The revolution the South forgot - "racism was the only bullet left in the chamber"

[kpete]

Editor: Laura Miller

Tuesday, Sep 7, 2010 08:30 ET
War Room
The revolution the South forgot
Why have poor white people, seemingly such obvious beneficiaries of progressive politics,
never joined with their oppressed black neighbors to overthrow their outnumbered overlords?
By Gabriel Winant

James D. Cannon holds a family photo that shows his grandfather, Claude Cannon, seated in the front row far left, who was killed in the Chiquola Mill shooting in 1934, in which seven people died and more than 34 people injured over labor unions that the mill didn't want.


.....

Now that Labor Day has come and gone, another annual tradition can be renewed: the mass migration of agricultural workers down the East Coast, to warmer climes. The trip down I-95 is an annual requirement for an estimated 100,000 laborers. Wary of proliferating checkpoints, the undocumented tend to travel in small vans and other inconspicuous vehicles, heading as far south as Georgia and Florida, where there's a longer season for crops like peaches and tomatoes. That would be the Florida tomato business, by the way, where in addition to the standard outrages inflicted on agricultural laborers -- poverty wages, fear of deportation, chemical poisoning -- many break their backs under a clearly unfree labor regime. Look for a moment, and work in the Florida tomato fields starts to bear an unmistakable resemblance to indentured servitude.

Elsewhere on the Gulf of Mexico, BP has pulled off the neat trick of hiring cleanup workers at depressed pay, thanks to its own malfeasance: The spill ruined Gulf maritime industries, further glutting the already flooded labor market, and driving down wages. That's the freely-employed, of course. But BP, like the Florida tomato growers, is also availing itself of another variety of unfree labor -- prison workers, happily offered up by local officials to do a job that The Nation has called "arguably the most toxic in America."

This is America, on Labor Day week in 2010. But in more ways than we like to notice, it feels like 1910. Somehow, the labor laws and basic protections that we once thought were part of the fabric of American democracy have been quietly excised. Of course, in the South, the postwar dream of free, prosperous, safe labor was never really there at all. The region has always been poorer. It's always had more rapacious bosses. And Southern workers (especially white ones) have always seemed mysteriously willing to take it, as far as often-condescending Northern liberals can tell.

.........

The basic tenets of 20th-century progressive politics in America -- unionism, the welfare state, public-safety regulations -- all failed the mill-hands, the largest class of industrial workers in the South. And the failure was spectacular, a once-in-a-generation trauma. The inability of New Deal liberalism to bring on board the Southern white working class was, it seems in retrospect, its ultimate undoing. Who was it that voted for Wallace, then Nixon, then Reagan? The depressing question points to the politically weak people for whomracism was the only bullet left in the chamber. We can't excuse their racism this way. But we can start to understand it.

much more:
http://www.salon.com/books/american_history/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/09/07/southern_labor_history

[Kalyke]

1. Um... didn't most of the country vote for Reagan?

I rarely see any more or any less racism in the South, but this piece does help me better understand why unions are so disparaged in the South: the big multi-national corporations have always beaten down the poor and middle class here. The South never enjoyed as much prosperity and was generally treated as the "red-headed step-child" of the union movement(s); therefore, why support the union and the working-class and starve when you can align with Big Business™ and starve a little less?

Our working class never got the chances.

[billlll]

3. racists all over..... boston bussing protests

No txt

[billlll]

2. WPA, jobs 4 ALL wd calm racists fear of job competition

Fm minorities

www.njfac.org