Labor and civil rights in the South: The industrial labor movement and black workers in Memphis, 1929-1945

This monograph examines the historic interrelationship between struggles for unionization and civil rights in the South, focusing on the era of economic and social change from the depression years through the end of World War Two. It considers Memphis, Tennessee, the center of commerce and industry for the Mississippi Delta and the city in which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., lost his life while attempting to join labor and civil rights causes, as a case study. It describes racism and segregation as the major obstacles to southern unions since the days of slavery. Both fostered a repressive social climate inimical to movements for change, exemplified in Memphis by the undemocratic rule of political boss E. H. Crump, and promoted racial conflict as barriers to working class economic organization and political power. This study documents the transition from craft to industrial unionism and the battles for labor and civil rights which accompanied it during the 1930's, and the wartime rise and consolidation of the CIO, which, by 1945, turned Memphis into one of the largest centers of industrial unionism in the South.;The study focuses on black activism and white support for bi-racial unionism as the keys to CIO success in Memphis. Black workers supported CIO unions both to improve their economic conditions and to counter the demeaning treatment they received by whites under the segregation system, and provided the strongest base of CIO support. Their activism and militance, sparked by the development of the CIO and a trade union left led by Communists, previewed the civil rights movements of a later era. Employers and the Crump machine attacked bi-racial unionism as "communism," repeatedly fomenting violence and racial strife to undermine it, and race remained an emotionally charged and divisive issue within the unions. As a result, most CIO unions avoided making direct attacks on racial discrimination. Nonetheless, the struggles of southern workers to organize on an interracial basis from the late 1930's to the end of World War Two left a significant, although previously undocumented, historical legacy for the labor and civil rights movements of later years. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.).