In the hot late summer of 1946, Winston-Salem’s tobacco stemmers took to the picket line. They were mostly black women, all of them poor. They held signs with photographs of the lean-to houses they lived in, underscored with the words “Would you like to live here?” Another picket sign read, “Fat back: 75¢. Our Labor: 50¢. We can’t make ends meet.”
The tobacco company bosses were nowhere in sight, but the strikers knew they had them quaking in their boots. The telltale sign was the police officers hovering nearby, batons in hand, waiting for the slightest disruption so they could descend.
The American labor movement finished the 1930s on a high note. In the Roaring Twenties, an era characterized by rapid wealth accumulation and steep economic inequality, waning membership and unsuccessful organizing drives painted a bleak picture for unions. But labor’s luck began to change during the Great Depression, when working people, fed up with the greed and excesses of American elites, showed renewed interest in organizing their workplaces.
In 1934, three huge and successful strikes happened nearly simultaneously in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Toledo. The next year, workers got another boost: Roosevelt’s National Labor Relations Act required businesses to recognize and bargain with unions in their midst, so long as those unions followed a set of rules to establish legitimacy. Union membership grew, and as the 1940s approached, there was good reason for optimism.
But corporations don’t roll over easily. In response to the upsurge in union activity, business owners began seeking greener pastures and relocating their factories to places with fewer unions — that way, they could keep benefits threadbare, wages low, costs down, and profits high. In the early 1940s, unions started to face a major problem: businesses in the union-heavy North and Midwest were simply leaving for the largely unorganized South.
Many unions responded to the migration of industry by softening their stance and attempting to show employers they could play nice. But the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had a different idea. Maybe the answer to the problem wasn’t to appease the bosses but to organize the South. They called this plan Operation Dixie.