Reconsidering Southern Labor History
Reconsidering Southern Labor History

Author: Matthew Hild

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2020-11-03

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0813065771

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United Association for Labor Education Best Book Award The American Dream of reaching success through sheer sweat and determination rings false for countless members of the working classes. This volume shows that many of the difficulties facing workers today have deep roots in the history of the exploitation of labor in the South. Contributors make the case that the problems that have long beset southern labor, including the legacy of slavery, low wages, lack of collective bargaining rights, and repression of organized unions, have become the problems of workers across the country. Spanning nearly all of U.S. history, the essays in this collection range from West Virginia to Florida to Texas. They examine vagrancy laws in the early republic, inmate labor at state penitentiaries, mine workers and union membership, and strikes and the often-violent strikebreaking that followed. They also look at pesticide exposure among farmworkers, labor activism during the civil rights movement, and foreign-owned auto factories in the rural South. They distinguish between different struggles experienced by women and men, as well as by African American, Latino, and white workers. The broad chronological sweep and comprehensive nature of Reconsidering Southern Labor History set this volume apart from any other collection on the topic in the past forty years. Presenting the latest trends in the study of the working-class South by a new generation of scholars, this volume is a surprising revelation of the historical forces behind the labor inequalities inherent today. Contributors: David M. Anderson | Deborah Beckel | Thomas Brown | Dana M. Caldemeyer | Adam Carson | Theresa Case | Erin L. Conlin | Brett J. Derbes | Maria Angela Diaz | Alan Draper | Matthew Hild | Joseph E. Hower | T.R.C. Hutton | Stuart MacKay | Andrew C. McKevitt | Keri Leigh Merritt | Bethany Moreton | Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan | Michael Sistrom | Joseph M. Thompson | Linda Tvrdy

Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights
Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights

Author: Michael K. Honey

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2023-02-03

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 0252054326

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Widely praised upon publication and now considered a classic study, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights chronicles the southern industrial union movement from the Great Depression to the Cold War, a history that created the context for the sanitation workers' strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis in April 1968. Michael K. Honey documents the dramatic labor battles and sometimes heroic activities of workers and organizers that helped to set the stage for segregation's demise. Winner of the Charles S. Sydnor Award, given by the Southern Historical Association, 1994. Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize given by the Organization of American Historians, 1994. Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Award for an outstanding book in American social history.

Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

Author: W. E. B. Du Bois

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 772

ISBN-13: 0684856573

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The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time. This pioneering work was the first full-length study of the role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War, when the slaves had been freed and the attempt was made to reconstruct American society. Hailed at the time, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 has justly been called a classic.

Masterless Men
Masterless Men

Author: Keri Leigh Merritt

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-05-08

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 110718424X

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This book examines the lives of the Antebellum South's underprivileged whites in nineteenth-century America.

Black Coal Miners in America
Black Coal Miners in America

Author: Ronald L. Lewis

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 1987-01-01

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 9780813116105

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From the early day of mining in colonial Virginia and Maryland up to the time of World War II, blacks were an important part of the labor force in the coal industry. Yet in this, as in other enterprises, their role has heretofore been largely ignored. Now Roland L. Lewis redresses the balance in this comprehensive history of black coal miners in America. The experience of blacks in the industry has varied widely over time and by region, and the approach of this study is therefore more comparative than chronological. Its aim is to define the patterns of race relations that prevailed among the m.

The Ordeal of the Jungle
The Ordeal of the Jungle

Author: David Bates

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2019-07-08

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0809337452

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Between 1910 and 1920, the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) inaugurated a massive organizing drive in the city’s meatpacking and steel industries. Although the CFL sought legitimately progressive goals, worked earnestly to organize an interracial union, and made major inroads among both black and white workers, their efforts resulted in a bitter defeat. David Bates provides a clear picture of how even the most progressive of intentions can be ground to a halt. By organizing workers into neighborhood locals, which connected workplace struggles to ethnic and religious identities, the CFL facilitated a surge in the organization’s membership, particularly among African American workers, and afforded the federation the opportunity to aggressively confront employers. The CFL’s innovative structure, however, was ultimately its demise. Linking union locals to neighborhoods proved to be a form of de facto segregation. Over time union structures, rank-and-file conflicts, and employer resistance combined to turn the union’s hopeful calls for solidarity into animosity and estrangement. Tensions were exacerbated by violent shop floor confrontations and exploded in the bloody 1919 Chicago Race Riot. By the early 1920s, the CFL had collapsed. The Ordeal of the Jungle explores the choices of a variety of people while showing a complex, overarching interplay of black and white workers and their employers. In addition to analyzing union structures and on-the-ground relations between workers, Bates synthesizes and challenges previous scholarship on interracial organizing to explain the failure of progressive unionism in Chicago.

The Southern Key
The Southern Key

Author: Michael Goldfield

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0190079320

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"The South is today, as it always has been, the key to understanding American society, its politics, its constitutional anomalies and government structure, its culture, its social relations, its music and literature, its media focus, its blind spots, and virtually everything else. The Golden Key argues that much of what is important in American politics and society today was largely shaped by the successes and failures of the labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s, and most notably the failures of southern labor organizing during this period. It also argues that these failures, despite some important successes in organizing interracial unions, left the South (and consequentially much of the rest of the United States as well) racially backward and open to right-wing demagoguery. These failures have led to a nationwide decline in unionization, growing economic inequality, and overall failures to confront white supremacy head on. In an in-depth look at unexamined archival material and detailed data, The Golden key challenges established historiography, both telling a tale of race, radicalism, and betrayal and arguing that the outcome was not at all predetermined"--

Looking South
Looking South

Author: Mary E. Frederickson

Publisher:

Published: 2012-04-01

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9780813042275

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Workers in the contemporary Global South—the developing nations of Central and Latin America, Africa, and much of Asia—live and work within a model of industrial development that first materialized in the red brick mills of the New South in the early twentieth century. Continuing through the present day, this model became the prototype used by U.S. companies as they expanded globally. This development has had far-reaching effects on both workers and consumers at home and abroad. Unlike earlier models of industrialization in the United Kingdom and New England, in which regulatory laws, worker guilds, and unionization restrained the power of manufacturers, New South industrialization sustained and fostered persistent patterns of corporate control, low wages, and an antiunion climate reinforced by state and local governments. While little of what we are witnessing in the Global South is new, the scale and scope of contemporary industrial development around the world are unprecedented. In Looking South, Mary E. Frederickson outlines the events, movements, and personalities involved in resisting industry’s relentless search for cheap labor. In eight compelling essays, she challenges us to better understand the complex historical landscape of the American South and its role in shaping the twenty-first-century world in which we live.