Opportunities Found and Lost

Author(s):  
Robert Korstad

This chapter explores two examples of the workplace-oriented civil rights militancy that arose in the 1940s—one in the South and one in the North. It analyzes the unionization of predominantly black tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the ferment in the United Auto Workers in Detroit, Michigan, that made that city a center of black working-class activism in the North. Similar movements took root among newly organized workers in the cotton compress mills of Memphis, the tobacco factories of Richmond and Charleston, the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Birmingham, the stockyards and farm equipment factories of Chicago and Louisville, and the shipyards of Baltimore and Oakland.

Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors

This chapter discusses Greensboro, North Carolina as the unofficial headquarters for the Black Power Movement in the south and the role that North Carolina A&T State University played in facilitating that development. Since the dawn of the turbulent 60s, A&T had been a force for change and an epicenter for student activism. With the dawning of the Black Power Movement, A&T students completely embraced the rhetoric of the era and followed it up with action. Those activists’ energies fed other Black Power initiatives across the state and soon led to the creation of a new national organization, as well as a powerful local organization that embodied the shifting agenda of the civil rights movement to address abject poverty throughout Black America. Those energies also attracted the attention of local law enforcement and the National Guard, which invaded the campus in May of 1969, shot and killed a student, and terrorized the predominantly black side of Greensboro. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the shifting landscape of HBCUs during the early 70s and the external and internal pressures that arrested the development of Black Power organizations during the decade.


Focaal ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (83) ◽  
pp. 25-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Orlando

Since the global crisis of 2008, Italy has witnessed several recoveries of failed private enterprises led by workers trying to escape the precarization of life under austerity. Some see this phenomenon as linked to the highly politicized occupations that took place in Argentina during the crisis of 2001. Italian recoveries, however, are usually far less controversial affairs carried out under the aegis of the state. What explains this difference? Looking at exceptions within the Italian case provides some answers. For example, a protracted conflict between workers (labor) and ownership (capital), the building of links with transnational struggles (including the Argentinian one), and the rediscovery of past working-class values such as mutualism all appear to be factors that can generate collective responses to austerity.


2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (01) ◽  
pp. 243-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein

Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007) advances the historiographical idea that a long civil rights movement, beginning well before the mid‐1950s, had a robust and innovative legal dimension. Her study of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) itself, demonstrates that lawyers in those organizations took guidance from many working‐class clients to successfully deploy a conception of civil rights rooted on the farm and in the factory to challenge the economic and social edifice of Jim Crow, in the North as well as the South.


Author(s):  
Marcel Van der Linden

Often, all too often, global working-class solidarity remains fragile, conditional or fails to be realized in practice, whatever the lofty rhetoric may be. The present paper explores one possible explanation: workers in the North profit from the exploitation of workers in the South through cheap commodities and services, and additional job opportunities. For example, wage-earners in the North can buy T-shirts so advantageously because their real wages are much higher than the real wages of labourers in the Global South. This is what I would like to call a relational inequality within the world working class: some workers are better off because other workers are worse off. The paper presents a very tentative historical outline of global relational inequality since the 1830s.


2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Aldrich

This address asks how we got to today’s politics in America; a politics of polarized political parties engaged in close political competition in a system of checks and balances. The result has often been divided control of government and an apparent inability to address major political problems. This address develops the historical foundation for these characteristics. Historically, the Founding period set the stage of separated powers and the first party system. America developed a market economy, a middle class, and a mass-based set of parties in the Antebellum period. Through the Progressive era, nation-wide reforms led to a more democratic but increasingly candidate-centered politics in the North, and the establishment of Jim Crow politics in the South. The post-War period saw the full development of candidate-centered elections. While the breakup of Jim Crow due to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s ended Jim Crow and made possible a competitive party system in the South, the later was delayed until the full implementation of the Republican’s “southern strategy” in 1980 and beyond. This set in motion the partisan polarization of today, to combine with separated powers to create what many refer to as the “current” political “dysfunction.”


Part 1 tells ten stories of young people who chose to be civil rights lawyers. Part 1 includes chapters 1, “Children of the South,” and chapter 2, “Children of the North.” Some of the lawyers were children of the South. All had grown up in a completely segregated society. For blacks, the opportunity to challenge the status quo they had always known contained a large measure of personal and cultural gratification and moral outrage. For whites, the evolution was one of a growing conviction of the immorality of the system that had nurtured them. Some of the lawyers were children of the North. Through a variety of experiences, they caught the fever of the civil rights movement in the Deep South and came south to help make changes. Some were Jews whose feelings were informed by the Holocaust. Some were blacks who had had a big enough taste of racism in the North to be lured into the rapidly changing South. For young lawyers from both the North and the South, their experience was materially impacted by their race


2020 ◽  
pp. 10-25
Author(s):  
David Menconi

Charles Cleveland “Charlie” Poole was a banjo-playing mill laborer who lived an eventful life before passing at age 39 from one alcohol binge too many. He was arguably the most important musician to emerge from the stringbands populating mill towns across the North Carolina Piedmont -- a working-class hero as well as an important crossroads figure in the 1920s evolution of old-time music into what became bluegrass and country music, recording songs that remain bluegrass-festival standards to this day. And yet he has never been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.


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