So Goes the Nation

This brief and synthetic epilogue argues that the South’s history lays bare the ways that antidemocratic governance has been used in this country to protect unfree labor arrangements and to blunt collective decision-making about the conditions of wealth production and distribution of wealth. That history helps sharpen our analysis of the current concern over the future of work. More than half a century ago, labor and black freedom advocates teamed up with analysts of the cybernetics revolution to ask “Are there other proper claims on goods and services besides a job?” The epilogue argues that the question is as pertinent now as when it was formulated, and that the South is where it will have to be answered.

Pens, Planes, and Politics

This chapter combines political, labor, and cultural history methodologies to compare the Lockheed aircraft factory in Marietta, Georgia, and the Scripto pen and pencil factory in nearby Atlanta. While the mostly male employees at Lockheed, a majority-white plant, enjoyed the job security delivered by defense contracts at the height of the Cold War military-industrial complex, the Scripto workers, the majority of whom were African American women, faced the more capricious turns of the market. Many of the disparities between these factories stemmed from their common management history found in the career of attorney, businessman, and civic leader, James V. Carmichael. Although situated within close geographical proximity, Lockheed and Scripto helped create disparate racial, political, and cultural worlds in the mid-twentieth century. The tale of these two factories uncovers the stark contrasts between the ways race, gender, and government intervention shaped different sectors of the postwar southern economy.

The Freedom Labor Union

The Mississippi Freedom Labor Union (MFLU) and related efforts were part of the larger evolution of black activism and of the maturing and varied philosophy of Black Power in the mid- and later 1960s. The MFLU and its offshoots embodied this mutation; first, in strategy, from a focus on demonstrations to capture the attention of a national white audience to awakening and organizing the poor black community in the South; and second, a shift in goals from requesting civil rights from the country's lawmakers to demanding a share of political and economic power. After a series of plantation strikes in the summer of 1965, MFLU members and other black Mississippians tried to gain a voice in the local application of War on Poverty programs and to establish Freedom City as communal housing for displaced workers.

African American and Latino Workers in the Age of Industrial Agriculture

Extensive chemical and pesticide exposure in the post–World War II period highlights African American and Latino farmworkers’ shared encounters with coercive labor structures, state hostility, economic marginality, racial discrimination, and bleak working conditions. Drawing heavily on oral histories and traditional archival sources, this case study of Florida farm labor draws directly on workers’ lived experiences and sheds light on the modern labor and environmental history of southern farm work. Examining this deep history of exploitation and negligence illuminates the challenges facing the South’s new working class.

“Vagrant Negroes”

Laws regulating the movement, residence, employment, and labor of the poor, and especially of poor African Americans in states with burgeoning free populations, demonstrate how mobility, when enacted by the poor and by non-whites, was classified as a criminal action in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States. In the Upper South especially, these laws had the express goal of attaching to all people of color the potential consequences of enslavement. This essay will link these ideas by tracing mobility and its construction as a classed and raced activity, as threats to existing labor regimes and social systems. This was most commonly and notoriously done through the policing of vagrancy, which allowed authorities to punish the poor, most punitively, in the South, African Americans, for unemployment or a reluctance to enter into a particular labor contract. This essay argues that the power dynamics of the South can be read clearly in the classed and raced regulation of vagrancy and geographical mobility in the antebellum era.

Rooted

This chapter establishes the importance of African American shop workers to Texas railroad hubs such as Marshall, Texas, and explores black responses to the 1922 National Railroad Shopmen’s Strike. Newspaper sources reveal that, while some Texas black and white shopmen cooperated in the 1922 walkout, 216 black shopmen in Marshall dramatically broke with the town’s white strikers and the mass of white citizens who supported them: the 216 petitioned the US government and the Texas & Pacific Railway for protection of their return to work against pro-strike violence and intimidation. The chapter contends that the Marshall petitioners found encouragement not only in WWI-era federal policies and civil rights activism but also in the opportunities for black education and stable family life in Marshall. In addition, an earlier rejection of interracial labor solidarity by Marshall’s white shopmen may have played a role. How, in the aftermath of the strike’s defeat, black shopmen and their families related to each other, and to the town’s developing civil rights movement, is a question ripe for investigation.

Unfaithful Followers

The United Mine Workers of America (UMW) had roughly 13,000 members when it called for a nationwide suspension in bituminous coal production in April 1894, but over 150,000 primarily non-union miners quit work in support of the UMW-orchestrated strike for better pay. Despite their longstanding hostility to UMW leaders and organizing tactics, miners in southern coalfields like Missouri and Kentucky were among the thousands to join the strike but not the union. This essay considers why laborers would follow the orders of a union they refused to join by considering the social and economic factors that shaped miners’ concepts of unionism. Ultimately, non-union participation in the 1894 coal strike demonstrated that non-unionism did not necessarily denote a rejection of union sentiment. Rather, workers could maintain a culture of faithfulness to union ideals even if they did not maintain union membership.

To Carry That Burden

In chapter 4 Maria Angela Diaz focuses on a short-lived incident called the Cart War of 1857, which took place in Central Texas. The war consisted of a series of attacks on Mexican-Texan cart drivers who transported goods back and forth between the Gulf Coast ports of Texas and San Antonio. The attacks, likely executed by whites interested in taking over the trade of cart-driving, reveal much about both the racial and class hierarchies that existed in the borderlands of the American South in the antebellum era and the struggles of Mexican Texans to fit into that landscape.

Origins of the Prison-Industrial Complex

In chapter 3 Derbes discusses efforts during the antebellum era by southern state legislators to create financially self-sustaining penitentiaries that encouraged inmate rehabilitation through silent reflection and physical labor. The European Enlightenment’s influence on new methods of punishment and technological innovation from the Industrial Revolution contributed to the rise of prison workshops and inmate labor in the Deep South. An examination of inmate labor at the state penitentiaries of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia highlights a controversial aspect of free labor within a slave society. Convicts provided a captive, reliable, and inexpensive workforce, but their use as labor attracted criticism from local artisans and mechanics’ organizations. This competition between costly private and cheap inmate labor led to conflict that abated temporarily when demand for military supplies increased during the Civil War. The modern prison-industrial complex evolved from experimental workshops established at southern state penitentiaries nearly two centuries ago.

The Historiographies of the Labor and Civil Rights Movements

This chapter argues that the historiographies of the labor movement and civil rights movement have proceeded on similar tracks: national, organization histories have been succeeded by more local, bottom-up approaches. This has simply replaced old orthodoxies with new ones. Second-generation labor history and civil rights history reflects the views of activists who were radicalized by their experiences and whose goals became more ambitious over time, as opposed to the views of ordinary workers and blacks that these historians claim to offer. This has led historians to adopt activists’ unrealistic standards in assessing the success of these movements as opposed to the more sober benchmarks that workers and blacks applied to measure the impact of these movements on their lives.