ordered Dole and other companies to pay $489 million to workers suffering from exposure to Nemagon. The companies’ response was to attack the credibility of the court and to deny that verifiable proof exists regarding the health risks posed by Nemagon exposure. In 2003, Dole and other companies filed a $17 billion countersuit against the complaining workers, accusing them and their doctors and lawyers of making fraudulent claims. Thousands of workers marched in protest, and the Nicaraguan government vowed to conduct its own investigation. The Nemagon scandals were covered extensively in the Nicaraguan press but largely ignored by the mainstream press in the United States. A decades-long investigation by the Gannett-owned Cincinnati Enquirer into the Latin American dealings of Cincinnati-based Chiquita Brands International, Inc., culminated in an eighteen-page special section in May 1998 that detailed a sordid history of bribes, behind-the-scenes deals to circumvent labor regulations, and environmental damage. However, two months later, Gannett and the Cincinnati Enquirer dropped the story completely with a front-page apology. The reason? Chiquita threatened a lawsuit when information surfaced that reporter Mike Gallagher had used illegally taped voice mail from company officials in his investigation. Gannett further agreed to a $10 million settlement in the case. “Instead of repudiating Gallagher’s conduct but defending the contents of the report, the Enquirer guaranteed that the allegations will be lost to history,” write the authors of the popular journalism textbook, Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning, in their description of the case.17 Murdock has always been careful to nurture a good public image. When he bought Cannon Mills in 1982, he promised that he’d come “to put Cannon back in its place at the top of the textile industry.”18 Four years later, he and his workers’ pension funds were on the way back to California. When workers felt the pinch of the insurance crisis that he helped create in the 1980s, Murdock stood with then-U.S. senator Terry Sanford, a North Carolina Democrat, to announce publicly that he was personally donating $800,000 to help retirees. “I’ve been particularly concerned myself with what is morally right, ethically right, and legally right,” Murdock said as the cameras rolled.19 150

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What Murdock failed to mention was that the North Carolina Insurance Guaranty Association—a state-sanctioned industry-run-and-financed agency set up to protect retirees in times of crisis—planned to reimburse him for the full amount. In modern-day Kannapolis, memorials to the powerful men who ruled it much of its history are everywhere. Roadside historical markers celebrate the contributions James and Charles Cannon made to the city. Any museum tour would have to include the shrine to the GI houses Cannon built after World War II and the textile museum in Cannon Village. The Boys and Girls Club of Cabarrus County is one of a number of local recreational centers, hospitals, and schools that are part of what the Independent Tribune calls the “rich history” of largesse from the Cannon Foundation, established by the family in 1943 to support worthy projects.20 The local library and YMCA are both named after Cannon, and a senior citizens’ home for aging millworkers was funded by and named after David Murdock. Even the old mill houses that Charlie Cannon built for his workers and rented out for as little as $25 a month remain in modern-day Kannapolis, only now as renovated, upscale downtown residences that can sell for as much as $140,000 each. What’s missing from the picture, however, is any real public acknowledgment of the long and historic battle for workers’ rights that was fought on Kannapolis soil. When the Reverend Richard Rhoades said he feared displaced Pillowtex workers “will be forgotten,” he might have added that the David-against-Goliath victory that took a quarter century for them to achieve has been forgotten. Yet where are the monuments anywhere to the struggles of Southern workers? When labor balladeer Ella May Wiggins was shot down by vigilantes for supporting the strike at the textile mill in Gastonia—less than fifty miles southwest of Kannapolis—in the fall of 1929, the mother of five cried out, “Lord a-mercy, they done shot and killed me.”21 Has the ghost of Ella May Wiggins also been killed? In his book Dixie Rising, Peter Applebome describes how Iona Cannon, the wife of one of the seven textile strikers who were shot and killed in the strike in Honea Path, South Carolina, in 1934, vowed never to mention the union again and simply went back to work at the mill for the remainder of her life. Yet Iona Cannon “used to commune quietly with the bloody clothes in which her husband was killed, until (her son) Marvin, in exasperation, took the blood-soaked, bullet-tattered rags and buried them in a vacant field.”22 Eventually, the citizens of Honea Path honored their town’s martyrs with a two-thousand-pound granite monument that lists the names of the dead and proclaims, “They died for the rights of the working man.”23 Pillowtex Says Goodnight

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While martyrs’ blood may not have been spilled in Kannapolis, a different kind of martyrdom can be seen as a regular feature of the obituary page of the Independent Tribune. “He worked at Cannon Mills Co. for more than 30 years as a loom fixer in weave rooms No. 2 and No. 6 at Plant 1 until 1995, when he left on disability.”24 Or: “She was a retired employee of Cannon Mills after 55 years of service.”25 Here’s another: “He retired from Cannon Mills Plant 1, card room, with 45 years of service.”26 Whether they were for the union or against the union, most of the deceased workers in the obituary pages retired before they ever gained the voice in their workplace and working lives that the union finally gave them in 1999. They were the workers whom Ella May Wiggins and the seven martyred strikers in Honea Path gave their lives to help. They were the workers for whom the real-life “Norma Rae”—Crystal Lee Sutton— risked her livelihood when she stood on a folding table at the J. P. Stevens towel mill plant in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, and waved a sign proclaiming her union allegiance, a scene famously depicted in the Academy Award-winning 1979 film, Norma Rae. In 1974, Crystal Lee Sutton and the members of the Textile Workers’ Union of America, or TWUA (which through mergers would later evolve into UNITE), eventually won their epic struggle to organize J. P. Stevens, labeled by legendary labor organizer Sol Stetin as the “number one labor outlaw” and most intransigently antiunion company in the nation. Another six years would be needed to win a contract. The seventeen-year struggle against illegal firings, blacklisting, delaying tactics, and intimidation became what National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) administrative law judge Bernard Reiss called “corporate designed lawlessness.”27 The victory for the workers in Kannapolis took even longer than the J. P. Stevens struggle but ended with a similar denouement. Eight years after finally agreeing to sit down at the bargaining table with its employees, J. P. Stevens was sold and broken up into three different companies. The firm that was known as J. P. Stevens essentially ceased to exist. Four years after UNITE’s dramatic victory at Pillowtex, the bankrupt company announced its immediate and total liquidation. The best reporting about the 1929 cotton mill strikes that took the life of Ella May Wiggins was done by non-Southern outsiders, such as the Minnesota-born, Nobel Prize-winning novelist and journalist Sinclair Lewis. Lewis described the typical millworker’s home as a “packing box on stilts” with newspaper-covered walls and no plumbing, “the way in which we teach them that in this country the results of honest labor are a splendor unlike that of the hovels of the Old World.”28 However, Lewis wrote, such is to be expected in a mill town. “The mills control the banks, the banks control the loans to small businessmen, the small businessmen 152

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are the best customers of the professional men—even when the latter are professional men of God—and so the mills can back up the whole human train, down to the clerical caboose.”29 The equally compelling story of the 1934 Southern worker-led general strike in the textile industry that ended the lives of the seven millworkers in Honea Path was resurrected from the ashes of history by New York–based documentarian George Stoney and independent filmmakers Judith Helfand and Susanne Rostock in their 1995 documentary, The Uprising of ’34. The film is a brilliant combination of archival footage, reportage, and interviews with veterans of the strikes and their descendants. An earlier chapter in this book described the strong opposition— particularly from major antiunion corporations like the textile firm Milliken and Company and the Michelin tire company—the filmmakers faced in getting their documentary aired in South Carolina. The state’s public television station refused, and finally a commercial network aired it shortly before midnight one Sunday evening six months after its release.30 “To view the old photographs and footage showing thousands of white Southerners marching arm in arm under union banners past the tin awnings and brick shops of the small towns and cities of the South is to contemplate for a moment an utterly changed Southern history, where the cultural bonding that has always knitted Southerners together was binding them in an entirely different direction,” Applebome wrote.31 The Uprising of ’34 ends with the words of Czech writer Milan Kundera. “The struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”32 The workers in Kannapolis also have had to look beyond local journalists in their struggle “against forgetting.” Inspired by The Uprising of ’34, the New York–based filmmaker and labor organizer Alexandra Lescaze produced her own documentary in 1999, Where Do You Stand? Stories from an American Mill, to give testament to the South’s greatest union victory and the twenty-five years required to achieve it. The film traces the shifting ownership of the old Cannon Mills plant from Charlie Cannon to David Murdock in 1982, Fieldcrest Mills in 1986, and Pillowtex in 1997, while following the organizing efforts that began with ACTWU in 1974 and survived defeats in union elections that same year, again after a fifteen-month campaign in 1984 and 1985, again in 1991, and again in August 1997, the last an election that the NLRB overturned due to illegal conduct on the part of the company. In the fifth and final election that took place on June 22 and 23, 1999, the union, now under the name UNITE (today the ever-evolving union goes by the name UNITE HERE and includes the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union), finally won the fifth and final election with a 2,270-to-2,102 vote. Pillowtex Says Goodnight

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A contract was ratified in February 2000. A highlight of Lescaze’s film is the victory celebration. Black and white workers—the once all-white textile industry integrated after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—hugged one another and sang “Victory Is Mine” as they danced in the streets of Kannapolis. Lescaze worked as a labor organizer for UNITE in the last campaign in Kannapolis, and this became the inspiration for her to make her first documentary. “I got to know well the (workers) in the film,” she said in a 2004 interview with the author. “I was so compelled with their stories, I started collecting them.”33 Throughout all but the very last campaign—which Pillowtex officials pledged to keep fair—the union and its supporters had to wage war with antiunion propaganda, the recruitment of local ministers to speak out against the union, illegal firings and other repeated violations of national labor laws, and subsequent filings with the NLRB. At one point, a chief circuit court judge, upholding an NLRB ruling against then-owner Fieldcrest in 1995, said, “Fieldcrest simply adopted a scorched-earth, takeno-prisoners approach to stop unionization without regard to statutory limitations.”34 In the film, pro-union millworkers like Delores Gambrell and Cynthia Hanes found themselves squaring off against company owners and CEOs like Fieldcrest’s Jim Fitzgibbons—“We will fight this union as long and hard as it takes”—as well as ministers, community leaders, and fellow workers who supported the company against the union. Even local hero Dale Earnhardt Sr. came out against the union in the 1991 election. Known as “The Intimidator” for his aggressive driving methods, he died in a crash in the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500 race. Gambrell, Hanes, and the others also knew they’d never get a fair hearing in the local newspapers. “The newspaper couldn’t print anything unless he (referring to the mill owner) said they could, and that’s not right,” Hanes says in the film. “That’s not freedom.”35 “The press was completely antiunion in Kannapolis,” Lescaze said in the 2004 interview. “The owner of the company owned the newspaper. They were very antiunion. They would encourage these editorials that were just wacky diatribes against unions and how unions are going to destroy our way of life.” The coverage in the local and even the national press was one of the factors prompting Lescaze to do the film. “After seeing how this story was covered, such an epic struggle, I really wanted to tell the full story, as told by the workers.”36 Near the end of Where Do You Stand? Lescaze tells the heartbreaking story of the final liquidation of Pillowtex and of the dreams and hard work of Delores Gambrell and others who fought so hard for the union. 154

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“What we produce here, it costs too much to produce and it’s high quality,” Gambrell says in the film about the towels and sheets produced in Kannapolis. “K-Mart and Wal-Mart won’t buy it because they can’t sell it for the price they want to sell it.” Indeed, the giant retailer Wal-Mart was Pillowtex’s most important customer in the textile company’s last few years, purchasing as many as three out of every ten towels it produced. Wal-Mart, in turn, was—and remains—famously demanding of its suppliers, constantly insisting on bottom-level prices for what it purchases. When Pillowtex fell, however, Wal-Mart officials said their company was innocent. As for her own future, Gambrell has this to say in Lescaze’s film: “All around us plants have closed, so there’s no jobs around for us to go to. All I’ve known, I’m thirty years worked in textiles. I don’t know nothing but textiles.”37 The future is much brighter for the people who owned and ran the Kannapolis plant. Former Fieldcrest-Cannon CEO Jim Fitzgibbons adjusted nicely to the new global economy. “In 1997 a bunch of us retired from Fieldcrest, and a group of us started a new business essentially importing the same kind of home furnishings that we had been making at Fieldcrest-Cannon,” he says near the end of Lescaze’s film. “We’d be bringing towels especially from Turkey, Pakistan, India, Japan, China, a few from Belgium, Brazil, Portugal, Sri Lanka. That’s about it.”38 Other industry leaders have also fared well. Wilbur Ross, the New York investor who purchased the bankrupt Burlington Industries in 2003, runs the ITG firm, working as a partner with the Hong Kong-based China Ting Group, a textile manufacturer and retailer, in building a dye-andfinishing plant in Hangzhou, China. It took a loose coalition of politicians, industrialists, retailers, and journalists over a quarter century to deconstruct the U.S. textile and apparel industries and transfer them to China and other countries. This process can be traced to the recession of 1974 and 1975, and the dramatic increase in textile imports that followed. Yet, the $350 billion global trading market today depends largely on what it has always depended on—cheap workers and minimal-standard conditions in the workplace. The only difference is that the nation now looks to China rather than the U.S. South to provide the textiles and apparel that come out of these conditions. The shift of U.S. companies toward cheap labor in foreign countries is an inevitable process regardless of its impact on U.S. workers, says Robert Kirkland Robinson, professor of management at the University of Mississippi. “In a global economy, there is no way we can afford to subsidize non-skilled labor in the United States. That’s just the way it is. It is the world in which we live. It’s the world we are going to have adjust to.”39 Pillowtex Says Goodnight

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This view was shared by the pro-free trade conservatives in the Southern press who were at the forefront in heralding the trade agreements and policy decisions that signaled the end of the textile and apparel industries in the South. In the fall of 1990, Oklahoma-born syndicated columnist James Kilpatrick, the erstwhile arch-segregationist editor of the Richmond News-Leader during the civil rights movement, decried the “naked protectionism” of legislation aimed at limiting textile imports. “If the American textile industry were in desperate straits, some measure of temporary relief might be warranted,” he wrote. “No convincing evidence suggests that the textile industry needs to be swaddled in additional batting.”40 “Vast new markets could open if the administration is allowed to continue moving responsibly toward a system of freer trade,” the Memphis Commercial Appeal editorialized that same fall in opposing the Textile, Apparel and Footwear Trade Act of 1990.41 The politicians were listening. On the campaign trail in 1991, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton of Arkansas railed against the free trade policies of President George H. W. Bush and the so-called free trade zones in the Caribbean that allowed U.S. companies to shift plants to nations where low wages, a nonunionized workforce, and the sweatshop promised giant profits under the guise of promoting industry in underdeveloped lands. Clinton also attacked Bush for “coddling dictators” by supporting China’s Most Favored Nation (MFN) status as a trading partner. Once elected, Clinton not only endorsed the free trade zones policy in the so-called U.S. AID program but also expanded it. He also made a 180-degree switch on China, supporting its MFN status and even working to de-link China’s dismal record on human rights—“one of the world’s worst” in the words of Nation writer Ken Silverstein—from its role as a trading partner.42 In China, the average factory worker officially earns about 64 cents an hour, a figure based on a forty-hour workweek although workweeks of up to one hundred hours aren’t uncommon. China’s economy also depends on millions of migrant workers who earn from 15 to 30 cents an hour. Compare this to the average wage at Pillowtex prior to its shutdown: $11 an hour. Clinton’s pro-China policies would be carried forth by his successor, President George W. Bush, whose administration would oversee the ending of quotas on imported fabric, yarn, and clothes on December 31, 2004. Major retailers like J. C. Penney and Liz Claiborne actually filed a lawsuit to prevent any political reneging on the quota expiration. China’s portion of clothing imports to the United States had already grown from 16 to 50 percent in the nine years prior to the ending of quotas. Even politicians in textile-dependent states like North Carolina and Georgia supported the broadening of Bush’s power to negotiate further 156

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trade deals that were guaranteed to hasten the demise of an industry once crucially important to their constituents. One of the most heralded moments of the new free trade globalism came in 1994 with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement by the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The U.S. Congress might never have approved the agreement without the vigorous and determined effort by President Clinton, who went to the mat to bring skeptical Democrats on board. As detailed in John R. MacArthur’s The Selling of Free Trade in 2000, Clinton was rewarded for his effort by access to top corporate leaders and in subsequent heavy campaign contributions. In an effort to sway labor advocates, Clinton endorsed the adding of some mild provisions to NAFTA to protect workers, but these later proved woefully inadequate. “The Clinton White House worked intimately with the Business Roundtable, top Washington lobbyists and major corporations to sell NAFTA, even turning over White House polling data,” writes labor journalist David Moberg in his review of MacArthur’s book.43 The great promise of NAFTA—joined in August 2005 by the Bushsigned Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA)—was that it would provide new and better jobs, particularly in the United States and Mexico. The results were the opposite for both countries. According to the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, NAFTA resulted in a net loss to the United States of more than 1 million jobs between 1994 and 2004, two-thirds of them in manufacturing. Although rising exports created a million new jobs, some two million were lost due to the resulting decline in key industries such as textiles, furniture making, electronics, and automobiles. Four of the hardest hit states were in the South: Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina. The United States lost 2.6 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2003 alone. Mexico’s early elation at the signing of NAFTA quickly evaporated. NAFTA’s effects on Mexico’s agricultural sector proved devastating as food imports from subsidized U.S. farmers poured across the border, displacing an estimated 1.3 million Mexican farm workers. Subsequent illegal immigration into the United States by Mexico’s jobs-hungry rural peasants and other workers grew from 2.04 million in 1990 to 4.8 million in 2000. The so-called maquiladoras—the U.S. and other foreign-owned assembly plants that set up just south of the U.S. border with the intention of sending the finished products back north—boomed for a while, creating more than 1.3 million new jobs. However, the rootlessness of these plants—they came primarily to take advantage of low wages, low taxes, and few regulations—made it easy for them to pack up again and move to China, where the wages were even cheaper. An assembly worker in Mexico earns an average $1.47 an hour, compared to a typical Chinese Pillowtex Says Goodnight

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worker’s 64 cents an hour or less. “Mexico believed NAFTA would make it the U.S.’s top workshop,” Business Week reported in its December 22, 2003, edition. “China got the job.”44 By going to China, U.S. companies were able to take advantage of an authoritarian government with little tolerance for dissidence and rebellion against twelve-hour workdays, one-hundred-hour workweeks, crowded barracks-style living conditions for workers, environmentally lax standards and other unsafe conditions, and a swelling migrant workforce so desperate that it accepts wages as low as twenty cents an hour. These are the reasons why the price of men’s shirts and sweaters at retail stores in the United States dropped 14 percent from 1996 to 2006. Yet these working conditions—along with rampant official corruption and an ever-stretching divide between the rich, government-connected Chinese elite and the masses of struggling Chinese workers—have indeed led to tens of thousands of protests across the country and contributed to the imprisonment of more journalists than in any other country in the world. Anti-sweatshop campaigns on U.S. campuses and elsewhere also helped cause enough public stir to force Wal-Mart and other major companies doing business with China to call for better standards by their Chinese partners. However, a cover story in Business Week’s November 27, 2006, edition on the “secrets, lies, and sweatshops” behind the China miracle in today’s global economy, detailed how the newfound insistence by Wal-Mart and other U.S. companies on humane working conditions in the plants of their Chinese partners are disingenuous because they continue to push for bottom-level prices for the products they purchase, thus furthering the very practices they say they want to stop. The American consumer is also to blame. “Americans expect everlower prices for many goods, driving the demand for cheaper supplies from China,” Business Week writers Dexter Roberts and Pete Engardio said in their cover story.45 “Worker rights and environmental protection are seen as threats to investment” in China, New York Times correspondent Joseph Kahn wrote in a profile of the industrial city of Guangdong in 2004. “Even more than England or the United States in their industrializing heydays, China’s growth relies on cheap labor. The foreign-invested factories here, including production centers for most multinational companies, depend on a flexible work force that actually grows cheaper by the year.”46 “A vast sweatshop enterprise employing tens of millions of workers in over 100 countries” has emerged out of the new economic globalism, UNITE HERE apparel industry coordinator Eric Dirnbach wrote in Z Magazine in February 2007. Writing on the apparel industry but about condi158

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tions that also would apply to the textile industry, Dirnbach continued: “Workers and their unions know how to deal with capital within one country. . . . But capital is now international, it can move where it wants to go, with very few restrictions. Meanwhile unions are still structured nationally and generally operate in only one country. . . . It is difficult for workers to unite to confront capital on a global basis.” The result is “class warfare, but only one side is really fighting,” Dirnbach wrote. “In a world with global trading, we need to raise workers’ bargaining power globally.”47 The challenge to Southern and other U.S. employers today is to retrain U.S. workers to do the kind of jobs that can’t be shipped overseas, says the University of Mississippi’s Robert Kirkland Robinson. “Labor is a commodity. When we (employers) plan for the future, we’re not looking at you, at your family. We look at your . . . KSA—knowledge, skill, and ability. We don’t need you. We need the skills you possess. If there is not a whole lot of KSA, we really can’t use you. In the South, the jobs we have attracted, the non-skilled jobs, those prepared by (a) sorry secondary education system, they are just going to stop here on the way to Mexico. We need to try to build a labor force that has marketable KSA.”48 For working people like Delores Gambrell and Cynthia Hanes in Kannapolis, the battle may now seem too distant, too big, and essentially already over. The terrain has changed, and the torch has been passed. Yet the battle is far from over. Whether they’re workers in Kannapolis or Guangdong, they’re still struggling for a decent wage, decent conditions, respect at the workplace, a voice in their working lives. And on the other side, the same voices they’ve always heard are telling them that they’re asking for too much, that they need to be content with their lot in life, and that they’re never, ever to join hands with other workers in a gesture that might be bad for the company.

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Chapter 9

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She once played an elf outside a Wal-Mart along the Tennessee-Mississippi border during the Christmas season, handing out pro-union leaflets while a fellow member of Wal-Mart’s bête noire, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), stood at the front entrance in red suit, black boots, and flowing white beard, distributing candy to the eager children of Wal-Mart shoppers. “Of course, the manager came out and tried to kick us off,” the fiftyyear-old former elf recalled in a March 2007 interview. A Memphis native and twenty-seven-year veteran labor organizer, she now works with UFCW’s highly visible and effective WakeUpWalMart.com campaign. Her local represents unionized retail stores in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas, but the specter that looms over every negotiation is vehemently antiunion Wal-Mart. “Every time we go to the table, all we hear is ‘We’ve got to compete with Wal-Mart.’ That’s all we hear—Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart.”1 That’s why she went undercover for six months in 2005 to work as a “spy” for her labor union at a Wal-Mart in a well-to-do east Memphis neighborhood. Her past as a “spy” is why she asked to remain anonymous in this interview. She worked under her own name, and she may someday be a spy again for the union that has been called the “archenemy” of Wal-Mart.2 Throughout the tortured history of the labor movement in the South, antiunion companies like Bentonville, Arkansas–based Wal-Mart—today the world’s largest retailer and private employer—have depended heavily on their own “spies” to work among their rank-and-file to ferret out any pro-union sympathies. Henry Ford became notorious for using spies at his automobile plants in Michigan from the 1910s through the 1930s. “Under the benevolent disguise of doing social work among the families, his spies would gain admission to the homes and report back on work160

men,” Jean Gould and Lorena Hickock write in their biography of United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther. “Men on the assembly line were encouraged to spy on each other.”3 Wal-Mart itself stirred a hornet’s nest in Germany in 2005 when it required workers to inform—albeit anonymously—on any violations by coworkers of company manual regulations. Bitter memories of the informant culture of the Germany’s Nazi and the former East Germany’s communist pasts were too fresh.4 So the UFCW spy from Memphis was simply turning the tables by employing one of the oldest of union-buster tricks against the busters themselves. “What I would do is listen, sit in the break room. The most problems I heard were about the health care. Nobody can really afford . . . their health care costs.”5 What she heard wasn’t unique to her store. WalMart, a company that reported $312.4 billion in net sales and $11 billion in profits in 2006, offered its 1.3 million U.S. workers a family health care plan that cost $141 per month and carried a $1,000 deductible. With average hourly earnings of less than $10 an hour, or yearly earnings of less than $18,000 a year, no wonder only 44 percent of the company’s workers signed up for the plan. One out of every five Wal-Mart workers had no health insurance at all. It’s also no wonder 46 percent of the children of Wal-Mart workers either had no health insurance or were dependent on Medicaid. In fact, taxpayers covered an estimated $14.5 million in annual Wal-Mart-related Medicaid costs. A U.S. House report estimated that each Wal-Mart store generated an average $420,750 in Medicaid, Food Stamps, and public housing costs to taxpayers. That’s in addition to the estimated $1 billion taxpayers already paid in local government subsidies to have a Wal-Mart in their midst. Health care was in 2005 and 2006 and remains today more important to Wal-Mart workers than to workers at most other companies. Studies have shown that Wal-Mart workers are three times as likely to develop diabetes and six times as likely to have coronary disease. Still, the UFCW spy couldn’t play the role of a Norma Rae at her WalMart store, stirring up the “associates”—the term Wal-Mart prefers for its workers—with tabletop speeches and pro-union signs. After all, this was a company that continued to preach and practice founder Sam Walton’s iron-clad dictum that “we don’t need unions at Wal-Mart.”6 Wal-Mart shut down its meat-cutting operations after a majority of the butchers at its Jacksonville, Texas, store voted to join the UFCW in 2000. In a move later deemed illegal by the National Labor Relations Board, the company either fired or transferred the pro-union workers and vowed to sell only pre-cut meat in the future. When workers at Wal-Mart’s Jonquière, Québec, voted to join the UFCW in 2004, the company simply closed the 190-worker Wal-Mart Conquers the World

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store. As writer Anthony Bianco detailed in his book, The Bully of Bentonville, Wal-Mart’s action came just four years into its twenty-year lease on the property. Jonquière is located in a remote, blue-collar, jobs-hungry area that also is one of Canada’s fiercest labor strongholds. “Wal-Mart’s draconian response to the Jonquière unionists scandalized all Québec,” Bianco reported. “Three of its other forty-six stores in the province were temporarily closed by bomb threats. Bernard Landrey, . . . a former premier of the province, urged Québecois to join him in boycotting Wal-Mart. Newspaper columnists turned the company’s name into a scatological pun: ‘Wal-Marde.’ A TV broadcaster likened Wal-Mart to Nazi Germany and then apologized.”7 Knowing the union hostility that companies and politicians nurture in the Deep South, the spy in east Memphis was careful to avoid being too overt. “During orientation—you go through two full days—they have one whole session that is antiunion. They say they have an open-door policy, but they tell you they don’t need unions, that Wal-Mart will take care of you. It is in a film and it is in their book.” During her six months as a spy, “I mentioned union twice, and I was waiting to be fired.”8 Her undercover work came to an end when the UFCW decided to give up a protracted unionization effort that had lasted from 1999 to early 2005 and included the filing of hundreds of charges against Wal-Mart with the moribund NLRB. Its new tactic, begun in April 2005, was WakeUpWalMart .com, a nationwide campaign to closely monitor Wal-Mart activity and educate the public about the company’s impact on communities, the nation, and worldwide. That same year the Services Employees International Union (SEIU), in conjunction with Democracy for America and the Sierra Club, launched its own public awareness initiative, Wal-Mart Watch, or WalMartWatch.com, in part as a reaction to a failed four-month strike at grocery stores in southern California that were pushing Wal-Mart-inspired reductions in worker benefits. Both campaigns reached deep into cyberspace and beyond to let the world know as much about Wal-Mart and its impact as could be learned. “We are trying to make the public aware, and make Wal-Mart do the right thing,” the UFCW’s Memphis spy said. “With Wal-Mart it is going to take some time.”9 Charles Martin had another kind of close-up view of the inner-workings of Wal-Mart. The sixty-year-old West Coast native came to Searcy, Arkansas, in 1998 to be close to his ailing parents, and he landed a job with the local Wal-Mart supercenter. Searcy, located fifty miles north of Little Rock, holds an important place in Wal-Mart history as the city where it built its first fully mechanized distribution center, a giant seven-hundredworker warehouse that also became the scene of one of the company’s 162

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first major labor skirmishes. The Teamsters tried and failed to organize the center in the early 1980s after what Local 878 president Alfred H. Pickering described as a campaign that featured Sam Walton himself warning workers he would not only strip them of their profit-sharing plans but also their jobs if they voted union. “This threat from management resulted in the union losing the election for representation,” Pickering told the Arkansas Times.10 Wal-Mart is so “antiunion” that “managers . . . look out for employees who are suddenly being friendly when they haven’t been friendly before, talking in the back room or in the parking lot,” said Martin, who worked in the frozen foods, chemicals and paper, and electronics sections over a seven-year stint at the supercenter. Starting at $5.40 an hour, he eventually worked his way up to $9.65 an hour. Over the years, Martin complained frequently about unsanitary conditions, rats and birds among the frozen food supplies, freezer doors that wouldn’t shut properly. He said he was “shocked” by the huge and persistent turnover in personnel that didn’t seem to bother upper-level managers. “People are so new they don’t even know what is in their own departments.”11 Like the Memphis spy, Martin got a micro view of what is a macro problem at Wal-Mart. Turnover rates at the retailer’s nearly four thousand U.S. stores stand at 45 percent, and that may be just the way Wal-Mart wants it. An estimated 30 percent of its workers are part-time, which some believe Wal-Mart executives would like to see rise to 40 percent. In October 2005 an anonymous source leaked to Wal-Mart Watch an internal company memo from Wal-Mart executive vice president M. Susan Chambers to members of the board of directors in which she complained about the costs of long-term workers. The company spends nearly 55 percent more on them than on one-year workers, she wrote, even though “there is no difference in his or her productivity.” Wal-Mart Watch passed the memo on to the New York Times, which quoted Chambers as follows: “Moreover, because we pay an associate more in salary and benefits as his or her tenure increases, we are pricing that associate out of the labor market, increasing the likelihood that he or she will stay with Wal-Mart. . . . The least healthy, least productive associates are more satisfied with their benefits than other segments and are interested in longer careers with Wal-Mart.”12 Chambers, the benefits chief at the company, called on managers to include “some physical activity” in all jobs at stores to help ensure healthier workers.13 Back in Searcy, Arkansas, Martin said he often felt sympathy for WalMart managers. “I saw some of those managers struggling to do the best they could but couldn’t because of the structure of the organization, the Wal-Mart Conquers the World

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incredible pressure. It is a meat grinder.” When Martin left in the summer of 2006, he was glad to be done with Wal-Mart. “It was hell. I hate WalMart. I hate them with a passion. I wish they’d go to hell and belly up, but that would wreck the economy and hurt all those people. I met some of the nicest people. Why do I hate them? It comes down to hypocrisy. They all say how good they are. ‘We are just one big happy family.’ The fact is, the only thing they care about is the bottom line. That is it.”14 Wal-Mart has been called an icon of modern-day America, the predominant symbol in a nation that still holds true to President Calvin Coolidge’s famous dictum: “The business of America is business.” In Coolidge’s America of the 1920s, the icons were John D. Rockefeller, Al Capone, and Prohibition-preaching evangelist Billy Sunday. Coolidge, a former governor of Massachusetts who rose to national prominence after sending in the state militia to bust a police strike in Boston in 1919, also called business “one of the greatest contributing forces to the moral and spiritual advancement of the race.”15 In his compelling book about Wal-Mart and founder Sam Walton, In Sam We Trust, Bob Ortega of the Wall Street Journal had this to say about business and American iconology. “Every generation in this country has had its icon of America Inc., some corporate titan that has dominated the business landscape, woven itself into and then warped the cultural fabric of the nation: Standard Oil, General Motors, Coca-Cola, Microsoft. And now Wal-Mart.”16 Sam Walton struck the taproot of American iconology by becoming a kind of folk hero who seemed to confirm myths Americans cling to about their nation and themselves—the myths of endless possibility, a classless society, the triumph of old-time, tried-and-true values over the ever-threatening darkness along the borders of our national consciousness. People cherish such myths because they embody the breath of hope and, too often, hope against reality. To attain folk hero status in America requires an innocence of certain cardinal sins. Arguably the worst of these sins is hypocrisy, for hypocrisy embodies pretension and falsity, both in diametric opposition to honesty, a cardinal virtue of American folk heroes. Yet hypocrisy is the charge—from former workers like Charles Martin and countless others—that is laid at the doorstep of Wal-Mart—and thus, too, its founder—again and again and again. “Wal-Mart, like any corporation, is merely a machine, an amoral construct with one imperative: the profit motive,” Bob Ortega writes. “Beneath the warm and fuzzy façade, everything, absolutely everything, came down to the bottom line.” As for Sam Walton, “he might sit in church every Sunday—but he worshipped six days a week (and often seven) at the altar of commerce.”17 164

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While another icon, the late economist Milton Friedman, believed profit is a company’s sole responsibility, the cult of personality that emerged around hard-nosed businessman Sam Walton indicates profit can be greatly aided by tapping into the undercurrents of the American imagination. A cult of personality may be as potentially beneficial to business as it is to authoritarian politics. “Mr. Sam” was the quintessential “benign patriarch . . . a self-made, rock-em-sock-em, capitalist cowboy,” Nation writer John Dicker wrote about Walton in 2002. “Walton has been dead for a decade, but he lives on as a deity, the customer-service superego of Wal-Martians nationwide.”18 He was a “Southern man of his word,” wrote Kentucky-based journalist Vance H. Trimble in his hagiographic 1990 biography, Sam Walton, “good, decent, honorable, likable . . . a genius in business, with an iron mind . . . a hideaway Croesus” whose attitude toward his vast wealth was “Aw, shucks—it’s just paper.”19 From out of Depression-era Dust Bowl Oklahoma, as the legend goes, Sam Walton moved to the backwoods of the Arkansas Ozarks to become a kind of cheap-suited Jed Clampett who didn’t get his millions from “bubblin’ crude” and who didn’t leave the Ozarks for Beverly Hills, but who lived by the same rustic and down-to-earth values that Jed did amid his vast wealth. If the Jed Clampett metaphor wears thin, try another, The Waltons television series, for before Sam’s ancestors came west they lived in rural Virginia, where likely they, too, shared prayers and meals around a big table in the old country home. Sam Walton, who died in 1992 at the age of seventy-four, wasn’t really discovered by the world at large until after he’d quietly built his empire and become the nation’s richest man, a designation given him by Forbes magazine in 1985. He was sixty-seven at the time and possessed a fortune estimated at $2.8 billion. Just three years earlier, he had ranked seventeenth with a little under $700 million to his name. To Walton’s chagrin, his number-one status brought truckloads of reporters and camera crews to Bentonville, a town of 10,800 that was named after the great nineteenthcentury Missouri populist Thomas Hart Benton. Even though Walton usually refused their requests for interviews, they relayed back to the world reports of the steely-eyed mega-millionaire who loved bird dogs and quail hunting, got his hair cut for five dollars, bought his suits from Wal-Mart for one hundred dollars, and drove an old Ford pickup truck. Sam Walton was so down-home—or cheap—that he borrowed change to make phone calls. He even kept his name listed in the town phone book. In the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, Sam Walton was “America’s Richest Nobody.”20 “Success has always had its price, I guess,” Walton wrote at the beginning of his 1992 autobiography, Sam Walton: Made in America. “The Wal-Mart Conquers the World

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impression I got is that most media folks—and some Wall Street types too—either thought we were just a bunch of bumpkins selling socks off the back of a truck, or that we were some kind of fast buck artists or stock scammers.”21 Southerners, in particular, have always had a weakness for the rustic, homespun hero—from Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson to Huey and Earl Long, Jimmie Rodgers to Hank Williams, Dizzy Dean to Paul “Bear” Bryant. These are heroes who are one with the people, speak the people’s language, share the people’s values in a culture that is populist to its core although deeply embedded with a class system that has always been a central feature of its economy. The elite—from planter to politician to businessman to corporate CEO—often take on the trappings of the commoner, knowing its resonance among Southerners and its value in establishing the patriarchal and paternalistic bond needed to rule in a populist culture. The Marxist historian Eugene Genovese has written extensively about Southern paternalism, so long the “reigning Southern ideal of social relations,” and its ability to make the underclass go against “its own collective interests” by making the yeoman—black or white—feel a pseudo-kinship with the patriarch and thus accept the patriarch as leader.22 W. J. Cash writes about this in his 1941 classic The Mind of the South. “The actual fact was simply that, unaware of any primary conflict in interest, and seeing the planter not as an antagonist but as an old friend or kinsman, the common white naturally fell into the habit of honoring him as primus inter pares (first among his peers), of deferring to his knowledge and judgment, of consulting him on every occasion, and of looking to him for leadership and opinion.”23 While Sam Walton undoubtedly preferred privacy to media spectacle, he fed the mythology surrounding him in his autobiography. “No question about it, a lot of my attitude toward money stems from growing up during a pretty hardscrabble time in our country’s history: the Great Depression.” He described how his father, Thomas Gibson Walton, once “traded his wristwatch for a hog, so we’d have meat on the table.”24 Yet Walton’s father was hardly a Tom Joad-like character out of The Grapes of Wrath. He was a banker, farmer, farm-loan appraiser, and insurance agent who repossessed countless farms from people who couldn’t make their payments. Sam, a hard worker with a knack for making money, did have to deliver newspapers and wait tables to help pay for his studies at the University of Missouri. He landed on his feet quite well after graduation, however. His first job was at a J. C. Penney store, where he trained for a management position and earned $75 a week, which writer Bob Ortega 166

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says would have been the equivalent of $920 a week in the late 1990s. In 1943 Walton married the daughter of one of the area’s richest men, who two years later would loan Walton $25,000 so that he could buy his first store, a Ben Franklin five-and-dime variety store in Newport, Arkansas. Ortega again notes that the $25,000 loan from Walton’s father-in-law would have been the equivalent of $245,000 in 1998. One undeniable truth about Sam Walton is that early on he valued a dollar. “We learned how much hard work it took to get your hands on a dollar, and that when you did it was worth something.” As he grew more experienced in the retail industry, he saw that “by cutting your price, you can boost your sales to a point where you earn far more at the cheaper retail price than you would by selling the item at the higher price.”25 This first step toward the formula that would make Wal-Mart so hugely successful was followed by another: paying the cheapest wages possible to employees. “In the beginning, I was so chintzy,” Walton admits in his autobiography. “I really didn’t pay my employees very well. The managers were fine. From the time we started branching out into more stores, we always had a partnership with the store managers . . . (who) all had a piece of their stores’ profits from the beginning. But we really didn’t do much for the clerks except pay them an hourly wage, and I guess that wage was as little as we could get by with at the time.” Walton offered this mea culpa: “I was so obsessed with turning in a profit margin of 6 percent or higher that I ignored some of the basic needs of our people, and I feel bad about it. The larger truth I failed to see turned out to be another of those paradoxes. . . . The more you share profits with your associates—whether it’s in salaries or incentives or bonuses or stock options—the more profit will accrue to the company. Why? Because the way management treats the associates is exactly how the associates will then treat the customers.”26 So why would Walton and Wal-Mart continue to fail to practice what the founder preached in his autobiography. Charles Martin’s answer would be simple: hypocrisy. The wide range in views that have existed over the years about Sam Walton and Wal-Mart is illustrated in the work of two Southern newspapermen: Arkansas-born Vance H. Trimble, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and editor with newspapers in Oklahoma, Texas, and Kentucky who wrote the 1990 biography Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America’s Richest Man; and Bill Quinn, a hardboiled veteran of newspapers in the tiny east Texas towns of Van, Grand Saline, and Mineola who authored a scathing critique of the giant retailer in 1998 called How Wal-Mart Is Destroying America: And What You Can Do about It. Wal-Mart Conquers the World

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Like Walton, Trimble and Quinn were both children of the Great Depression, and they both filled their books with countless details about the empire Sam Walton built. However, Trimble’s deep admiration for the mega-millionaire who refused to grant him an interview is obvious throughout his book. Adjectives like “brilliant,” “fascinating,” and “amazing” are common. “This absolutely is not an authorized biography, but I am certain Sam Walton and his family would find it accurate, reasonably complete, and above all fair to him,” Trimble writes in the acknowledgments.27 The title of Quinn’s book sums up well the views of the author. “Why this bitter anti-Wal-Mart book?” he asks in his preface. “First, Wal-Mart and its subsidiaries have destroyed Small-Town America. Once towns lose their identity, their uniqueness, their mom-and-pop stores, and the young people who look forward to taking over the family business, the towns rarely, very rarely recover. Second, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., . . . has done more to stomp out Middle-Class America than all other discount houses put together.” At the end of his book, Quinn concludes: “The long and the short of it for me is, I hate Wal-Mart. I’ll never set foot in another of those emporiums of crap as long as I live, and I’ll fight them until the day I die.”28 As full of praise as Trimble’s book is, the author doesn’t blink at some of the dents in the Walton empire armor. For example, he recounts in detail the April 1989 automobile accident in which Sam’s daughter, Alice, struck and killed pedestrian Oletha Hardin with her speeding 1987 silver Porsche. No charges were filed. Harold Hardin told Trimble a Walton lawyer offered him $2,500 to cover his late wife’s funeral expenses—a claim denied by the lawyer. “I’d rather have her back than have all the money Sam Walton’s got,” Hardin said, although he later agreed to an out-of-court settlement in the matter.29 Quinn’s book is an unrelenting indictment that depicts a company so greed-obsessed its “employees are wrung dry” and “taxpayers pay for the disaster.”30 Press treatment of Wal-Mart over the years since Sam Walton’s death ranges from Trimble-like hagiography to Quinn-like jeremiads. In Arkansas, Walton and Wal-Mart have enjoyed a comparatively friendly press even though veteran political and editorial writer Ernie Dumas told Trimble the company is “kind of scandalous” in the way it treats its employees.31 The Waltons have themselves been in the newspaper business ever since Sam bought Bentonville’s local newspaper, the Benton County Daily Democrat (later changed to the Benton County Daily Record) in 1972. The Waltons even have a newspaper chain, Community Publishers, which owns three dailies, 19 weeklies, and a half-dozen other publications in Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. 168

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Arkansas Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice head Stephen Copley told Nation writer Liza Featherstone that Wal-Mart “gets great media” in Arkansas “even though in reality their business practices are very bad” and the company’s much-ballyhooed charitable contributions often end up in the pockets of arch-conservative, antiunion organizations like the Heritage Foundation, the Goldwater Institute, and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.32 “When Wal-Mart comes to town, it has been known to be a newspaper publisher’s best friend,” Quinn writes in How Wal-Mart Is Destroying America. “Full-page advertisements! Color inserts! The advertising money that Sam brings feels like a bonanza. But just you wait. As soon as the local drugstores and dry goods and hardware and appliance stores have closed, Wal-Mart may just decide to withdraw almost its entire advertising expenditure from your pages.”33 Wal-Mart has also been known to punish newspapers when the coverage is not to its liking. After a column critical of Wal-Mart appeared in the June 19, 2005, edition of the Pensacola News-Journal in Pensacola, Florida, the company refused to allow the newspaper to be sold at its area stores and asked that the columnist be fired. “Only after the paper’s banning was publicized did Wal-Mart rescind the decision,” notes the crusading mediafocused newsletter Extra.34 By and large, however, the company is more interested in national than local media. Northwest Arkansas Business Journal senior editor Bill Bowden told the Web magazine BusinessJournalism.org that “Wal-Mart is least friendly with the small publications like the one I work for. It has so much clout, but the one thing we have going for us is proximity.”35 Yet the treatment Wal-Mart has received in the national media is as wide-ranging as the views of Trimble and Quinn. Nationally syndicated columnist George Will, one of Wal-Mart’s biggest supporters, once called the company “the most prodigious job-creator in the history of the private sector in this galaxy” and “about as important as the Federal Reserve in holding down inflation,” a company so pro-consumer that shoppers spend an average 17 percent less for items they could purchase elsewhere.36 Wal-Mart critics, Will said, are simply liberal elitists. Wal-Mart observer John Dicker says media hostile Sam Walton himself “might be surprised to find just how many of the vermin actually take his side. In addition to certain pundits and assorted op-ed rock stars, WalMart’s cast of boosters includes a mishmash of free-market cheerleaders, conservative contrarians, and pseudopopulists.”37 Jay Nordlinger of National Review and Luke Boggs of Human Events are so upbeat about Wal-Mart that they have even questioned the patriotism of its critics. Time magazine ran a resolutely positive assessment Wal-Mart Conquers the World

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of the company titled “Wal-Mart Nation” in its June 27, 2005, edition, describing how the company’s operations in China were “spreading a management style that many of its young Chinese employees find liberating.” The Extra newsletter blasted the magazine article for its “undeniably cheerleading theme” and for allowing Wal-Mart to “trump” any criticism hurled its way.38 But the company has also received its toughest coverage on the national stage. The Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for a series of stories that probed the company’s way of doing business. In the broadcast media, PBS’s Frontline also investigated Wal-Mart in a report that aired in November 2004. Business Week published a cover story in October 2003 that posed the question: “Is Wal-Mart Too Powerful?” Written by Anthony Bianco and Wendy Zellner, the article detailed how WalMart’s low prices—groceries at 14 percent below competitors’ prices—are possible, in part, because of wages that are 20 percent below union-scale wages. The average wage of a Wal-Mart sales clerk in 2001 was actually below the federal poverty line. Another factor in Wal-Mart’s low prices is the source of the products on the shelves, the magazine reported. Despite Sam Walton’s “Buy American” campaign of the mid-1980s, the company bought $12 billion in goods from China in 2002 alone, accounting for 10 percent of all Chinese exports to the United States. Another Business Week investigation in November 2006—“Secrets, Lies, and Sweatshops”—portrayed U.S. giant firms like Wal-Mart and Nike as bullies squeezing their Chinese suppliers for the lowest-possible prices on goods and, in essence, encouraging behind-the-scenes sweatshop conditions at the same time they were assuring critics back home that their auditors were vigilantly on the lookout for such conditions. Wal-Mart’s “methods of squeezing out those low prices—paying salaries below the poverty line, building superstores that crush mom-and-pop shops, and pushing manufacturers to the wall for savings are creating a strong backlash,” Business Week warned in an October 2003 editorial. “There’s a growing sense that Wal-Mart may be too powerful. If the company is to continue to succeed, it may have to focus more energy on dealing with these concerns.”39 The bad national press really began in the mid-1980s, according to John Dicker. That’s when “Wal-Mart became saddled with a designation that it still wears today: the preeminent assassin of small businesses.” The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications ran multiple articles depicting “communities that were reeling from the arrival of a Wal-Mart,” Dicker wrote in his 2005 book, The United States of Wal-Mart.40 Among Wal-Mart’s victims were towns like Donaldsville, Louisiana, and Hearne, Texas. The 1990s brought new controversies such as revela170

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tions that television personality Kathie Lee Gifford’s line of clothing sold at Wal-Mart was made in sweatshops in Central America and in New York City. By the beginning of the new millennium, the image of the company had grown even more sinister, at least in the alternative and labor press. It had become a symbol of what was wrong with America. Christopher Hayes’s article for In These Times magazine’s November 21, 2005, edition asked the question: “What do you get when you cross gutted labor laws with a corporate culture of impunity?” The answer? “Why Wal-Mart, of course!” In the words of AFL-CIO Voices@Work campaign director Andy Levin, “Wal-Mart’s not a bad apple—it’s the very symbol of a rotten system” that has brought “the right to organize in the United States (to) the verge of extinction.”41 Wal-Mart itself was the source of an early volley against its image in the first decade of the new century. In January 2004, the New York Times published an account of a sealed internal audit of 25,000 employees in 128 stores that Wal-Mart conducted in July 2000. The audit revealed thousands of labor violations, including the employment of minors during school hours and the working of employees through breaks and lunches. Company officials disavowed the audit, saying it was “invalid” and failed to distinguish incidents in which workers simply failed to punch out for breaks.42 However, Wal-Mart would pay more than $135,540 in February 2005 to settle a federal case that involved eighty-five child labor law violations at stores in Arkansas, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. Another and even more serious attack on Wal-Mart’s image emerged in 2004 with the certification of a class-action lawsuit against the company on behalf of an estimated 1.6 million former and current female employees alleging discrimination in pay raises and promotions. Wal-Mart appealed the class action—the largest such lawsuit in U.S. history—and argued that discrimination cases should be decided on a store-by-store basis. Two-thirds of Wal-Mart’s U.S. workers are women. Titled Dukes vs. Wal-Mart after lead plaintiff and thirteen-year veteran Wal-Mart worker Betty Dukes in Pittsburg, California, the lawsuit raised the specter of back pay and punitive damages totaling in the billions of dollars if Wal-Mart were to lose the case. Sam Walton, who in the words of biographer Trimble was “no more prejudiced against women in executive roles that perhaps was the norm in corporate America until recent years,” wrote about his female workers in a column for the company publication, Wal-Mart World, in June 1989. “I’m convinced that our Wal-Mart women associates have unlimited opportunity to advance and assume top management responsibilities in our Wal-Mart Conquers the World

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Wal-Mart organization.”43 Apparently many of his “women associates” today would disagree. In February 2007, a federal appeals judge in San Francisco upheld an earlier court decision to allow the class-action lawsuit to go to trial. Business Week writer Wendy Zellner wrote that the case could force Wal-Mart into a “cultural revolution” even if it were to result in an out-of-court settlement. The company possibly would have to accept a court-appointed monitor who would be able to probe pay and promotion records. Furthermore, closing the gap between male and female pay at the company could cost as much as $500 million, the plaintiffs’ lawyers told Zellner.44 The class-action lawsuit was just one of Wal-Mart’s legal headaches. In June 2004, Wal-Mart and Rite Aid Corporation agreed to pay the federal government nearly $10 million to settle a prescription drug case. The government alleged the companies billed government insurance programs for prescription claims on drugs that were either never delivered or only partially delivered to beneficiaries. Wal-Mart’s portion of the settlement was $2.8 million. In April 2005, Wal-Mart froze benefits totaling millions of dollars to one-time Sam Walton protégé and company vice president Tom Coughlin, who would plead guilty in January 2006 to fraud in a case alleging he had spent at least $500,000 in Wal-Mart funds for personal use over several years. Coughlin initially claimed the missing money went to a behind-the-scenes antiunion campaign at Wal-Mart. In early November 2005, the U.S. Labor Department came under sharp criticism by its own inspector general for agreeing to give Wal-Mart fifteen days’ notice before conducting inspections to determine child labor violations. The agreement was part of the settlement Wal-Mart had reached in February 2005 in which it paid $135,540 for earlier alleged violations. Later in November 2005, the company again was the subject of controversy as a result of the arrest of 120 workers on immigration violations at a Pennsylvania distribution center. The company argued that a subcontractor hired the workers, but Wal-Mart already had a history with such violations. In March 2005, the retailer paid a record $11 million to settle a case dealing with the use of undocumented workers in twenty-one stores. Federal agents arrested more than 300 such workers at Wal-Mart stores in October 2003. In January 2006, the state legislature in Maryland overrode a governor’s veto from the previous year to enact a state law requiring Wal-Mart to raise its health care coverage for its employees. The Maryland Fair Share Health Care Fund Act, a reaction to Wal-Mart workers’ dependence on the state Medicaid program, was ruled invalid by a federal judge seven months later. Wal-Mart booster and syndicated columnist George Will 172

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called the Maryland law an example of the “tawdry drama of state politics as governments grasp for novel sources of money.”45 Well aware that the sustained attacks could eventually take a toll on the company’s finances—indeed, by August 2006, Wal-Mart had reported its first quarterly profit decline in a decade—the company launched a multifaceted media campaign to improve its public image. In January 2005 it released an advertising blitz that included full-page ads in more than one hundred newspapers across the country. Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott made himself available for interviews with ABC’s Good Morning America show and National Public Radio’s Tavis Smiley program. The interview with Smiley, an African American, also coincided with the company’s efforts to overcome opposition to its desire to locate a supercenter in Inglewood, a predominantly African American and Latino suburb of Los Angeles. Smiley, whose popular talk show is underwritten by Wal-Mart, was later criticized widely for his “fawning” interview and ingratiating questions.46 In November 2005, the New York Times reported that Wal-Mart had established a “war room”—also known as Action Alley—at its headquarters in Bentonville, where a team of key strategists worked out game plans to handle the company’s multiple legal and media battles. The team included top former aides to both Democratic president Clinton and Republican president Ronald Reagan.47 The next month Wal-Mart launched a “Working Families for WalMart” campaign, organized by the high-profile Chicago public relations firm of Edelman with civil rights–era leader and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young as its chief spokesperson. A top goal of Working Families for Wal-Mart was to offset the damage being inflicted by the labor union-connected WakeUpWalMart and WalMartWatch campaigns. However, the company’s efforts seriously stumbled the following August when Young told a reporter with a black-owned Los Angeles newspaper that Wal-Mart provided a needed change to big city African-American neighborhoods where “mom-and-pop” stores “have been overcharging us—selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables.” Young went on to say that “I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”48 Young, whose resumé also includes service as a United Nations ambassador, later apologized and resigned his post. In March 2007 the New York Times reported that federal agents were investigating the actions of a Wal-Mart computer systems technician who had secretly taped telephone exchanges between New York Times retail reporter Michael Barbaro and Wal-Mart employees. Barbaro and the newspaper’s top labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse, had been the Wal-Mart Conquers the World

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company’s most scrutinizing observers in recent years. Wal-Mart CEO Scott apologized to the newspaper but insisted the employee acted independently. The employee said he was part of a company surveillance operation to spy on critics. As in most of its previous media battles, Wal-Mart once again found itself embroiled on a national stage with a national publication. Conspicuously absent from these battles and from much of the debate surrounding Wal-Mart over the years has been the press from Wal-Mart’s own region. Few major news organizations in the South have devoted the time and effort to investigate the company like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Business Week, Frontline, and alternative magazines such as Nation and In These Times have. The Atlanta-based Cox News Service, serving the Cox-owned Atlanta Journal-Constitution and more than a dozen other newspapers across the South and in Ohio, published an in-depth analysis by reporter Marilyn Geewax in November 2006 that assessed the ongoing public relations battle between the company and the union-backed WakeUpWalMart and WalMartWatch campaigns. The North Carolina-based Institute for Southern Studies, with its magazine Southern Exposure and newsletter Facing South, has looked into unionization efforts at Wal-Mart and at the politics of race that has often accompanied Wal-Mart’s urban expansion efforts. However, by and large, most of the close scrutiny leveled at the company has come from the national—not Southern—press and other media. My eighteen-year-old son Michael returned from the August 14, 2000, opening of the new Wal-Mart supercenter at the western edge of my hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, with a look of utter contempt on his face. “It was like a Hitler Youth rally,” he sneered, shaking his head. I listened, allowing for a youthful propensity toward hyperbole. Details, I told him. Details. First of all, he said, uniformed guards were on hand for the 7:30 Wednesday morning ceremony. As one of the guards solemnly held the U.S. flag high, the crowd outside the front doors of the new 240,000square-foot retail colossus sang the national anthem. The proceedings included a communal prayer, a poetry reading, and, of course, the cutting of the ribbon to open the facility. A highlight of the event was the famous Wal-Mart cheer, instituted by Mr. Sam himself and led in Oxford by handclapping, newly hired “associates” with big smiles on their faces. Everyone in the crowd got a rose and a piece of cake. A front-page photograph in the local newspaper, the Oxford Eagle, that afternoon showed the Wal-Mart workers doing the cheer. The topof-the-fold story next to the picture told how the company had promised $119,000 to local nonprofit organizations and $1.5 million to help pay for 174

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a $5 million general obligation bond issue to widen the road in front of the store. In giving Wal-Mart the nod, the mayor and local board of aldermen had to stand up to a feisty and vocal group of protesters, who were concerned about the retailer’s potential effects on the city’s fabled downtown square as well as Wal-Mart’s abandonment of its previous location as an anchor store in the city’s only shopping mall. To show its good will, Wal-Mart agreed to maintain a stand of trees as a buffer between the new supercenter and Highway 6, where visitors coming in from the west get their first view of the town. Wal-Mart ultimately bulldozed those trees, however, and replaced them with seedlings that seven years later had yet to grow more than a few feet tall. In 2005, a somewhat grumpy board of aldermen approved Wal-Mart’s request for a 4,477-square-foot expansion to allow for more storage space. The approval came with a condition, however: that the company do a new and better landscaping that restores the buffer between store and highway. The square is still vibrant—thanks to the fact that Oxford is a university town—but the store’s old shopping mall site remains empty, and the mall is struggling. The University of Mississippi has promised to make use of the empty space. In the meantime, a mall merchant told the local newspaper, “We’ll just sit here and die quietly.”49

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Chapter 10

charleston “The First Major Labor Battle of the Twenty-first Century”

The first sign of trouble ahead was the swelling crowd of police at the entrance of the Columbus Street Terminal off Morrison Drive. It was 5 p.m., Wednesday, January 19, 2000, still the dawn of the new millennium in Charleston, South Carolina. Hundreds of battle-ready, black-clad police and highway patrol officers stood in formation, armed with riot helmets, wooden clubs, and plastic shields. A handful rode horses. They carried weapons able to shoot rubber pellets and buckshot. Canine units stood ready with attack dogs. The officers on the ground, summoned from across the state, formed a solid, impregnable phalanx. Parked nearby were mobilized armored vehicles as well as the platoon of buses that had brought them to the terminal gate. Before the night was over, the force would reach six hundred troops on the ground, a virtual infantry, plus the police equivalent of an air force and navy. Patrol boats trolled the waters of Charleston harbor while helicopters circled over Morrison Drive. Charleston hadn’t seen such a show of military might since the fire-eating secessionist editor Edmund Ruffin fired the first cannonball of the Civil War against the federal troops at Fort Sumter in 1861. At 6 p.m., members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) Local 1422 gathered at their union hall on Morrison Drive. They joked and tried to remain light-hearted yet still grumbled at the military force gathering at the terminal entrance. They talked about seeing maneuver-like training sessions, organized lunges into imaginary crowds, clubs and plastic shields raised against the imaginary enemy, which they knew to be themselves. “My Lord, what are they preparing for?” Local 1422 president Ken Riley recalled thinking in a later interview with the Nation magazine writer JoAnn Wypijewski.1 176

“Be patient,” one ILA member told a reporter with Charleston’s Post and Courier at the scene that night, “you’ll get your story.”2 The union hall, described as a “fortress” in the Charleston press, was a safe haven for the longshoremen. Out on the docks, tension had been building since late 1999 when the Danish Nordana Shipping Line broke a twenty-two-year-old relationship with the local by hiring nonunion workers with “waterfront figure” Perry Collins’s Winyah Stevedoring, Inc., of neighboring Georgetown. Why pay union workers $16.50 to $25 an hour when nonunion workers will do the job for $8 an hour?3 Protests had followed that decision, intensifying every time another Nordana ship pulled into Charleston Port. Peaceful pickets eventually turned loud and ugly with honking horns, blocked traffic, vandalism— slashed tires, damaged air hoses—and claims by Winyah workers that they’d been assaulted by ILA members. No charges were ever filed, however. The police held back. Ken Riley met with Nordana to offer concessions. Nordana turned him down. “You can’t take that night [January 19–20] without understanding the buildup,” says Tony Bartelme, a reporter who covered the story from start to finish.4 Bartelme works for Charleston’s major newspaper, the Post and Courier. Founded in 1803, it bills itself as “the South’s oldest daily newspaper.” Owned by the Manigault family and various others, the newspaper was a pioneer in congressional coverage in the early 1800s. Its correspondent Felix Gregory de Fontaine, using the penname “Personne,” wrote some of the most acclaimed dispatches of the Civil War. After World War II, the newspaper’s editorials stood strong and true for Strom Thurmond and segregation. Now they simply reflect the political conservatism that dominates much of the region. Nordana was a small line that accounted for only two ships per month in what is the nation’s fourth-largest container port, a port that handles $80 million worth of cargo per day. Nine of the world’s ten biggest shipping lines operate here. This is South Carolina’s window to the world, a key component in the industrialization that has brought BMW, Michelin, General Electric, and other mega-corporations to the state. The port’s regional clout has earned its status as the “lynchpin of the South’s global economy.”5 The longshoremen who work its docks—the ILA local includes around one thousand members—are very proud of what they do. Most of them are black, descendants of a long tradition of labor activism in the city. Free black chimneysweepers organized here in 1763 and so enraged the Charleston Gazette that it called them “insolent” and their actions “evils.”6 This lineage also includes the black workers who organized into the strike-prone Charleston: “Labor Battle of the Twenty-first Century”

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Longshoremen’s Protective Union Association in 1867, becoming the state’s most powerful black union. More important to today’s workers, however, is their own record of productivity. The Charleston longshoremen handle more tonnage per hour than workers at any other port in the nation. In fact, they are the second-fastest longshoremen in the world. Only their counterparts in Tokyo outdo them. For black blue-collar workers, they make good wages. Despite repeated claims in the Post and Courier that they can earn $100,000 a year, the Charleston longshoremen more typically earn about $55,000. However, with lots of overtime and seniority, some can reach as high as $110,000, excellent money for a low-wage state. The “buildup” to the night of January 20 wasn’t just about Nordana. The longshoremen at Charleston knew what was happening in New Orleans, Houston, and other ports where nonunionized cheap labor was threatening union jobs. They knew, too, that they worked in arguably the most anti-union state in the nation. Next to North Carolina, South Carolina is the least unionized state—with just 3.5 percent of its workforce belonging to unions. Only North Carolina’s 3.2 percent is lower. Like the rest of the South, South Carolina is a “right-to-work” state, or as the College of Charleston labor historian George W. Hopkins calls it, “right to work for less.”7 Workers in South Carolina typically earn five thousand dollars less per year than the average U.S. worker. To keep wages low, the state legislature even passed a bill prohibiting local city or county governments from raising their minimum wage levels. “Ever wonder why a German company like Bosch would set up shop in Charleston? Or BMW in Spartanburg? Or all of Fuji Film’s 33mm color film is manufactured in the booming metropolis of Greenwood, S.C.?” asked Lorne M. Chambers of the Charleston City Paper in one of the more compelling local articles on the dockworkers’ dispute. “Rest assured, it’s not the weather that draws these companies to South Carolina. Two words sum it up pretty well—‘Cheap Labor’. . . . It is not unlike domestic corporations taking their business offshore to less developed nations like Indonesia or Thailand, where workers are exploited for a fraction of what American workers earn on average.”8 As labor historians Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais noted in their 1955 book, Labor’s Untold Story, the Civil War itself was fundamentally a war over labor and property. What labor is cheaper than that of slaves, and what were slaves, other than the human property of their owners? Just prior to the Civil War, the Charleston Mercury editorialized that “slavery is the natural and normal condition of the laboring man . . . The theory of a free society is a delusion.”9 Boyer and Morais maintain that 178

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slavery was a key reason why a strong national labor movement didn’t emerge until after the Civil War. “Slavery was the same kind of brake on the young labor movement as the unorganized, low-wage South is at present on today’s labor.” As pre–Civil War New England textile workers were told, “You must work as long and cheap as slaves in the South.”10 In convincing nonslaveholding Southerners to fight its war, the Southern slaveholding minority had to make racial fear the central issue. “They undertook a campaign to convince nonslaveholders that they too had a stake in disunion,” writes Civil War historian James McPherson. “The stake was white supremacy.”11 Unlike other Southern states, where editorial opinion argued on both sides of the issue of secession, the newspapers in South Carolina were essentially unanimous in “opposition to concession or compromise” and in their “insistence on secession” as mandated by the state’s “axis” of fireeating editors and orators: Edmund Ruffin, Robert Barnwell Rhett, and William Lowndes Yancey.12 Aiding and abetting the Southern politicians and editors were the region’s religious leaders. “If you are tame enough to submit, abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands,” South Carolina Baptist leader James Furman told his faithful.13 As early as 1850, the South Carolina religious and educational leader James H. Thornwell, a precursor of many cold warriors a century later, was blasting the ranks of abolitionists as rife with “atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins.” Perhaps Thornwell had seen an omen. Trade unionists indeed heeded President Abraham Lincoln’s call to join the Union forces against the Confederacy. They enlisted in such numbers that the North’s workforce was reduced by more than 50 percent, forcing the temporary disbanding of locals across the country. A strong supporter of unions, Lincoln once said that “the strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people of all nations, tongues and kindreds.”14 After the Civil War, Northern industrialists managed to find common ground with the Southern oligarchy—the planters and leaders of the Southern Democratic Party—to help steer the economy in a way that would be mutually beneficial. A result of this pact was the peonage and Jim Crow politics in the post-Reconstruction South. A “colonial” economy developed in the South, financed largely by Northern capital, that contributed to greater land values and the development of towns and cities but which also ensured the power and status of a Southern white elite. “Formerly labor was wealth and wealth was chiefly labor,” economist Gavin Wright says in his book Old South, New South. “After emancipation, Charleston: “Labor Battle of the Twenty-first Century”

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the ‘masters without slaves’ were landlords, whose concern was to raise the value of output per acre, treating labor as a variable cost.”15 Like the rest of the region, South Carolina has wrestled with this history, battled between pride and shame in assessing the legacies of not only the Civil War but also Jim Crow. One legacy has been poverty and status as an economic backwater. Especially after World War II, political leaders recognized industrialization as key to the future. Powerful politicians like U.S. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mendel Rivers, D-S.C., also looked to federal largesse. Rivers pumped so many military dollars into Charleston that by the early 1970s its bases directly or indirectly provided one out of every three jobs in the city. Yet, the legacies of the Old South weren’t that easily erased, perhaps because New South leaders remained unwilling to give up key staples of the Old South: a lingering nostalgia for the past, oligarchical control, and cheap labor. Just three days prior to the disturbance at the Charleston port, an estimated 46,000 people marched in Columbia to demand that the state bring down the Confederate flag that still waved from atop the Capitol dome. The protests succeeded in getting the flag relocated to another spot on the Capitol grounds. A major organizer of the march was the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422 in Charleston. “The only thing stronger than racism in South Carolina is the hatred of unions and the attendant fear that workers might choose class solidarity over skin and challenge the setup that depends on keeping most of them poor, weak, and divided,” JoAnn Wypijewski wrote in Nation magazine.16 Local 1422 President Riley puts it this way: “This state is so hostile to unions it is unbelievable.”17 At 7 p.m. that January 19, 2000, nineteen nonunion dockworkers began unloading containers from the 443-foot Nordana Skodsberg inside the Columbus Street Terminal. Protected by the army at the gate, they worked quietly for two hours. At 9 p.m., two protestors carrying signs showed up at the terminal gate. With a cold mist hanging in the air, and in the words of reporter Tony Bartelme, “the whole scene lit by a temporary light,” the two lonely protestors picketed in front of hundreds of police and patrol officers, silent except for once pointing toward the union hall—separated from the terminal by marshland—and telling the officers to “go back there.”18 At the union hall, longshoremen came and went until 11:30 p.m., when between 130 and 200 gathered in response to Ken Riley’s instruction. Joining Local 1422 were members of two other locals: 1771 of the union for checkers and clerks, and 1422-A, representing port mechanics.

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By that time, some had been drinking. More were furious at the roadblocks and harassment they had encountered en route and the in-yourface provocation that stood waiting for them at the Columbus Street Terminal. As Ken Riley told another reporter, “You would think there was going to be a terrorist attack on the state of South Carolina.”19 At midnight the march to the terminal began. Many were loud, some rowdy, and they chanted “ILA! ILA! ILA!” as they made their way down the street. They waved signs, warned reporters to keep their distance, and finally squared off against the police. “Things have a funny way of happening in the night, things that never would happen but for the mixture of fear and anger and the infuriating exertion of overwhelming force,” JoAnn Wypijewski of Nation writes in her compelling account of the event. “The story of that night has shrunk to caricature in some tellings, as if the only way to defend the workers is to portray them as passive actors set upon by police and collapsing under the assault. Perhaps it’s a liberal fetishization of nonviolence, or a reflexive response to the state’s claim, seconded by the white press, that police were passive guards attacked by frenzied workers. What seems to have transpired instead was an explosion of human emotion when only one side has all the serious weapons.”20 Tony Bartelme, the key reporter for the “white press” that the Post and Courier came to symbolize, was an eyewitness to the event, even getting shoved at one point by an irate longshoreman. His accounts portray the ILA as the aggressor. “They were coming out of the hall carrying sticks. They were ready to fight,” he said in a November 21, 2005, interview. Once at the terminal, the longshoremen “rushed the line. They made the first move.” He says the protesters threw rocks and debris at the police, tore down spotlights. Others dispute this version of events. Longshoremen talk of seeing police officers attack workers with sticks and cruisers rushing through the crowd and firing smoke grenades. Regardless of who threw the first punch, “it was an explosive situation,” Bartelme says. “It’s amazing that no one got killed.”21 Here is an excerpt of Bartelme’s account, written after the smoke had cleared: A group of longshoremen tried to lunge through the police onto the terminal. Police held them back using their shields. Standing inches away from officers, dockworkers shouted threats and waved sticks and signs. Soon, a hailstorm of rocks, bricks, logs and other debris rained down on the officers who raised their shields to protect themselves. Moments later, the crowd knocked over the temporary police light, plunging the scene into darkness. Although the protestors

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continued to throw debris, police managed to prop up the lights. The situation continued to deteriorate. Longshoremen beat and wrestled a freelance cameraman to the ground.22

Bartelme does go on to describe officers beating dockworkers and dropping shock grenades. “A squad car slammed into at least one of the protestors, who toppled over the hood and roof.” After ordering the protestors to disperse, officers fired “bean-bag projectiles” into the crowd. One longshoreman said he was shot in the leg. The crowd pushed over a nearby television van as it retreated from the police. “There were probably five or six real yahoos out there, drunk, jumping up and down,” Bartelme said.“A couple of excessive cops, and a handful of excessive longshoremen, the hotheads.”23 Tear gas finally helped break up the protest, then Mother Nature stepped in around 3 a.m. with a thunderstorm—rare for winter in Charleston—that finally doused the last embers of the confrontation. Four hours later, the nonunion workers at the terminal finished loading the Nordana ship, which then sailed for Baltimore. Ten people, including Riley and a police captain, received injuries. Riley needed twelve stitches to fix a bad gash on his head. Police arrested nine protestors, who were charged with trespassing. “There was this really weird feeling after that night, like something had been lost,” Bartelme said. “It was like a wreath—people in the ILA feeling sorry it had happened, the police, too.”24 “Everyone woke up reeling the next day,” recalled D. Peters Wilborn Jr., a Charleston attorney who worked with the ILA local on what would come to be known as the “Charleston Five” case. “It was because everyone knew we dodged a bullet, that it could’ve been bad.”25 Those closest to what happened on the night of January 20, 2000, agree that the “riot”—the chosen description of the incident by the Post and Courier—could have been resolved with limited lingering fanfare at the local level. However, that was made impossible by South Carolina attorney general Charlie Condon, a politician cut from the same cloth as “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, Cole Blease, Cotton Ed Smith, Strom Thurmond, and others in the long line of race-baiting, chest-thumping demagogues South Carolina has hoisted upon the world. “The local community could’ve handled it all,” attorney D. Peters Wilborn said. “Charleston is different from the rest of the state. It would’ve been over with.”26 Unlike the rest of South Carolina, Charleston has a long union tradition. The ILA has been a major part of that tradition as well as a mainstay in the city’s economic life since Local 1422 formed in 1936. William Morrison, mayor of Charleston from 1947 to 1959, was the ILA local’s first 182

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attorney and served in that position more than thirty years. Furthermore, “Charleston doesn’t like disruption,” Bartelme said. “Keeping the peace, that’s the Charleston thing, even if things are not peaceful.”27 Despite the massive show of force vis-à-vis the longshoremen and longstanding complaints about police treatment in black neighborhoods, a degree of sympathy existed among local police officers regarding the protesters. Like most of the protesters, the Charleston police chief at the time, Reuben Greenberg, was black. An effort to organize a union within the department was also underway. In the massive showdown between police and demonstrators January 20, local police made only eight arrests, with prosecutors filing comparatively mild trespassing charges against the longshoremen. However, Condon, a Charleston native, former district attorney, one-time Democrat, and likely Republican candidate for governor, quickly decided to up the ante. Promising a “comprehensive plan for dealing with union dockworker violence,” the attorney general publicly threatened “jail, jail, and more jail” against the longshoremen and called for additional felony charges of rioting that can carry a five-year prison term.28 A judge set bail and put the defendants under a curfew that forbid them from leaving their homes between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. Condon also pushed to get a court ruling limiting to four the number of picketers who could protest at any one time. Circuit judge Daniel Martin, agreeing that “unlawful acts” occurred during the January 20 demonstration and that “irreparable harm” could occur without limiting demonstrations, ruled that no more than nineteen picketers could assemble at the same time and cannot block entrances to State Ports Authority (SPA) property.29 The rioting charges were tossed three weeks later when a circuit court decided the prosecution had failed to provide sufficient evidence of complicity in the “riot” that Condon and the Post and Courier insisted took place that night. Undeterred, Condon took the case to a grand jury, which handed him the felony indictments he sought against five of the longshoremen: Kenneth Jefferson, Elijah Ford, Ricky Simmons, Peter Washington Jr., and Jason Edgerton. All but Edgerton were black, and together they became the “Charleston Five.” Their arrests and charges came after they were identified on video and in photographs of the incident. “Who are these guys?” labor attorney Wilborn asked in a 2005 interview. “Not leaders. Just guys in the wrong place at the wrong time.”30 Video and photographs had been a particular fear of the longshoremen, Wilborn said, because a judge had warned after earlier demonstrations in December that he would put protesters “under the jail” if photographs showed them “doing something wrong.” This likely was a factor in Charleston: “Labor Battle of the Twenty-first Century”

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longshoremen striking a television cameraman and Post and Courier photographer during the incident. Three news trucks were also damaged. Condon, who’d wanted the Confederate flag to continue flying above the Statehouse, was a “racist union-buster” who was only concerned with furthering his political career at the expense of the longshoremen, Riley said.31 Condon said the protesters should have taken their case to the South Carolina General Assembly rather than the streets. Yet it was Condon and other conservative pols who took their case to the General Assembly after they had worked the courts. By early February, Republicans in the state house had pushed through a bill to toughen South Carolina’s so-called right-to-work law, imposing fines and jail terms on violators, allowing plaintiffs to collect punitive damages, and sanctioning unannounced government visits of worksites—even when no complaint had been filed—to ensure compliance. The bill passed the house by an 83–32 vote. The Charleston incident wasn’t alone in inspiring the anti-union legislation. Labor unions had won six elections at companies across the state in 1999, the most labor victories in a decade, prompting the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce and others to call for a strengthening of the right-to-work law. The state chamber of commerce along with the South Carolina Manufacturing Association had been earlier successful in pressuring Democratic governor Jim Hodges—the state’s first Democrat in that office in twelve years, an office he attained with strong labor support—to back off his nomination of Ken Riley to the State Ports Authority Board. Republican lieutenant governor Bob Peeler, another gubernatorial hopeful, even introduced legislation—often dubbed the “Ken Riley Bill”—that would prevent a union member from serving on the SPA board. Riley eventually withdrew his name, and in his place Hodges nominated James M. Micali, president of Michelin North America Inc. Micali’s company was the port’s biggest customer, but this was seen as less problematic and less of a conflict of interest than having a union leader on the board. “Right to Work,” the politically loaded moniker Republicans and conservative Democrats apply to the provision in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 allowing states to prohibit the so-called closed shop and thus severely limit union activity, became as much an issue as the Charleston Five themselves. Nation writer JoAnn Wypijewski quoted a local black journalist as asking, “Why should the union prevent a brother from working for $8 to feed his family?” Wypijewski’s response was: “Why shouldn’t every worker be threatened with replacement by someone who will work for less until everyone is working for less and every job is a low-wage job? But he didn’t see it that way, and he is not alone. This is the colonizing power of ‘right to work’ ideology.” 184

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The real effect of a right-to-work- law is that it “intimidate(s) workers from organizing and . . . sow(s) division by allowing those in shops that have unions to reap the benefits of a contract but to opt out of paying dues,” Wypijewski continued.32 Martin Luther King Jr. once put it another way. “In the Right to Work law, there is no right to work and there is no work, and this is the fraud that we need to stop.”33 Over the next several months, debate over the January 20 incident escalated as state officials dug in their heels and support for the Charleston Five mobilized at the local, state, national, and international levels. By May, more than one hundred workers at the State Ports Authority had joined the ILA, complaining of low pay and workweeks of ninety to one hundred hours. SPA officials responded that their action was meaningless since state law prohibited public agencies from negotiating with unions, a position upheld by the South Carolina Supreme Court in a ruling that same month. On the hot, muggy afternoon of June 9, between 4,000 and 7,000 supporters of the Charleston Five rallied before the Statehouse in Columbia and near the listless Confederate flag that had once flown upon its dome, including national labor leaders AFL-CIO executive vice president Linda Chavez-Thompson, United Mine Workers president Cecil Roberts, and International Longshoremen’s Association President John Bowers. Korean and Swedish union leaders also came as well as civil rights leaders. “South Carolina has the mind of the Confederacy,” the NAACP regional director Nelson Rivers III told the crowd. “It is the home of the Confederacy, and Charlie Condon is a lieutenant in the Confederacy.”34 Ironically, Charleston Five supporters included state senator Glenn McConnell, Republican-Charleston, who operated a Confederate memorabilia shop in North Charleston and who was a leader in efforts to keep the Confederate flag flying above the Statehouse. “Here is a respected leader in this community, with a positive outlook and a track record of trying to make the port run more efficiently, and he was attacked in an anti-labor campaign by the big business in this state,” McConnell said about Ken Riley. “I have not the first regret about supporting him.”35 Local religious leaders also joined union members and politicians in organizing rallies and prayer vigils in support of the Charleston Five. A late January rally attended by an estimated four hundred people was an effort to offset the “negative press” given the ILA, said state senator Robert Ford, one of the organizers. The rally, which took place at the ILA headquarters on Morrison Drive, was also a protest against the ruling by circuit judge Daniel Martin that limited the number of persons who could picket at any one time. Southern Christian Leadership Conference local Charleston: “Labor Battle of the Twenty-first Century”

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president and Reverend Robert Woods put it this way: “We’re going to stand up for this because we believe it’s right.”36 When Ken Riley today thinks back about the Charleston Five, he knows this was the event that put him and the members of his local on the world map. They became players in the global economy. “It opened up the world,” he said in a December 1, 2005, interview. “I think the powers that be in the state thought we would just roll over. They didn’t know we were connected internationally, and now we are more connected than ever before.”37 Not only the “powers that be” were surprised at the extent of that connection. Ken Riley was, too. “We are very active in the community. I didn’t have a clue that that community would be the world.” Even as the ILA’s conservative national leadership was deciding how to position itself vis-à-vis its activist Charleston locals, the West Coast– based International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) was mobilizing support. Even today copies of the ILWU paper, the Dispatcher, are prominent in the offices and waiting rooms of the Charleston union hall. The Dispatcher became the lead labor organ in reporting on the Charleston Five. The West Coast international also was able to raise almost $150,000 in support of the five. “Any relationship that now exists [between the ILA and the ILWU] is by way of Charleston,” Riley said. “We had very little support from the ILA. No one jumped on board until it looked like we were going to be successful.” Not so the ILWU. “When the massive police force was sent in to bust heads and imprison workers like they used to do in the Old South, the ILWU was there immediately to say ‘No!’ And we moved quickly to rally other unions, union federations and civil rights and community groups to the cause,” wrote ILWU International President James Spinosa in an October 2005 editorial in the Dispatcher.38 The ILA and ILWU both represent longshoremen, but their differences are as deep and vast as the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The ILA, the dominant union for longshoremen along the East Coast and Gulf Coast, has historically been a conservative union that for the most part preferred backroom negotiations to strikes and confrontations. From 1927 to 1953, it was led by Joseph P. “The Waxer” Ryan, an autocratic labor powerhouse in New York City and across the state who was derisively labeled ILA “president for life” by crusading labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse. Ryan was known for cutting secret deals with shipowners and virulently attacking the ILWU leader Harry Bridges and other labor activists as communists. He also championed the antiquated, corruption-prone “shape-up” system of hiring. Famously depicted in the classic film On the 186

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Waterfront, workers in the “shape-up” gather each day in a line or a circle around a hiring boss, who decides who’ll get the so-called “brass check,” or the nod to work that could easily be withheld from those who cause trouble or buck the system. Ryan ultimately was kicked out of the ILA amid charges that he’d stolen union funds collected to support his anti-communist campaigns. The ILA itself became a haven for organized crime in New York City, with mobsters like Johnny “Cockeye” Dunn and Andrew “Squint” Sheridan on the payroll. A reform movement within the union led by Pete “Peter Pan” Panto in the late 1930s only resulted in Panto’s murder by “Murder Inc.” mobster Anthony Anastasia, the brother of Brooklyn ILA leader Albert Anastasia. The ILA was finally booted out of the AFL in 1953, an act that served as precursor to the noted ousting of the Teamsters in 1956. A joint commission in New York and New Jersey was established to monitor the docks and rid them of the discredited “shape-up” system of hiring. A reformed ILA rejoined the merged AFL-CIO in 1960. Under subsequent leaders such as Thomas W. “Terry” Gleason and the current leader, John Bowers, however, the union remained staunchly conservative and resistant to the kind of activism Local 1422 demonstrated in Charleston in 2000. Corruption and mob influence also remain major problems in the ILA, particularly with locals in New York and New Jersey. Efforts to breath new life into the union have included the Longshore Workers Coalition, co-chaired by Riley, which called for more democracy, accountability, and racial equality within the ILA decision-making process. The history of unionism along the docks of the West Coast has been radically different, thanks in large part to the dynamic labor leader Harry Bridges. An Australia-born merchant seaman, longshoremen, and onetime Wobbly who got his first taste of labor activism as a picketer during a maritime strike in New Orleans in 1921, Bridges was vilified in the press as a communist and hounded by the government throughout his long career, yet he persisted in making his union one of the nation’s strongest and best organized. Bridges broke with the nonmilitant, ever-compromising ILA leadership after the dramatic 1934 general strike along the West Coast. In 1937 he led his West Coast dockworkers into the CIO, itself a rebel from the conservative AFL, and subsequently formed the ILWU. He served as its president for forty years. With its motto of “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All,” the ILWU became the activist, militant counterpart to the staid, corruption-prone ILA, taking a lead role in refusing to load or unload vessels from Germany and other fascist countries during World War II and establishing solidarity with workers in other unions up and down the West Coast as well as in other countries. It reflected the character of its leader, Charleston: “Labor Battle of the Twenty-first Century”

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Harry Bridges, who became a symbol of integrity, courage, selflessness, and loyalty to the needs and rights of workers. Globalism has put pressure on longshoremen on both coasts and in ports around the world. Unionized dockworkers from Charleston to Europe to Australia have seen their jobs threatened as docks privatized and shipping companies flirted with nonunion labor in an effort to reduce costs. This has bred a truly international solidarity among the unions that was seen not only in Charleston in 2000 but also along the West Coast in October 2002 when ports were closed for ten days because of a major contract dispute between ILWU members and shipping management. Companies accused workers of an intentional slowdown, while longshoremen demanded a better contract that would help the unions adjust to new jobs-threatening technology. The dispute was eventually resolved with both sides claiming victory, but not before President Bush asked for a Taft-Hartley injunction to prohibit a strike for eighty days. Bush’s action came at the strong insistence of Wal-Mart, Toyota, Gap, and other members of the so-called West Coast Waterfront Coalition. At one point, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and Homeland Security head Tom Ridge threatened to bring in the U.S. Navy to operate the ports. “Historically, dockworkers have been the most willing of all labor groups to act in international solidarity,” wrote labor journalist David Moberg in his coverage of the dispute for In These Times magazine, “and they hold a strategically critical position at the heart of global production networks that are increasingly vulnerable to disruption.”39 The case against the Charleston Five eventually found its way into the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush as South Carolina attorney general Condon mentioned it in press releases and in a paid advertisement for the Republican candidate. However, Condon’s fiery rhetoric reached its nadir in a televised interview soon after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 9, 2001. “I’m not anti-union, but I’m against forcing people to join unions in order to get a job,” he said on the Channel 5 Talkback program. “And so this whole idea of ends justifying the means, as we know these terrorists that killed so many people, that’s exactly their argument.”40 As a result of this and other comments, attorneys for the Charleston Five filed motions asking that Condon be disqualified from the case. Charleston mayor Joseph P. Riley also asked the attorney general to back off the case, agreeing in essence with local police investigators that the felony charges were too harsh. Condon finally agreed in October 2001 to withdraw and turn the case over to a Dorchester County solicitor. “This appointment to you removes the focus from the person who is prosecuting the case and returns the focus to where it belongs—the true 188

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facts of the case,” Condon said in a letter to First Circuit solicitor Walter Bailey.41 Shortly before their trial was to take place in November 2001, the five defendants pleaded no contest to misdemeanor rioting charges. The criminal felony charges were dismissed and the case essentially ended, but not before the five had served eighteen months under house arrest, prohibiting them from leaving their homes between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. unless their work required it. “Without Condon, we wouldn’t have had this tremendous network of labor and civil rights groups,” Ken Riley told the media as he discussed a new “Thank You, Charlie Condon” campaign that would show how political demagoguery can ultimately implode upon itself.42 Within five months of the incident, Nordana Lines had agreed to resume working with the ILA longshoremen. The agreement came amid intense international pressure, including a refusal by dockworkers in Spain and elsewhere in Europe to load Nordana ships until a contract was negotiated with the ILA. “We didn’t have much success until the international community got involved,” Riley told In These Times magazine. “After that began to happen, we did not have to contact Nordana. They contacted us and wanted to sit down and talk.”43 D. Peters Wilborn Jr., the ILA attorney, said that the racial overtones of the incident, and that includes the legacies of slavery and segregation that still haunt Charleston and the South, resonated in the international community and added to the pressures on Nordana to cooperate with the ILA locals. “They saw all of this in their papers—black workers in the South and so on. It’s the reason Nordana backed down.”44 Today, Ken Riley is an international figure in the labor movement as a result of the events of January 2000. “We travel to Copenhagen, Finland, and so on,” Wilborn said. “We know who to call in Italy, Spain, Copenhagen” if there’s another problem. Condon’s political star began its descent after the Charleston incident. He ran for governor and the U.S. Senate, and he lost both races. Today he is a private attorney in Charleston. “He self-destructed at a lot of levels,” said Post and Courier reporter Bartelme.45 Ken Riley agreed. “This was selfdestructive for him, ruined him politically. This state prides itself on being a conservative state, but they can’t have fanaticism.”46 Governor Jim Hodges, who became South Carolina’s first Democratic governor in twelve years due in part to strong labor support, was defeated in his 2002 reelection bid by Republican Mark Sanford, a miserly foe of most government spending who was designated by Time magazine in 2005 as one of the worst governors in the United States. Under Sanford’s leadership, the state’s credit rating dropped, annual pay for workers declined, Charleston: “Labor Battle of the Twenty-first Century”

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and per-capita income remained among the nation’s lowest. As for the Charleston Five, they are still working the docks, just as they were doing prior to January 2000. D. Peters Wilborn Jr. talks with the restless energy of a labor activist and he confesses to a weakness for hyperbole, but he has the lawyer’s commitment to detail and facts. Boxes stuffed with press clippings and other documents from the Charleston Five case fill one corner of his law office on Calhoun Street near Charleston’s harbor and aquarium. Even though the case is several years old, Wilborn knows it remains current and important enough to keep the files within easy reach. In a November 21, 2005, interview, the labor attorney described the essence of the case: “The story of the Charleston Five is the story, not the event.”47 Leaning across the table to make his point, he explained. “The Charleston Five was a campaign by the labor movement that took on a lot of significance. It had to do not only with labor but with race. I’m not looking at Tony [Bartelme] and the Post and Courier. I’m looking at national and international media, . . . the labor media.” When “the story” went national, the ILWU and the AFL-CIO got involved, and eventually so did the ILA’s own leadership. Absolutely key to what both Wilborn and Riley see as Local 1442’s victory in the case was the international pressure that forced Nordana to back down and resume using unionized workers. The story ran on the AFL-CIO’s Web site, the ILWU publication the Dispatcher, the Black World Today, as well as in socialist and communist publications. Alternative and leftist magazines such as CounterPunch, Clamor, and the Nation ran articles. Clamor called the Charleston Five incident “the first major labor battle of the 21st century.”48 JoAnn Wypijewski’s piece, “Audacity on Trial: Talking Union Still Amounts to a Punishable Offense in Parts of the Old South,” in the August 6–13, 2001, edition of The Nation remains the best account of the event and its aftermath. Like legendary labor writer Mary Heaton Vorse traveling from Provincetown to cover the 1930s textile strikes in the Carolinas, Wypijewski brought a labor context and broad perspective that generally was missing in the Post and Courier accounts. “I have got admiration for Tony’s work,” Wilborn said about Post and Courier reporter Bartelme. “We don’t have a strong paper. It’s a very conservative paper. Tony is one of the best, one of their few high-quality writers. . . . The problem was that Tony was there.” Bartelme’s stories of the event—usually described as a “riot” or a “melee”—tended to focus on rock-throwing, beer-guzzling, angry longshoremen aggressively confronting a peace-keeping force of uniformed police officers. As an eyewitness who himself was shoved around by a longshoreman that night, Bartelme may have gotten too caught up in 190

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the fear and potential violence of the night to see the perspective of the protesters, Wilborn explained. A graduate of Northwestern University and fifteen-year veteran at the newspaper, the forty-two-year-old Bartelme acknowledged the emotions such an experience can produce. “There was no influence from editors pro or con” on how to cover the event, he said. “I was free to cover it as I saw fit. Any bias you detect is from me.”49 Perhaps inevitably missing in mainstream Southern newspapers is a sense of labor history and the long, bitter battles workers have had to wage when they organize. As “guys in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the Charleston Five entered a long, sad tradition in the U.S. labor movement. Their arrests, seemingly random and due mainly to the fact that they were identifiable in photographs, were eerily similar to the fate of the “Haymarket Eight,” the eight men convicted in the deadly bombing that took place during labor protests for the “eight hour (work) day” at Haymarket Square in Chicago in 1886. Only two of the eight were even present during the protests, and none were directly linked to the bomb that killed eleven people. Four of the eight were eventually hung, and a fifth committed suicide in jail. As with the Charleston Five, the Haymarket incident caused a global reaction. Workers in England, Holland, Russia, Italy, and Spain protested. Since six of the eight were German, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck placed a ban on public meetings. In the trial of the Haymarket Eight, the state attorney told the jurors that “these men . . . are no more guilty than the thousands who follow them.” However, he said, “convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and you save our institutions, our society.”50 Nowhere in the coverage of the Post and Courier is there a sense of this history. In the local press, only the Charleston City Paper even cited South Carolina’s own bloody labor history, such as the slaying of seven striking textile workers in Honea Path on September 6, 1934. “Union blocking is not a new hobby in South Carolina,” wrote Lorne M. Chambers in the August 17, 2001, edition of the Charleston City Paper, whose story, “Eye on the Five,” is one of the best accounts of the event. “In 1934, a half-million unsatisfied textile workers across the country walked off their jobs. In Honea Path, S.C., the owner of the local mill hired agents to quash the local demonstration. Seven unarmed protesters were shot dead. No one was ever prosecuted for the killings. Now, 76 years later, attitudes toward labor movements and collective bargaining are different . . . right?”51 The article goes on to describe how the award-winning 1995 documentary on the incident, The Uprising of ’34, was aired by PBS in fortynine states and the District of Columbia, but not in South Carolina until months after it was released. The film “was immediately followed by a Charleston: “Labor Battle of the Twenty-first Century”

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thirty-minute clip featuring local legislators talking about how things are different here now. But there are five men confined to their homes in Charleston who probably think differently.” As important as the past is in understanding the Charleston Five, Ken Riley believes the story of what happened in Charleston in January 2000 is even more significant because of what it says about the future of the South and the labor movement. Just as the Solidarity labor movement among shipyard workers in Poland laid the seed and subsequently led the way to major change in that country and in the rest of the communist world in the 1980s, the longshoremen of Charleston, and their counterparts in other parts of the nation, may have signaled great potential change twenty years later, Riley said. “If you’re not going to the South, you’re not going anywhere,” he said. “Look here in South Carolina. Daimler-Chrysler, Boeing, a ton of money is coming here. . . . I believe the answer to some of our problems in the movement is going to rest with those of us in the transportation industry. Truckers, dockworkers, the ILWU, the ILA. We all walk together, and I believe it will resonate. You can’t have trade without transportation.”52 Wilborn agreed. “Today the ILA, Teamsters, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are the only unions on the rise—delivering, moving products, serving. That’s because America doesn’t make anything any more. The global movement is the hot issue.”53

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Chapter 11

detroit south

James Fisher, his hair closely cropped, his blue Nissan work shirt clean and neatly pressed, his demeanor serious, stood at the podium in the meeting hall of the Canton United Methodist Church and surveyed the assembly before speaking. He was there to give his personal testimony—not about his religious faith, but about his job. “One of the first things they showed us when we came in was an antiunion video, people throwing rocks,” the twenty-four-year-old tooland-die worker at the company’s giant Canton, Mississippi, plant said at the January 2007 gathering. After three and a half years at Nissan, he said, the message hasn’t changed. “The unions are the devil from Detroit. That’s the way they look at it. They tell us, ‘We got a thousand applicants at the door waiting to replace you.’” The crowd of sixty or so workers, activists, and ministers had already been warmed up by two hours of labor preaching and testifying at the African American church. They punctuated every sentence or two with an “Amen!” and long nods of affirmation as Fisher talked about working in a unionized shop in Tupelo, Mississippi, before he came to Canton, the protection and security a union provides, the sharp contrast to a worksite like Nissan where no union exists. Before unions, “companies would work you twelve hours a day, seven days a week.” Today at Nissan, he said, management questions the validity of work injuries, and hires temporary workers to keep costs down. “They hire a lot of young people, a lot who don’t really look to the future. I do look to the future. I got a daughter crying on my knee, ‘When you coming home from work, daddy?’” He leaned into the podium to make the next point. “We need a voice, and this is how we’re going to get it.”1 I sat back in my metal chair several rows back and marveled at his courage. Even after getting fortified by an afternoon-long of sermonizing, Bible quoting, and gospel singing led by the Reverend J. Herbert Nelson and the Reverend Nelson Johnson of the 193

meeting’s co-sponsor, the Southern Faith, Labor, and Community Alliance, the man was brave to speak so openly while virtually in the shadow of Nissan’s $1.4 billion, 3.5 million-square-foot plant and its nearly six thousand employees. After all, this was a company run by the fiercely antiunion Carlos Ghosn, the Brazilian-born, French-educated “wunderkind” of modernday automaking who slashed twenty-five thousand jobs on his climb to the top, a man who personally intervened in a union election at Nissan’s Smyrna, Tennessee, plant to tell workers that a “yes” vote threatened not only the plant’s future but theirs as well. “Nissan’s got this big halo, this rainbow over them,” Fisher said about the company that cuts his checks. “It’s all on the outside. We have to fight tooth and nail on the inside. They can do what they want to on the inside. It’s always somebody trying to cut somebody’s throat.”2 When Yvette Taylor got her turn at the podium, each step to the front of the hall was slow and labored. Once she reached the microphone, her nervousness was visible. She struggled for words. “So many things happened that I just don’t know where to begin.” What followed was a tale of work-related injuries, missteps in treatment, disrespect, suspicion, and finally dismissal. When she started work at the plant in 2004, the mother of ten was excited to be once again in the workplace after twenty-one years of rearing children at home. “After all the children were grown and left, I went to work.” She injured her hands and knees, however, and soon found herself caught in a bureaucracy that shifted her back and forth between home, the workplace, and interviews with plant officials who questioned her background and history of previous injuries. “I got a letter in the mail saying I was terminated. . . . What I’m dealing with now is my right hand. I can barely lift it.”3 This was one of a series of meetings of workers and local community leaders organized by the SFLCA and the United Auto Workers (UAW), which had been laying the groundwork for a possible major organizing effort at the Canton plant since early 2005. I attended every one of them, and most of them were held in black churches, where the air was rich with the social teachings of Jesus, hand-clapping good music, and preaching that evoked the Martin Luther King Jr. of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike in 1968. An intimacy pervaded these meetings, as if the participants were underground revolutionaries. One heard the echo of the civil rights movement. Feeding those feelings was the presence of old-time movement warriors like Mississippi activists Hollis Watkins, Rims Barber, and even James Meredith—the black man whose enrollment at the allwhite University of Mississippi in 1962 launched a riot that killed two and wounded dozens. Like back in the day, meeting sites weren’t always 194

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easy to find. At least one had to be quickly rescheduled after the church minister for the original site abruptly announced he wanted nothing to do with a union. In December 2006, former workers from Nissan’s $3.5 billion, 6,500employee Smyrna, Tennessee, plant traveled to Jackson—just south of Canton—to warn their comrades in Mississippi to avoid the fate that befell them back home. One of them, fifty-nine-year-old Gail Corley of Manchester, Tennessee, told a gathering of 100 or more workers, union organizers, and ministers how thrilled she was in 1983 when she was hired to become part of the “family” at the Nissan plant just southeast of Nashville. “It was a dream come true,” she said. Tears welled up in her eyes as she described how the dream became a nightmare. “I had a line inspection job, crawling in and out of trucks. The many injuries I had were knee injuries, and they sent me to the hospital, sewed me up, and sent me back.” Doing the same work brought back the same injuries, until finally “they put me out. They said, ‘You’re 50. You can get a job and be a greeting lady at Wal-Mart.’” Her voice trembled as she recalled the grin on the face of the man who made that suggestion. “I’ve seen my nerves fall apart. They took away my self-esteem. They made me feel like I was nothing. I have a bulging disk. I can’t walk right. The quality of my life is gone.” At one time, Corley said, “I was antiunion. I no longer feel that way. You can’t speak for yourself. . . . They said ‘union comes in and you’re not going to have a job.’ They’re not going to shut that plant down. Too much money (invested) down here.”4 When I called Nissan to get a response to such statements, I was referred to company spokeswoman Vicki Smith in Smyrna. Her response was a generic statement of company policy. “We provide competitive wages and benefits along with a comprehensive shop-floor safety program. We have good employee relations at all our plants. Our policies, procedures, and programs are applied fairly to all.”5 James Fisher, Yvette Taylor, and Gail Corley are the underreported dark side of “Detroit South,” that amazing transformation of a South once dominated by cotton, tobacco, and textiles into a global center for automobile manufacturing. Finding their counterparts in history would require a trip back to early-twentieth-century Michigan, when Henry Ford built his first plants to manufacture what would become the ultimate symbol of American consumerism and economic might. Ford awed the nation when he announced in 1914 that he was going to more than double the prevailing wage and pay his workers an unheard-of five dollars a day—“On that day we first created a lot of customers,” he said about his decision.6 However, the fine print of the notoriously austere and union-busting Ford’s Detroit South

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plan included an expansion of his company-wide spy system to ferret out lax morals and any union-leaning disgruntlement with the mind-numbing, dehumanizing monotony of his assembly lines and the back-breaking “speedup” demands of his managers. Just as the real stories of those workers in Henry Ford’s first plants were rarely told by a press that fawned over the industrialist—the New York Evening Post gushed, for example, about Ford’s “magnificent act of generosity”—the personal testimonies of the Nissan workers from Smyrna and Canton created little interest in the mainstream media in Tennessee or Mississippi.7 “The newspapers and television treated Nissan like heroes,” said Tracy Reed, who worked at the Smyrna plant from 1992 until 2004, when workrelated injuries and six subsequent surgeries finally resulted in a letter of termination. “They glorified them.” This was a factor in the loss of union elections at Smyrna in 1989 and again in 2001, she said. “The community at Smyrna didn’t understand the need for a union. It’s not all sunshine and flowers.”8 The temptation to glorify major jobs creators in the jobs-hungry South is hard for news organizations to resist. Brett Clanton, a business reporter with the Montgomery Advertiser who covered the arrival of Hyundai as well as the impact of the Mercedes Benz and Honda plants in Alabama, conceded that he’s had a difficult time seeing the downsides to such important economic boosts to the region. “In a field where cows were grazing is now a two-million-square-foot auto plant,” he said at a conference on labor and the Southern press at the University of Mississippi in October 2003. “There’s a lot of growth, and it’s also a lot of good news, so I say it’s a good time to be covering the auto industry because everyone is excited to be talking about the auto industry right now. It’s not plant closings and it’s not layoffs. It’s growth. It’s adding jobs. People are happy to open up their books and say how much their wages are. It’s all good news.”9 Scott Waller, business editor of the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger and later vice president for governmental affairs at the Mississippi Economic Council, agreed. “As someone said, ‘Even mention the word Nissan and it’s like the elixir that fixes all our problems.’ . . . I currently live in Madison County (where the Canton plant is located) and watched as Nissan has come and begun to build, and all the supplier plants and other things that go along with it. We’ve had Japanese grocery stores, Japanese restaurants, Japanese schools. They’re doing a Japanese worship service in Jackson now. So I mean all the things that go along with Nissan—that has created a huge growth and development explosion in the county.”10 This is the story the headlines tell. 196

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After Nissan announced in November 2000 that it would accept what would ultimately become a record $363 million incentives package offered by the nation’s perennially poorest state to build its next plant in Canton, the Clarion-Ledger—Mississippi’s largest newspaper and the only publication with a statewide circulation—was ecstatic. Coverage the next day included a front-page, top-of-the-fold story with photographs of Governor Ronnie Musgrove and Nissan president Ghosn, five sidebars, plus editorial, editorial cartoon, and highlighted quotes such as Canton resident Landres Cheeks’s statement that “this is going to be the best thing that ever could have happened. It’s a blessing from God.”11 In the coming months and years, the newspaper offered continuous coverage, including online articles for a special Web site devoted to Nissan and special sections such as the forty-eight-page “Nissan Mississippi” section published two days before the plant’s opening on May 27, 2003. The section featured dozens of stories and color photographs, all resolutely upbeat except perhaps for the one headlined “Expect UAW to Try Organizing, Expert Says.” In her story on the UAW and Nissan-Canton, staff writer Nell Luter Floyd warned readers of “the threat of organized labor (that) will still be on the horizon” despite “salaries and benefits (that are) almost comparable to other companies in the automotive industry.”12 The article included quotes from two management professors and a Nissan official but none from a UAW representative. That same month of May 2003 Clarion-Ledger business editor Scott Waller wrote a glowing assessment in his business page column. “Nissan will have a tremendous ripple effect that will be felt for years to come. . . . Mississippi’s $363 million investment is already paying off.”13 The other foreign and domestic automakers that have built plants in the South since 1980 have been met with similar cheerleading in the region’s press. Article after article in Canton’s Montgomery Advertiser touted the economic advantages Hyundai was bringing to Alabama, whether from the many supplier companies setting up shop close to the plant or from the boost to the local housing market. Here are a few headlines: “Hyundai Expected to Drive Housing Market” (April 29, 2002); “Hyundai on a Roll Nationwide” (May 12, 2002); “Hyundai Sales up in Montgomery” (May 14, 2002); “Alex City to Get 400 Auto Jobs” (April 28, 2003); “Extras Bring Jobs to Towns” (April 28, 2003). Rarely has a discouraging word been heard in the Southern press in the rise of “Detroit South.” Even though German automaker MercedesBenz’s decision to locate in Vance, Alabama, in 1993 ultimately contributed to a disastrous fiscal crisis for the state, the Birmingham News largely set the tone for its Mercedes coverage with its September 28, 1993, editorial, Detroit South

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“Willkommen in Alabama!” This editorial came just prior to the company’s final decision. Two days later readers encountered this headline, “Mercedes Coming to Alabama ‘Better Than Ice Cream and Cracker Jack.” The next month, on October 10, 1993, the newspaper editorialized that “Mercedes Puts a Glow on Alabama.” The “glow” that came over Alabama came only after a fierce “war between the states”—using a description employed by hard-hitting Southern Exposure magazine—had been fought, pitting one state against one another to land the $300 million, 1,500-employee (later expanded to $1.1 billion and up to 4,000 employees) plant. Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama were among the top contenders. In fact, shortly before Mercedes-Benz made its announcement in September 1993, auto analysts were confidently predicting to newspaper reporters that North Carolina would win the bidding. Alabama’s $250 million incentives package won the contest, even though company president and CEO Helmut Werner insisted the package “looked alike from the contenders.”14 The cost to Alabama would reach far beyond what was promised to Mercedes-Benz. As reported in Southern Exposure magazine, the package included $118 million in land purchases, employee training, water and sewer improvements, and other subsidies, plus $55 million in tax breaks. More important, the state agreed to change its tax laws to allow Mercedes-Benz to offset its construction debt through tax credits and what amount employees would pay in personal income tax. By 1995, this last provision, subsequently known as the “Mercedes Law,” had led to eighty-six other companies filing for the same break since no tax law can be written specifically for one company. As a result, the state of Alabama eventually lost up to $3 billion in revenues to accommodate a company that only paid $65.8 million in state and local taxes. The tax break for Mercedes-Benz alone totaled $173 million. Labor unions and state educators cried out against the law, as did a grassroots, statewide community organization called Alabama Arise that argued subsidies should be used to help the state’s needy. A decade after Mercedes-Benz gave Alabama the nod, the state faced such a fiscal crisis in 2003 that its fiscally conservative Republican governor, Bob Riley, proposed the largest percentage tax increase—$1.2 billion—in the history of state government. Alabama voters rejected the proposal 67 to 33 percent in a statewide referendum. “In today’s economic environment, corporate loyalty seems all but extinct,” Pronita Gupta wrote in her essay on the “Mercedes Law” for Southern Exposure. “Using their ability to relocate as leverage, corporations have taken to playing states off each other to get subsidies and benefits 198

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in exchange for jobs. . . . The people of Alabama would be the ultimate losers.”15 Even as Alabama was making its bid for Mercedes-Benz, noted scholars such as the University of Tennessee historian James Cobb warned against the South’s penchant for selling itself cheap. “The Mercedes plant will be a plus to the state that wins it, but too often the benefits are overstated,” Cobb said.16 Yet, Alabama was soon back in the incentives-offering business. In May 1999, the state agreed to give Honda America $160 million in tax cuts to locate a new fifteen-hundred-employee plant east of Birmingham. The ultimate cult film of my youth was Thunder Road with actor Robert Mitchum, who not only played the leading role but also wrote the story and cowrote the theme song. The 1958 tale about a maladjusted Korean War combat veteran and his revenuer-evading 1957 Ford on the back roads between Harlan County, Kentucky, and Memphis, Tennessee, was de rigueur watching for every teenage boy in my hometown of Sanford, North Carolina, in the early 1960s. Whether up-and-coming shade tree mechanic or hopeless incompetent under the hood like this author, we all watched it. I knew some who claimed to have seen the film a dozen times. Thunder Road was a paean to the automobile and to the rebellion and freedom that it represented. Mitchum’s revved-up, souped-up Ford was his weapon against the Memphis gangsters cutting in on his turf and the federal agents who ultimately brought him down. The automobile has been important in many films about the South and the border South—from The Grapes of Wrath to The Reivers to Smokey and the Bandit—but Thunder Road resonated especially deeply with audiences that looked to stockcar drivers Herb Thomas, Junior Johnson, and Fireball Roberts as their folk heroes and cultural icons. The Joads escaped to California. Smokey was more comic book than real-life hero. Robert Mitchum’s Luke Doolin, however, was cut from the same cloth as the shade tree mechanics I knew. Furthermore, he carried that James Dean–like air of impending doom about him that was so seductive to young pre-Sunbelt Southerners. In fact, the movie ends with Luke’s inevitable demise, his younger brother and the girl who loved him consoling one another as distant headlights from a funeral procession of cars slowly cross the dark Kentucky valley. Thunder was his engine And white lightnin’ was his load ... The law they swore they’d get him But the devil got him first.17

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I think about those Thunder Road fans who sat hour after hour in the old Temple Theatre in Sanford, imagining themselves Luke Doolin, taking their fantasy out later that evening to some rural drag strip where they would race their Fords and Chevys while their girlfriends cheered them on. Most of them likely went on to work at one of the many textile plants in town, but I’ll bet they kept their tool boxes and still did their own car repair work—that is, until the Fords and Chevys either became too computerized to fix or were traded in for Hondas and Toyotas. Writers from Karl Marx to Stanley Aronowitz have probed the human impulse that drives people to look for a sense of completion in what they do with their hands, people like my school friends who would spend nearly all their spare time breaking down and building up car engines only to run them down again at the local track. The impulse could never be satisfied at the textile mill, a Fordist world of assembly line production where speed and efficiency are hailed as the ultimate values. Here, Marx would say, is where the worker inevitably experiences alienation, where he can never satisfy his very human need of self-realization, because the assembly line—whether in a textile mill or an automobile factory—fragments work in such a way that the worker can never really connect with the finished product. Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film, Modern Times, inspired by Ford’s Model-T plant in Highland Park, Michigan, vividly depicts the maddening, sped-up-conveyor-belt alienation of modern manufacturing. General Motors worker Gary Bryner in Lordstown, Ohio, talked about it when he was interviewed by Chicago journalist and author Studs Terkel in 1972. Management’s “idea is to cut costs, be more efficient, take the waste out of working, and all that kind of jazz. . . . They use time, stopwatches. They say it takes so many seconds or hundreds of seconds to walk from here to there. We know it takes so many seconds to shoot a screw. . . . We perspire, we sweat, we have hangovers, we have upset stomachs, we have feelings and emotions, and we’re not about to be placed in a category of a machine.” On the assembly line, he said, “workers are the lowest on the totem pole when it comes to job fulfillment. They don’t think they have any skill. Some corporate guy said, ‘A monkey could do the job.’ They have no enthusiasm about pride in workmanship. They could care less if the screw goes in the wrong place. Sometimes it helps break the monotony if the screw strips. . . . If the guys didn’t stand up and fight, they’d become robots too.”18 Under the shade tree, amateur mechanics are able to reconnect with what their hands are able to achieve. “Tens of thousands of young people have become ‘car freaks,’” Stanley Aronowitz wrote in 1973. “The automobile is invested with much more than reified status or power. It has 200

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become a vital means for the realization of the frustrated need to make a direct link with the totality of material production for youth who are condemned to either the fragmented labor of the factory or the office or the truncated learning of the school.”19 Today, most of the textile mills that once hired the non-collegebound youth in my hometown are gone. To a degree, the automobile and related industries are taking the role that textiles once had in much of the South. Maybe some of those “car freaks” I knew in North Carolina are now working at places like Freightliner, the commercial vehiclemanufacturing Daimler-Chrysler subsidiary that now has four locations and thousands of workers in the Tar Heel state. If so, they’re among a select group of workers in “Detroit South” who also belong to a union. Freightliner workers in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia opted to join the UAW in a “card check” election in 2003 and 2004 that the UAW called “the largest successful organizing drive by manufacturing workers during the past decade by any union, anywhere in the United States.”20 In card check elections, workers simply indicate on a card whether they want to join a union, avoiding the brutal divisiveness that often accompanied old-style union campaigns. The UAW’s jubilation is understandable considering the fact that the economic leaders of “Detroit South” are just as antiunion as those of the old textiles-dominated South. The automobile industry came primarily for the same reason as the once New England–based textile industry came a century before, the same reason that drove the “runaway plant” movement of the 1950s, and that subsequently contributed to the “Rustbelt” decline in the industrial North and Midwest over the next thirty years. Although some of the domestic-owned operations like the GM Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, are unionized, none of the foreign-owned automaking plants in the South are. An early warning of what lay ahead for workers in the North and Midwest came in 1954 when thousands of Studebaker employees in the Midwest were forced to swallow 14 percent cuts in their wages if they didn’t want their plant to move South. As the Sunbelt rose to its apex in the spring of 1980, General Motors told the city of Detroit that it was shutting down its Cadillac and Fisher body plants and threatened to build a new, six-thousand-employee plant somewhere down South unless the city came up with a better plan. The city, already desperate for jobs, coughed up a $200 million incentives package and agreed to the destruction of the ethnic neighborhood known as “Poletown,” displacing thousands of Polish-American residents, to clear way for the new plant. Even after “Detroit South” had become a reality, automakers were still pitting the unionized North against the largely nonunionized South. Detroit South

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In 1991, General Motors announced a Wall Street–driven cost-savings initiative that would force it to shut down either the historic Willow Run plant near Detroit or its plant in Arlington, Texas. Once owned by Ford, the Willow Run plant commanded a special place in U.S. industrial history. In 1940 it helped the pending war effort by transforming into a bomber plant, employing up to 42,000 workers—making it the largest assembly plant in the world—and giving the nation its most enduring symbol of both can-do American workmanship and American womanhood during World War II, Rose Will Monroe, the Kentucky-bred widow and mother who became the model for “Rosie the Riveter.” She was one of many Southerners working at Willow Run and other plants in the North and Midwest. After a lengthy tug-of-war that even became an issue in the 1992 presidential race, GM decided to shut Willow Run down and keep the Arlington plant open. As Christopher R. Martin detailed in his 2004 book Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media, unions and wages were at the heart of the decision although the national and Texas media treated it as the inevitable outcome of the modern-day global economy. The Houston Chronicle crowed about the Texas victory. “Much of the credit must go to the quality and cooperative spirit of the Texas work force.”21 Although the press claimed objectivity, it promoted a corporate worldview, Martin said. “The news endorsed worker concessions, layoffs, mass firings, human-replacing technology, and capital mobility as the key to sustaining corporate profitability and economic health. By doing so, the news media failed to acknowledge that corporate strategies are choices, not inevitabilities. Corporations make a choice when they favor shortterm profits over long-term gains; they make a choice when they hold stockholder interests far above community interests; they make a choice when they treat workers as flexible expenses instead of investments.”22 For all the massive incentives packages offered automakers, the bottom line for the southward shift of the industry is obvious, said Clarion-Ledger business writer Jack Mazurak. “Why the South? In a word: unions.”23 Yet if the U.S. labor movement is to survive, it will also need a Southward shift. “The South drags down national standards in working conditions and wages,” Ian Urbina wrote in a March 2002 article for In These Times magazine, words that might have also been written in 1880, 1900, 1927, and 1950. “Northern victories in organizing, job security, livable wages or improved labor laws can only be temporary with the entrance to a Third World free-trade zone at the Mason-Dixon line.”24 The automobile industry has had some presence in the South at least since Nashville’s Marathon Motor Works produced its first “horseless carriage” in 1906. The UAW sit-down strike at GM’s Lakewood plant in 202

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Atlanta in November 1936 became the first shot fired in the historic allout “Battle of the Running Bulls” that would take place in Flint, Michigan, in early 1937. This, in turn, would lead to the emergence of the then-still-fledgling UAW as arguably the nation’s premier union and the UAW’s Walter Reuther as labor hero in the “Battle of the Overpass” at Ford’s River Rouge plant. In that battle, Reuther and other union leaders were physically beaten—as the press cameras rolled—by goons under the leadership of Ford’s top antiunion commandant, Harry Bennett. However, the first real seeds planted toward the blossoming of “Detroit South” came in 1980 when Nissan accepted a $44 million incentives package from the state of Tennessee to locate a four-thousand-employee plant in Smyrna. Four years later, another Japanese firm, Mazda, eyed the GreenvilleSpartanburg area in South Carolina as a potential site for a new auto plant, but the area’s largest employer, textile baron Eugene Stone, told Mazda officials the company wasn’t welcome. The reason? He and other local leaders feared the firm’s presence might force an overall increase in local wages and open the door to an invasion by the UAW. When Mazda decided to locate the plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, the local Greenville News ran a story with the headline “Saved from Mazda.”25 “Detroit South” wouldn’t be stopped, however. In 1988, Toyota began production at its Georgetown, Kentucky, plant, a prize that cost the state $150 million in incentives but which ultimately provided in return seven thousand jobs. The 7.5-million-square-foot plant is the company’s largest plant that’s not on Japanese soil. The GM Saturn plant came to Tennessee two years later. By 1994, Tennessee ranked only behind Michigan and Ohio in the nation in the production of passenger cars. In the early 1990s, German automakers joined their Japanese counterparts in putting their stamp on “Detroit South.” In 1992, BMW located a fifteen-hundred-employee plant in the same Greenville-Spartanburg area that had rejected Mazda six years earlier. This time South Carolina paid $150 million in incentives to land the firm. The next year brought Mercedes-Benz to Alabama. Other plants followed, such as Japan’s Honda in Lincoln, Alabama, and South Korea’s Hyundai in Montgomery, Alabama. In early 2007, Toyota announced it would build a $1.3 billion, fourthousand-worker plant near Tupelo, Mississippi. The price to the state in incentives was $356 million. The growth and benefits from these investments cannot be denied. In Scott County, Kentucky, Toyota’s Georgetown plant contributed to an 11 percent growth in population between 2000 and 2003, with a projected growth of another 47 percent by 2020. The county has boasted one of the lowest unemployment rates in the state, and its 2005 median family income of $49,000 ranked one of the state’s highest. When Mississippi’s Detroit South

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Clarion-Ledger posed the question “Is State’s Investment in Nissan Paying Off?” in its November 21, 2003, edition, the overwhelming answer from those interviewed in the story was “Yes”—from flower shop owner Debra Bowen Jensen, who said her profits were up 20 and 30 percent, to pizza deliverers who talked about the bulk orders of ten to fifteen pizzas they get from Nissan workers.26 Yet the testimonies of Nissan workers James Fisher, Yvette Taylor, and Gail Corley indicate all is not necessarily sunny on the horizons of “Detroit South.” What other costs are being incurred as the region continues to roll out the welcome mat—perhaps the Persian rug would be a better metaphor—for these primarily foreign-owned companies that have come in large part because of low wages and the same supposedly docile workforce that attracted textile companies a century ago? At the same time Mississippi was pledging $356 million to land the Toyota plant in Tupelo, its state legislature failed to fund a burn center for the state, forcing burn victims to continue to be transported to Memphis and other outlying areas for treatment. The legislature also rejected a bill that would have lowered Mississippi’s regressive sales tax on food, at 7 percent the highest in the nation and particularly punitive in a state that also has the nation’s lowest per capita income. Toyota, on the other hand, is a company that projected $12.9 billion in profits from $193 billion in sales in the year it agreed to locate in Mississippi. As the new fiscal year began, the Japanese firm threatened to overtake General Motors and Ford as the top automaker in the United States. Still, the March 1, 2007, edition, of the Clarion-Ledger featured a front-page story that concluded Mississippi’s $719 million in combined incentives to Toyota and Nissan “may be a bargain.”27 National syndicated columnist Neal Pierce is not so sure. “The profound and continuing irony is that while the states spend billions on tax incentives of dubious merit, they are struggling to pay bills for the very services that will strengthen them, and indeed all of America’s business, for the long haul—education, libraries, public safety, quality water systems, roads, transit systems, parks, and more. Meanwhile, some corporations are apparently laughing all the way to the bank.”28 Over the “long haul,” the question remains as to whether the giant automakers will someday do like the textile industry and move to Asia or Eastern Europe, where the workers are even cheaper and the markets are growing. Shutting down plants is how Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn rose to the top of his trade, as a top executive with Renault in France and of Nissan after Renault became a major stockholder in the Japanese firm. Eventually president and CEO of both firms, Ghosn slashed jobs and shut down plants in both countries. 204

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Former Nissan-Smyrna worker Gail Corley’s prediction to her colleagues in Canton that “they’re not going to shut that plant down” might sound hollow to the Renault workers who lost their jobs after the man known in France as “le cost killer” shut down their plant in 1996. The same would be true for the more than twenty thousand workers whom Ghosn trimmed from Nissan’s ranks within three years of taking over in 1999. “Too well do many Southerners recall the case of the textile industry, which carried southern industrialization in earlier decades but eventually moved on to overseas locations with even lower wages,” market research analyst Karsten Hülsemann wrote in a 2001 essay, “Greenfields in the Heart of Dixie.”29 Automobile plants are more difficult to move than textile mills— textile manufacturers “could (and did) shut down their operations literally overnight”—because the “several hundred million dollars of investment in machinery” needed to manufacture automobiles make them less mobile, Hülsemann said.30 Still, workers at GM’s Willow Run undoubtedly felt their plant would outlive them all. So did the thirty-seven thousand workers who once punched their cards at Renault’s historic BoulogneBillancourt plant near Paris. This complex of seventeen factories, the scene of some of the most dramatic action in the worker-student revolt of 1968, was once the symbol of French industrialism. At least a million workers passed through its gates over the years. Boulogne-Billancourt, once known as “the workers’ fortress,” shut down in 1992, although the Paris suburb remains the site of Renault’s headquarters. To his admirers and detractors, Carlos Ghosn is the embodiment of modern global capitalism. Born to Lebanese parents in Brazil in 1954, he is a French citizen, a British knight, and the inspiration for a Japanese comic-book hero. He speaks French, English, Portuguese, and Arabic. With his black hair, prominent black eyebrows, olive complexion, and dark, pinstriped suits, Ghosn is also what Business Week has called “the auto industry’s rock star.”31 As chief executive of both Nissan and Renault, Ghosn is a mediasavvy micro-manager who even chooses the music that will play when he goes on stage to appear before workers or shareholders. What the automaker drives when he gets behind the wheel depends on where he is. He prefers a convertible Nissan Z in Japan, a Vel Satis or Modus in France, and a QX56 in the United States.32 Back at the office, he favors frill-less, Spartan-like décor. As the Wall Street Journal writer Monica Langley wrote in a compelling profile in October 2006, “an air of formality permeates the offices of both companies (Nissan and Renault). Everyone from senior executives to his driver calls him Mr. Ghosn—never Carlos. His top advisers have never been to his home.”33 Detroit South

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The workaholic father of four children says he still finds time to shop with his family, and lunch on Saturday is strictly reserved for his wife, Rita. Despite the glowing smiles that he exhibits in his public appearances with plant workers, he is strictly business in his daily dealings, a no-nonsense, straight-to-the-point executive who lets business associates know that their time is limited when they meet with him. The Japanese even nicknamed him “7–11” because of the round-the-clock schedule he seems to maintain. For his efforts, he gets paid an estimated $4 millionplus a year (a figure that likely does not include stock options and other income factors). Ghosn’s speaking style reflects his personality. He edits his speeches to make sure he makes his points quickly and clearly. Langley described one editing session in which Ghosn “slashed adverbs and adjectives, reducing sentences to match his blunt style: subject, verb, object.” The speech was replete with numbers because “numbers are a universal language.”34 The globe-trotting Ghosn got his North American start with the French firm Michelin, which hired him a few years after his graduation from the École Polytechnique in Paris in 1974. In 1989 the tire maker sent him to Greenville, South Carolina, to oversee its North American division. Based in Clermont-Ferrand in central France, Michelin long had a reputation as a firm unfriendly to unions. In their work on the 1968 student-worker riots in France, Red Flag, Black Flag, writers Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville cite the “positively medieval conditions” inside many French factories at the time. “Companies like Michelin used to boast that they had talked to strikers only three times in thirty years.”35 A year after Ghosn arrived in Greenville, Michelin doubled its North American holdings by acquiring Uniroyal-Goodrich. Ghosn earned major credits for his merging of the very different cultures of the two firms, but the division preserved the firm’s antiunion reputation under his leadership. An example of this can be seen in the fact that Michelin played a role in preventing the pro-union documentary Uprising of ’34 from being shown in a classroom at Spartanburg Technical College in 1995. The film dealt with the killing of seven striking textile workers in nearby Honea Path, South Carolina, in 1934. “The arrival of Michelin in the United States was devastating to the union,” said labor writer Stephen Franklin in his book, Three Strikes, referring to the United Rubber Workers. “Not only did the French company set up nonunion operations, but it ran its facilities around the clock, seven days a week. The 24-hour tire factory was a reality that the union had staved off.”36 In 1996, Ghosn moved to Paris to become second-in-command of Renault, a company that suffered an estimated $1 billion in losses that 206

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year. He quickly earned his reputation as “le cost killer”—a compliment on the lips of Renault shareholders, an insult when shouted by protesting workers—by cutting jobs, closing a factory, and saving the company an estimated $3.6 billion. Renault was able to report a profit again in 1997. Two years later, in 1999, Ghosn was rewarded for his efforts with the post of chief operating officer with Nissan, Renault’s struggling new partner in Japan. He would eventually become the president and CEO of Nissan, a company entrenched in Japanese traditions such as the “keiretsu” system of maintaining long-term partnership relationships with suppliers. With Nissan reporting a $6.2 billion loss in 2000, Ghosn called for draconian measures—breaking keiretsu deals with suppliers, shutting down five plants, and slashing more than twenty thousand jobs. In fiscal year 2001, Nissan reported a record net income of $2.98 billion. It was this “turnaround” that made Ghosn a superstar in the industry. The accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers and The Financial Times pronounced Nissan the “best turnaround” anywhere in the world. Ghosn won designation as one of the globe’s top respected businessmen, ranking behind only Bill Gates of Microsoft and John F. Welch Jr. of General Electric.37 Fortune magazine named him Asia’s businessman of the year for 2002. A comic book was launched in Japan titled “The True Life of Carlos Ghosn.” “It is true that Detroit has seen its share of phoenixes rising from the ashes,” Joseph B. White wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Even so, Nissan’s resurgence merits study: there are few to match it.”38 Of all the praise that went to Ghosn, none was more lavish than that from his biographer, David Magee, a former newspaper editor based in Oxford, Mississippi, and author of Turnaround: How Carlos Ghosn Rescued Nissan. Ghosn is a “man who raises the bar after every step is made and sees the world as a place limited only by the perceptions and preconceived notions of others,” Magee wrote. “This vision of greatness is why Ghosn keeps pushing Nissan and its people to higher ground despite record achievements along the way.”39 Ghosn’s vision would lead Nissan to locate a $1.4 billion plant in Canton, Mississippi, and to move the company’s North American headquarters from California to Nashville, Tennessee, in 2006. The automobile industry’s “rock star” later would relinquish his duties as head of Nissan’s North American operations in order to focus on overall strategy for both Nissan and Renault. Throughout it all, however, he has made clear that his vision does not include a role for organized labor. At no time was this clearer than when a union election was held at Nissan’s Smyrna plant in 2001. On the day before the election, Ghosn appeared in a video that was required viewing for workers. “Bringing a union into Smyrna could result in making Detroit South

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Smyrna not competitive, which is not in your best interest or Nissan’s,” he warned them.40 They listened, and they rejected the union. A much different vision was once offered by another major figure in the automobile industry, Walter Reuther, the West Virginia–born son of German immigrants who moved to Detroit in 1927 at the age of twenty and worked as a tool-and-die maker with Briggs Manufacturing and Ford. After getting fired by Ford for unionizing, he would spend three years—his Wanderjahre—with his brother Victor traveling through Europe, Asia, and the “Workers’ Paradise” of the Soviet Union, where he learned Russian, worked in an automobile factory, and gained invaluable experience that would contribute to making the onetime socialist an ardent anticommunist later in his career. A frugal, talkative, teetotaling, nonsmoking ascetic who loved to fish in his spare time, Reuther would go on to become a legendary union leader, president of the UAW and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, described by labor writer and author Stephen Franklin as “a man of sweeping social visions (who) preached a philosophy that put the union in the heart of politics and the community.”41 Reuther’s oratory would stand today in sharp contrast to Carlos Ghosn’s blunt “subject, verb, object” speaking style and perhaps even to most other labor leaders. “Compared to the flat prose of my union’s tired old men, Reuther’s rhetoric sounded like poetry,” writer and sociologist Stanley Aronowitz once wrote.42 Here are a couple examples of Reuther’s vision and “poetry.” “If we can have full production in the time of war, why can’t we have a job for every American in the pursuit of peace,” Reuther said on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington, “fair employment within the framework of full employment, so every American can have a job?”43 Reuther was a civil rights leader as well as a labor leader. “When (police commissioner) Bull Connor is destroying freedom in Birmingham, he is destroying my freedom in Detroit,” Reuther said.44 Here is Reuther on his vision of labor. “The kind of labor movement we want is not committed to a nickel-in-the-pay-envelope philosophy. We are building a labor movement not to patch up the old world so men can starve less often and less frequently, but a labor movement that will remake the world so that the working people will get the benefit of their labor.”45 Reuther died in a tragic plane crash in 1970. He was only 62. Some, like nationally syndicated columnist George Will, would say the labor movement died with him. “The heroic era of organized labor is long gone,” the conservative Will wrote in an August 2005 column that detailed, among other things, Reuther’s role in the “Battle of the Overpass” as well as the sharp decline in union membership across the country—from 24 percent 208

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of the workforce in 1973 to 12.5 percent in 2005.46 The UAW saw its membership drop from over 700,000 at the beginning of the new century to around 610,000 by 2005. However, the current leadership at the UAW sees Reuther’s vision as very much alive in the union’s efforts to organize Nissan in Canton, Mississippi, and elsewhere in the South. “We’re glad Nissan is here,” the UAW president Ron Gettelfinger said when he came to Mississippi in February 2005 for one of the first of the series of meetings that culminated in the testimonies of Fisher, Taylor, Corley, and other workers. “We’re going to make them a better company by helping the workers. . . . We do not want to see Nissan fail. We want them to prosper, to grow. We want to share in the fruits.” Ultimately, Gettelfinger said, “it’s not about profits. It’s about people.”47 “This is the battleground of labor,” said Gary Casteel, the UAW regional director for the South, at that same gathering of labor organizers and community leaders. “We are an organization of social consciousness. Like Walter Reuther, we see this as a social movement.”48 Another participant in the series of meetings UAW co-hosted in Mississippi offered perhaps the best description of what the union envisions in “Detroit South.” This was Father Jeremy R. Tobin, a Jackson-area Catholic priest in the grand tradition of his church that includes the French “worker-priests” of the 1940s and 1950s and labor priests in the United States like Monsignor George G. Higgins, Father Charles Owen Rice of Pittsburgh, and Father Martin Mangan of Decatur, Illinois. “What we need is action,” Father Tobin said. “We can make the South a beacon, a light of justice. An auto plant can be an oasis of justice.”49

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Chapter 12

immigrants from a deeper south

When Mexican artist Diego Rivera traveled to the great metropolis of New York City during the Great Depression, he was both “amazed and appalled” at the shantytowns, breadlines, starvation, and suicides that he found to be endemic to a city that was for non-natives like him the very symbol of the United States. As New York journalist Pete Hamill wrote in his book on Rivera in 1999, the heavy-set, cigar-chomping, “‘big-jowled paisano’” and world-famous muralist proceeded to paint his conflicting views in one of his most compelling works, Frozen Assets. The painting is a haunting depiction of the American metropolis as a place of towering, overwhelming wealth and power built atop the countless, faceless legions of its anonymous workers.1 “At the top loomed skyscrapers like mausoleums reaching up into the cold night,” Rivera once said about his painting. “Underneath them people were going home, miserably crushed together in the subway trains. In the center was a wharf used by the homeless unemployed as their dormitory, with a muscular cop standing guard. In the lower part of the panel, I showed another side of this society: a steel-grilled deposit vault in which a lady was depositing her jewels while other persons waited their turn to enter the sanctum.”2 In 1930s New York, many of those people “miserably crushed together” were likely immigrants or the children of the earlier great waves of immigrants from Ireland or Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, the ones escaping the barren farms, ghettoes, and pogroms of their motherland to accept the beckoning of poet Emma Lazarus inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.3

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Many of those earlier generations of immigrants brought with them radical, sometimes even socialist, ideas about the relationship between work and capital. With names like Dubinsky, Potovksy, Hill, Hillman, Reuther, Frankensteen, and Zaritsky, they and their counterparts elsewhere in the country would play a great role in expanding the U.S. labor movement and its challenge to capital’s otherwise unfettered dominance. A new generation of immigrants is now landing on America’s shores, and many of them come from Diego Rivera’s homeland. Most are just as tired and poor as those Emma Lazarus had in mind. They’ve come to work, to send money to their families back home, perhaps, too, to establish themselves for good in a new homeland. Unlike those “huddled masses” Rivera saw at the base of the skyscraper canyons of New York, many in this new generation of immigrants are coming to the U.S. South, a region whose own backwater poverty so long stood in great contrast to the rest of the nation. This is a region that has known sprinklings of immigrants—the Chinese and Italians of the Mississippi Delta, the Cubans in Tampa and Miami—but never a wave of this proportion in its modern history. These immigrants come from a land where revolutionaries Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were heroes of the people, where the great populist murals of Rivera, David Álfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco are national treasures. Even in the United States, they can point to César Chávez, the legendary founder of the United Farm Workers union, as one of their own. They are part of yet another “new” South that finally may never again be able to divide itself solely according to a racial fault line of black and white. Their voices are being increasingly heard, although the press has yet to see them as fully incorporated into society. When tens of thousands of immigrants in the South and around the country marched and chanted, “¡Si Se puede!” (“Yes! We can!”) during “National Day of Action for Immigration Justice” on April 10, 2006, the nation listened— even if just briefly. Victories gained by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) in North Carolina and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Florida are part of a nationwide movimiento in which these new immigrants are taking a stand for their rights. Still, on a day-to-day basis, they remain largely invisible even though they’ve been arriving in large numbers for more than a decade. Night had descended outside, blanketing the corner of Martin Luther King and Main with a gloomy darkness. East Biloxi’s unlit streets were a lingering legacy of Hurricane Katrina. But the lights were burning inside the offices of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance (MIRA), and the sounds of Latino voices filled the air, a half-dozen varieties of accented Spanish—Mexican, Cuban, Guatemalan, Salvadoran, Honduran, Peruvian. Immigrants from a Deeper South

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Holding court was Victoria Cintra, the MIRA coordinator whose job description should have read: Lifeline for immigrant workers along the Gulf Coast with nowhere else to turn. On the night that I visited—July 31, 2006—she heard case after case of workers getting ripped off by employers, assaults along dark streets on payday, slumlords who evict without notice or reason, boyfriends in trouble with the law, door-to-door salesmen selling snake oil. “I didn’t get paid for my work,” complained a Mexican roof worker. “He owes me three hundred dollars.” “You have to keep a daily record of when you worked, how many hours, when you were paid,” Cintra told him. “Without this, you have no record at all.” A woman, also Mexican, told of a man who claimed to be a telephone company representative and cheated her of one hundred dollars for a phony phone service plan. Cintra promised to contact the telephone company. “We do all of it,” she told me. “Our main goal is not to provide social services, but what do you do? There’s no other place to go to.”4 I listened to the hours of testimony, struggling to make my rudimentary Spanish step up to the challenge, and I recalled what we’re taught as youngsters in the South, a lesson too easily forgotten: “I was a stranger, and ye took me in. . . . Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” These Latino workers certainly fit the bill as “the least of these,” doing all the dead-end jobs most others reject, including the dirty work of rebuilding the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast. They worked those jobs in hazardous conditions, often with unscrupulous employers; then they returned home to slum-like conditions, ever mindful along the way of the thugs who know they don’t use banks and thus carry their cash on them. They worked in a world that completely changed on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck with such a horrendous force that it displaced 1.2 million residents, killing more than 1,400 and leaving thousands of others missing. Estimated property damages totaled upwards of $200 billion over an area covering 90,000 square miles. Great swaths of the Mississippi Gulf Coast—including entire towns like Waveland and Pass Christian—were essentially destroyed. Subsequent flooding put 80 percent of the city of New Orleans under water—twenty feet of water in some sections—and destroying 46 percent of the homes in the greater New Orleans metropolitan area. Neighborhoods like the predominantly African-American Lower Ninth Ward were turned into ghost towns. The city’s population dropped from nearly a half million to less than 200,000. 212

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The Gulf Coast and New Orleans were always an ethnically rich area—from the Slovenian, Italian, and Vietnamese communities in Mobile, Biloxi, Gulfport, and Bay Saint Louis to the ethnic gumbo that was always New Orleans. With Hurricane Katrina, Spanish became the mother tongue spoken in work camps throughout the region. Within the first year after Katrina struck, some 100,000 Latinos moved to the Gulf Coast looking for jobs in the reconstruction effort. The Latino population of New Orleans jumped from 3 percent to 20 percent of all residents. One in four construction workers in New Orleans in August 2006 was an undocumented worker, and 28 percent of them reported having problems getting paid for their work. In Mississippi, complaints by MIRA to the U.S. Labor Department succeeded in restoring $700,000 in back pay to immigrant workers by the end of 2006. This included $141,000 from Halliburton/KBR, the firm once led by Vice President Dick Cheney and which grew rich winning huge, no-bid contracts from the Bush-Cheney government. Halliburton and other firms working in the region got a major boost from the Bush administration just days after the storm when the president temporarily suspended Davis-Bacon Act requirements that employers in the area pay prevailing wages, making it easier for them to hire immigrant workers at the lowest possible wage. In Cintra’s estimate, as much as 80 percent of Mississippi’s immigrant workers are undocumented, and this includes not only those at the construction sites but also those in the poultry plants upstate and in the Gulf Coast’s numerous casinos as well as at the construction sites. “Working in a chicken plant ten or twelve hours a day deboning chickens is not exactly my idea of a career,” she said. “It is hard work, very hard work. Down here, people hadn’t come back after the storm, so it was the immigrant community, laborers. If it weren’t for them, this would probably look just like Katrina had just hit.”5 Yet at the same time Latino workers were busy rebuilding the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, a chorus of politicians, television pundits, radio talk-show hosts, and others were blaming them and other immigrant, and especially undocumented, workers for the nation’s problems. From CNN’s Lou Dobbs to Mississippi legislator Mike Lott to New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, they kept a running drumbeat on the ills of immigration, giving legitimacy to vigilante-like groups such as the so-called Minuteman Civil Defense Corps that want to barricade the border between the United States and Mexico. In fact, President Bush, acting on that sentiment as well as the will of Congress, authorized the construction of a seven-hundred-mile, $1.2 billion fence along the United States–Mexico border in October 2006. Seven months later, the funding still had yet to be appropriated to actually build the fence. However, the media and Immigrants from a Deeper South

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political frenzy over immigration had an impact on public opinion. A Time magazine poll in January 2006 showed 63 percent of the U.S. public either “extremely” or “very” concerned about illegal immigration. Immigrants view such debate as pure hypocrisy, Cintra said. “You want me to come and pick up your toxic wastes, your asbestos, your arsenic poisoning, with no safety gear, no protection. And as soon as I’m done, you don’t want me as your neighbor. You can discard me.” Cintra, a native of Cuba who grew up in New York, said she was no advocate of illegal immigration. “I believe in legal immigration, but you’ve got to look at the laws. They are so outdated and useless. They can’t keep up. Look at why they are coming. NAFTA. It was supposed to create all those jobs in Mexico. What happened? They all went to China.”6 The North American Free Trade Agreement that was adopted in 1994 came with much ballyhoo about the mutual benefits of breaking down economic barriers dividing the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The results, however, were in some ways as devastating to Mexico as to the U.S. South, which saw NAFTA accelerate the departure of much of its already struggling textile industry. Although NAFTA expanded manufacturing in Mexico, much of the expansion was in the so-called maquiladora plants along the border that mainly made products for U.S.-based firms. The agreement had the further effect of tripling U.S. corn exports to Mexico between 1996 and 2006, resulting in the loss of more than a million jobs in the agricultural sector and sending huge portions of the country’s peasant workforce northward along with millions of others in the search for jobs. One of the undocumented workers making that northward trek was a twenty-year-old whom I interviewed in my hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, in May 2006. “Jercy”—the name he asked me to use after requesting anonymity—worked in a restaurant during the day and helped out at one of the local bars at night. On the day I met him at a downtown coffeeshop, he was wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the logo of one of those bars and a baseball cap with the bill turned to the back of his head. His easy, engaging smile was frequently accompanied by expressions like “cool” and “back in the day.” He had come to the United States four years earlier from Tlaxcala, a city south of Mexico City. Like so many other immigrants, he came to work and to help his struggling family back home. His mother’s restaurant as well as other business interests had failed. In another year, her health would begin to fail as well with bouts of cancer and other illnesses. Jercy was one of five children in the family. “Everything was about to break. Life was about to crash. The best I could do for my mother was to leave so she didn’t have to support me.”7 214

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He had no idea of the adventure that awaited him when he made the decision to make the journey north. Only sixteen years old but traveling with his uncle, he first took a two-day bus trip to Reynosa in northeast Mexico. After two days of waiting in Reynosa and nearly running out of food and money, he took the next leg, traveling west to Sonora. From Sonora to Phoenix, Arizona, he, his uncle, and ten others walked. The distance between the border and Phoenix alone was over one hundred miles. “It was long, a long trip. We were walking three days and two nights. We walked all night. You are walking, walking, walking, up a mountain, down a mountain, dead cows along the way, caves, abandoned bicycles. You drink dirty water. There would be this puddle in the ground, dirty and black, and you might think you wouldn’t drink from something like that, but you will. I didn’t know it was going to be anything like that.” He traveled from Arizona to Texas to Arkansas, and finally to Mississippi, where his stepfather also lived. Despite living in the underground world of immigrants, he was able to attend a local high school, work a variety of jobs, and even open a bank account. He wanted to study at the university, but too much documentation is required. So he worked. “I’ve had all kinds of jobs—roofing, painting, carpenter, laying bricks. I tried being an electrician but that didn’t work out. Plumbing, insulation. There’s good money in insulation, thirteen dollars an hour, but it’s not worth it. It gets all over you, and you itch too much.” At the time of my interview, he lived in a trailer and worked five hours a day, six days a week, as a cook in a local restaurant. Four days a week, he did bar work from 7 p.m. to the wee hours. It was a sixty-hour work week that brought in about two thousand dollars monthly. “I’m tired on Saturday, but when I see the money then I’m happy.”8 Someday, he said, he planned to return to Mexico, go to a university, and study psychology, or maybe he would open up a bar. Latino workers like Jercy are now all over the South and the nation as well. In 2005, Latinos made up the largest minority group in the United States, claiming 14.5 percent of the nation’s population of 300 million. Blacks constituted the second largest group with 12.8 percent. An estimated 41.3 million Latinos—including both legal and undocumented— were living in the United States in 2005. Among the states with the largest percentage increases in Latino population between 2000 and 2005 were South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, Texas, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. U.S. Census Bureau statistics showed South Carolina at the top of the list for fastest-growing immigrant population, with Arkansas in the lead for largest increase in Latino residents. NonSouthern states also reporting major increases included California, New Jersey, and New Mexico. Immigrants from a Deeper South

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Illegal immigration is a major factor in these statistics. The Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington, D.C.–based research group, released a report in March 2005 that showed the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States had increased from 8.4 million in 2000 to 10.3 million in 2004, a 23 percent hike. The impact of these workers on the economy is mixed. Since they are willing to work for less, their presence can have the effect of depressing local wages, particularly for the unskilled. A study by University of North Carolina researchers released in January 2006 showed Latinos holding up to 30 percent of all construction jobs in North Carolina, pulling down wages in that industry by as much as $1 billion in 2004 alone. However, the study also showed North Carolina’s ninety thousand Latino workers and their families contributed $9.2 billion a year to the state’s economy. The state’s Latino population grew 400 percent in the 1990s and another 35 percent between 2000 and 2004. According to another Pew Hispanic Center study released in 2006, the huge jump in the Latino population nationwide has had no negative effect on overall employment possibilities in the country. The study did not assess the impact on wages, however. Injuries and other problems plague the lives of immigrant day laborers, according to yet another study in early 2006. Twenty percent reported having work-related injuries, and close to 50 percent—a figure even higher than New Orleans’ numbers—said they had been cheated out of their pay. Baldemar Velasquez, a sixty-year-old, Texas-born son of migrant workers, has a vision for the South that is as encompassing as that described by Martin Luther King Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. “There is a new Latino labor force all over the South that will be the foundation of the next civil rights movement in the U.S.—a movement that is going to have a brown face.”9 Velasquez, an ordained minister and evangelical Christian who once looked at religion as “an anglo trick,” is at the forefront of this movement.10 The charismatic leader founded the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in Ohio in 1967 and shortly thereafter was arrested for distributing leaflets in a migrant labor camp. He went on to lead a decades-long battle for migrant workers in Ohio and Michigan that included a seven-year boycott of the Campbell Soup company and finally resulted in historic labor agreements for thousands of farm workers with Campbell as well as with Dean Foods, Vlasic, and Heinz. Under the agreements, workers received up to 22 percent increases in their wages. Velasquez was recognized for his efforts with a $265,000 MacArthur Fellowship in 1989 and the 1994 Aquila Azteca Award, which was given to him by Mexican president Carlos Salinas. 216

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In the late 1990s, Velasquez’ FLOC turned its attention to North Carolina and launched a national boycott against the Mt. Olive Pickle Company, a purchaser of 45 million pounds of cucumbers annually from growers in the Carolinas. Most of the state’s 340,000 farm workers were migrants, with many laboring under the federal H2A program that provided temporary work visas during the growing season. FLOC’s campaign included not only the boycott but also a four-day march to the state Capitol in Raleigh, visits to work camps, gatherings at Duke University and other sites, and an extended community network building that gained the support of religious leaders like Catholic Bishop F. Joseph Gossman of Raleigh. On September 16, 2004, Velasquez won a three-way agreement that included FLOC, the Mt. Olive Pickle Company, and the North Carolina Growers Association. With the agreement came formal recognition of the union as negotiator for wages and working conditions. “We have been saying Hasta la Victoria (Until the Victory) for a long time, and it has come because of the hard work of many people in this room who have taken part in this struggle,” Gossman said at the signing ceremony.11 Hasta la Victoria were the words on the red flags carried by FLOC marchers during the campaign. The agreement was a victory against the odds in a state where companies and growers shared hostility toward unions. Monsignor George G. Higgins, the legendary “labor priest” and longtime social activist, told the National Catholic Reporter that Velasquez and FLOC’s victory in “nonunion and antiunion” North Carolina was especially significant, but that much work remained to be done. “Ohio and Michigan, after all, are strong union states, and it took him a long time to get a foothold there.” In the South, “I would predict it will be a long, long fight.”12 Velasquez, however, said FLOC’s philosophy was to “make a permanent commitment to a community.”13 FLOC’s victory came just a few years after another important struggle for the rights of immigrant workers in North Carolina, the decade-long effort by Guatemalan and Mexican workers at the Case Farms poultry plant in Morganton to organize and win a collective bargaining contract. These workers, most of them Q’anjob’al-speaking Mayans from the mountain villages of Guatemala, staged walkouts, work stoppages, and a hunger and labor strike between 1991 and 1996 in protest of poor working conditions that included humiliating limits on bathroom visits, inadequate wages, excessive speeds demanded on the assembly line, and immediate firings for those who protested. “The workers at Case Farms poultry plant etched a profile of uncommon (if still frustrated) courage in demanding a voice and degree of respect at the workplace,” writes labor historian Leon Fink in his account Immigrants from a Deeper South

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of the struggle, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South.14 The Case Farms workers did win a union election campaign in 1995. However, they failed to gain a contract from the company despite a protracted struggle over the next half-dozen years. Their union, the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA), finally gave up the campaign in December 2001. In its wake, a workers center was formed to provide workers an outlet for their grievances and frustrations. “The union threw in the towel and walked away,” said Juan Montes, a Mexicanborn leader in the effort to win a contract with Case Farms. “The only way we are going to improve the life of the worker is to stay in there for the long term.”15 Another Velasquez-like champion of migrant workers in the South has been Guerrero, Mexico, native Lucas Benitez, whose Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Immokalee, Florida, has produced major victories in getting Taco Bell and McDonald’s to agree to increase pay and improve conditions for tomato pickers and other workers. Boycotts and marches have also been part of the arsenal of weapons used by CIW’s Mexican, Guatemalan, and Haitian immigrant workers. Benitez’ work was recognized in 2003 when he won the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Human Rights Award. “Picking is dignified, honest work that deserves to be treated as such,” Benitez told Mother Jones magazine in 2004. “This community of workers is . . . clearing the path for those who will come behind us. It’s not something that can wait for others. It has to come from us, who’ve worked in the fields.”16 In their struggles, FLOC, CIW, and other immigrant worker groups not only faced hostile growers but also a press that immigrants distrusted and considered insensitive. This was one finding that emerged from a 1999 discussion session with Latino and African American activists in North Carolina led by Southern Exposure magazine editor Chris Kromm. The participants said newspaper stories tended to focus either on problems in their communities such as crime or on bitter feelings between workingclass Latinos and African Americans. “They’re missing a clue,” said Rosa Savedra, a former director of the Farmworker Project in Benson, North Carolina, and later educator with the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. “I know from experience we’ve had that they (the media) don’t come seeking answers, but seeking the answers they’ve already got. Latinos here don’t trust the media.” As for problems between Latinos and blacks, she said, “there’s a conflict everywhere. But to spotlight this, it’s like they use it as a tool to 218

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divide. . . . The newspaper has never been a friend of communities of color. It’s always been racist, it’s always been homophobic, it’s always been sexist. When you want to know what’s going on in the black community, Latino community, white community, you have to go to the community.”17 Luis Alvarega, a teacher in Durham and community organizer with Durham-based La Casa Multicultural, agreed. “I used to be a media person. I started with a newspaper, and then I became a reporter for radio, and then TV. And the main job of the media person is to get the dirty story, the one that sells the most. They have to sell stories.”18 Even so, Savedra and Alvarega admitted that tensions do exist between Latinos and African Americans, feelings of resentment, frustration, and anger as they elbow one another for space at the lower end of the economic ladder. Some African Americans have bristled at Velasquez and others’ incorporation of civil rights–era terminology to describe Latinos’ struggle today. “We died for that” was how writer Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez described the frequent reaction of African Americans in an article she wrote for Z Magazine in June 2006.19 Five African American males were arrested in 2005 in connection with the slaying of a half-dozen Mexican immigrants in Tifton, Georgia, a town where Latino and poor black workers had been in competition for farm jobs. Politicians have sometimes exploited the tensions. During the reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, an African American, met with a group of contractors and business owners and asked, “How do I insure that New Orleans is not overrun by Mexican workers?”20 Yet major efforts have been underway to overcome such tensions as seen in the work of organizations like the Southern Faith, Labor, and Community Alliance and the United Food and Commercial Workers, both of which have worked together in the campaign to bring a union to the Smithfield Packing pork-processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. At that plant, six thousand blacks and Latinos work side by side. In the recent history of the South, no event has posed a greater challenge to the region’s newspapers than Hurricane Katrina, and two of them—the Sun-Herald in Biloxi, Mississippi, and the Times-Picayune of New Orleans—met that challenge with Pulitzer prize–winning coverage of the disaster, its aftermath, and its impact on residents. Their coverage included stories on immigrants in the area. Both before and after Katrina, the Southern press has tried to cover the immigration story. Examples would include the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger’s three-part series on “Becoming a Piece of the American Puzzle” in August 2006 and the syndicated columns of Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker. Immigrants from a Deeper South

219

Certainly Southern newspapers have moved beyond the era when they could simply tag immigrants as dangerous anarchists rather than deal with the issues affecting their working lives, such as the Tampa Tribune’s treatment of the Cuban, Spanish, and Italian cigar workers who went on strike in that Florida city in 1931. “The best treatment for a riotious [sic] ‘red’ is jail,” the newspaper editorialized after blows were exchanged between police and workers. Then, in a seeming call to vigilantism: “When it has been found that authorities were not sufficiently powerful, the American manhood of the city has always risen to the occasion.”21 Perhaps the mainstream Southern press today cannot be expected to probe immigrants’ lives with the kind of consistency that alternative news outlets like CIW’s Web site www.ciw-online.org or its low-power radio station in Immokalee, Florida, provide. However, these immigrants remain invisible to the public at large because the coverage in the mainstream press is sporadic at best, and when it occurs, it usually lacks the kind of righteous indignation against injustice that Mexican magazine Día Siete exhibited in a 2006 article titled “Mississippi: Mexican Slaves.” The magazine described in depth the lives of Mexican workers on the post– Katrina Gulf Coast—crowded living quarters, seven-day work weeks, twelve to fourteen hours a day at seven to eight dollars an hour, often in dangerous conditions, including exposure to toxic chemicals. “The Mexicans do a job that no one wants to do—neither Anglos nor African-Americans: the cleanup and reconstruction from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita,” wrote the article’s author, Julián Cardona. “But they carry out this task in slavery conditions.”22 The article also included a host of photographs taken by Cardona himself showing Latino workers laboring on damaged roofs and living in overcrowded dormitories. The article and photographs evoked the work of crusading journalist Jacob Riis in the 1890s. Riis, once a povertystricken immigrant himself from Denmark, helped change the nation’s attitudes with his reportage and photographs in newspaper articles and in books like How the Other Half Lives, which depicted the crowded, choleraand-crime-ridden lives of European immigrants in New York City’s ghettoes. His work had such an effect on then New York police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt that the future president took it upon himself to help clean up the tenements Riis exposed and push for new laws to prevent such injustices in the future. Riis said he was only able to achieve such results because of a dogged persistence and refusal to let go of the story. “It takes a lot of telling to make a city know when it is doing wrong,” he once wrote. “However, that was what I was there for.”23

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Victoria Cintra said newspaper and television reporters can be counted on to come by her office in east Biloxi when something newsworthy occurs. However, soon enough they’re leaving again to cover the next story. Meanwhile, the daily grind of immigrant life continues. “As far as what is going on down here, everybody turns a blind eye. Nobody wants to talk about it.” The immigrants talk among themselves, of course, and increasingly with others. “We are building bridges with the community,” Cintra said, “reaching out to the Vietnamese community, reaching out to the AfricanAmerican community. . . . The Latin American community is very welcoming because most people have gone through struggles. They have that spirit. They just need a boost. There’s a lot of potential.”24 The South’s newest immigrants have found leaders like Baldemar Velasquez, Lucas Benitez, and Victoria Cintra to encourage them that “¡Si Se puede!” is more than just an expression, more than just a rallying cry. What they haven’t found is a modern-day Jacob Riis in the Southern press to tell their story like it deserves to be told.

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Postscript

my hometown From Tobacco and Textiles to an Iglesia on Main Street

It is the first anniversary of my father’s death, and I’ve come home with my brother, sister, and mother to put flowers on his grave. We spend much of the rest of the day and evening on a nostalgia tour through the gritty, blue-collar town I grew up in. It seems that every other building or house in Sanford, North Carolina, is a landmark in our personal history—the boarded-up elementary school across from the textile mill where my father worked, the Pentecostal Holiness church where my grandfather once preached, the dairy bar where we teenagers hung out every Friday night, the movie theater where I saw Go Johnny Go! and Thunder Road and where blacks had to watch from the balcony, the parking lot that used to be the pool hall where we pretended to be Minnesota Fats and Fast Eddie. “There’s the house where D. O.’s wife hung herself,” I remind my brother. Every Southern town has its gothic tales. My father’s fishing buddy found his wife in the living room after coming home from a hard day at the mill. I grew up in a town of about 15,000 or so, and nearly every family I knew was tied to either tobacco or textiles. It was a “dry” (no bars, no cold beer) town, the seat of (Robert E.) Lee County, in the dead center of North Carolina. It had a political boss, Mayor E. L. “Fish” Fields, an oldline segregationist who nevertheless later helped corner the black vote by giving away sacks of fish from his ice store. I remember my teenaged self buying illegal beer from hizzoner at that ice store. The town had a saltytalking, tough-as-nails, moneybags, skinflint newspaper publisher, too. I worked for him, covering local business as well as a half dozen other beats. “No union stories,” he told me soon after I was hired. I don’t recall ever writing one, don’t even recall if a union existed in the area, so I guess I made him happy. 222

The more I see the more I realize that Thomas Wolfe was right. You can’t go home again. If you try, you could find yourself more lost than Ralph Stanley’s rank stranger. Southerners wrestle with this. The Sanford we are seeing from our rented car is like the setting for a “film noir,” or maybe a Barry Hannah story—a town of fine, Victorian homes gone to seed, motorcycle gangs parked on the front lawns, eyeing passing motorists, a town that’s “wet” now but with little lonely bars where everyone stops and watches when a stranger walks in. Most noticeable are the Latinos. Official statistics say they’re 19 percent of the population, but they’re everywhere. I see them tending the giant vegetable garden across the street from my old high school, working at construction sites, operating the corner store where I used to buy candy and ice cream. There’s an iglesia on main street, and a Mexican restaurant practically every block or two. Sanford made national headlines back in 1997 when immigration agents broke up a ring that had smuggled in deaf and mute adults and children from Mexico to peddle trinkets on the streets. Just forty miles to the north is the high-tech, Ph.D.-laden Research Triangle, a yuppie heaven where Southern accents are getting harder and harder to find. Sanford is way off the edge of that North Carolina. No shiny, high-rise think-tanks here, no Milton Friedman–spouting intellectuals or technocrats who worry about stock values. But don’t kid yourself. This is part of a “New South” of sorts, a New South that’s beyond the horizons of Wall Street investors or sun-seeking snowbirds, a New South where the grandchildren of sharecroppers and tenant farmers are trying to adjust to new, dark-skinned neighbors from an even deeper South, where the old values of hard-gained goods square off against the high-rolling lure of lotteries and casinos, where the temptation to slip into an old, familiar malaise is ever-present and still to be resisted, that dark piece of the Old South that’s still there and may never go away.

Postscript: My Hometown

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Notes

Chapter 1 Labor, the Southern Press, and the Civil War That Never Ended 1. Ray Smithhart and Robert Bracken, interview by author, handwritten notes, Jackson, Miss., May 20, 2004. 2. Pavlito Geshos, “Working Class Heroes,” Clamor, March/April 2002, 51. 3. Robert Shaffer, interview by author, notes, Jackson, Miss., October 1, 2003. 4. “N.C.’s Textile Losses,” Charlotte Observer, July 31, 2003, sec. A, p. 14. 5. “Nissan Ushers in New Industry” and “Resident: ‘It’s a Blessing from God,’” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, November 10, 2000, sec. A, p. 1. 6. “It’s for Real, Nissan Tells Miss.; Plant, Prosperity Will Follow,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, November 10, 2000, sec. A, p. 1. 7. “Hyundai Era Begins,” Montgomery Advertiser, April 16, 2002. http://www .montgomeryadvertiser.com/specialreports/hyundai/041602_hyundai.html. “Hyundai Finds a Warm-Weather Home,” Montgomery Advertiser, April 3, 2002. http://www .montgomeryadvertiser.com/1news/specialreports/hyundai/040302_alaauto.html. 8. Shadows in the Sunbelt: Developing the Rural South in an Era of Economic Change, MDC Panel on Rural Economic Development, May 1986, 11. 9. “Shady Car Deals,” Southern Exposure, summer/fall 1998, 24. 10. James C. Cobb, “The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936–1980,” in The American South Comes of Age, ed. Jack Bass and Thomas E. Terrell (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, Inc., 1986), 319. 11. Joshua Freeman et al., eds., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 2 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 39. 12. Pronita Gupta, “The Art of the Deal,” Southern Exposure, summer/fall 1998, 30–31. 13. David Welch, “How Nissan Laps Detroit,” Business Week, December 22, 2003, 58–60. 14. Freeman et al., Who Built America?, 39–42, 615–16. 15. Peter Applebome, Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture (New York: Random House, 1996), 187. 16. “South’s Income Likely to Be Lower,” Tupelo (Miss.) Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, February 4, 2004, sec. B, p. 1. 225

17. Stanley Aronowitz, From the Ashes of the Old: American Labor and America’s Future (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 88. 18. “Providing Better Wages: Fringe Benefits Keep Packages Competitive,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, February 22, 2004, sec. C, p. 1. 19. “Skilled Trades and Organizing,” Skill Magazine fall/winter 2001, February 4, 2003. http://www.uaw.org/publications/skill/01/2/skill02.html. 20. “Skilled Trades and Organizing,” Skill Magazine fall/winter 2001, February 4, 2003. http://www.uaw.org/publications/skill/01/2/skill02.html. “Nissan Factory Signals New Era,” (from Mississippi Press) Jackson Clarion-Ledger, June 8, 2003, sec. G, p. 3. 21. Applebome, Dixie Rising, 185. 22. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; reprint, New York: Vintage books, 1969), 356–58, 362. 23. “Read and You Will Go to North Carolina,” Sanford (N.C.) Herald, September 13, 1986, sec. B, p. 8. 24. Ralph McGill, The South and the Southerner (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1963), 195. 25. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), 2. 26. Bernstein, The Lean Years, 9–11. 27. Bernstein, The Lean Years, 22, 25. 28. Applebome, Dixie Rising, 189. 29. George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock, The Uprising of ’34 (New York: First Run/Icarus Films, 1995), documentary film. 30. Applebome, Dixie Rising, 193–94. 31. Frank D. Durham, “Anti-Communism, Race, and Structuration: Newspaper Coverage of the Labor and Desegregation Movements in the South, 1932–40 and 1953–61,” Journalism Communication Monographs, an AEJMC publication, 4, no. 2 (summer 2002): 77. 32. James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964), 78. 33. Applebome, Dixie Rising, 103. 34. James Dickerson, Dixie’s Dirty Secret (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 4. 35. Mississippi AFL-CIO, file 47-86, series 5, Box 2208-4, Southern Labor Archives, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Ga. 36. Mississippi AFL-CIO, file 47-86, series 5, Box 2208-6, Southern Labor Archives, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Ga. 37. “Vote No to Union at Cooper Tire,” paid advertisement, Tupelo Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, August 19, 2002, sec. B, p. 4. 38. Durham, “Anti-Communism, Race, and Structuration,” 85–86. 39. Cash, The Mind of the South, 363. 40. McGill, The South and the Southerner, 191. 41. Ann Waldron, Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1993), 78. 42. Chris Kromm, panel discussion on “Overview/An historic look at organized labor, the press and the South,” 5 October 2003, A Conference on Labor and the Southern Press, October 4–7, 2003, University of Mississippi, University, Miss.

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43. Applebome, Dixie Rising, 16. 44. Richard A. Beaumont, “Working in the South,” in Southern Business: The Decades Ahead, ed. David A. Shannon and Rand V. Araskog (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1981), 70. 45. Takehiko Nomura, panel discussion on “Globalism: New Challenges for the Press, Labor and the South’s Economy,” October 5, 2003, A Conference on Labor and the Southern Press, October 4–7, 2003, University of Mississippi, University, Miss. 46. Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 374. 47. Jean Gould and Lorena Hickok, Walter Reuther: Labor’s Rugged Individualist (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1972), 321. 48. Applebome, Dixie Rising, 208. 49. Robert H. Zieger, “A Venture into Unplowed Fields: Daniel Powell and CIO Political Action in the Postwar South,” in Labor in the Modern South, ed. Glenn T. Eskew (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 175. 50. Robert Shaffer, panel discussion on “Overview: An historic look at organized labor, the press and the South,” October 5, 2003, A Conference on Labor and the Southern Press, October 4–7, 2003, University of Mississippi, University, Miss.

Chapter 2 Labor in the Old New South 1. “People’s Party Platform,” Jeffersonian, July 30, 1908, III, no. 31, p. 3. 2. John Ray Skates Jr., “Fred Sullens and the Growth of Organized Labor,” Southern Quarterly 10, no. 4 (July 1972): 341. 3. Skates, “Fred Sullens and the Growth of Organized Labor,” 341–51. 4. C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (1938; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 220. 5. Woodward, Tom Watson, 432. 6. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 590. 7. Lewis W. Jones, Cold Rebellion: The South’s Oligarchy in Revolt (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1962), 32. 8. Joshua Freeman et al., eds., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 2, From the Gilded Age to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 39. 9. Woodward, Tom Watson, 223. 10. Frank Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), 43. Quoted in Gavin Wright, Old South, New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 146. 11. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 25. 12. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill Village (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 4, 152.

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13. Gary M Fink, The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Strike of 1914–1915: Espionage, Labor Conflict, and New South Industrial Relations (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 1993), 6–7. 14. Will D. Campbell, “Used and Abused: The Redneck’s Lot,” Atlanta JournalAtlanta Constitution, July 18, 1988, p. 28. 15. Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973), 165. 16. Hall et al., Like a Family, 178–79, 283. 17. Campbell, “Used and Abused: The Redneck’s Lot,” 30. 18. Freeman et al., Who Built America?, 116. 19. Jim Green, “The Brotherhood,” in Working Lives: The Southern Exposure History of Labor in the South, ed. Marc S. Miller (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 38–39. 20. Fink, The Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills Strike of 1914–1915, 6. 21. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), 42. 22. John Egerton, Speak Now against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 35. 23. Bernstein, The Lean Years, 22. 24. Bernstein, The Lean Years, 41. 25. Leslie F. Orear, ed., Mother Jones and the Union Miners Cemetery, Mount Olive, Illinois (Chicago: Illinois Labor History Society, 2002), 76. 26. Dale Fetherling, Mother Jones: The Miners’ Angel (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974), 192. 27. William G. Shepherd, “Eyewitness at Triangle,” in Muckraking! The Journalism That Changed America, ed. Judith and William Serrin (New York: New Press, 2002), 29. 28. Bernstein, The Lean Years, 378. 29. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking Press, 1947), 12. 30. Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 17. 31. F. Ray Marshall, Labor in the South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 140. 32. Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 108. 33. V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Vintage Books, 1949), 5. 34. Bernstein, The Lean Years, 381. 35. Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 72. 36. Peter Applebome, Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture (New York: Random House, 1996), 193–94. 37. Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 249. 38. Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 23.

Chapter 3 The CIO and Operation Dixie: A “Lamp of Democracy” in the South 1. Clarice Kidder, interview by author, notes, Helena, Ark., July 2, 2006. 2. Dorothy Day, from a postcard distributed by the Catholic Worker, October 24, 1994.

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3. Michael Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 209. 4. John Egerton, Speak Now against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 165. 5. Ralph McGill, The South and the Southerner (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1963), 191. 6. Joshua Freeman et al., eds., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 2, From the Gilded Age to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 278. 7. Maxwell C. Raddock, Portrait of an American Labor Leader: William L. Hutcheson (New York: American Institute of Social Science, Inc., 1955), 204. 8. Jean Gould and Lorena Hickok, Walter Reuther: Labor’s Rugged Individualist (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1972), 93. 9. Freeman et al., Who Built America?, 379. 10. Raddock, Portrait of an American Labor Leader, 206–7. 11. F. Ray Marshall, Labor in the South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 170. 12. John A. Salmond, Miss Lucy of the CIO: The Life and Times of Lucy Randolph Mason, 1882–1959 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 77. 13. Salmond, Miss Lucy of the CIO, 79. 14. Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 166. 15. Salmond, Miss Lucy of the CIO, 88, 80. 16. John Ray Skates Jr., “Fred Sullens and the Growth of Organized Labor,” Southern Quarterly 10, no. 4 (July 1972): 348–49. 17. Salmond, Miss Lucy of the CIO, 96. 18. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 359, 360. 19. Lucy Randolph Mason, To Win These Rights: A Personal Story of the CIO in the South (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), 183. 20. Mason, To Win These Rights, 184. 21. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 218–19. 22. Mason, To Win These Rights, 104. 23. Mason, To Win These Rights, 165. 24. Salmond, Miss Lucy of the CIO, 91. 25. Frank D. Durham, “Anti-Communism, Race, and Structuration: Newspaper Coverage of the Labor and Desegregation Movements in the South, 1932–40 and 1953–61,” Journalism Communication Monographs, an AEJMC publication, Vol. 4, No. 2 (summer 2002): 76. 26. Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 159. 27. Miles Horton and Lawrence L. Bostian, “Highlander Folk School,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 1418. 28. Durham, “Anti-Communism, Race, and Structuration: Newspaper Coverage of the Labor and Desegregation Movements in the South, 1932–40 and 1953–61,” 77. 29. Marshall, Labor in the South, 155.

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30. Marshall, Labor in the South, 154. 31. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975), 6. 32. George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South: 1913–1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 411. 33. Caldwell and Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces, 22. 34. Robert F. Martin, Howard Kester and the Struggle for Social Justice in the South, 1904–77 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 92. 35. Martin, Howard Kester and the Struggle for Social Justice in the South, 1904–77, 92. 36. Caldwell and Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces, 11. 37. Caldwell and Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces, 11, 19. 38. Caldwell and Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces, 25. 39. Elizabeth Anne Payne, “The Lady Was a Sharecropper: Myrtle Lawrence and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union,” Southern Cultures 4, no. 2 (summer 1998): 12. 40. Payne, “The Lady Was a Sharecropper: Myrtle Lawrence and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union,” 13. 41. C. Wright Mills, The Marxists (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1962), 127. 42. Marshall, Labor in the South, 183. 43. Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 185. 44. Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 189. 45. Salmond, Miss Lucy of the CIO, 155. 46. Egerton, Speak Now against the Day, 190. 47. William A. Nunnelley, Bull Connor (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991), 30. 48. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South: 1913–1945, 637. 49. Martin, Howard Kester and the Struggle for Social Justice in the South, 120. 50. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, 245. 51. Salmond, Miss Lucy of the CIO, 125, 165. 52. Ann Waldron, Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1993), 282. 53. Salmond, Miss Lucy of the CIO, 119. 54. Wright, Old South, New South, 236. 55. McGill, The South and the Southerner, 206. 56. Robert H. Zieger, “A Venture into Unplowed Fields: Daniel Powell and CIO Political Action in the Postwar South,” in Labor in the Modern South, ed. Glenn T. Eskew (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001, 175. 57. Salmond, Miss Lucy of the CIO, 125. 58. Zieger, “A Venture into Unplowed Fields,” 167. 59. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, 216. 60. Freeman et al., Who Built America?, 451. 61. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, 227. 62. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, 164. 63. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, 164, 165. 64. Mason, To Win These Rights, 80. 65. Marshall, Labor in the South, 262–63. 66. Salmond, Miss Lucy of the CIO, 104.

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67. Freeman et al., Who Built America?, 506. 68. Earl Black and Merle Black, The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 142. 69. Michelle Brattain, The Politics of Whiteness: Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 144. 70. J. H. O’Dell, “Looking Back on ‘Operation Dixie’: Notes on a Promise Abandoned,” Labor Notes #313, April 2005, 5–6. 71. Marshall, Labor in the South, 261. 72. Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, 1955), 361. 73. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, 230. 74. Marshall, Labor in the South, 269. 75. Zieger, “A Venture into Unplowed Fields,” 174. 76. Charles J. McCollester, ed., Fighter with a Heart: Writings of Charles Owen Rice, Pittsburgh Labor Priest (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 99–106. 77. Timothy J. Minchin, What Do We Need a Union For? The TWUA in the South, 1945–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 8, 18. 78. Minchin, What Do We Need a Union For?, 2, 19. 79. Salmond, Miss Lucy of the CIO, 129–30. 80. Mason, To Win These Rights, 198–200.

Chapter 4 Labor, Civil Rights, and Memphis 1. Michael Honey, “A Dream Deferred,” Nation, May 3, 2004, 36. 2. The Reverend J. Herbert Nelson, speech, Southern Faith, Labor and Community Alliance Conference, Memphis, Tenn., July 28, 2006. 3. Edward Morrison, speech, Southern Faith, Labor and Community Alliance Conference, Memphis, Tenn., July 29, 2006. 4. Juan Montes, panel discussion on “Faith, Labor, and Immigration,” July 29, 2006, Southern Faith, Labor and Community Alliance Conference, July 27–29, 2006, Memphis, Tenn. 5. Nelson, speech, Memphis, Tenn., July 28, 2006. 6. James Dickerson, Dixie’s Dirty Secret (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 4. 7. Dickerson, Dixie’s Dirty Secret, 4. 8. Robert Sherrill, Gothic Politics in the Deep South: Stars of the New Confederacy (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1968), 6. 9. Sherrill, Gothic Politics in the Deep South, 123. 10. “Senator Eastland Urges Regional Commission to Counteract Anti-Southern Propaganda,” Hapeville (Ga.) Statesman 23, no. 44 (November 3, 1955): 1. 11. James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis, eds., Mississippi: Conflict and Change (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 253. 12. Sherrill, Gothic Politics in the Deep South, 123. 13. Alan Draper, Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954–1968 (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 1994), 13.

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14. Sherrill, Gothic Politics in the Deep South, 129. 15. Dickerson, Dixie’s Dirty Secret, 5. 16. Nelson, closing sermon, Memphis, Tenn., July 29, 2006. 17. The Reverend J. Herbert Nelson, speech, Jackson Faith Labor Consultation, Jackson, Miss., May 22, 2006. 18. Michael Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 165. 19. Loren Ghiglione, The American Journalist: Paradox of the Press (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1990), 51. 20. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, 70. 21. Martin Luther King Jr., press conference, Atlanta, Ga., December 4, 1967. 22. Mickie Anderson, “The Civil Rights Dream Begins and Is Then Deferred as Old Order Reacts,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, January 1, 2000, sec. H, p. 4. 23. Honey, “A Dream Deferred,” 36–37. 24. Cutline to photograph of striking sanitation workers, Memphis Commercial Appeal, January 1, 2000, sec. H, p. 4. 25. “Hurt Pride in Memphis,” Time, April 26, 1968. http://time-proxy.yaga.com/ time/magazine. 26. Claude-Jean Bertrand, “Foreword” to Good News: Social Ethics and the Press, Christians, Ferré, and Fackler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), vi–vii. 27. John Bartlow Martin, “The Deep South Says Never,” Saturday Evening Post, June 15, 1957, 23–26, 68–75. 28. Irv Goodman, “Public Schools Died Here,” Saturday Evening Post 234, no. 17 (April 29, 1961): 32–33, 85–89. 29. Charles Morgan Jr., as told to Thomas B. Morgan, “I Saw a City Die: Birmingham,” Look 27, no. 24 (December 3, 1963): 23–25. 30. Frank R. Parker, Turning Point: The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer (Washington, D.C.: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 1994), 1. 31. Parker, Turning Point, 6. 32. Gay Talese, The Kingdom and the Power (New York: World Publishing Company, 1969), 143–44. 33. Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, “The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV,” Media Beat, January 4, 1995. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2269. 34. Lee Ragland, “State Papers Downplayed Local Unrest,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger/ Jackson Daily News, July 1, 1984, sec. H, p. 13. 35. Ragland, “State Papers Downplayed Local Unrest.” 36. “Hurt Pride in Memphis.” 37. “Memphis’ Wildcat Garbage Strike,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, February 13, 1968, p. 6. 38. “Garbage, Law and People,” Memphis Commercial-Appeal, February 15, 1968, p. 6. 39. “Loeb Takes Right Course,” Memphis Commercial-Appeal, February 16, 1968, p. 6. 40. “Memphis Is Being Used,” Memphis Commercial-Appeal, February 18, 1968, p. 6. 41. “Threat of Anarchy: City Hall Sit-In,” Memphis Commercial-Appeal, February 23, 1968, p. 6. 42. “Added to the Heap: Law and Order,” Memphis Commercial-Appeal, February 24, 1968, p. 6.

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43. “Piling Up! This City’s Resentment,” Memphis Commercial-Appeal, February 16, 1968, p. 6. 44. The Reverend C. O. Basinger, “Newspaper Accused,” Memphis CommercialAppeal, February 28, 1968, p. 7. 45. Joseph Sweat, “Housewives Tell of Concern about Strike, Racial Tension,” Memphis Commercial-Appeal, March 8, 1968, p. 1. 46. “Make This Prayerful Day,” Memphis Commercial-Appeal, April 7, 1968, p. 6. 47. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, 279. 48. Draper, Conflict of Interests, 165. 49. Draper, Conflict of Interests, 115. 50. “On the Klan, the Reds and the Un-Americans,” I. F. Stone Weekly 13, no. 13 (April 5, 1965): 1. 51. Draper, Conflict of Interests, 111. 52. Robert B. Patterson, interview by author, notes, Itta Bena, Miss., December 14, 2004. 53. Walter Reuther, speech, March on Washington, Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963. 54. Draper, Conflict of Interests, 12–13. 55. Patrick J. Maney, “Hale Boggs, Organized Labor, and the Politics of Race in South Louisiana,” in Southern Labor in Transition: 1940–1995, ed. Robert H. Zieger (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 241. 56. Victor Bussie, interview by author, notes, Baton Rouge, La., February 18, 2006. 57. Ray Smithhart, interview by author, notes, Jackson, Miss., May 20, 2004, as well as a April 26, 2004, letter to the author and also undated handwritten correspondence. 58. Danny Forsyth, guest lecture in author’s course on “Labor and the Press,” University of Mississippi, October 27, 2004. 59. “Winning the Pulitzer: For Jackson Newspaper Ironies Are Immense,” Washington Post, April 28, 1983; “Finally, We’re Moving beyond Our Lost Causes,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger-Jackson Daily News, September 26, 1982, sec. E, p. 10. 60. “Black, White, and Dead: Most of the Murders in Memphis Are Cases of ‘Black-on-Black’ Crime,” Memphis Flyer, July 20–26, 2006. 61. Otis Sanford, panel discussion on “Civil Rights, Labor and the Press,” October 6, 2003, A Conference on Labor and the Southern Press, October 4–7, 2003, University of Mississippi, University, Miss. 62. Julian Bond, speech, AFL-CIO Convention, Chicago, Ill., July 25, 2005.

Chapter 5 Labor, Race, and the Mississippi Press 1. Claude Ramsay, speech, NDEA Institute in History, University of Mississippi, July 13, 1966. 2. “State AFL-CIO President Ramsay Hinting Next Term May Be His Last,” Jackson Daily News, April 23, 1982, sec. A, p. 17. 3. Alan Draper, Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954–1968 (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 1994), 121, 145.

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4. Joshua Freeman, Nelson Lichtenstein, Stephen Brier et al., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 2, From the Gilded Age to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 491. 5. Ramsay, speech, NDEA Institute of History, University of Mississippi, July 13, 1966. 6. Richard Aubrey McLemore, ed., A History of Mississippi: Volume II (Hattiesburg: University & College Press of Mississippi, 1973), 254, 258. 7. Erle Johnston, I Rolled with Ross: A Political Portrait (Baton Rouge, La.: Moran Publishing Corp., 1980), 1. 8. David L. Bennett, “Ira B. Harkey Jr., and the Pascagoula Chronicle,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, ed. David R. Davies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 177. 9. Ira B. Harkey Jr., The Smell of Burning Crosses: An Autobiography of a Mississippi Newspaperman (Jacksonville, Ill.: Harris-Wolfe & Company, 1967), 13. 10. Ira B. Harkey Jr., Dedicated to the Proposition: Editorials from the Chronicle, Pascagoula, Mississippi (Pascagoula, Miss.: Ira Harkey, 1963), 4. 11. Harkey, The Smell of Burning Crosses, 161–62. 12. Ira B. Harkey Jr., telephone interview with author, Kerrville, Tex., March 22, 2005. 13. Draper, Conflict of Interests, 134, 137. 14. Draper, Conflict of Interests, 130, 136. 15. Oral history with Mr. Claude Ramsay, president: Mississippi AFL-CIO, a cooperative project of the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries and Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage, interview with Dr. Orley B. Caudill, Jackson, Miss., April 28, 1981. 16. Ramsay, speech, NDEA Institute of History, University of Mississippi, July 13, 1966. 17. Bill Barton, “Turmoil: Time Will Tell if Claude Ramsay’s Labors Are Lost,” Mississippi Magazine, vol. 5, no. 1 (summer 1965): 32. 18. Oral history with Mr. Claude Ramsay, president: Mississippi AFL-CIO, interview with Dr. Orley B. Caudill. 19. Robert S. McElvaine, “Organized Labor, and the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi: 1959–1966,” in Southern Workers and Their Unions, 1880–1975: Selected Papers, The Second Southern Labor History Conference, 1978, ed. Merl E. Reed, Leslie S. Hough, and Gary Fink (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 114, 115. 20. Oral history with Mr. Claude Ramsay, president: Mississippi AFL-CIO, interview with Dr. Orley B. Caudill. 21. McElvaine, “Organized Labor, and the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi: 1959–1966,” 116. 22. Oral history with Mr. Claude Ramsay, president: Mississippi AFL-CIO, interview with Dr. Orley B. Caudill. 23. Draper, Conflict of Interests, 146. 24. Oral history with Mr. Claude Ramsay, president: Mississippi AFL-CIO, interview with Dr. Orley B. Caudill. 25. “Miss. Chemical: Once Influential Company Bankrupt,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, May 17, 2003.

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26. Laura Nan Fairley, “George A. McLean and the Tupelo Journal,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, ed. David R. Davies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 139. 27. Ramsay, speech, NDEA Institute of History, University of Mississippi, July 13, 1966. 28. “Ramsay Forged a New Way,” Jackson Daily News, January 20, 2005.

Chapter 6 The Sunbelt South and Its Shadows 1. Thomas A. Lyson, Two Sides to the Sunbelt: The Growing Divergence between the Rural and Urban South (New York: Praeger, 1989), 7. 2. Lyson, Two Sides to the Sunbelt, 10. 3. Henry Unger, interview by author, handwritten notes, Atlanta, Ga., July 12, 2006. 4. Daniel Zoll, “Opposition Growing to Home Depot,” (IPS) Albion Monitor, March 30, 1997. http://www.monitor.net/monitor. 5. Michael Blanding, “The Case against Coca-Cola,” Nation, May 1, 2006, 13. 6. “Atlanta Called Hub for Meth Distribution,” (Associated Press) Jackson ClarionLedger, January 26, 2006, sec. B, p. 6. 7. Ferald J. Bryan, Henry Grady or Tom Watson? (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1994), 103. 8. Bryan, Henry Grady or Tom Watson?, 102–3. 9. “Flag Issue Raising Social, Economic Fears in Atlanta,” (Associated Press) Jackson Clarion-Ledger, February 28, 2003, sec. A, p. 3. 10. Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 40. 11. Cynthia Tucker (columnist for Atlanta Journal-Constitution), “Atlanta Must Fight to Restore Its Image,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, June 20, 2006, sec. A, p. 9. 12. George B. Leonard, “Mind and Soul of the South,” Look, November 16, 1965, 143. 13. “City Anthem Alarms Some Atlantans,” (Los Angeles Times) Jackson Clarion-Ledger, December 12, 2005, sec. B, p. 5. 14. Charles Rutheiser, “Atlanta: The City of Global Dreams Ain’t Like It Seems,” Southern Exposure, summer/fall 1998, 43. 15. Rutheiser, “Atlanta: The City of Global Dreams Ain’t Like It Seems,” 43. 16. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (New York: Pocket Books, 1967; Macmillan Company, 1936), 862. 17. James C. Cobb, “Industry and Commerce,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 716. 18. Fred Hobson, Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 352. 19. Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 124.

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20. William Faulkner, “Spotted Horses,” (from The Hamlet, 1940) in The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 323. 21. Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, 1955), 362. 22. Lyson, Two Sides to the Sunbelt, 6. 23. Lyson, Two Sides to the Sunbelt, 6. 24. “South’s Better Labor Cited as Magnet to Northern Industry,” Hapeville (Ga.) Statesman 22, no. 23 (June 10, 1954): 1. 25. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 125. 26. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 125, 128. 27. George Brown Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, The Littlefield Fund for Southern History of the University of Texas, 1967), 731. 28. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 146. 29. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 133. 30. Harnett T. Kane, Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship, 1928–1940 (1941; reprint, Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Company, 1971), 57. 31. T. Harry Williams, Huey Long (1969; reprint, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 196–97, 318. 32. Lyson, Two Sides to the Sunbelt, 74. 33. Kane, Louisiana Hayride, 57. 34. Leonard, “Mind and Soul of the South,” 142–43. 35. Carl Abbott, “The American Sunbelt: Idea and Region,” in The American South Comes of Age, ed. Jack Bass and Thomas E. Terrell (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 316. 36. Ralph McGill, The South and the Southerner (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1963), 208. 37. Chris Kromm, “Going for Broke,” Southern Exposure, summer/fall 1998, 23. 38. Kromm, “Going for Broke,” 25. 39. Peter Applebome, Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture (New York: Random House, 1996), 9. 40. Applebome, Dixie Rising, 10. 41. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, 171. 42. Monroe Billington, Southern Politics since the Civil War (Malabar, Fla.: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1984), 143. 43. Earl Black and Merle Black, Politics and Society in the South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 47. 44. Earl Black and Merle Black, The Vital South: How Presidents Are Elected (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 366. 45. Joe Atkins, “Dixiecrat Recalls Southern Revolt against Dem Party,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, July 18, 1988, sec. A, p. 4. 46. Lyson, Two Sides to the Sunbelt, 70. 47. The President’s National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, 1967, The People Left Behind (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office), ix. Quoted in Lyson, Two Sides to the Sunbelt, 25. 48. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, viii.

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49. Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa, The Almanac of American Politics, 1982 (Washington, D.C.: Barone & Company, 1981), xviii. 50. MDC Panel on Rural Economic Development, Shadows in the Sunbelt: Developing the Rural South in an Era of Economic Change (Chapel Hill, N.C.: MDC, Inc., 1986), 4. 51. MDC Panel on Rural Economic Development, Shadows in the Sunbelt: Developing the Rural South in an Era of Economic Change, 10, 16. 52. 1986 Commission on the Future of the South, Halfway Home and a Long Way to Go (Research Triangle Park, N.C.: Southern Growth Policies Board, 1986), 7. 53. 1986 Commission on the Future of the South, Halfway Home and a Long Way to Go, 10. 54. “South Remains Poorest Region,” (Associated Press) Hattiesburg (Miss.) American, November 5, 1986. 55. “Sun Belt May Soon Disappear on Horizon: Golden Expectations of Region Have Lost Their Shine, Some Say,” (Orlando Sentinel) Clarion-Ledger, February 1, 1987, sec. C, p. 1. 56. David Treadwell, “Sun Belt Promise Fading in Depressed Rural South: Small Towns Decay as Cities Prosper,” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 1987, sec. A, p. 1. 57. Steven Beschloss, “Prosperity’s Broken Promise,” (Virginian-Pilot) Southern Exposure, fall/winter 1987, 60. 58. Joe Atkins, “Place of Contrasts and Common Ground: Southerners Still Unified by the Emotional Hold of Their Land,” (Gannett News Service) Florida Today, January 31, 1988. 59. Atkins, “Place of Contrasts and Common Ground: Southerners Still Unified by the Emotional Hold of Their Land.” 60. Joe Atkins, “Enter the Post-Sunbelt South,” CrossRoads: A Journal of Southern Culture 1, no. 2 (spring/summer 1993): 34. 61. “Sun Belt May Soon Disappear on Horizon: Golden Expectations of Region Have Lost Their Shine, Some Say,” sec. C, p. 1. 62. James C. Cobb, “Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877–1984,” in The American South Comes of Age, 334–35. 63. MDC Inc., The State of the South, 2002: Shadows in the Sunbelt Revisited (Chapel Hill, N.C.: MDC Inc., 2002), 39. 64. Leah D. Totten, interview by author, handwritten notes, Chapel Hill, N.C., July 29, 2003. 65. Emily Le Coz, “State Touts Low Ranking in Business Cost,” Tupelo (Miss.) Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, August 16, 2005, sec. A, p. 1. 66. James C. Cobb, “Southern Exposure,” New York Times, November 19, 2005, sec. A, p. 27.

Chapter 7 Southern Exposure: “A New Style of Southern Journalism” 1. Clifford A. Christians et al., Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2005), 56. 2. Editorial, Southern Exposure 2, no. 4 (1975): inside cover page.

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3. Editorial, Southern Exposure 2, no. 4, inside cover page. 4. Bob Hall, Joseph “Chip” Hughes, and Chris Kromm, interview by author, notes, Research Triangle Park, N.C., July 17, 2006. 5. Michael B. Russell, “Greenville’s Experiment: The Non-Union Culture,” Southern Exposure 7, no. 1 (spring 1979): 94. 6. Russell, “Greenville’s Experiment: The Non-Union Culture,” 96-98. 7. Chris Kromm, panel discussion on “Overview/An Historic Look at Organized Labor, the Press, and the South,” October 5, 2003, A Conference on Labor and the Southern Press, October 4–7, 2003, University of Mississippi, University, Miss. 8. Hughes, interview by author. 9. Hall, interview by author. 10. Bob Hall, “Memo Re: Institute for Southern Studies’ Journal/Newsletter,” fall 1972. 11. Kromm, interview by author. 12. Chip Hughes, from “In the Beginning,” Southern Exposure 11, no. 3 (May/June 1983): 6. 13. Hall, interview by author. 14. Michael Hudson, “Which Side Are You On? The Biography of a Protest Song,” Southern Exposure 31, no. 1 (spring 2003): 42. 15. Hall and Hughes, interview by author. 16. Tom Bethell, “1974: Contract at Brookside ‘In Perspective,’” Southern Exposure 4, nos. 1–2 (spring–summer 1976): 116. 17. Bob Hall, “We Had a Victory,” Southern Exposure IV, nos. 1–2 (spring–summer 1976): 118. 18. Hall, interview by author. 19. Bethell, “1974: Contract at Brookside ‘In Perspective,’” 116. 20. Peter Dreier, “Why Mine Deaths Are Up,” Nation, June 12, 2006, 6. 21. Hughes, interview by author. 22. Kromm, panel discussion on “Overview/An Historic Look at Organized Labor, the Press, and the South.” 23. Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (1952; reprint, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1981), 212–13. 24. William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982), 286–87. 25. Christopher R. Martin, Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 2004), 70. 26. Martin, Framed!, 71, 99. 27. Thomas Frank, “Triangulation Nation: Affirming Mediocrity in a Jaded Age,” The Baffler, no. 11 (1998): 6, 9. 28. Mark Crispin Miller, in “The National Entertainment State,” Nation, July 3, 2006, 30. 29. William Deresiewicz, “The Dispossessed,” The American Scholar (winter 2006): 18, 20–21. 30. John L. Hess, “Pro-Union, Anti-Fascist, No Ads,” review of PM: A New Deal in Journalism, 1940–1948, by Paul Milkman, Nation, July 14, 1997, 25.

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31. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 422. 32. Ron Nixon and Jordan Green, “Who Owns the Southern Media?” Southern Exposure 25, no. 1–2 (spring-summer 1997): 12. 33. Frank, “Triangulation Nation: Affirming Mediocrity in a Jaded Age,” 11. 34. Marsha Stopa, “SPJ Caught in the Middle,” Quill 85, no. 11 (January/February 1997): 17. 35. Thomas Frank, “Killing News in Motor City,” Nation, November 25, 1996, 20–21. 36. Frank, “Killing News in Motor City,” 21. 37. Kromm, panel discussion on “Overview/An Historic Look at Organized Labor, the Press, and the South.” 38. Editorial, Southern Exposure 1, no. 3 & 4 (1974): inside cover page. 39. Neill Herring and Sue Thrasher, “UAW Sit-down Strike: Atlanta, 1936,” Southern Exposure 1, no. 3 & 4 (1974): 64. 40. Herring and Thrasher, “UAW Sit-down Strike: Atlanta, 1936,” 64. 41. Miller, in “The National Entertainment State,” 29. 42. Deresiewicz, “The Dispossessed,” 23.

Chapter 8 Pillowtex Says Goodnight 1. Joe Atkins, “Brown Lung Sufferers Seeking Compensation,” Sanford (North Carolina) Herald, June 3, 1977, sec. A, pp. 1, 10. 2. Danny Forsyth, interview by author, handwritten notes, Oxford, Miss., October 27, 2004. 3. Kathy Nelson, interview by author, handwritten notes, Kannapolis, North Carolina, July 12, 2006. 4. Nelson, interview by author. 5. Adam Bell, “Ex-Plant Workers Face Harsh Job Market Short on Training, Education,” Charlotte Observer, July 31, 2003, sec. A, p. 6. 6. Barbara Hagenbaugh, “Lives Unraveled,” USA Today, July 30, 2004, USATODAY .com. 7. Hagenbaugh, “Lives Unraveled.” 8. Nelson, interview by author. 9. “Murdock biotech plan valued at $1B,” Charlotte Business Journal, September 12, 2005, http://charlotte.bizjournals.com/charlotte/stories/2005/09/12/daily4.html. 10. Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 171. 11. Joe Drape, “Through the Mill,” Southern Exposure (fall 1991) (originally published in Atlanta Journal/Atlanta Constitution, May 12, 1991): 8. 12. Nelson, interview by author. 13. “Site of ’03 Layoffs May Hire Again,” (Associated Press) Jackson Clarion-Ledger, September 12, 2005, sec. B, p. 5. 14. “Murdock Biotech Plan Valued at $1B,” Charlotte Business Journal.

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15. Drape, “Through the Mill,” 10–11. 16. Nicholas Bérubé, “Chiquita’s Children,” In These Times 29, no. 13 (May 23, 2005): 21. 17. Clifford G. Christians et al., Media Ethics: Cases and Moral Reasoning, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2005), 76. 18. Alexandra Lescaze, Where Do You Stand? Stories from an American Mill (New York: Mighty Fine Films, 2003), documentary film. 19. Drape, “Through the Mill,” 10. 20. Erin Cox, “‘People Helping People,’” The Fabric of Our Communities, a publication of Kannapolis (North Carolina) Independent Tribune, April 30, 2006, p. 29. 21. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), 27. 22. Peter Applebome, Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture (New York: Random House, 1996), 183. 23. Applebome, Dixie Rising, 185. 24. “Charles Ray Dunlap,” (Obituary) Kannapolis (North Carolina) Independent Tribune, July 9, 2006, sec. A, p. 9. 25. “Mrs. Iva Hardin,” (Obituary) Kannapolis (North Carolina) Independent Tribune, July 12, 2006, sec. A, p. 7. 26. “Mr. Paul Eugene Jones,” (Obituary) Kannapolis (North Carolina) Independent Tribune, July 12, 2006, sec. A, p. 7. 27. James A. Hodges, “The Real Norma Rae,” in Southern Labor in Transition: 1940– 1995, ed. Robert H. Zieger (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 261–62. 28. Bernstein, The Lean Years, 8. 29. Bernstein, The Lean Years, 2. 30. Applebome, Dixie Rising, 193. 31. Applebome, Dixie Rising, 189. 32. George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock, The Uprising of ’34 (New York: First Run/Icarus Films, 1995), documentary film. 33. Alexandra Lescaze, interview by author, notes, Oxford, Miss., June 8, 2004. 34. Where Do You Stand? Stories from an American Mill, Timeline/History, http:// www.wheredoyoustand.info/timeline.html. 35. Lescaze, Where Do You Stand? Stories from an American Mill. 36. Lescaze, interview by author. 37. Lescaze, Where Do You Stand? 38. Lescaze, Where Do You Stand? 39. Robert Kirkland Robinson, panel discussion on “”The Other Side of Globalism: The Plants Leaving the South and Moving to Mexico, China, and Elsewhere in Search of Cheaper Labor,” October 6, 2003, A Conference on Labor and the Southern Press, October 4–7, 2003, University of Mississippi, University, Miss. 40. James Kilpatrick, syndicated columnist, “Fighting a Textile War,” Oxford (Mississippi) Eagle, September 28, 1990, 4. 41. “Veto Needed / Textile Bill Works against Goals,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, September 22, 1990, sec. A, p. 14. 42. Ken Silverstein, “The New China Hands: How the Fortune 500 Is China’s Strongest Lobby,” Nation, February 17, 1997, 12.

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43. David Moberg, “Rough Trade,” review of The Selling of Free Trade: NAFTA, Washington and the Subversion of American Democracy by John R. MacArthur and Mollie’s Job: A Story of Life and Work on the Global Assembly Line by William M. Adler, In These Times, November 13, 2000, 29. 44. Geri Smith and Cristina Lindblad, “Mexico: Was NAFTA Worth It?” Business Week, December 22, 2003, 70–71. 45. Dexter Roberts and Pete Engardio, “Secrets, Lies, and Sweatshops,” Business Week, November 27, 2006, 58. 46. Joseph Kahn, “China’s Leaders Manage Class Conflict Carefully,” New York Times, January 25, 2004, sec. WK, p. 5. 47. Eric Dirnbach, “Unions, Activists, and the Global Apparel Industry,” Z Magazine 20, no. 2 (February 2007): 53, 55. 48. Robinson, panel discussion on “The Other Side of Globalism: The Plants Leaving the South and Moving to Mexico, China, and Elsewhere in Search of Cheaper Labor.”

Chapter 9 Wal-Mart Conquers the World 1. Labor organizer (anonymous), telephone interview by author, notes, March 1, 2007. 2. Anthony Bianco, The Bully of Bentonville (New York: Doubleday, 2006), 6. 3. Jean Gould and Lorena Hickok, Walter Reuther: Labor’s Rugged Individualist (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1972), 166. 4. Bianco, The Bully of Bentonville, 279–80. 5. Labor organizer, interview by author. 6. Sam Walton with John Huey, Sam Walton: Made in America (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 129. 7. Bianco, The Bully of Bentonville, 235. 8. Labor organizer, interview by author. 9. Labor organizer, interview by author. 10. Vance H. Trimble, Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America’s Richest Man (New York: Dutton, 1990), 230. 11. Charles Martin, telephone interview by author, notes, February 28, 2007. 12. Steven Greenhouse and Michael Barbaro, “Wal-Mart Memo Suggests Ways to Cut Employee Benefit Costs,” New York Times, October 26, 2005, sec. C, p. 1. 13. Greenhouse and Barbaro, “Wal-Mart Memo Suggests Ways to Cut Employee Benefit Costs.” 14. Martin, interview by author. 15. Joshua Freeman et al., eds., Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 2, From the Gilded Age to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 273. 16. Bob Ortega, In Sam We Trust (New York: Random House, 1998), 374–75. 17. Ortega, In Sam We Trust, 368, xii–xiii. 18. John Dicker, “Union Blues at Wal-Mart,” Nation, July 8, 2002, 16.

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19. Trimble, Sam Walton, 7–8, 239. 20. Ortega, In Sam We Trust, 194. 21. Walton with Huey, Sam Walton: Made in America, 1–2. 22. William I. Hair, “Marxist History,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 1399. 23. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 54. 24. Walton with Huey, Sam Walton: Made in America, 3. 25. Walton with Huey, Sam Walton: Made in America, 5, 25. 26. Walton with Huey, Sam Walton: Made in America, 127–28. 27. Trimble, Sam Walton, x. 28. Bill Quinn, How Wal-Mart Is Destroying America: And What You Can Do about It (Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 1998), x, 102. 29. Trimble, Sam Walton, 299. 30. Quinn, How Wal-Mart Is Destroying America, vi. 31. Trimble, Sam Walton, 231. 32. Liza Featherstone, “Manna from Hell,” Nation, November 21, 2005, 16. 33. Quinn, How Wal-Mart Is Destroying America, 6. 34. Peter Hart and Janine Jackson, “Media Lick the Hand That Feeds Them,” Extra!, November/December 2005, 22. 35. Kevin Sweeney, “The Job of Reporting about Wal-Mart,” BusinessJournalism.org, June 24, 2004. http://www.businessjournalism.org/rt/062504/sweeney/index.cfm. 36. George Will, “Liberals Really Don’t Understand Wal-Mart Shoppers,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, September 17, 2006, sec. G, p. 5. 37. John Dicker, The United States of Wal-Mart (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005), 133–34. 38. Hart and Jackson, “Media Lick the Hand That Feeds Them,” 21. 39. “The High Cost of Low Prices,” Business Week, October 6, 2003, 168. 40. Dicker, The United States of Wal-Mart, 132. 41. Christopher Hayes, “Symbol of the System,” In These Times, November 21, 2005, 22–23. 42. Lorrie Grant, “Wal-Mart Rejects 2000 Labor Audit,” USA Today, January 14, 2004, sec. B, p. 3. 43. Trimble, Sam Walton, 153–54. 44. Wendy Zellner, “A Wal-Mart Settlement: What It Might Look Like,” Business Week, July 5, 2004, 48. 45. George Will, “Could One State’s ‘Mugging’ of Wal-Mart Spread to Others?” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, January 19, 2006, sec. A, p. 9. 46. Liza Featherstone, “Race to the Bottom,” Nation, March 28, 2005, 18. 47. Michael Barbaro, “A New Weapon for Wal-Mart: A War Room,” New York Times, November 1, 2005, sec. A, p. 1. 48. Marilyn Geewax, “Wal-Mart, Unions Score PR Points,” (Cox News Service) Memphis Commercial Appeal, November 26, 2006, sec. D, p. 4. 49. Lucy Schultze, “Mall Merchants Lament Loss of Wal-Mart, Hope for New Business Neighbor,” Oxford (Miss.) Eagle, August 14, 2002, sec. A, p. 1.

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Chapter 10 Charleston: “The First Major Labor Battle of the Twenty-first Century” 1. JoAnn Wypijewski, “Audacity on Trial: Talking Union Still Amounts to a Punishable Offense in Parts of the Old South,” Nation, 6/13 August 2001, 20. 2. Tony Bartelme and Glenn Smith, “Riot’s Aftermath: Assessing the Long-Term Fallout of the Waterfront Riot,” Charleston Post and Courier, 22 January 2000. http:// www.charleston.net/news/ilariot/riot0121.html. 3. Wypijewski, “Audacity on Trial,” 20. 4. Tony Bartelme, interview by author, notes, Charleston, S.C., November 21, 2005. 5. Wypijewski, “Audacity on Trial,” 21. 6. Mark S. Miller, “Labor on the Move: The Future,” in Working Lives: The Southern Exposure History of Labor in the South, ed. Marc S. Miller (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 352. 7. Lorne M. Chambers, “Eye on the Five: Five Local Dock Workers Have Shaken the Foundation of Labor Relations in the State,” Charleston City Paper, Charleston, S.C., August 17, 2001. http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/cover_story.html. 8. Chambers, “Eye on the Five.” 9. Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Labor’s Untold Story (New York: United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, 1955), 13. 10. Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, 17. 11. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 243. 12. Roy P. Basler, A Short History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1967), 24. 13. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 243. 14. Boyer and Morais, Labor’s Untold Story, 15, 11. 15. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 34. 16. Wypijewski, “Audacity on Trial,” 20. 17. Ken Riley, telephone interview by author, notes, December 1, 2005. 18. Bartelme and Smith, “Riot’s Aftermath.” 19. Chris Kromm, “Blacks, Labor, and Southern Politics: The Case of the Charleston Five,” CounterPunch 8, no. 12 (June 16–30, 2001): 1. 20. Wypijewski, “Audacity on Trial,” 21. 21. Bartelme, interview by author. 22. Tony Bartelme, “Indicted Longshoremen Adopted as Union Crusade,” Charleston Post and Courier, September 3, 2001. 23. Bartelme, interview by author. 24. Bartelme, interview by author. 25. D. Peters Wilborn Jr., interview by author, notes, Charleston, S.C., November 21, 2005. 26. Wilborn, interview by author. 27. Bartelme, interview by author. 28. Bartelme and Smith, “Riot’s Aftermath.”

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29. Richard Green Jr., “Port Pickets Limited to 19,” Charleston Post and Courier, January 27, 2000. 30. Wilborn, interview by author. 31. Bartelme, “Indicted Longshoremen Adopted as Union Crusade.” 32. Wypijewski, “Audacity on Trial,” 22. 33. Brett Bursey, “Port Authority: Union Busting in the Holy City,” News & Comments (summer 2001): 9. 34. Tony Bartelme, “Rally for Longshoremen,” Charleston Post and Courier, June 10, 2001, sec. A, p. 1, COL edition. 35. Ted Reed, “Union Leader Balances Camp, Friends Say,” Columbia State, September 4, 2000, sec. B, p. 3, final edition. 36. Delawese Fulton, “Non-Dockworkers May Join Fight,” Charleston Post and Courier, February 1, 2000, sec. B, p. 1, PC edition. 37. Riley, interview by author. 38. James Spinosa, “President’s Report: Remembering the Past to Better the Future,” Dispatcher, San Francisco, Calif., October 2005, 2. 39. David Moberg, “What’s up on the Docks? Bush Turns to Taft-Hartley to Battle the Country’s Most Militant Union,” In These Times, November 11, 2002, 12. 40. Tony Bartelme, “Condon Gives up Charleston Five Case,” Charleston Post and Courier, October 11, 2001, sec. B, p. 6. 41. Bartelme, “Condon Gives up Charleston Five Case,” sec. B, p. 1. 42. Tony Bartelme, “Charleston 5 Case Ends with No-Contest Pleas,” Charleston Post and Courier, November 14, 2001, sec. B, p. 1. 43. Interview with Ken Riley, In These Times, October 1, 2001, 14. 44. Wilborn, interview by author. 45. Bartelme, interview by author. 46. Riley, interview by author. 47. Wilborn, interview by author. 48. Pavlito Geshos, “Working Class Heroes: Activism in the American Labor Movement,” Clamor, March/April 2002, 51. 49. Bartelme, interview by author. 50. William J. Adelman, Haymarket Revisited (Chicago: Illinois Labor History Society, 1976), 21. 51. Chambers, “Eye on the Five.” 52. Riley, interview by author. 53. Wilborn, interview by author.

Chapter 11 Detroit South 1. James Fisher, community meeting with the Southern Faith, Labor, and Community Alliance and United Auto Workers, Canton, Miss., January 16, 2007. 2. James Fisher, interview by author, handwritten notes, Canton, Miss., January 16, 2007.

244

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3. Yvette Taylor, community meeting with the Southern Faith, Labor, and Community Alliance and United Auto Workers, Canton, Miss., January 16, 2007. 4. Gail Corley, community meeting with the United Auto Workers and Southern Faith, Labor and Community Alliance, Jackson, Miss., December 2, 2006. 5. Vicki Smith, interview by author, notes, Oxford, Miss., December 2006. 6. “Henry Ford’s Revolution for the Worker,” AmericanHeritage.com, January 5, 2006. http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/web/20060105. 7. “Henry Ford’s Revolution for the Worker,” AmericanHeritage.com, January 5, 2006. http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/web/20060105. 8. Tracy Reed, community meeting with the United Auto Workers and Southern Faith, Labor and Community Alliance, Jackson, Miss., December 2, 2006. 9. Brett Clanton, panel discussion on “Globalism: New Challenges for the Press, Labor and the South’s Economy,” October 5, 2003, A Conference on Labor and the Southern Press, October 4–7, 2003, University of Mississippi, University, Miss. 10. Scott Waller, panel discussion on “Globalism: New Challenges for the Press, Labor and the South’s Economy,” October 5, 2003, A Conference on Labor and the Southern Press, October 4–7, 2003, University of Mississippi, University, Miss. 11. Arnold Lindsey, “Resident: ‘It’s a blessing from God’,” Jackson Clarion Ledger, November 10, 2000, sec. A, p. 1. 12. Nell Luter Floyd, “Expect UAW to Try Organizing, Expert Says,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, May 25, 2003, “Nissan Mississippi,” p. 27. 13. Scott Waller, “Mississippi’s Investment in Nissan Paying Off,” Jackson ClarionLedger, May 4, 2003, sec. C, p. 1. 14. “‘State of Surprise’ Reason Mercedes Picked Alabama,” Birmingham News, September 30, 1993. http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives. Article ID: 0004138603. 15. Pronita Gupta, “The Art of the Deal,” Southern Exposure 26, nos. 2 & 3 (summer– fall 1998): 30–31. 16. “South Must Stop Selling Cheap, Historian: Mercedes Bids Should Be Cautious,” Birmingham News, August 4, 1993. http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/ Archives. Article ID: 0004134752. 17. Don Raye and Robert Mitchum, “Ballad of Thunder Road,” from Thunder Road, MGM, 1958. 18. Studs Terkel, Working (New York: Avon Books, 1975), 260–62. 19. Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 130. 20. “The Auto Industry in Mississippi: New Opportunities for Workers and Communities,” United Auto Workers, undated, 7. 21. Christopher R. Martin, Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 2004), 94. 22. Martin, Framed!, 78. 23. Jack Mazurak, “10 and Growing: Labor, Incentives Lure Auto Plants,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, March 18, 2007, sec. C, p. 1. 24. Ian Urbina, “Southern Bellwether: Unions Won’t Survive Unless They Organize down in Dixie,” In These Times, March 4, 2002, 16.

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25. Karsten Hülsemann, “Greenfields in the Heart of Dixie: How the American Auto Industry Discovered the South,” in The Second Wave: Southern Industrialization from the 1940s to the 1970s, ed. Philip Scranton (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 225. 26. Josee Valcourt, “Is State’s Investment in Nissan Paying Off?” Jackson ClarionLedger, November 21, 2003, sec. C, p. 1. 27. Laura Hipp, “Package May Be a Bargain,” Jackson Clarion-Ledger, March 1, 2007, sec. A, p. 1. 28. Neil Peirce, “First Shoe Drops in Legal Battle against State-Local Favors to Corporations,” Washington Post Writers Group, September 19, 2004. peircecolumns@ citistates.com. 29. Hülsemann, “Greenfields in the Heart of Dixie,” 238. 30. Hülsemann, “Greenfields in the Heart of Dixie,” 239. 31. David Welch, “Grading Ghosn,” Business Week, September 25, 2006, 50. 32. Maria Bartiromo, “Carlos Ghosn on Detroit’s Odds,” Business Week, December 5, 2005, 110. 33. Monica Langley, “For Carlos Ghosn, Fast Lane Gets Bumpy,” Wall Street Journal, October 28–29, 2006, sec. A, p. 8. 34. Langley, “For Carlos Ghosn, Fast Lane Gets Bumpy,” sec. A, p. 8. 35. Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, Red Flag, Black Flag: French Revolution, 1968 (New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1968), 156. 36. Stephen Franklin, Three Strikes: Labor’s Heartland Losses and What They Mean for Working Americans (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 120. 37. James Brooke, “Nissan’s Mr. Fix-It Is the Talk of Detroit,” New York Times, November 19, 2005, sec. B, p. 4. 38. Joseph B. White, “From the Brink of Disaster,” review of Turnaround, by David Magee, Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2003, sec. W, p. 8. 39. David Magee, Turnaround: How Carlos Ghosn Rescued Nissan (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 164. 40. “Skilled Trades and Organizing,” Skill Magazine, fall/winter 2001, February 4, 2003. http://www.uaw.org/publications/skill/01/2/skill02.html. 41. Franklin, Three Strikes, 47. 42. Aronowitz, False Promises, 374. 43. Walter Reuther, speech, March on Washington, Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963. 44. Reuther, speech, March on Washington. 45. Franklin, Three Strikes, 47. 46. George F. Will, “Labor since the Overpass,” Newsweek, August 15, 2005, 54. 47. Ron Gettelfinger, community meeting with the United Auto Workers, Jackson, Miss., February 24, 2005. 48. Gary Casteel, community meeting with the United Auto Workers, Jackson, Miss., February 24, 2005. 49. Father Jeremy R. Tobin, community meeting with the United Auto Workers and Southern Faith, Labor and Community Alliance, Jackson, Miss., December 2, 2006.

246

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Chapter 12 Immigrants from a Deeper South 1. Pete Hamill, Diego Rivera (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002), 145, 152. 2. Hamill, Diego Rivera, 154. 3. Charles Van Doren and Robert McHenry, eds., Webster’s American Biographies (Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1975), 613. 4. Victoria Cintra, interview by author, handwritten notes, Biloxi, Miss., July 31, 2006. 5. Cintra, interview by author. 6. Cintra, interview by author. 7. “Jercy,” interview by author, handwritten notes, Oxford, Miss., May 10, 2006. 8. “Jercy,” interview by author. 9. Sandy Smith-Nonini, “A Union Is the Only Way,” Southern Exposure (summer 1999): 47. 10. Smith-Nonini, “A Union Is the Only Way,” 50. 11. Patrick O’Neill, “Farm Laborers Win Union Victory,” National Catholic Reporter, October 1, 2004, 7. 12. Patrick O’Neill, “Union Leader Brings Organizing Campaign to Cucumber Pickers,” National Catholic Reporter, July 4, 1997, 13. 13. Smith-Nonini, “A Union Is the Only Way,” 52. 14. Leon Fink, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 1. 15. Juan Montes, panel discussion on “Faith, Labor, and Immigration,” July 29, 2006, Southern Faith, Labor and Community Alliance Conference, July 27–29, 2006, Memphis, Tenn. 16. Rob Gurwitt, “Power to the Pickers: Demanding a Harvest without Shame,” Mother Jones, July/August 2004, 24. 17. “Beyond ‘Divide and Rule,’” Southern Exposure (summer 1999): 54. 18. “Beyond ‘Divide and Rule,’” 54. 19. Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez, “Latinos Create a New Political Climate,” Z Magazine, June 2006, 32. 20. Darryl Fears, “Union Tries to Unite Blacks, Latinos,” Washington Post, July 24, 2006, sec. A, p. 4. 21. Robert P. Ingalls, “Radicals and Vigilantes: The 1931 Strike of Tampa Cigar Workers,” in Southern Workers and Their Unions, 1880–1975, ed. Merl E. Reed, Leslie S. Hough, and Gary M Fink (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 47–48. 22. Julián Cardona, “Mississippi: esclavos mexicanos,” Día Siete, año 6, número 276, 49. 23. Jacob Riis, “Introduction, How the Other Half Lives,” in Muckraking! The Journalism That Changed America, ed. Judith and William Serrin (New York: New Press, 2002), 3. 24. Cintra, interview by author.

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247

Index

Abbott, Carl, 114 Addams, Jane, 44 Aderholt, O. F., 12, 30 Advanced Technology Development Center, 117 African American workers, 14, 21, 23, 25, 43, 45, 48, 51, 53, 55, 58, 60, 65, 72–74, 79, 84, 100, 103, 135, 177–78, 183, 189, 218–19 Agee, James, 47 Agency for International Development, 146 Agriculture Adjustment Act, 48 Ahlgren, Frank, 72 Al Jazeera, 127 Alabama, 8, 9, 22, 31, 34, 43, 45, 59, 80, 109, 111, 119, 126, 137, 196–99, 203; Anniston, 72; Birmingham, 32, 36, 44, 50–53, 59, 72, 75, 104, 199, 208; Eutaw, 124; Huntsville, 117; Lincoln, 203; Lowndes Co., 80; Mobile, 213; Montgomery, 45, 68, 203; Selma, 76, 79; Vance, 197 Alabama Arise, 198 Alinsky, Saul, 129 Alvarega, Luis, 219 Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers, 17, 40, 88, 144, 148, 149, 153 American Bemberg Mill, 29

American Federation of Labor (AFL), 26, 30, 39–40, 43, 44, 50, 55–57, 60, 61, 89, 187 American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFLCIO), 14, 17, 74, 79–82, 85, 86, 88, 92, 94–95, 171, 185, 187, 190 American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, 73 American Glanzstoff Mill, 29 American Guardian, 135 American Newspaper Guild, 56, 60, 71–72, 84–85, 139 American Scholar, 137 American Social History Project, 8 Ameringer, Oskar, 49, 135 Anastasia, Albert, 187 Anastasia, Anthony, 187 Anderson, Sherwood, 36 Appalachia, 26, 32, 35 Appalachian Views, 96 Applebome, Peter, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 35, 116–17, 151, 153 Arkansas, 33, 46, 47, 49, 157, 168, 215; Bentonville, 160, 165, 168–69, 173; Helena, 37; Hot Springs, 110; Little Rock, 72; Mena, 50; Newport, 167; Searcy, 162–64; Tyronza, 44, 49 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 138 Arkansas Gazette, 91

249

Arkansas Interfaith Committee for Workers Justice, 169 Arkansas Times, 163 Armstrong Tire and Rubber Plant, 109 Arnold, Bob, 130 Aronowitz, Stanley, 10, 16, 24, 200–1, 208 Ashmore, Harry, 91 Atkins, Michael, 174 Atlanta Compromise, 103 Atlanta Constitution, 8, 11, 15, 20, 21, 27, 39, 53, 55, 91, 98, 103, 104, 108, 115, 148 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 99–101, 104, 174, 219 Atomic Energy Commission, 117 auto industry, 33, 41, 140, 193–209 Bailey, Walter, 189 Baker, Ray Stannard, 137 Balance Agriculture with Industry program, 34, 57, 89–90, 109, 121 Baldanzi, George, 56, 60 Baldwin Mill, 30 Banner Coal Mine, 32 Barbaro, Michael, 173–74 Barber, Rims, 194 Barbour, Haley, 83 Barnes, Anita, 10 Barnett, Ross, 90, 91 Barone, Michael, 120 Barr, John U., 68, 70 Bartelme, Tony, 177, 180–83, 189–91 Barton, Bill, 92 Basinger, C. O., 78 Bass, Linnie, 142–43 Beal, Fred E., 12, 29, 30 Beaumont, Richard A., 16 Becker, Bill, 88 Beckwith, Byron De La, 77, 95 Benitez, Lucas, 218, 221 Bennett, David L., 91 Bennett, Harry, 203 Benton, Thomas Hart, 165 Benton County Daily Democrat, 168

250

Index

Bernstein, Irving, 12, 29, 31 Bertrand, Claude-Jean, 75 Bérubé, Nicolas, 150 Beschloss, Steven, 123 Bethell, Tom, 134 Bianco, Anthony, 162, 170 Bilbo, Theodore, 34, 54, 71, 83, 88 Billington, Monroe, 118 Bingham, Barry, 52 Birmingham News, 197–98 Bismarck, Otto von, 191 Bittner, Van, 54, 56, 60 Black, Earl and Merle, 118 Black, Hugo, 34, 52 Black World Today, 190 Blair, J. H., 133 Blease, Cole, 182 BMW, 7–8, 115, 146, 177, 178, 203 Boeing, 192 Boggs, Luke, 169 Bond, Julian, 85, 131 Booker, Simeon, 75 Bosch, 178 Bourke-White, Margaret, 47 Bowden, Bill, 169 Bowers, John, 185, 187 Boyle, Joe, 71 Boyle, Tony, 133 Boyer, Richard O., 60, 109, 178–79 Bracken, Robert, 3–4 Bradshaw, Eva, 143 Brady, Tom, 69 Brand Atlanta campaign, 105 Bridges, Harry, 186, 187–88 Briggs Manufacturing, 208 Broad, Molly, 149 Brookings Institution, 9–10 Brookside Mine, 132–35 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 64 Brotherhood of Timber Workers, 26–27 Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, 67, 69, 79, 90, 104 Browning, Gordon, 71 Bryner, Gary, 200 Burlington Industries, 142–43, 145, 155

Bush, George H. W., 120, 156 Bush, George W., 125, 134, 156–57, 188, 213 Business Week, 115, 158, 170, 172, 174, 205 BusinessJournalism.org, 169 Bussie, Victor, 80–81, 83, 88 Byrd, Harry, 34, 58 Byrd, William, II, 108 Cahan, Abraham, 137 Caldwell, Erskine, 46–47, 107 Campbell, Bill, 105 Campbell, Will D., 24, 25 Campbell Soup, 216 Canada, 157, 214 Cannon, Charles A., 144–45, 147, 151, 153 Cannon, Iona, 151 Cannon, James W., 144, 151 Cannon, Ruth Louise Coltrane, 147 Cannon Foundation, 151 Cannon Mills and Village, 144–45, 148–50, 151–53, 155 Cardona, Julián, 220 Carey, James B., 59 Carnegie, Andrew, 51 Carolina Brown Lung Association, 142–43 Carpenters’ Brotherhood, 39 Carson, John, 28 Carter, Hodding, Jr., 15, 18, 36, 53, 57, 91 Carter, Jimmy, 111, 114–15, 120 Case Farms, 66, 217–18 Cash, W. J., 11, 15, 23–24, 36, 42, 53, 166 casino industry, 213 Casteel, Gary, 209 Catchings, John, 51, 52 Catholic Worker, 135–36 Catholic Worker Movement, 38 Caudill, Harry M., 35 Caudill, Orley B., 93–95 Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), 157

Central Trades and Labor Assembly, 25 Chambers, Lorne M., 178, 191–92 Chambers, Susan, 163 Chaney, James, 75, 106, 107 Change to Win Coalition, 85 Chao, Elaine, 188 Chaplin, Charlie, 200 Charleston City Paper, 178, 191–92 Charleston Five, 182–86, 188–89, 190–92 Charleston Gazette, 177 Charleston Mercury, 178 Charlotte Observer, 143 Chattanooga Times, 45 Chávez, César, 85, 99, 211 Chavez-Thompson, Linda, 185 Cheeks, Landres, 197 Cheney, Dick, 213 China, 16, 155–56, 157–59, 170, 214 China Ting Group, 155 Chiquita Brands International, 149–50 Chrysler, 33 Cigar Makers Union, 52 Cincinnati Enquirer, 150 Cintra, Victoria, 212–14, 221 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 13–14, 15, 20, 26, 38–45, 50, 52, 54–63, 70, 72, 79, 89, 187, 208 construction industry, 213, 216 Citizens Councils, 68, 79, 80, 87, 88, 90, 93, 95 Civil Rights Act, 74, 77, 83, 95, 120, 154 civil rights movement, 17, 38, 45, 64–85, 88, 90–97, 104, 106, 111, 156, 194 Civilian Conservation Corps, 89 Clamor magazine, 4, 190 Clanton, Brett, 196 Clarion-Ledger, 7, 10, 14, 76–77, 84, 86–87, 90, 94, 96–97, 138, 196–97, 202, 204, 219 Clinchfield Mill, 30 Clinton, Bill, 120–21, 122, 125, 156–57, 173 CNN, 102

Index

251

coal industry, 28, 31–33, 45, 132–35, 140 Coalition of Immokalee Workers, 211, 218, 220 Cobb, James C., 98, 123–26, 199 Coca-Cola, 101–2 Cohen, Jeff, 76 Collins, Perry, 177 Commission on the Future of the South, 122 Committee for Industrial Organization, 40 Committee on Political Education, 88 Commonwealth Labor College, 50 Communism, 12, 13, 45–46, 49–50, 54, 56, 59–62 Communities Organized for Public Service, 129 Community Publishers, 168 Condon, Charlie, 182–85, 188–89 Congress of Racial Equality, 72 Conley, Jim, 28 Connor, Eugene “Bull,” 53, 72, 107, 208 Contract With America, 105–6, 121 convict labor, 32, 50 Coolidge, Calvin, 164 Cooper, Owen, 96 Cooper Tire, 14 Copley, Stephen, 169 Corley, Gail, 195, 204, 209 Cortes, Ernie, 129 Cotton, Robert, 43, 71 Cotton Manufacturers Association, 110 Coughlin, Tom, 172 CounterPunch, 190 Cox, James, 104 Cox News Service, 174 Crump, E. H., 38, 43, 57, 70–71, 144 Dabney, Virginius, 36, 41–42, 53, 128 Daily Corinthian, 87 Daimler-Chrysler, 192, 201 Daniels, Jonathan, 41 Daniels family, 84, 138 Davidson, Donald, 107

252

Index

Davis-Bacon Act, 213 Day, Dorothy, 38, 135–36 de Fontaine, Felix Gregory, 177 Dean Foods, 216 Debs, Eugene, 26, 86 Delta Air Lines, 100, 101–2 Delta Democrat-Times, 15, 53, 57, 91 Delta Pride catfish plant, 84 Delta Star, 15 Democracy for America, 162 Democracy North Carolina, 130 Democratic Party, 13, 35, 58–59, 119–21 Der Anzeiger, 135 Deresiewicz, William, 137, 141 Detroit Free Press, 139 Detroit News, 139 Dewey, John, 44 Día Siete, 220 Dicker, John, 165, 169, 170 Dickerson, James, 68 Dirnbach, Eric, 158–59 Dispatcher, 186, 190 Dixiecrats, 13–14, 35, 58–59, 68, 69, 89–90, 119 Dobbs, Lou, 213 dock industry, 176–92 Dole Food Company, 148–50 Dombrowski, James, 45, 52 Dowd, Mollie, 52 Drape, Joe, 148, 149 Draper, Alan, 69, 79, 80–81, 92 Dubinsky, David, 40 Duke Power Company, 132–34 Dukes, Betty, 171 Dukes vs. Wal-Mart, 171–72 Dumas, Ernie, 168 Dunn, Johnny, 187 Durham, Frank D., 13, 14, 45 Durr, Virginia, 45, 52 Earnhardt, Dale, Jr., 147 Earnhardt, Dale, Sr., 147, 154 East, Clay, 49 Eastland, James O., 14–15, 46, 54, 68–69 Eastover Mining Company, 132, 134

Ebbers, Bernie, 10 Economic Policy Institute, 157 Edgerton, Jason, 183 Egerton, John, 29, 34, 36, 41, 44, 52, 53 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 119 El Paso Times, 138 Elsas, Jacob, 27, 28 Engardio, Pete, 158 England, 5 Ethridge, Mark, 52 Ethridge, Tom, 14, 87 Evans, Herndon, 35 Evans, Walker, 47 Evers, Medgar, 3, 77, 82, 91, 93, 95, 106 Extra newsletter, 169, 170 Facing South, 174 Fair Employment Practices Commission, 54, 58 Fair Labor Standards Act, 43 Faircloth, Talbert, 143 Farm Labor Organizing Committee, 211, 216–18 Farmers’ Alliance, 22, 25 Farmworker Project, 218 Faubus, Orval, 50 Faulkner, William, 108–9 Featherstone, Liza, 169 Federation for Constitutional Government, 14, 67–70, 72, 81 Fentress Coal Company, 45 Fieldcrest Mills, 144, 148, 153–55 Fields, E. L., 222 Financial Times, 207 Fine, Sidney, 140–41 Fink, Gary, 24, 27 Fink, Leon, 217–18 Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, 56–57, 70, 74, 79 Fisher, James, 193–95, 204, 209 Fitzgibbons, Jim, 154–55 Florida, 34, 119, 211; Cape Canaveral, 117; Immokalee, 218, 220; Pensacola, 169; Tampa, 100, 220

Floyd, Nell Luter, 197 Folsum, Jim, 111 Forbes, T. M., 110 Forbes magazine, 165 Ford, Elijah, 183 Ford, Henry, 9, 160–61, 195–96, 200 Ford, Robert, 185 Ford Motor Company, 202, 203, 208 Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 71 Forsyth, Danny, 81–83, 144–45 Fortune magazine, 115, 207 Forward, 137 Forward Atlanta, 103–4 France, 205, 206 Frank, Leo, 28 Frank, Thomas, 137, 138–40 Franklin, Shirley, 105 Franklin, Stephen, 206, 208 Freedom Riders, 72, 90 Freedom Summer, 93 Freightliner, 201 Friedman, Milton, 165 Frontline, 170, 174 Fugitives, 107 Fuji Film, 178 Fulton Bar and Cotton Mills, 27–28 Fur and Leather Workers Union, 60 Furman, James, 179 Gallagher, Mike, 150 Gambrell, Delores, 154–55, 159 Gannett group, 138–39, 150 Gap, 188 Garcia, Manuel, 52 Gardner, O. Max, 30 Gartin, Carroll, 90 Gastonia Gazette, 12, 30 Gates, Bill, 207 Geewax, Marilyn, 174 Gelders, Joe, 51–52, 53 General Electric, 100, 177, 207 General Motors, 7, 8, 20, 33, 39, 101, 115, 200, 201–3, 205 Genovese, Eugene, 166 George, Walter, 34, 58

Index

253

Georgia, 30, 34, 41, 47, 111–12, 119, 120, 122, 156, 198, 201, 215; Atlanta, 19, 27–28, 33, 41, 99, 100–6, 117, 121, 122, 124, 128, 131, 132, 135, 140, 203; Augusta, 110; Gibson, 124; Hapeville, 110; Rome, 59; Tifton, 219; Warm Springs, 34 Georgia Power Company, 132–33 Germany, 161 Gettelfinger, Ron, 209 Ghosn, Carlos, 7, 10, 13, 16, 194, 197, 204–8 Gifford, Kathie Lee, 171 Gingrich, Newt, 105, 120–21 Glazer, Joe, 51 Gleason, Thomas W., 187 Goldwater, Barry, 16–17, 31, 95, 119 Goldwater Institute, 169 Gompers, Samuel, 86 Good Morning America, 173 Goodman, Andrew, 75, 106, 107 Gossman, Joseph, 217 Gould, Jean, 40, 161 Grady, Henry, 8, 20–22, 27, 28, 55, 98, 102, 103, 107, 108, 129 Graham, Billy, 61 Graham, Frank, 53 Grange movement, 22, 25 Graves, Bibb, 52 Graves, John Temple, 52 Great Speckled Bird, 135 Green, Jim, 27 Green, Jordan, 138 Greenberg, Reuben, 183 Greenhouse, Steven, 173–74 Greensboro Daily News, 15 Greenville News, 203 Grenada County Weekly, 57 Grenada Industries Company, 57 Grenada Sentinal-Star, 13, 57–58 Grimsley, James Ira, 91 Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch, 127 Gunter, James, 67–68, 70 Gupta, Pronita, 198–99 Gutman, Herbert G., 8

254

Index

Hagenbaugh, Barbara, 147 Hall, Bob, 65, 129–34, 136 Hall, Covington, 26–27 Hall, Grover, 41, 47 Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, 24 Halliburton/KBR, 213 Hamill, Pete, 210 Handy, W. C., 70 Hanes, Cynthia, 154, 159 Hapeville Statesman, 110 Hardin, Harold, 168 Hardin, Oletha, 168 Harkey, Ira B., 87–88, 91–92 Harlan County USA, 132 Harriet Mill, 29 Hartley, Fred, 89 Hartsfield, William B., 102, 103–4 Hat, Cap, and Millinery Workers, 40 Hattiesburg American, 138 Hayes, Christopher, 171 Haymarket Affair, 25–26, 191 Haywood, William, 26–27, 86 Hebert, F. Edward, 14, 69, 111 Hederman family, 84, 86, 88 Heinz, 216 Helfand, Judith, 12, 153 Helper, Hinton Rowan, 107 Henry, Aaron, 77, 95–96 Heritage Foundation, 169 Herring, Neill, 140–41 Hewitt, Purser, 94 Hickok, Lorena, 40, 161 Higgins, George G., 209, 217 Highlander Folk School movement, 13, 14, 44–46, 60, 64 Highlander Research and Education Center, 218 Hightower, Willie, 124 Hill, Joe, 29 Hill, Lister, 34 Hillman, Sidney, 17, 38, 40, 55, 88 Hobson, Fred, 107, 108 Hodges, Jim, 184, 189 Hodges, Luther, 117 Hollinger International, 138

Holton, A. Linwood, 121 Home Depot, 101–2 Honda, 196, 199, 203 Honea Path Chronicle, 13, 35 Honey, Michael, 57, 59–60, 61, 71, 74, 79, 80 Hoover, Herbert, 119 Hopkins, George W., 178 Horton, Myles, 44–45, 52 Hosack, Ed, 147 House Committee on Un-American Activities, 19 Houston Chronicle, 202 Howard, Charles P., 40 Howell, Clark, Jr., 103 Hughes, Joseph “Chip,” 129–35 Hülsemann, Karsten, 205 Human Events, 169 Hurricane Katrina, 126, 127, 137, 211, 212–13, 219–20 Hurricane Rita, 220 Hutcheson, William L., 39–40 Hyundai, 8, 196, 197, 203 IBM, 117 I’ll Take My Stand, 36, 107 immigration, 210–21, 223 In Fact, 91 In These Times, 149–50, 171, 174, 188, 189, 202 Inc. magazine, 102 Independent Tribune, 145, 151, 152 Industrial Workers of the World, 26, 27, 39 Ingalls Shipbuilding, 92, 109 Institute for Southern Studies, 15, 127, 130–35, 174 International Ladies’ Garment Workers, 15, 40 International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, 186–88, 190, 192 International Longshoremen’s Association, 4, 176–78, 180–87, 189–90, 192 International Paper plant, 89

International Union of Electrical Workers, 95 International Workers of the World, 87 ITG, 155 J. C. Penney, 156 J. P. Stevens and Company, 130, 132, 152 Jackson, Andrew, 118 Jackson, Maynard, Jr., 105 Jackson Capitol Reporter, 96, 135 Jackson County Emergency Unit, 91 Jackson Daily News, 20, 41, 71, 76–77, 84, 86, 90, 94, 97 Japan, 16 Jefferson, Kenneth, 183 Jefferson, Thomas, 107, 108, 118 Jeffersonian, 19–20 Jensen, Debra Bowen, 204 Jet, 75 Jewell, Richard, 103 Jim Crow, 23, 40, 179–80 Johnson, Charles S., 52 Johnson, Gerald W., 53 Johnson, Lilian, 44, 64 Johnson, Lyndon B., 74, 78, 113, 119–20 Johnson, Nelson N., 65, 193 Johnson, Paul, 92 Johnson Space Center, 117 Jones, Bill, 94 Jones, Lawrence, 133 Jones, Mother, 26, 31, 35, 64, 86 Jonquiére, Québec, 162–63 Kahn, Joseph, 158 Kahn, Si, 65 Kefauver, Estes, 71 Kennedy, John F., 81, 119 Kennedy, Robert, 74 Kennedy, Stetson, 140 Kennedy Space Center, 117 Kentucky, 4, 6, 7, 22, 109, 115, 133; Georgetown, 203; Harlan Co., 33, 35, 132–34, 199; Scott Co., 203

Index

255

Kester, Howard, 47–48, 50, 52, 53 Key, V. O., 35, 61, 83, 88 Kidder, Clarice, 37–38, 46 Kilpatrick, James, 156 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 4, 17, 45, 64, 65–66, 72, 73–79, 80, 84–85, 87, 104, 106, 107, 185, 194 Kirsh, David, 138 K-Mart, 155 Knight, Thomas, 88 Knight-Ridder, 139 Knights of Labor, 25–26, 39, 40 Knoxville News-Sentinel, 45 Kopple, Barbara, 132 Kromm, Chris, 15, 116, 130–31, 135, 140, 218 Kruse, Kevin M., 104–5 Ku Klux Klan, 71, 75, 77, 79–83, 87, 88, 100 Kundera, Milan, 153 La Casa Multicultural, 219 Labor History, 61 Laborers International Union of North America, 218 Landrey, Bernard, 162 Lange, Dorothea, 47 Langley, Monica, 205–6 Latin American workers, 7, 65–66, 84, 211–21, 223 Lawrence, Myrtle, 49 Lawson, James, 74–75, 77 Lazarus, Emma, 210–11 Lee, Robert E., 38 Leech, Edward T., 71 Legg, Mike, 149 Leonard, George B., 104, 114 Lescaze, Alexandra, 153–55 Levin, Andy, 171 Lewis, Anthony, 67 Lewis, John L., 20, 26, 31, 38–41, 64 Lewis, Sinclair, 36, 152–53 Lewis, William H., 59 Lexington Advertiser, 88, 95 Liebling, A. J., 138

256

Index

LifeBuilder Ministries, 147 Like a Family: The Making of the Southern Cotton Mill World, 24–25 Lincoln, Abraham, 179 Liuzzo, Viola, 79–80, 106 Liz Claiborne, 156 Lockheed Martin, 121 Loeb, Henry, 72–75, 78 London, Jack, 49 Long, Huey, 15, 34, 68, 112–13 Longshore Workers Coalition, 187 Longshoremen’s Protective Union Association, 178 Look magazine, 75, 104, 113–14 Loray Mill, 12, 29–30, 140 Lorraine Motel, 74–75, 107 Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 99 Los Angeles Times, 105, 123, 170, 174 Lott, Mike, 213 Louisiana, 26, 34, 59, 81, 109, 111, 112–13, 119, 123, 126; Bogalusa, 20; Donaldsville, 170; Grabow, 27; New Orleans, 56, 110–11, 112, 126, 137, 178, 187, 212–13, 216, 219; Shreveport, 7 Louisville Courier-Journal, 21, 52, 91, 108, 138 Lowe’s Motor Speedway, 147 lumber and timber industry, 56, 115 Lumberjack, 27 Lyson, Thomas A., 98, 109–10, 113, 119 MacArthur, John R., 157 Magee, David, 207 Mangan, Martin, 209 Manigault family, 177 Manville-Jenckes Corporation, 29 Marathon Motor Works, 202 Marshall, F. Ray, 40, 46, 51, 61 Marshall, John, 38 Marshall, Thurgood, 93 Marshall Space Flight Center, 117 Martin, Charles, 162–64, 167 Martin, Christopher R., 136, 202

Martin, Daniel, 183, 185 Martin, Robert F., 47 Martinez, Elizabeth, 219 Marx, Karl, 50, 200 Maryland, 120, 172 Maryland Fair Share Health Care Fund Act, 172–73 Mason, George, 38 Mason, Lucy Randolph, 15, 36, 38–39, 41–43, 44, 45, 52–54, 56, 61, 62–63 Masonite Corporation, 57 Mathews, Ottis, 95 Maurin, Peter, 135 Maverick, Maury, 34, 52 Maybank, Burnet R., 52 Mazda, 110, 203 Mazurak, Jack, 202 McCarthy, Joseph, 54 McClatchy group, 138 McClure’s, 137 McConnell, Glenn, 185 McConville, Maureen, 206 McDonald’s, 218 McElvaine, Robert S., 94 McGill, Ralph, 11–12, 15, 36, 39, 53, 55, 91, 104, 115, 128 McLean, George, 96 McMahon, Tom, 40 McMillen, Neil, 75–76 McPherson, James, 179 McPherson, Karl, 124 MDC, Inc., 8, 121–22, 125 Meany, George, 56, 74 Media General, 138 Meeman, Edward J., 71, 77 Memorial Day Massacre, 39 “Memphis Blues, The” (Handy), 70 Memphis Commercial Appeal, 7, 60, 67, 70, 71–72, 74–78, 84–85, 136, 156 Memphis Free Speech, 135 Memphis Press-Simitar, 56, 71–72, 76–77 Mencken, H. L., 36 Mercedes Law, 198 Mercedes-Benz, 8, 9, 196, 197–99, 203 Meredith, James, 72, 91, 93, 194

Metal Trades Council, 92 Mexico, 157–58, 159, 213–15, 220 Micali, James M., 194 Michelin, 10, 13, 115, 153, 177, 184, 206 Michigan, 33, 195, 201–3 Microsoft, 207 Militant Truth, 60–61 military spending, 111–12, 180 Milken Institute, 126 Miller, Arnold, 133 Miller, Francis Pickens, 53 Miller, Mark Crispin, 137, 141 Miller, William D., 136 Milliken and Company, 153 Mills, C. Wright, 50 Minchin, Timothy J., 62 Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union, 51, 60 Miners for Democracy, 133 Minor, Bill, 96, 135 Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, 213 Mississippi, 6–7, 8, 10, 23, 34, 49, 59, 82, 86–97, 109, 112, 113, 119, 126, 137, 157, 204, 212–13, 215; Aberdeen, 87; Amory, 82; Bay St. Louis, 213; Biloxi, 211, 213, 219, 221; Brandon, 3; Canton, 7, 8, 10–11, 193–97, 205, 207, 209; Cleveland, 82; Corinth, 87; Indianola, 68, 84; Greenville, 15; Grenada, 13, 57–58; Gulfport, 213; Jackson, 72, 86, 88, 90, 93–94, 121, 195; Jackson Co., 91–92; Laurel, 57; McComb, 90; Money, 68; Natchez, 109; Neshoba Co., 3, 72, 75, 93, 113; Nettleton, 19; New Albany, 57; Ocean Springs, 88–89; Olive Branch, 66; Oxford, 174–75, 214; Pascagoula, 10–11, 92, 109; Pass Christian, 212; Port Gibson, 82; Ripley, 82; Tupelo, 14, 15, 126, 193, 203–4; Water Valley, 144; Waveland, 212 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 92–93, 95

Index

257

Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, 75–76 Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, 211–13 Mississippi Press, 10–11 Missouri, 49, 168 Mitchell, H. L., 36, 49–50, 52 Mitchell, Margaret, Gone with the Wind, 103, 105, 106 Moberg, David, 157, 188 Modern Times, 200 Monroe, Rose Will, 202 Monroe Manufacturing Company, 87 Monroe News-Star, 138 Montes, Juan, 66, 218 Montgomery Advertiser, 8, 41, 47, 138, 196, 197 Montgomery Bus Boycott, 68 Montgomery Journal, 14 Moore, Fred T., 13, 35–36 Morais, Herbert M., 60, 109, 178–79 Morris, Charles, 146–47 Morrison, Edward, 65 Morrison, William, 182–83 Mosley, Donald C., 90 Mother Jones, 218 Mozen, Judy, 124 Mt. Olive Pickle Company, 217 Mubarak, Hosni, 127 Murdock, David, 144, 148–51, 153 Murray, Philip, 40, 55, 56 Musgrove, Ronnie, 7, 197 Myrdal, Gunnar, 52 Nagin, Ray, 213, 219 NASA, 117 NASCAR, 147 Nashville Tennessean, 13, 45, 138 Nation magazine, 64, 131, 134, 137, 156, 165, 169, 174, 176, 180–81, 184, 190 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 88, 93, 95, 185

258

Index

National Association of Manufacturers, 68 National Catholic Reporter, 217 National Civil Rights Museum, 75 National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, 51 National Environmental Research Center, 117 National Farm Labor Union, 50 National Industrial Recovery Act, 43 National Institute of Environmental Health Services, 130 National Journal, 115, 123 National Labor Relations Board, 152–54, 161, 162 National Review, 169 National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, 169 National Textile Workers, 12, 29–30 Nelson, J. Herbert, 65, 66–67, 70, 193 Nelson, Kathy, 145–47, 149 Nemagon, 149–50 New Southern Labor History, 79–81 “New Strategies for Southern Progress” conference, 125 New York City, 210–11, 220 New York Evening Post, 196 New York Times, 47, 67, 75, 114, 158, 163, 170, 171, 173, 174 Newsweek, 104 Nicaragua, 150 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 44, 49 Nike, 170 Nissan, 7, 8–9, 10–11, 16, 115, 126, 193–97, 203–5, 207–9 Nixon, Richard, 120 Nixon, Ron, 138 Nomura, Takehiko, 16 Nordana Shipping Line, 177–78, 180–82, 189–90 Nordlinger, Jay, 169 Norma Rae, 152 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 146, 157–58, 214

North Carolina, 6, 9, 11, 15, 22, 29, 82, 107–8, 116, 117, 122, 131–33, 144, 156, 157, 178, 198, 201, 211, 215–18; Benson, 218; Cabarrus Co., 147, 151; Carrboro, 130; Chapel Hill, 8, 125; Charlotte, 100, 121, 122; Concord, 145, 147; Durham, 15, 127, 219; Erwin, 142–43, 145; Gastonia, 11, 12, 15, 29–30, 41, 140, 151; Greensboro, 65; Harnett Co., 142; Henderson, 29; Kannapolis, 143–49, 151–55, 159; Lee Co., 142, 222; Marion, 4, 12, 30; Morganton, 66, 217; Raleigh, 121, 122, 127, 217; Roanoke Rapids, 132; Sanford, 4–5, 11, 127, 199–200, 222–23; Tar Heel, 65, 84, 219; WilÂ� mington, 100; Winston-Salem, 100 North Carolina Growers Association, 217 North Carolina Insurance Guaranty Association, 151 North Carolina Research Campus, 147–48 Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, 14, 96, 126 Northwest Arkansas Business Journal, 169 oil and gas industry, 56, 115, 123 Oklahoma, 49, 135, 168 Olympics, 102–3, 105 On the Waterfront, 186–87 Operation Dixie, 13, 39–63, 64, 79, 89 Orlando Sentinel, 123, 124 Ortega, Bob, 164, 166–67 Overton, Jim, 130 Oxford Eagle, 174–75 Panto, Pete, 187 Parker, Frank R., 75 Parks, Rosa, 45 Pascagoula Chronicle, 88, 91 Patterson, F. D., 52 Patterson, Robert B., 80 Payne, Elizabeth Anne, 49 Payne, Larry, 74

Peabody Hotel, 67–68 Peeler, Bob, 184 Pensacola News-Journal, 169 People’s Party, 20–21 Pepper, Claude, 34, 36, 52 Percy, William Alexander, 107, 108 Perdue, Frank, 129 Perdue poultry plant, 147 Perez, Leander, 68, 81, 83 Perkins, Frances, 33 Pew Hispanic Center, 216 Phagan, Mary, 28 Phillips, Kevin, 98, 106 Phillips, Rubel, 92 Pickering, Alfred H., 163 Pierce, Neal, 204 Pillowtex Corporation, 6, 143–56 Pittston Coal Company, 134 Plessy vs. Ferguson, 83 PM, 137 Poland, 192 Poor People’s Campaign, 64, 74, 79 Populism, 22–23, 25, 36 Portman, John, 102 Post and Courier, 177–78, 181–84, 189–91 poultry industry, 66, 109, 213, 217–18 Powell, Daniel, 56, 61, 65, 88 President’s Committee on Civil Rights, 58 PricewaterhouseCoopers, 207 Quebecor World, 66–67, 84 Quill, 139 Quinn, Bill, 167–69 Raddock, Maxwell C., 39 Raleigh News and Observer, 15, 41, 53, 138, 143 Ramsay, Claude, 4, 80, 82, 86–97 Randolph, A. Phillip, 64, 80 Rankin, Allen, 14 Rankin, John, 19 Ransom, John Crowe, 36, 107 Rather, Dan, 75 Ray, James Earl, 74

Index

259

Reagan, Ronald, 120, 149, 173 Redstone Missile Arsenal, 117 Reece, Florence, 33, 133 Reed, Tracy, 196 Reiss, Bernard, 152 religion and labor, 42, 49, 57–58, 61, 65, 185, 193–94 Renault, 10, 204–5, 206–7 Republic Steel Company, 39, 51 Republican Party, 35, 58–59, 118–21, 125 Research Triangle Park, 117, 122, 130, 223 Resurrection in Memphis, 65, 67 Reuther, Victor, 208 Reuther, Walter, 14, 16–17, 31, 40, 64, 80, 87, 140, 161, 203, 208–9 Rhett, Robert Barnwell, 179 Rhoades, Richard, 147, 151 Rice, Father Charles Owen, 61–62, 209 Richmond News-Leader, 156 Richmond Times-Dispatch, 41, 53 Ricoeur, Paul, 117 Ridge, Tom, 188 right-to-work laws, 35, 59, 80, 81, 90, 98, 178, 184–85 Riis, Jacob, 220–21 Riley, Bob, 9, 198 Riley, Joseph P., 188 Riley, Ken, 176–77, 180–82, 184–86, 187, 189–90, 192 Rite Aid Corporation, 172 Rivera, Diego, 210–11 Rivers, Mendel, 14, 69, 111–12, 180 Rivers, Nelson, III, 185 Roberts, Cecil, 185 Roberts, Dexter, 158 Robinson, Robert Kirkland, 6, 155, 159 Romaine, Howard, 131, 135 Rome News-Tribune, 59 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 36, 49, 52, 136 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 33–35, 46, 50, 52, 54, 55, 58, 89, 111 Roosevelt, Theodore, 220 Rosenfeld, Morris, 137

260

Index

Ross, Wilbur, 143, 155 Rostock, Susanne, 12, 153 Rudolph, Eric, 103 Ruffin, Edmund, 107, 108, 176, 179 Russell, Michael E., 130–31 Russell, Richard, 111 Ryan, Joseph P., 186–87 Sago Mine, 134 Sale, Kirkpatrick, 106–7 Salinas, Carlos, 216 Salmond, John A., 41–42, 43–44 San Francisco Chronicle, 165 Sanderson Farms, 10 Sanford, John, 47, 48 Sanford, Mark, 189–90 Sanford, Otis, 84–85 Sanford, Terry, 150 Sanford Herald, 11, 142 sanitation workers, 66, 72–75, 77–79, 194 Saturday Evening Post, 75, 104 Saturday Review, 114 Savedra, Rosa, 218–19 Schneider, Charles, 72 Schulman, Bruce J., 110–13, 117–18, 148 Schwerner, Michael, 75, 106, 107 Scott, Lee, 173–74 Scottsboro Boys, 45 Seale, Patrick, 206 Seldes, George, 91, 138 Services Employees International Union, 162, 192 Shadows in the Sunbelt, 8 Shaffer, Robert, 4, 17 sharecroppers, 37–38, 46–50, 55 Sharecroppers Union of Alabama, 49 Shelton, Robert, 79 Shepherd, William G., 32 Sheridan, Andrew, 187 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 103 Sherrill, Robert, 68, 69 shipbuilders, 55 Shreveport Times, 138

Sierra Club, 162 Sillers, Walter, 69 Silver, James W., 13, 83 Silverstein, Ken, 156 Simmons, Ricky, 183 Simpkins, Francis Butler, 22 Sinclair, Upton, 49 Sitton, Claude, 75 slavery, 178–79 Sledge, Ida, 15 Smiley, Tavis, 173 Smith, Al, 119 Smith, Ed, 34, 58, 182 Smith, Hazel Brannon, 88, 95 Smith, Lillian, 53, 107 Smith, Robert L. T., 93 Smith, Stanton, 92 Smith, Vicki, 195 Smithfield Packing plant, 65, 84, 219 Smithhart, Ray, 3–4, 81–83, 91 Society of Professional Journalists, 139 Solidarity movement, 192 Solomon, Norman, 76 South Carolina, 6–8, 13, 22, 23, 34, 59, 109, 111, 115, 119, 153, 178–80, 184, 191, 198, 203, 215; Charleston, 4, 17, 100, 112, 176–78, 180–92; Columbia, 180; Georgetown, 177; Greenville, 100, 110, 130–31, 135, 203, 206; Greenwood, 178; Honea Path, 4, 12–13, 30, 35, 41, 151–53, 191, 206; Spartanburg, 7, 110, 146, 178, 203 South Carolina Manufacturing Association, 184 Southbridge Plastics, 87 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 185–86 Southern Conference Educational Fund, 54 Southern Conference on Human Welfare, 36, 44, 52–54, 59, 60, 64 Southern Exposure, 8, 15, 65, 106, 116, 123, 127–36, 138, 140–41, 174, 198, 218 Southern Faith, Labor, and Community Alliance, 65–67, 70, 84–85, 194, 219

Southern Growth Policies Board, 122, 125 Southern Industrial Association, 11 Southern Labor Institute, 124 Southern Labor Union, 132 Southern Lumber Operators’ Association, 26–27 Southern Negro Youth Congress, 57 Southern Policy Committee, 53 Southern Political Action Committee, 56, 64 Southern States Industrial Council, 60, 68 Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, 33, 44, 46, 48–50, 64, 71, 135–36, 140 Southern Worker, 51 Spinosa, James, 186 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 47 State Ports Authority (S.C.), 185 steel workers, 41, 51 Steffens, Lincoln, 137 Stennis, John, 111 Stetin, Sol, 152 Stevens, Bob, 130 Stone, Eugene, 110, 203 Stone, I. F., 80 Stoney, George, 12, 153 Stopa, Martha, 139 Storkline Corporation, 93–94 strikes, 55; auto workers, 33, 41, 55, 101, 140–41; catfish plant workers, 94; cigar workers, 220; miners, 28, 31–33, 45, 55, 132–34; newspaper workers, 139–40; poultry workers, 217; railroad workers, 55; sanitation workers, 66, 72–75, 77–79, 84, 194; shop craft workers, 90; steel workers, 41, 51, 55; tenant farmers and sharecroppers, 49; textile workers, 12–13, 15, 27–31, 41, 62, 135, 140, 151–53, 190, 191 Studebaker, 201 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 65 Sullens, Major Fred, 20, 41, 71, 86

Index

261

Sunday, Billy, 44 Sun-Herald, 219 Sutton, Crystal Lee, 152 Swim, Pete, 56, 60 Taco Bell, 218 Taft-Hartley Act, 6, 13, 35, 59, 62, 89–90, 184, 188 Talese, Gay, 76 Talmadge, Eugene, 30, 34, 41 Talmadge, Herman, 69, 110 Tampa Tribune, 220 Tannenbaum, Frank, 23 Tapscott family, 19 Tarbell, Ida, 137 Tate, Allen, 36, 107 Taylor, Frederick W., 29 Taylor, Yvette, 194–95, 204, 209 Taylor, Zachary, 114 Teamsters, 66, 85, 99, 139, 163, 187, 192 tenant farmers, 46–50, 55 Tennessee, 13, 45–46, 49, 115, 119, 135–36, 140, 157, 198, 201, 203, 215; Elizabethton, 12, 29; Grundy Co., 44; Knoxville, 45; Memphis, 4, 17, 31, 38, 43, 56–57, 64–79, 84–85, 129, 135–36, 160, 194, 199; Monteagle, 44; Nashville, 36, 73, 107, 202, 207; New Market, 46; Oak Ridge, 117; Smyrna, 10, 194–96, 203, 205, 207–8; Spring Hill, 201; Wilder, 45 Terkel, Studs, 140, 200 Texas, 6, 26, 34, 119, 120, 135, 215; Arlington, 202; Austin, 121; Hearne, 170; Houston, 115, 117, 121, 178; Jacksonville, 161; San Antonio, 7, 129 Textile, Apparel and Footwear Trade Act, 156 textile industry, 12–13, 15, 27–31, 41, 56, 60, 62, 82, 109–10, 121, 122, 130–32, 134, 140, 142–47, 150–59, 179, 200–1, 205, 214, 222 Textile Workers Organization Committee, 41

262

Index

Textile Workers Union of America, 40, 60, 62, 152 Thelan, Gil, 138 Thomas, Norman, 49 Thomas, R. N., 95 Thompson, Allen C., 82 Thornwell, James H., 179 Thrasher, Sue, 131, 140–41 Thunder Road, 199–200 Thurmond, Strom, 13–14, 35, 59, 69, 89, 119, 177, 182 Till, Emmett, 68, 106, 107 Tillman, Ben, 182 Time magazine, 77, 115, 169–70, 189, 214 Times-Picayune, 219 Tindall, George B., 111, 124 tobacco industry, 55, 222 Tobin, Jeremy R., 209 Tools, Josh, 79 Totten, Leah D., 125 Toyota, 7, 8, 115, 126, 188, 203–4 Treadwell, David, 123 Triangle Shirtwaist Company, 32 Trimble, Vance H., 165, 167–68, 171 Truman, Harry, 35, 58, 89, 119 Trumpet, 60 Tucker, Cynthia, 104, 105, 219 Tupelo Daily Journal, 87, 96. See also Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal Turner, Ted, 102 Tuskegee Institute, 103 Twomey, Louis, 95 Typographical Workers, 40 Ujifusa, Grant, 120 undocumented immigrants, 157, 172 Unger, Henry, 99–102, 105 Union of Needletrades Industrial and Textile Employees, 144, 152–54, 158 Union Theological Seminary, 44 Uniroyal-Goodrich, 206 United Auto Workers, 10, 16–17, 33, 39, 40, 87, 110, 140, 161, 194, 197, 201, 202–3, 208–9

United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, 93 United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of American, 50, 61 United Electrical Workers, 59, 99–100 United Farm Workers, 85, 99, 211 United Food and Commercial Workers, 160–62, 219 United Mine Workers, 20, 26, 31, 33, 39, 40, 51, 132–35, 185 United Paperworkers, 89 United Rubber Workers, 79, 82, 87, 206 United Steel Workers, 80 United Textile Workers, 12, 29, 56 Uprising of ’34, The, 12–13, 153, 191–92, 206 Urbina, Ian, 202 U.S. Labor Department, 172, 213 USA Today, 138, 146–47 Vance, Rupert, 108 Velasquez, Baldemar, 216–17, 219, 221 Vicksburg Evening Post, 90 Vinson, Carl, 111–12 Virginia, 34, 75, 108, 119, 120, 134, 215; Danville, 30; Prince Edward Co., 75; Richmond, 25, 128 Virginian-Pilot, 123 Vlasic, 216 Von Braun, Werner, 117 Vorse, Mary Heaton, 186, 190 Voting Rights Act, 74, 76, 83, 85, 95, 120 Wagner Act, 20, 33–34, 59, 89 WakeUpWalMart.com, 160, 162, 173, 174 Walker, Edwin A., 93 Wall Street Journal, 115, 123, 164, 170, 205, 207 Wallace, George, 80, 95, 120 Waller, Scott, 196, 197 Wal-Mart, 7, 101, 155, 158, 160–75, 188 Wal-Mart World, 171

WalMartWatch, 162, 163, 173, 174 Walton, Sam, 161, 163, 164–72, 174 Walton, Thomas Gibson, 166 Ward, Jimmy, 86 Warren, Robert Penn, 36, 107 Washington, Booker T., 103 Washington, Peter, Jr., 183 Watkins, Hollis, 194 Watson, Thomas E., 19–21, 23, 25 Watterson, Henry, 21, 91, 108 Weeks, Barney, 80, 88 Welch, John F., Jr., 207 Wells, Ida B., 71, 129, 135 Werner, Helmut, 198 West, Don, 44 West Coast Waterfront Coalition, 188 West Virginia, 4, 6, 22, 31, 120, 133, 134; Matewan, 32 Westinghouse, 100 Where Do You Stand?, 153–55 White, Hugh, 34, 89, 109 White, Joseph B., 207 Who Built America?, 8, 22, 59 Wiggins, Ella May, 12, 29, 30, 151–52 Wilborn, D. Peters, Jr., 182, 183, 189–92 Will, George, 169, 172–73, 208–9 Williams, Aubrey, 45 Williams, Dick, 105 Williams, T. Harry, 69–70 Willis, A. W., Jr., 72 Willow Run plant, 202, 205 Wilson, Charles Reagan, 21 Winter, William, 121 Winyah Stevedoring, Inc., 177 Withers, Ernest, 75 WLBT television station, 88, 93–95 Women’s Trade Union League, 52 Woodruff, Robert, 103 Woods, Robert, 186 Woodward, C. Vann, 22, 23, 52 Woodward, James G., 101 Working Families for Wal-Mart, 173 Works Progress Administration, 43 World Congress of the Comintern, 49

Index

263

World War II veterans, 111–12 WorldCom, 10 Wright, Fielding, 14, 35, 69, 89, 119 Wright, Gavin, 22, 43, 55, 123, 179–80 Wypijewski, JoAnn, 176, 180–81, 184–85, 190 Yablonsky, Jock, 133 Yancy, William Lowndes, 179

264

Index

Young, Andrew, 173 Young, Sinway, 88 Z Magazine, 158, 219 Zaritsky, Max, 40 Zellner, Wendy, 170, 172 Zieger, Robert H., 61 Zinser, Michael, 85 Zippert, Carol, 124