Money / Comparison

Black and White Workers and Communists Built a “Civil Rights Unionism” Under Jim Crow

Today’s activists should look to North Carolina's black and white tobacco workers, who organized a union and went on strike in the teeth of the Jim Crow South.

by Nelson Lichtenstein via Jacobin on October 3, 2022

...finished a chapter, I’d check my Twitter feed to see if there were new developments at Starbucks, Amazon, REI, or Apple. And when there were, I invariably found that Civil Rights Unionism shed some new light on the obstacles and opportunities that workers face when they challenge entrenched power.

There is obviously a world of difference between the unionizing impulse stirring among the sometimes young, multicultural, gender-bending baristas now making trouble at coffee houses around the country and the African-American women who stemmed tobacco eighty years ago in in Winston-Salem. You can’t read Korstad’s book without understanding the difference. But his exploration of race and class power, of authority, subordination, rebellion, and repression also speaks powerfully and persuasively to the young radicals seeking to make a new world in our day.

At the start of his book, after describing the strikes and manifestations that galvanized thousands of Reynolds Tobacco Company workers in such a profound and successful challenge to the New South industrial and social order, Korstad asks the question, “Why, suddenly, would so many workers do what only a day before they might have been afraid to do?” That is the question of our day and the question for any student of social transformation, of the way that a new consciousness comes to the fore that banishes fear and instills courage and commitment in a whole stratum of heretofore reluctant subalterns.

Nothing in the Labor Movement Is “Spontaneous”

Civil Rights Unionism has three virtues that make it timeless and compelling. First, it is a labor history that transcends all the industrial-relations categories into which that subdiscipline has sometimes been confined. The subtitle of his book is “Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for the Democracy in the Mid-twentieth-Century South,” so Korstad makes clear that every fight inside the factory and at the bargaining table reflects or advances a corresponding struggle on the outside, whether that be in politics, gender norms, or the stability of the Jim Crow order.

Thus when their new union, Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers, sought plantwide seniority for those African-American women laid off by a new technological innovation, this was hardly a prosaic demand but an assault on an entire set of segregationist and hierarchical factory relationships — ones that mirrored the male-privileged, white-supremacist order foisted upon North Carolina and the rest of the South during the counterrevolution that ended Reconstruction in the late nineteenth century.

In creating this Jim Crow order, Korstad makes clear that the new, reactionary hegemony was “hard work,” to borrow a phrase from Stuart Hall. It takes time, effort, and brute power to naturalize inequality and subordination, whether that be of class, race, or gender. A pernicious process of indoctrination created and reinforced the new traditions and social norms that constituted a Jim Crow order barely half a century old.

“Each morning on which a black tobacco worker entered a factory through the ‘colored’ door,” writes the author, “the more segregation came to seem timeless and inevitable.”