Selling bread and freedom: The aircraft organizing drives of the United Automobile Workers in Birmingham, Alabama, 1943 to 1952

The United Automobile Workers (UAW) launched aircraft organizing drives in Birmingham, Alabama in 1943 and 1952 as attempts to gain the union's first foothold in the city. Although the 1943 drive failed, the 1952 drive succeeded and enabled the union to establish its first permanent local in Birmingham. "Selling Bread and Freedom" examines the forces that led to the organizing failure in 1943 (Part I); the steps the union took in the interim years to strengthen its organizing appeal to southern aircraft workers (Part II); and the events of 1951 to 1952 that led to the entrenchment of the local union (Part III). In order to successfully organize in the South, the northern-based UAW had to overcome the stigmas associated with being labeled as sympathetic to communism and supportive of racial equality. Both labels left the UAW vulnerable to its collective white southern opposition's playing the red and race cards against the union.;The UAW trumped the red and race cards in 1952 by utilizing three strategies. First, it offered workers top bread, meaning top wages, insurance and pensions. This bread standard derived from the lucrative UAW automobile wage models set in the 1940s that insisted on reducing north-south wage differentials. Second, the UAW offered workplace freedom, which also used UAW automobile standards such as a secure two-year contract, a grievance and steward system, and a voice in plant decision-making. Third, the Auto Workers offered accommodation to segregation within the contract's job hierarchy. This acquiescence to southern racial discrimination appealed to the overwhelmingly white laborforce. Black unionists, though segregated and subordinated, joined the UAW-CIO based on its equality rhetoric. Eventually, in the 1960s, these African American unionists sued the company and the local union to demand desegregation.;"Selling Bread and Freedom" contributes to the small historiography of the Congress of Industrial Organization's Operation Dixie, UAW organizational history, southern labor history, and the histories of the intersection of the civil rights and labor movements that I call civil rights unionism.