The Failure of Labor Unionism in the US South

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cody R. Melcher ◽  
Michael Goldfield
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The South ◽  
Us South ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
The American South ◽  
White Workers

The failure of labor unions to succeed in the American South, largely because national unions proved unable or unwilling to confront white supremacy head on, offers an important key to understanding post–World War II American politics, especially the rise of the civil rights movement. Looking at the 1930s and 1940s, it is clear that the failure was not the result of a cultural aversion to collective action on the part of white workers in the South, as several histories have suggested, but rather stemmed from the refusal of the conservative leadership in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to organize an otherwise militant southern workforce composed of both whites and Blacks. These lost opportunities, especially among southern woodworkers and textile workers, contrasts sharply with successful interracial union drives among southern coal miners and steelworkers, especially in Alabama. Counterfactual examples of potentially durable civil rights unionism illustrate how the labor movement could have affected the civil rights movement and transformed politics had the South been unionized.

4. Confronting change

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-70
Author(s):  
Charles Reagan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Black Leadership ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
Major Player ◽  
The American South ◽  
The New Deal

‘Confronting change’ describes how the American South became a major player in the national mobilization for World War II. The war pushed the South far along the path of modernization. Democracy became a watchword during World War II, as the nation fought against fascism and emphasized that democratic values had to be affirmed by all as the reason for fighting. Ultimately, the war produced an assertive black leadership within the South, and the continued reform spirit of the New Deal led to aggressive campaigns for organized labor and for urban efforts to improve African American living conditions and opportunities. The rise of the civil rights movement was crucial to defining this period of American history.

Urban Exceptionalism in the American South

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Goldfield
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
The South ◽  
Urban South

While colonial New Englanders gathered around town commons, settlers in the Southern colonials sprawled out on farms and plantations. The distinctions had more to do with the varying objectives of these colonial settlements and the geography of deep-flowing rivers in the South than with any philosophical predilections. The Southern colonies did indeed sprout towns, but these were places of planters’ residences, planters’ enslaved Africans, and the plantation economy, an axis that would persist through the antebellum period. Still, the aspirations of urban Southerners differed little from their Northern counterparts in the decades before the Civil War. The institution of slavery and an economy emphasizing commercial agriculture hewed the countryside close to the urban South, not only in economics, but also in politics. The devastation of the Civil War rendered the ties between city and country in the South even tighter. The South participated in the industrial revolution primarily to the extent of processing crops. Factories were often located in small towns and did not typically contribute to urbanization. City boosters aggressively sought and subsidized industrial development, but a poorly educated labor force and the scarcity of capital restricted economic development. Southern cities were more successful in legalizing the South’s culture of white supremacy through legal segregation and the memorialization of the Confederacy. But the dislocations triggered by World War II and the billions of federal dollars poured into Southern urban infrastructure and industries generated hope among civic leaders for a postwar boom. The civil rights movement after 1950, with many of its most dramatic moments focused on the South’s cities, loosened the connection between Southern city and region as cities chose development rather than the stagnation that was certain to occur without a moderation of race relations. The predicted economic bonanza occurred. Young people left the rural areas and small towns of the South for the larger cities to find work in the postindustrial economy and, for the first time in over a century, the urban South received migrants in appreciable numbers from other parts of the country and the world. The lingering impact of spatial distinctions and historical differences (particularly those related to the Civil War) linger in Southern cities, but exceptionalism is a fading characteristic.

Paul Bunyan and the “Frozen Logger”

2020 ◽  
pp. 180-240
Author(s):  
Michael Goldfield
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The Other ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
Wood Industry ◽  
National Office

Chapter 5 highlights the wood industry, one of the largest industries in the country. Most of the woodworkers were located in the South, and half of those workers were African-American. Woodworkers successfully organized in the Northwest and Canada, the other two centers of the industry. Despite a perceived willingness of southern woodworkers to unionize, this did not happen. The chapter attributes most of the problems to an incompetent, right-wing, racially backward leadership, which was installed by the CIO national office before World War II. The chapter also argues that the successful organization of southern woodworkers had the potential to radically transform the civil rights movement.

The Consumers’ Co-operative Union: Embedding Integrated Popular Front and War on Poverty Social Programs in the South

2020 ◽  
pp. 83-114
Author(s):  
Anne Gessler
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Credit Union ◽  
Grocery Store ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
The South ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Racially Mixed ◽  
The Cost

Chapter three analyzes radical Great Depression- and World War II-era consumer cooperatives in working-class Freret neighborhood as their anti-racist, socialist calls for a complete overhaul of the capitalist system careened into their constituents desire for economic expediency. Opening an integrated grocery store called Consumers’ Co-operative Union, along with host of affiliated cooperatives, German, black, and Latin American organizers muted their Popular Front sympathies to lower the cost of living for racially mixed Freret residents and implement New Deal economic reforms in the South. Although critics charged that Rochdale cooperatives were too apolitical, and while radicals’ principles were co-opted to serve a capitalist agenda, chapter three illuminates how the city’s mid-twentieth-century credit union movement embedded Popular Front ideals into Great Society social policies. Credit unions operated as political channel for marginalized communities, situating New Orleans urban growth within the context of the long civil rights movement.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ritterhouse
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
Human Welfare ◽  
Franklin Roosevelt ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

This chapter shows how race-baiting, red-baiting, and white southern liberals' own ambivalence made it impossible for a broad-based coalition to lead an ongoing fight for democratic social change, despite the large number of people who had come together at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) in 1938. Activists like Virginia Durr lobbied for anti-poll tax bills in the early 1940s without success. Meanwhile, New Deal policies gave way to mobilization for World War II, which favoured the South with defense-related and infrastructure spending but did not challenge the Jim Crow system. Black civil rights activists like A. Philip Randolph and the lawyers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead in a Long Civil Rights Movement that earlier efforts to bring change to the South had helped to make possible. Jonathan Daniels was never an activist but became increasingly supportive of civil rights initiatives after working as an aide to Franklin Roosevelt from 1943-1945. The chapter describes his wartime work and briefly traces the remainder of his career, including the reissue of A Southerner Discovers the South in 1970 and his death in 1981.

Liberalism Transformed

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Schickler
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Industrial Organizations ◽  
Fair Employment ◽  
The Military

This chapter explores the deepening and consolidation of ideological changes as support for civil rights became a defining commitment of a more robust liberal coalition in the 1940s. African American movement activists capitalized on the World War II crisis to force new civil rights issues onto the political agenda—such as fair employment practices and discrimination in the military—and to forge a much broader civil rights coalition. After the war, continued movement activism laid the groundwork for the dramatic fight over the Democratic platform at the convention in 1948. Ultimately, the political work by African American groups, in cooperation with the Congress of Industrial Organizations and other urban liberals, fostered a new understanding of “liberalism” in which support for civil rights was a key marker of one's identity as a liberal.

Robert H. Zieger, ed.,Southern Labor in Transition, 1940-1995. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. x + 346 pp. $42.00 cloth.

2000 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 152-155
Author(s):  
Daniel Letwin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
New South ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
University Of Tennessee ◽  
Congress Of Industrial Organizations ◽  
Road Map ◽  
Industrial Organizations

Beginning with the surge of interest in slavery a generation ago, the South has steadily emerged as an integral part of America's labor past. From the mid-1970s into the early 1990s, attention flowed chiefly to the period from Reconstruction through World War One. And pathbreaking studies continue to appear on the women and men, white and black, who worked the farms, homes, docks, mines, forests, craft-shops, railroads, factories, and service trades of the New South. Lately, though, the frontier of research has shifted to the eras of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), World War Two, the early Cold War, and the civil rights movement—a chapter of Southern labor history once left to journalists, activists, and social scientists. Southern Labor in Transition, 1940–1995, edited by Robert H. Zieger, offers a valuable road map of current scholarship.

Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Draper
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Employment Discrimination ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Individual ◽  
White Workers

The relationship between organized labor and the civil rights movement proceeded along two tracks. At work, the two groups were adversaries, as civil rights groups criticized employment discrimination by the unions. But in politics, they allied. Unions and civil rights organizations partnered to support liberal legislation and to oppose conservative southern Democrats, who were as militant in opposing unions as they were fervent in supporting white supremacy. At work, unions dithered in their efforts to root out employment discrimination. Their initial enthusiasm for Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed employment discrimination, waned the more the new law violated foundational union practices by infringing on the principle of seniority, emphasizing the rights of the individual over the group, and inserting the courts into the workplace. The two souls of postwar liberalism— labor solidarity represented by unions and racial justice represented by the civil rights movement—were in conflict at work. Although the unions and civil rights activists were adversaries over employment discrimination, they united in trying to register southern blacks to vote. Black enfranchisement would end the South’s exceptionalism and the veto it exercised over liberal legislation in Congress. But the two souls of liberalism that were at odds over the meaning of fairness at work would also diverge at the ballot box. As white workers began to defect from the Democratic Party, the political coalition of black and white workers that union leaders had hoped to build was undermined from below. The divergence between the two souls of liberalism in the 1960s—economic justice represented by unions and racial justice represented by civil rights—helps explain the resurgence of conservatism that followed.

scholarly journals “So sensual, so languid, and so private”: James Baldwin’s American South

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-29
Author(s):  
Jeff Fallis
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American South ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The South ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
Essential Question ◽  
The American South ◽  
Legal Fact

James Baldwin has frequently been written about in terms of his relationship to geographical locations such as Harlem, Paris, St. Paul-de-Vence, Istanbul, and “the transatlantic,” but his longstanding connection to the American South, a region that served as a vexed and ambiguous spiritual battleground for him throughout his life and career, has been little discussed, even though Baldwin referred to himself as “in all but no technical legal fact, a Southerner.” This article argues that the South has been seriously underconsidered as a major factor in Baldwin’s psyche and career and that were it not for the challenge to witness the Southern Civil Rights movement made to Baldwin in the late 1950s, he might never have left Paris and become the writer and thinker into which he developed. It closely examines Baldwin’s fictional and nonfictional engagements with the American South during two distinct periods of his career, from his first visit to the region in 1957 through the watershed year of 1963, and from 1963 through the publication of Baldwin’s retrospective memoir No Name in the Street in 1972, and it charts Baldwin’s complex and often contradictory negotiations with the construction of identity in white and black Southerners and the South’s tendency to deny and censor its historical legacy of racial violence. A few years before his death, Baldwin wrote that “[t]he spirit of the South is the spirit of America,” and this essay investigates how the essential question he asked about the region—whether it’s a bellwether for America’s moral redemption or moral decline—remains a dangerous and open one.

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