In the spring of 1974, a dozen white and African American women and their daughters gathered outside the office of the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina.¹The union in 1974 was the Textile Workers Union of America, which merged with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union in 1976 to form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union of America (ACTWU). As the cameras of Gloria Steinem's PBS series Woman Alive! rolled, the girls, wearing handmade cheerleading uniforms with "TWUA" emblazoned across the front, chanted, "You can rock us, you sock us, but you can't knock us flat! Tell me Mr. Stevens, can you top that?" Their mothers tried to ignore the camera crew. They had created the cheerleading squad the previous year to support unionizing the seven J. P. Stevens plants in Roanoke Rapids, but they were unaccustomed to this kind of attention.

Steinem's episode featured Crystal Lee Sutton.²Joan Shigekawa, Woman Alive! (June 19, 1974; Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas: KERA-TV), Documentary. Accessed in Crystal Lee Sutton's personal papers 986.87, an unprocessed collection housed at Alamance Community College, Graham, North Carolina. For more information about the history and content of the Woman Alive! series, see Woman Alive! produced by KERA-TV Dallas/Fort Worth and WNET/13 New York; made possible by a grant from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting; exective producer, Joan Shigekawa: A Finding Aid, MC 421; Vt-30, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliff College. On May 30, 1973, Stevens had fired Sutton for insubordination after she insisted on copying an anti-union letter posted on the company bulletin board. Sutton then climbed atop a shop floor table and raised a piece of cardboard with "UNION" scrawled on it. She spent the night in jail. Steinem read about Sutton's confrontation with Stevens managers and local police in a New York Times article on the TWUA's organizing drive and wanted to include her in Woman Alive!—an early example of the media coverage and outside support the union received in its six-year struggle with the J. P. Stevens corporation. While the episode called attention to Sutton, it also showed many other mill women front and center.

A bold, multi-faceted effort, the campaign to unionize J. P. Stevens included boycotts, community-based organizing, and publicity campaigns against corporate intransigence and irresponsibility. The union's deployment of these tactics reached many audiences and motivated allies within and beyond the labor movement. This essay contextualizes the mill women's experiences, illuminating the crucial role they played in capturing attention, garnering support, and motivating action from allies. Personal narratives of white and African American women workers tapped into concerns with workplace justice fostered by the women's and civil rights movements. Aware of the limits of Stevens unionization, I examine what women gave to the effort and the distinct forms their activism took.

The Stevens Campaign and the Southern Textile Industry

From the 1920s through the 1960s, textile unionists labored to organize mill workers in the southern Piedmont, a region stretching from north Georgia and central Alabama through the middle of the Carolinas and into southern Virginia. Flanked on the west by the Appalachian Mountains and to the east by the Atlantic coastal plain, the Piedmont was a stronghold of textile and apparel manufacturing, which provided the main source of industrial jobs for working-class white families. From the 1920s through the 1950s, white women comprised at least one-third of the textile labor force; in 1929, their numbers in North Carolina peaked at 44.6 percent. By 1960, the United States textile labor force was overwhelmingly white, southern, and female. More than three-fourths of all textile manufacturing in the United States happened in the southern Piedmont, where 45 percent of all textile workers were female. African Americans, barred from all but the least-skilled and lowest-paid jobs in the mills, accounted for less than 5 percent of the work force. Wages in southern textile mills were always lower than the national average for factory workers, with the exception of the 1950s, when average wages in the southern mills equaled those in the North. About 5 percent of Piedmont mill workers belonged to a union in the 1960s, compared to 37 to 46 percent in New England and Mid-Atlantic states. Despite low wages and harsh working conditions, most workers' standard of living improved when they traded agricultural and domestic work for manufacturing.³Timothy J. Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 164–165; Timothy J. Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!: The J. P. Stevens Campaign and the Struggle to Organize the South, 1963–80 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 10–11, 22–24; Linda Frankel, "Southern Textile Women: Generations of Survival and Struggle," in My Troubles Are Going to Have Trouble with Me: Everyday Trials and Triumphs of Women Workers, eds. Karen Brodkin Sacks and Dorothy Remy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 41–42; Nancy MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 79.

Postwar growth and industrial diversification shrank the textile labor force in the 1950s and 1960s. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act enabled black workers to demand more and better jobs in the mills. African Americans organized through the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) "TEAM" project (Textiles: Employment and Advancement for Minorities). They were more likely than white workers to believe unionization was necessary for wage justice and equal opportunity.⁴Minchin, Don't Sleep With Stevens!, 23–24; MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough, 78–79, 84. Sensing an opportunity in the 1960s, the TWUA sent waves of organizers into the J. P. Stevens mills, the second-largest textile corporation in the United States with more than thirty thousand workers in some seventy mills in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas. Stevens proved an unrelenting opponent. Between 1963 and 1973, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found Stevens guilty of violating labor laws in twenty-one of twenty-two cases. Stevens paid $1.3 million in back wages to nearly three hundred workers illegally discharged for union support. In 1974, workers in Stevens's seven Roanoke Rapids plants voted for union representation, a stunning achievement for the interracial group of workers who led the organizing drive. As Stevens fought a contract for the next six years, the Roanoke Rapids struggle transformed from a local conflict to a national campaign. The election victory united labor, civil rights, and women's rights activists behind the newly merged textile and clothing workers' union and its "Don't Sleep with Stevens" boycott.⁵Minchin, Don't Sleep With Stevens!, 27; Timothy J. Minchin, "‘Don't Sleep with Stevens!': The J. P. Stevens Boycott and Social Activism in the 1970s," Journal of American Studies 39, no. 3 (2005): 512.

Cover of Norma Rae, directed by Martin Rich, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1979. The 2001 DVD re-release cover of Norma Rae features Sally Field's title character in the film's most famous moment.

In 1979, Hollywood told a fictionalized version of the Stevens campaign in the Academy Award–winning Norma Rae. Scriptwriters framed the movie around Sutton's life story, as told to journalist Henry Leifermann in a 1973 New York Times Magazine article and 1975 book, Crystal Lee, A Woman of Inheritance.⁶Norma Rae, directed by Martin Ritt (1979; Hollywood: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2001), DVD; Henry Leifermann, "The Unions Are Coming: Trouble in the South's First Industry," New York Times Magazine, August 5, 1973, sec. 6, 10–11, 25–26. Leifermann later published a book based on his interviews with Sutton entitled Crystal Lee, A Woman of Inheritance (New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1975). Sutton revealed her past marital infidelity and that she had never married her second son's father. She feared that anti-union people in town who knew or suspected these things about her would use her secrets to silence her. Sutton later reflected that the New York Times Magazine article freed her from the small town rumor mill because "nobody will ever have anything to hold over me no more."⁷Sutton, quoted in Victoria Byerly, Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1986), 212. Sutton's unabashed revelations about her checkered past and her unrepentant sexuality caused trouble for her with pro- and anti-union people. "Rumor has got back to me," she recalled, "that people are saying that it's a bunch of whores standing out getting people to join the union." While she was leafleting outside of the mills between shifts, an older white woman refused to take a union card, saying to her, "I been wanting to meet you. I sure do feel sorry for you because of any woman that has little enough respect for herself to [reveal sexual indiscretions in a newspaper article]."⁸Shikegawa, Woman Alive!, Documentary. In 1974, a dozen pro-union workers wrote to Harold McIver, regional director of the organizing drive, complaining that Sutton exerted too much influence over Eli Zivkovich, the organizer in Roanoke Rapids. One letter insinuated that Sutton and Zivkovich were having an affair: "[Crystal] has got a key to the office. She has got a key to Eli's motel room. So why shouldn't people be talking?"⁹Letters to Harold McIver from Roanoke Rapids workers, October 29 and 30, 1974, Box 5, Folder "JPS-Roanoke rapids, N.C., General Information and Correspondence," Textile Workers Union of America records, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin, Collection 396. (Hereafter cited as TWUA records, WHS, 396.) To the chagrin of Sutton and union leaders, Norma Rae relied heavily on these themes of sexuality, rumor, and internal tensions. But the movie was enormously popular and drew positive attention to the union's Stevens campaign. Sutton toured the country as "the real Norma Rae" in support of the boycott of Stevens's products, always stressing that there were many Norma Raes.

A scene from Norma Rae (1979) illustrating the tension between Norma Rae, a worker at a textile mill, and Reuben Warshowsky, a union organizer. In this scene, Norma Rae's attempt to copy the company's racially inflammatory anti-union letter is mostly faithful to Sutton's biography and official records. The sexually-charged argument between Norma and Reuben, however, was fabricated to demonstrate the unconsumated attraction between the two that the filmmakers wanted in the story. Reuben pushes Norma to prove her political commitment and personal investment in the union campaign, then storms out to relieve the tension by having sex with any woman in town but Norma.

Under pressure from leaders of northern and southern progressive churches and religious groups, women's groups, consumers, and stockholders, Stevens agreed to negotiate contracts in good faith at its mills in Roanoke Rapids and Montgomery, Alabama, the two sites where the union had won elections but did not have contracts. In return, the union agreed to end its boycott and corporate campaign. The 1980 settlement covered only about 12 percent of Stevens workers, but compared to totally nonunion textile corporations, such as Burlington and Cannon, this victory seemed extraordinary. Although national textile employment fell 26 percent between 1973 and 1983, pro-union mill workers in 1980 did not imagine that this victory marked the beginning of the end of their struggle with a failing domestic industry.¹⁰Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!, 166–168,177; John Gaventa and Barbara Ellen Smith, "The Deindustrialization of the Textile South: A Case Study," in Hanging by a Thread: Social Change in Southern Textiles, eds. Jeffrey Leiter, Michael D. Schulman, and Phillip J. Wood (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1991), 139–162. For more on the decline of textile manufacturing in the United States and the effects of globalization on textile and apparel industries, see Grace I. Kunz and Myrna B. Garner, Going Global: The Textile and Apparel Industry (New York: Fairchild, 2007); Mary E. Frederickson, Looking South: Race, Gender, and the Transformation of Labor from Reconstruction to Globalization (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011); and Timothy J. Minchin, "Shutdowns in the Sun Belt: The Decline of the Textile and Apparel Industry and Deindustrialization in the South," in Life and Labor in the New New South, ed. Robert H. Zieger (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012). The Stevens campaign built new alliances among feminists, civil rights, and labor advocates and brought publicity to the union's southern effort. Verdicts in the plaintiffs' favor were rolling in from class action discrimination lawsuits filed by African American and women workers against textile corporations. In Roanoke Rapids, Sutton's sister Syretha Medlin evoked the sentiment of her fellow pro-union workers when she said, "This is just wonderful. It's like a whole new life."¹¹Medlin quoted in Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!, 170. On verdicts in class-action discrimination lawsuits, see MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough, 86–87.

Since the 1980s, several labor historians have written about Norma Rae and the Stevens campaign. Timothy Minchin's monograph explores the boycott and corporate campaign from the union's perspective and argues that J. P. Stevens set a precedent for aggressive anti-union attacks in the 1980s. Essays by James Hodges and Robert Zieger describe Crystal Lee Sutton's participation in the unionization effort, critique Norma Rae's poetic license, and celebrate her as a working-class heroine.¹² Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!; James A. Hodges, "The Real Norma Rae," in Southern Labor in Transition, 1940–1995, ed. Robert H. Zieger (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 251–272. See also James A. Hodges, "J. P. Stevens and the Union: Struggle for the South," in Race, Class, and Community in Southern Labor History, eds. Gary M. Fink and Merl E. Reed (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 53–64; Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010). In these historians' writings, however, the task of separating fact from fiction obscures the interplay between politics and fantasy, sex and race, and labor and feminism at work in the 1970s. The Stevens campaign reveals how important working-class women's labor feminism and considerations of gender and sexuality were to organizing the textile and apparel industries.¹³My use of gender and sexuality to analyze the roles of women in labor organizing and economic justice campaigns is greatly influenced by the following scholarship: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South," The Journal of American History 73, no. 2 (1986): 354–382; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Public Eyes, Private Women: Images of Class and Sex in the Urban South, Atlanta, Georgia, 1913–1915," in Work Engendered: Toward A New History of American Labor, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 216–242; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Mary E. Frederickson, "Heroines and Girl Strikers: Gender Issues and Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century American South," in Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South, ed. Robert H. Zieger (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press 1991), 84–112; Mary E. Frederickson, "I Know Which Side I'm On: Southern Women in the Labor Movement in the Twentieth Century," in Women, Work, and Protest, ed. Ruth Milkman (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 156–180; Nancy MacLean, "Redesigning Dixie with Affirmative Action: Race, Gender, and the Desegregation of the Southern Textile Mill World," in Gender and the Southern Body Politic, ed., Nancy Bercaw (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 161–191; Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Nancy Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1933–1975 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Alice Kessler-Harris, Gendering Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990), see especially Chapter 3, "Work, Family, and Black Women's Oppression"; Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar's Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005).

Sick for Justice

On August 28, 1974 in Roanoke Rapids, 3,133 workers streamed through the polling stations in the seven Stevens plants in an NLRB election to determine if the TWUA would represent them. Maurine Hedgepeth, a middle-aged weaver who lost her job in the 1960s because she supported the union, observed the ballot counting that evening in the meeting room in front of the Rosemary mill. The union won by 237 votes. For organizers and union leaders, the success in Roanoke Rapids seemed to signal a turning point: black and white workers could unite against a company as aggressively anti-union as Stevens. "Roanoke Rapids is everywhere," proclaimed North Carolina civil rights activist Reverend W. W. Finlator. Organizer Michael Spzak, who had worked in Greenville, South Carolina, recalls that among labor organizers in the South in the 1970s, "everything was Roanoke Rapids."¹⁴ Statement of W. W. Finlator, August 26, 1977, Box 2363, Folder 1, North Carolina State AFL-CIO records, 1945–1981, Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Atlanta, Georgia, Collection L1981-20. (Hereafter cited as "NC State AFL-CIO records, GSU Library.") Michael Spzak, recorded interview with the author, March 23, 2011, in author's possession. (Hereafter, cited as "Spzak interview.")

It soon became clear, as one NLRB judge noted, that J. P. Stevens "approached [contract] negotiations with all the tractability and openmindedness of Sherman at the outskirts of Atlanta."¹⁵Mimi Conway, Rise Gonna Rise: A Portrait of Southern Textile Workers (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979), 11. The quotation from the NLRB judge also appears in Hodges, "J. P. Stevens and the Union," 59. Two years after the euphoria of Roanoke Rapids, the workers still had no contract, and Stevens's persistent labor law violations mired the TWUA in legal battles that siphoned resources away from the organizing. In 1976, the TWUA and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACWA) merged to create the Amalgamated Textile and Clothing Workers Union of America (ACTWU, pronounced "Act Two"). Inspired by the ACWA's successful boycott against the Farah Manufacturing Company in Texas, ACTWU undertook "Don't Sleep with Stevens."¹⁶ For information on the Farah Strike, see Emily Honig, "Women at Farah Revisited: Political Mobilization and Its Aftermath among Chicana Workers in El Paso, Texas, 1972–1992," Feminist Studies 22, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 425–452. ACTWU staffer Ray Rogers started a corporate campaign aimed to pressure Stevens executives through stockholders and the financial and insurance companies that supported the company's operations.¹⁷Minchin, Don't Sleep With Stevens!, 111–112, 122–124. Hodges, "J. P. Stevens and the Union," 59–61.

Blonde Woman Working in a Textile Plant, Tennessee, circa late 1970s. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Southern Labor Archives, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, Memphis-Jackson Joint Board Records, L1992_11_112.

Labor activists and pro-union politicians recognized that with the dramatic growth in economies of the southern states since the 1950s, the future of manufacturing workers in the United States was linked to the South. At the 1977 national labor law reform hearings held in the Roanoke Rapids Civic Center, Congressman Ted Weiss of New York told the Stevens workers there to testify that "the fight that you are waging here in North Carolina and the rest of the South is not just your fight for the workers down here." Wilbur Hobby, president of the North Carolina state AFL-CIO, spoke to the assault on trade unionism through decertification efforts. Civil rights and anti-poverty advocates understood the Stevens campaign to be the next step in keeping alive the 1960s vision of a more equitable and just society. Diana Wilson, a young, African American anti-poverty activist, told the House subcommittee, "People's concerns with union campaigns today are like what black Southerners experienced during the early civil rights days." In March 1977, Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr., and Bayard Rustin, executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, marched with workers in a protest at Stevens's stockholders meeting in New York.¹⁸Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, 130–131, 148, 154–155.

ACTWU allies included politicians, such as US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan; organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Institute for Southern Studies (ISS), and the National Football League Players Association; and civil rights groups and liberal religious associations. Southerners for Economic Justice (SEJ), formed in 1976 with financial support from ACTWU, became the backbone of the coalition. High profile figures from the 1960s Virginia Durr, Georgia senator Julian Bond, freedom rider John Lewis, Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, Rev. W. W. Finlator of the Pullen Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, and NAACP southern director Ruby Hurley. These veterans joined forces with young, relatively unknown social justice activists coming out of the 1960s New Left and student movements such as Bob Hall, a thirty-two-year-old Florida native and one of the founders of ISS, and Bill Finger, a thirty-year-old civil rights and labor activist from Mississippi who served as SEJ's first executive director. SEJ emphasized its background in the civil rights movement, origin in the South, and independence from ACTWU.¹⁹"ACTWU Press Release," December 1978, Box 25, Folder "IUD information," TWUA records, WHS, 396; Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!, 94; "Hearings Before the Committee on Education and Labor (Sub-committee on Labor-Management Relations), H.R. 8410, Labor Reform Act of 1977," August 9, 1977, Box 16, Folder "Misc. Legal Cases," TWUA records, WHS, 396.

SEJ sought to unite activists and organizations around the goal of economic justice. It portrayed the union's campaign as a human rights struggle pitting decent, hard-working women and men against an impersonal corporate giant with a record of discrimination and law-breaking that affronted Christian principles.²⁰"Report from Jim Sessions, SEJ Executive Director," August 8, 1978, Box 12, Folder "Southerners for Economic Justice," TWUA records, WHS, 396. SEJ put pressure on Stevens through letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and rallies, television and magazine ads, and protesting at stockholder meetings. In January 1978, for instance, SEJ paid for a television commercial, featuring Tom Banks and Ken Reaves of the St. Louis Cardinals, a professional football team that later moved to Arizona, which aired on Greenville, South Carolina, stations just days before the Super Bowl. Banks likened the Stevens campaign to the struggle to organize professional football players.²¹"Letter to Harold McIver from Bill Finger, with ad script enclosed," December 22, 1977, Box 12, Folder "Southerners For Economic Justice," TWUA records, WHS, 396. SEJ helped the union secure boycott endorsements from civic and religious organizations against Stevens products and the stores that sold them. The United Presbyterian Church identified three Biblical concepts that supported workers' right to organize and passed a resolution that urged its two-and-a-half million members to make a "public witness" through the boycott and "cast their economic ballots in favor of collective bargaining."²²"Final report and recommendations on the J. P. Stevens situation, United Presbyterian General Assembly," May 29, 1979, Box 1799, Folder 144, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department Southeastern Office Records,1974–1984, Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Atlanta, Georgia, Collection L1985-16. (Hereafter cited as "AFL-CIO Civil Rights Dept. SE Office records, GSU Library.")

The boycott, as Spzak makes clear, "brought the issue of J. P. Stevens workers to the public eye and into the public arena."²³Spzak interview. This did not guarantee change. In a 1976 working paper, SEJ admitted that "the participants in the J. P. Stevens campaign . . . are relatively unknown to most people," making it difficult to "define the merits" of unionization. The participants were "vast numbers of working women who call on the average consumers of Stevens products—another working woman—to help them earn a living for their families."²⁴"Southerners for Economic Justice, Working Paper on J. P. Stevens Campaign," December 1976, Box 1799, Folder 130, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Dept. SE Office records, GSU Library. The personal testimonies of white and African American women workers sought to transform public attention into action. Rank-and-file women displayed their paychecks, private lives, and their bodies as evidence of injustice and as a call to action.

Woman Working with Textiles, ca. late 1970s. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Southern Labor Archives, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, Memphis-Jackson Joint Board Records, L1992-11_73.

Lucy Taylor was the president of the Roanoke Rapids chapter of the Carolina Brown Lung Association, a group dedicated to getting compensation for mill workers afflicted with respiratory diseases caused by inhaling cotton fibers. She was a fiery public speaker, peppering her speeches with statements like, "They gave me brown lung, I'm giving them hell." Taylor testified at the 1977 annual J. P. Stevens stockholder meeting that at Stevens the "machinery [is] more important than people."²⁵Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, 131, 136. Mildred Whitley of the West Boylston plant in Montgomery, Alabama, explained that after she had a mastectomy, her supervisor told her she could either continue working at the expected pace or go on welfare. SEJ printed her photograph and story in fliers and newsletters sent to supporting organizations, such as the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression.²⁶"J. P. Stevens Flier," undated, Box 2, Folder ‘Behavior Control," National Alliance Against Racism & Political Repression Collection, The Schomburg Library, New York City, New York. (Hereafter cited as "NAARPR, Schomburg.") In an interview with the Appalachian magazine, Mountain Life and Work, Addie Jackson of Statesboro, Georgia, linked the treatment of black mill workers to the history of chattel slavery.²⁷"Testimony of Addie Jackson," Mountain Life and Work: The Magazine of the Appalachian South, Volume 53, No. 3 (April 1977), accessed in the Sutton collection, ACC, 986.87. At the labor law reform hearings in Roanoke Rapids in 1977, Louise Bailey, a spinner for thirty-six years, testified that her support of the union in the 1940s got her blackballed for four years. "I feel just sick to my gut," said Bailey, "because when I go in [to work] now, I don't know whether I am going to have a job or not. I know what it is to go hungry. I know what it is when you have a child."²⁸Testimony of Louise Bailey at the congressional field hearings on national labor law reform, the Roanoke Rapids Civic Center, Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, August 9, 1977, quoted in Conway, Rise, Gonna Rise, 142.

The women's stories made visceral and vivid the abstractions of labor law violations and corporate intransigence. The everyday details in the stories drew the public sympathetically into the workers' lives and complaints: how they had to eat their lunches in the bathrooms because the air in the mill was thick with "cotton dust"; how foremen told crude jokes and vulgar stories to harass and intimidate them; how Stevens monitored bathroom breaks, embarrassing female workers when their "womanly troubles" required more frequent visits; how the company passed them over for promotions and raises because of their sex or race or both. Lucy Taylor's husband quipped that he should sue Stevens for "alienation of affection" because the couple slept in separate beds when brown lung kept Lucy coughing all night. Then he added, "When she gets quiet, I start to worry that she's dead."²⁹The examples of harassment and intimidation that the women described can be found in: Fred Powledge, "The South Will Fall Again," Penthouse, May 1979, 72–79, and Wayne King, "Southern Leaders Form Group to Support Stevens Textile Workers," New York Times, December 12, 1976. Both articles were accessed at Sutton, ACC, 986.87. For personal testimony on women experiencing racial and sexual discrimination in hiring and job placement in the mills, see Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, 109–113. Lucy Taylor's husband quoted in Conway, Rise, Gonna Rise, 86.

Religious Support for Stevens Workers after the 1974 Election Victory

SEJ focused much of its energies on religious leaders and church groups and on publicizing their support. This was especially important in mill towns, where churches provided space for gatherings, were often the center of community life, and lent moral credibility to the activities on their grounds. Chip Hughes and Len Stanley, organizers for the Carolina Brown Lung Association (CBLA) in Erwin, North Carolina, noted that most workers they encountered had grafted their union and CBLA activism onto their church activities. Stanley noted that this was especially true of the women, who organized fish fries and potluck dinners that brought activists and workers together.³⁰Len Stanley from field notes of interview with Betty Bailey, Len Stanley and Thad Moore by Alicia J. Rouverol January 6, 1995, (G-0222), in the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007), Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chip Hughes recalled the importance of church organizing experience for the elderly women in Erwin. Joseph "Chip" Hughes, recorded interview with the author, December 20, 2011, in author's possession. (Hereafter cited as "Hughes interview.") SEJ's independence from the union allowed it to work through institutions that might have been prejudiced against or wary of organized labor. Spzak recalls that a Free Will Baptist church in Spartanburg, South Carolina, lent its bus to Stevens workers protesting in Columbia.³¹Spzak interview. Aware that organized religion in the South was often a strong force working against unionization, SEJ sought to organize through sympathetic churches to demonstrate "with maximum visibility the broad range of citizens and southern leaders that support the J. P. Stevens workers" and "minimize the potential for the Stevens campaign to be viewed as a contest between ‘big labor' and ‘big business.'"³²"Southerners for Economic Justice, Working Paper on J. P. Stevens Campaign," December 1976, Box 1799, Folder 130, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Dept. SE Office records, Georgia State University Library.

SEJ reported that in 1977 it held more than sixty workshops with ministers, local leaders, and teachers in almost thirty towns and cities and five universities in Tennessee, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama.³³"Proposal for SEJ's Third Year," August 8, 1978, Box 12, Folder "Southerners for Economic Justice," TWUA records, WHS, 396. In November 1978, SEJ sponsored a conference, "The Church's Responsibility in the Changing Southern Economy; Case Study: The Church and J. P. Stevens," at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina. Seventy clergy and laity from Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, DC, and the Carolinas participated, representing seven different Christian denominations. In the summer of 1979, SEJ secured a $5,000 donation for the Stevens campaign from the World Council of Churches and organized an economic justice ministry with Sister Mary Priniski in Rock Hill, South Carolina.³⁴"Conference pamphlet, ‘The Church's Responsibility in the Changing Southern Economy; Case Study: The Church and J. P. Stevens,'" November 4 and 5, 1978. "Report from Bill Finger, SEJ Staffer, to Harold McIver," January 19, 1978. "Memo to SEJ Board of Directors, two-month report July 15-Sept. 15, 1979 from Jim Sessions, Director," September 1979. All items from Box 12, Folder "Southerners for Economic Justice," TWUA records, WHS, 396.

Southeners for Economic Justice (SEJ) pamphlet for the symposium for southern churches held in North Carolina, November 4-5, 1978. Courtesy of the Textile Union of America records, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin.

In Roanoke Rapids in February and November of 1977, Reverend Jim Sessions, then an organizer with the Southern Appalachian Ministry and soon-to-be director of SEJ, and Collins Kilburn of the North Carolina Council of Churches met with ministers of Rosemary United Methodist, First United Methodist, and First Presbyterian churches. "All three are generally supportive of the workers' right to organize," Finger summarized in a report to ACTWU, however they "had some reservations about the boycott." First Union Methodist's pastor had many "high level management people in his church" who did not "believe in the tactic of a boycott," but admitted the NLRB process was an inefficient way to resolve the impasse over a contract. The minister of First Presbyterian, "a patriarch in town [with] some 35 years at the same church," agreed to publicly state that he supported the workers' right to form a union, but felt the boycott "might hurt the town."³⁵"Staff Report by Jim Sessions, Southern Appalachian Ministry," November 3, 1977, and "Report to Concerned Parties by Bill Finger," Box 12, Folder "Southerners for Economic Justice," TWUA records, WHS, 396. While many African American and northern Baptist and Methodist churches and Catholic leaders endorsed the boycott, the support of white southern Protestant churches was more difficult to secure. Getting white southern church leaders to agree to any public acknowledgement of workers' rights—or even just neutrality rather than anti-unionism—was a step forward. Union organizer Joe Uehlein recounts meetings in which he helped Spzak and Sessions talk with anti-union Baptist preachers in Mississippi, explaining that, "Our hope was—and it worked—was to neutralize them so they wouldn't preach against the union."³⁶Joseph Uehlein, recorded interview with the author, March 24, 2012, in author's possession. (Hereafter cited as "Uehlein interview.")

By 1979, an array of religious groups endorsed the boycott: the National Council of Churches, the Women's Division of the United Methodist Church (with nearly one million members), the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church, the National Council of Catholic Women, the National Council of Catholic Charities, the Commission on Religion in Appalachia, and the North Carolina Council of Churches.³⁷"ACTWU Press Release," December 1978, Box 25, Folder "IUD information," TWUA records, WHS, 396. At a Roman Catholic Call to Action conference in Detroit, Michigan, in October 1976, the participating bishops issued a statement that advocated the repeal of right-to-work laws and urged the Catholic Church to "commit itself with monies and human resources to aid the struggle of non-union workers to organize in the South, especially the textile industry."³⁸"Catholic Leaders Urge Church to Aid the Organizing Struggle of Textile Workers in the South," Labor Unity 62, no. 13 (December 1976): 11, Sutton, ACC, 986.87. "We believe that those multinational corporations [like] J. P. Stevens . . . must be challenged by Christians in the name of the Lord," extolled the National Coalition of American Nuns. Forty-three-year-old Lucille Sampson, an African American who worked for SEJ after Stevens fired her from its Greenville plant, explained, "They [anti-union co-workers] put you through mental torture. [But] God says, ‘Fear not for I am with thee,' so I'm not afraid."³⁹Quotation from the National Coalition of American Nuns from Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!, 96. Quotation from Lucille Sampson in "Church Women Investigate J. P. Stevens & Company," undated clipping from the newsletter of Church Women United, The Church Woman, page 24, Box 12, Folder "Southerners for Economic Justice," TWUA records, WHS, 396. ACTWU secretary-treasurer Jacob Sheinkman and boycott director Del Mileski claimed that the union's boycott "stirred the nation's conscience" and received more support than the Farah or the United Farm Workers boycotts. SEJ's organizing carried ACTWU's message through networks the union could not or would not work through. Support from preachers, churchwomen, and priests infused the Stevens campaign with a moral urgency and righteous indignation.

Labor Feminism

Woman Working in a Textile Plant, Tennessee, circa late 1970s. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Southern Labor Archives, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, Memphis-Jackson Joint Board Records, L1992_11_88.		African American Woman Working in a Textile Plant, Tennessee, circa late 1970s. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Southern Labor Archives, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, Memphis-Jackson Joint Board Records, L1992_11_91.

In the last twenty years, historians and feminist scholars have challenged stereotypes and popular images of second-wave feminism, revealing the feminisms of women of color, the gender-conscious activism of working-class women, and the concerns for economic justice that infused many feminist agendas in the 1970s.⁴⁰See for instance: Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Anne M. Valk, Radical Sisters: Second-wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Dennis Deslippe, Rights, Not Roses: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Donald Mathews and Jane Sherron De Hart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Stephanie Gilmore, ed., Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Stephanie Gilmore, Groundswell: Grassroots Feminist Activism in Postwar America (New York: Routledge, 2012); Lisa Levenstein, "‘Don't Agonize, Organize!': The Displaced Homemakers Campaign and the Contested Goals of Postwar Feminism," Journal of American History 100, no. 4 (March 2014): 1114–1138; Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar's Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); Anna Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Melissa Estes Blair, Revolutionizing Expectations: Women's Organizations, Feminism, and the Transformation of Political Culture, 1965–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014). Dozens of women's rights groups endorsed the Stevens boycott, including: the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), Church Women United, the National Assembly of Women Religious (NAWR), and the YWCA. Bella Abzug, NOW president Eleanor Smeal, Jane Fonda, and Gloria Steinem spoke in support of the union's campaign. In March 1978, representatives from more than thirty women's organizations met in Washington and established the National Women's Committee to Support J. P. Stevens Workers. The Committee organized letter-writing campaigns aimed at major department store chains, urging them not to sell Stevens products. "As the major purchasers of domestic products," one letter to Woolworth's stated, "we are using our consumer power to help bring justice to the workplace at J. P. Stevens."⁴¹"ACTWU Press Release," December 1978, TWUA records, WHS, Box 25, Folder "IUD information," 396; Social Justice 17 (May 1978), accessed in Sutton collection ACC, 986.87; quotation in Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!, 98. The New York chapter of NOW burned Stevens bedsheets in front of Madison Square Garden. The Durham chapter held NOW meetings in the state AFL-CIO's Labor Temple, where they connected their efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment with the Stevens campaign.⁴²"Letters from Harriet Hopkins (coordinator of the NOW Durham chapter) to NC AFL-CIO president Wilbur Hobby," September 10 and 22, 1978, Box 2376, Folder 15; "News from the AFL-CIO: ERA," July 7, 1976, Box 2349, Folder 2, both items in NC State AFL-CIO 1950-81, GSU; "Let's Stand Together: The Story of Ella Mae Wiggins," September 14, 1979, Metrolina Chapter of NOW, Charlotte, NC, in Sutton, ACC, 986.87. See also Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!, 96–98.

Crystal Lee Sutton's speaking tour as "the real Norma Rae" provided the most public example of the connection between labor and feminism in the Stevens campaign and demonstrated how personal narratives engaged a broader public. Norma Rae was a rare Hollywood movie: a sympathetic portrayal of organized labor with a female protagonist. The Washington Post editorialized that "chances were better than good that [audiences] would emerge from the theater cheering for Norma Rae and the Union against the Big, Powerful, Impersonal Company."⁴³"Norma Rae 1, J. P. Stevens 0," Washington Post, October 24, 1980, accessed in Sutton collection, ACC, 986.87. Sutton was disappointed that the film obscured the role of other workers—especially the black workers—who sacrificed their time and often their jobs for the campaign. She also disliked the movie's portrayal of her character as a promiscuous and directionless unwed mother whose romantic interest in the union organizer motivated her activism.⁴⁴Sutton expressed her displeasure with the movie in several interviews: Mary Bishop, "The Diary of a Union Organizer," Charlotte Observer, May 7, 1978, Section D, 1, 3; Megan Rosenfeld, "Through the Mill with Crystal Lee and ‘Norma Rae,'" Washington Post, June 11, 1980; C. S. Crawford, "Life on Film? One-time Organizer, Crystal Lee Says Movie Is Based On Her Life," Greensboro Daily Times, April 18, 1979; William C. Lhotka, "Real-life Norma Rae Recalls Stevens Fight During St. Louis Visit," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 14, 1980, 12A; all accessed at Sutton, ACC, 986.87. Scenes that demonstrate Norma Rae's personal growth hinge on her sexuality: her prior promiscuity, the sexual tension between her and union organizer Reuben Warshowsky, and her revelations about her past to her children. In contrast, director Martin Ritt desexualized Warshowsky to protect "the whole moral fiber of the film" so that it would not seem to audiences that the organizer "was going from one town to another, screwing every dame he made a connection with."⁴⁵Ritt quoted in Lyn Goldfarb and Anatoli Ilyashov, "Working Class Hero: An Interview with Martin Ritt," in Martin Ritt: Interviews, ed. Gabriel Miller (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2003), 87. The audience, Ritt believed, needed to see Norma Rae's sexuality in order to understand her commitment to the union, but they could not see Warshowsky's sexuality if they were to believe in his integrity.

Whatever misgivings Sutton had about Norma Rae and the script's sexual double standard, she eagerly supported the Stevens campaign. The union ignored the movie's poetic license and embraced its potential to raise public awareness. ACTWU sent publicist Gail Jeffords on a nationwide speaking tour with Sutton. Jeffords wrote to Mileski that Sutton was "a proven media ‘draw,'" and that "ACTWU's position in the Stevens conflict can only be enhanced by taking advantage of her inherent usefulness in public relations." In the first six months of 1980, Sutton was featured in fifty-seven newspapers and made sixty-three appearances on local television and thirty-nine on radio, reaching a potential audience of seventy-five million people.⁴⁶"Gail Jeffords to Del Mileski," October 16, 1979, and "Gail Jeffords to Murray Finley et al, Final Media Report on Media Coverage for Crystal Lee Sutton," June 30, 1980, both in Box 23, Folder 25, ACTWU Papers, Organizing Department Records, the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 5619/007. (Hereafter cited as "ACTWU Paper, Kheel Center, Cornell University.) On Sutton's "Norma Rae" tour, see also Hodges, "The Real Norma Rae," 267.

A Woman's Place Is in Her Union, button by the Women's Department of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, date unknown. Photograph by the Minnesota Historical Society. Featured on the Minnesota Historical Society's Collections Up Close Blog. Courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society.

Across the country, labor activists arranged screenings of Norma Rae. Reverend Finlator wrote to North Carolina AFL-CIO president Wilbur Hobby recommending that when introducing the film, Hobby should "mention that it was the Women who shut down the machines first—Black and White."⁴⁷"‘Rev. – W. W. Finlator – Best Regards,' handwritten letter from Finlator to Wilbur Hobby," undated, Box 2363, Folder 1, North Carolina State AFL-CIO records, 1945–1981, GSU Library, L1981-20. In May 1979 in Laurens, South Carolina, the Oaks Cinema cancelled the screenings of Norma Rae after the manager received harassing phone calls and unknown individuals attempted to tear down the cinema's marquee. SEJ organized a petitioning campaign to the stars of the film from moviegoers in Laurens. One handwritten letter accompanying the petitions stated, "We beg you Mr. Liebman [Ron Leibman, who played the union organizer] please don't let us miss Norma Rae. We have heard so much about it and want to see it in our home town where it should be shown." The authors added, "P.S. There is a J. P. Stevens supervisor who works part time at the Oaks Theater."⁴⁸"Notes on Norma Rae viewings and controversy at the Oaks Cinema," dated April 30–May 18, 1979, TWUA records, WHS, Box 25, Folder "Norma Rae (cancellation)," 396.

Norma Rae and Sutton's speaking tour garnered support for the Stevens campaign from feminists and women's groups. Sutton renewed her ties with Gloria Steinem, who wrote a scathing indictment of Stevens's labor law violations in the Village Voice. Sutton was in conversation with Barbara Kopple, director of the 1977 Oscar-winning documentary of a Kentucky coalminers' strike Harlan County USA, hoping to collaborate on a more factual account of Sutton's experiences with Lily Tomlin in the leading role. Sutton connected the movie's theme of a woman's liberation from her dependency on men with the fight for economic justice in the textile industry. She reminded audiences that in the mills, "women stay on those same jobs year after year with no promotions and few raises [and] it's women who have to smile and flirt to be sure they keep their jobs or don't get impossible jobs."⁴⁹For more quotations from Sutton that connected economic justice and women's liberation, see Elizabeth Stone, "Norma Rae: The Story They Could Have Told," Ms. Magazine, May 1979, 30–32; Mary Bishop, "The Diary of a Union Organizer," Charlotte Observer, May 7, 1978, Section D, 1, 3; Anicia Lane, "Fact and Fiction: Crystal Lee Sutton Insists She Is Not ‘Norma Rae,'" Signal, April 8, 1980, 10–12. On the number of women in the US labor force in the 1970s, see: "U.S. Department of Labor Employment Standards Administration Women's Bureau ‘Highlights of Women's Employment and Education,'" Box 2443, Folder 18, NC AFL-CIO State Records, GSU. Sutton quoted in "Transcript, International Women's Day Speech," March 8, 1980, Sutton, ACC, 986.87. For scholarly analyses of the themes of unionism and feminism in the movie, see Edward Benson and Sharon Hartman Strom, "Crystal Lee, Norma Rae, and All Their Sisters: Working Women on Film," Film Library Quarterly 12, no. 2/3 (1979): 18–23, and Gay P. Zieger and Robert H. Zieger, "Unions on the Silver Screen: A Review-Essay of F.I.S.T., Blue Collar, and Norma Rae," Labor History 23, no. 1 (Winter 1982): 67–78. She described letting housework take a backseat to the organizing drive in 1973 and the strain on her marriage. "When I got involved with the union there was just no way that I could do [all the housework]," Sutton explained, "And that started causing trouble [at home]."⁵⁰Sutton quoted in Megan Rosenfeld "Through the Mill With Crystal Lee and ‘Norma Rae,'" Washington Post, June 11, 1980.

Sutton's stories and Norma Rae rang true to many women in the 1970s who discovered a new vocabulary through the women's movement for discussing the challenges they faced as daughters, wives, mothers, and workers.⁵¹For an example of southern feminist literature on changing men's attitudes and reforming the institutions they dominated, see Gainesville Women's Liberation Movement, "What Men Can Do for Women's Liberation" in Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement, eds., Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 76–77. For an example of an evangelical feminist leader addressing Christian men's unease with women's liberation, see Letha Scanzoni, "How to Live with a Liberated Wife," Christianity Today, June 4, 1976, 6–9. Pat Burgess, for instance, worked at the White Horse and Monaghan Textile plants in Greenville, South Carolina, in the 1970s. When she saw Norma Rae in the theater, she told the Greenville News and Piedmont, "I got so excited I had to holler two or three times." Burgess's coworkers shunned her for passing out union literature. "It's like you're working in a pit of snakes," she said. "Those ladies, I love them, but they're afraid, they define their opinions with what their husbands think."⁵²Sharon Todd, "Two Reviews of Norma Rae," March 25, 1979, Greenville News and Piedmont, Box 26, Folder "Norma Rae Articles," TWUA records, WHS, 396. Charlotte Brody, an activist who lived in Roanoke Rapids from 1976–1979 and worked for the union and the Carolina Brown Lung Association, traveled with Stevens workers to hearings and rallies up and down the eastern seaboard. On the long bus rides, Brody recalls, white and African American working-class women talked about their lives and families. "They were basically saying," Brody recounts, "this is who I always had to be, this is how I always had to fight."⁵³Charlotte Brody, recorded interview with the author, September 3, 2011, in author's possession. (Hereafter cited as "Brody interview.") Some African American women, such as Roanoke Rapids worker Lucy Sledge, had previous organizing experiences with the NAACP and the Halifax County Voters Movement. Many older white women drew on their experiences in church ladies auxiliaries. For most, the campaign was their first chance to be leaders and to speak out as women and workers. Norma Rae was the first time they saw their stories on the big screen.

The extent to which southern working-class women embraced (or even tolerated) the principles and values of women's liberation should not be exaggerated. Brody recalls white working-class women punishing her through gossip and shunning for wearing tight pants and a two-piece bathing suit: "Your politics alone were enough to dismiss you and to suggest that you were less worthy. And then if anybody knew anything about your sexual politics . . . it meant that all forms of misogyny were deserved. It's a lot to stand up to. And people still did."⁵⁴Ibid. Maurine Hedgepeth, the middle-aged weaver in Roanoke Rapids who had won reinstatement and back pay, met Jane Fonda in 1977. Fonda was one of several actresses under consideration for the role of Norma Rae; she came to Roanoke Rapids to research the campaign and stayed in a rental house owned by the Hedgepeth family. Hedgepeth told Fonda not to take the role because the movie would "throw us in a bad light" and the Norma Rae character was "a loose woman."⁵⁵Moe Foner, interviewed by Robert Master, Columbia University Oral History Research Office, Notable New Yorkers collection, Session 15, page 359, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/nny/fonerm/transcripts/fonerm_1_15_356.html, January 23, 1986. Hereafter cited as "Foner interview."

For some workers in Roanoke Rapids, whether pro- or anti-union, the organizing drive and nationwide campaign tapped into social anxieties in the 1970s: desegregation, sexual liberation, Watergate, the oil embargo, soaring inflation, and the ignominy surrounding the Vietnam War. The activism of mill women threatened the gender and sexual normalcy that structured family life and social relationships and supported privileges enjoyed by men and women, including local status and respect. Women such as Hedgepeth had good reason to be invested in the cultural strictures of respectable womanhood. Gossip and rumor had political purchase in Piedmont mill towns. For women labor activists, a sterling reputation as a "good woman" offered protection against accusations of impropriety.⁵⁶On the sense of social disorder in the 1970s, see Cowie, Stayin' Alive. For an excellent overview of African American experiences integrating the mills in the 1960s and 70s, see Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker. Nancy MacLean argues that "southern white mill workers did not, by and large, militantly act out anxieties about life troubles on black newcomers" in textile mills, but points out that white women "redrew racial boundaries around areas they had more power to control: courtship, family, and church life." "Redesigning Dixie," 179, 184. See also interviews with mill women in Roxanne Newton, Women Workers on Strike: Narratives of Southern Women Unionists (New York: Routledge, 2007); Victoria Morris Byerly, Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1986); and Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, for evidence in the oral histories of white and African American workers that anxieties over racial integration in the mills tended to play out through social exclusivity rather than physical violence. Transgressions against gendered codes of ethics had consequences, from the loss of a job and friends to public shaming and abandonment. Millworkers relied heavily on "who you knew and how you were known" to get and keep a job at the mill. Reverend Joseph Battle, black pastor of the Quankey Baptist Church in Roanoke Rapids, recalled that in 1974 he went to Jessie Shaw, a white man whose family owned a store in town, to get a reference to work at Stevens. Shaw was "the person that folk listened to and if he gave you a reference, you were in."⁵⁷Reverend Joseph Battle, recorded interview with Rob Shapard and the author, December 4, 2013, in author's possession. (Hereafter cited as "Battle interview.") Good standing in the community was critical to white and African American working-class women. A damaged reputation, from fact or fiction, could mean unemployment and poverty. White and African American women took substantial risks when they stood for the union.

In the Textile Mills in Union Point, Greene County, Georgia, 1941. Photograph by Jack Delano. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USF34-046430-D.

The working-class women of the Stevens campaign joined a long history of "disorderly" working women who blended indictments of labor exploitation, gender inequality, and racial discrimination in their protests and resistance, from the mill girls who formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association in 1844, to the "washing Amazons" of the Atlanta laundresses' strikes in 1877 and 1881, to the female strikers who led the "flying squadrons" across the southern Piedmont in the 1934 General Textile Strike, and the women of the black freedom struggle who led "a rebellion of working-class women" in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.⁵⁸On the Lowell mill girls, see Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). On the "washing Amazons," see Tera Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1997). On the disorderly women of the 1920s strikes and 1934 General Textile Strike in the southern Piedmont, see Hall et al, Like A Family, and Hall, "Disorderly Women." The "rebellion of working-class women" quotation comes from Ruby Nell Sales, interview by Joseph Mosnier, Library of Congress, Civil Rights History Project, http://findingaids.loc.gov/db/search/xq/searchMferDsc04.xq?_id=loc.afc.eadafc.af013005&_start=58&_lines=125, April 25, 2011. Partial transcript in author's possession.

By the late 1970s, opportunities for living very different lives from their mothers arose for a younger generation of mill women. Cohabitation before marriage was more common, there were legal tools to combat discrimination and abuse, and for all but the most isolated of women, televised evidence of women's "liberation," from demonstrations in Durham, Atlanta, and Gainesville to sitcoms about single mothers like Alice.⁵⁹See, for instance: Cowie, Stayin' Alive; Enke, Finding the Movement; and Beth Bailey, "‘She Can Bring Home the Bacon': Negotiating Gender in Seventies America," in America in the Seventies, eds. Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2004). Oral history interviews in the Southern Oral History Program's "The Women's Movement in the South" series U-16, and "The Women's Movement and North Carolina Churches," series R-25 offer many firsthand accounts of how the social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s changed women's communities and lives in North Carolina and east Tennessee. When Sutton graduated from high school in 1959, she could not imagine any options other than living with her parents or living with a husband. She had never worked closely with African American men or women. In 1974, Sutton befriended Jeannie Bailey and Cheryl Wasmund, two young white women at a Stevens Fabricating Plant who rented a trailer together in town. The three attended interracial union meetings in Sutton's home on Henry Street, next door to one of her foremen at Stevens.⁶⁰Leifermann, Crystal Lee, 132. Lucy Sledge came from a black working-class family in Halifax County, North Carolina, where her uncle Otis worked for the Stevens mills. In 1970, Sledge represented more than a thousand black workers in Roanoke Rapids in a class-action discrimination lawsuit against the company.⁶¹Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, 96–101, 109–113. The TWUA cheerleading squad may not have been the first time mill women brought their daughters into public protests, but because of the women's movement, it was broadcast on public television. "Looking back," said a Roanoke Rapids union activist, the Stevens campaign "really was a working-class women's campaign."⁶²Anonymous union activist, in discussion with the author, October 26, 2013.

At an event in New York City in 1980 celebrating an exhibition of photographs of southern textile workers, Roanoke Rapids weaver Maurine Hedgepeth apologized to Fonda for dissuading her from taking the Norma Rae role. Fonda embraced Hedgepeth and replied, "I've got China Syndrome, Sally [Field] has Norma Rae, we've both got big hits. So it's okay."⁶³Foner interview.

The Norma Raes Win a Contract and Create a Legacy

Women Support J. P. Stevens Workers. Courtesy of the National Alliance Against Racism & Political Repression Collection, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.

In 1980, ACTWU and J. P. Stevens agreed to a settlement. Stevens would not block negotiations over contracts in Roanoke Rapids plants and at West Boylston in Montgomery, Alabama, the two sites where the union had won bargaining rights. Stevens agreed to recognize the union at plants ACTWU was able to organize within the next year and a half. The company agreed to automatic check-off of dues, binding arbitration of grievances, and compensation for the wage increases the workers lost during the years spent trying to secure a contract. In the wake of the settlement, dozens of Roanoke Rapids workers joined the union for the first time. In return, ACTWU called off the boycott and agreed to not single out Stevens as a target in the corporate campaign.⁶⁴Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!, 166–171.

Success came at a price. In debt, the union laid off many organizers and staffers. Stevens closed the West Boylston plant in 1982; the union negotiated severance pay. ACTWU won more than a third of its elections in the early 1980s, but this was overshadowed by plant closures and layoffs.⁶⁵Ibid., 175–176; Mary Robinson, Moisture of the Earth: Mary Robinson, Civil Rights and Textile Union Activist, An Oral History, Compiled and Edited by Fran Leeper Buss (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 180. Facing import rates that doubled in the 1980s, Stevens, like many textile and apparel manufacturers in the United States, reduced production and shut down many operations. There were more than two million textile and apparel workers in the United States in 1973. By 2009, there were 400,000, nearly all in the Carolinas. Between 1980 and 1985, ACTWU lost more than 50,000 members.⁶⁶Minchin, "Shutdowns in the Sun Belt," 260, 264. With the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, US-owned factories flourished in the maquiladora zone along the Mexican border, exacerbating the decline in textile and apparel manufacturing. The Piedmont lost hundreds of thousands of jobs between 1989 and 1999, and Asian imports continued to flood American markets, especially after China's admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001.⁶⁷Minchin, "Shutdowns in the Sun Belt," 267. See also Frederickson, Looking South, 241–246.

Production in Roanoke Rapids declined, but the mills—and the union—survived the 1980s. WestPoint Pepperell, Inc. bought J. P. Stevens in a leveraged buyout in 1988 and broke the corporation into three separate businesses. The mills in Roanoke Rapids continued operating under the Bibb Company, and in 1993 Bibb and WestPoint Pepperell merged to create WestPoint Stevens.⁶⁸Minchin, "Shutdowns in the Sun Belt," 265; Battle's interview. More information on the history of the J. P. Stevens textile corporation can be found at "Global Manufacturing," WestPoint Home, accessed August 9, 2017, http://www.westpointhome.com/about-us.html. When the last mill in Roanoke Rapids closed in 2003, WestPoint Stevens employed about three hundred workers, and the union local was part of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). Two decades of assaults on organized labor through decertification campaigns, a deindustrialized manufacturing base, and hostility at the state and federal levels of government had considerably weakened the United States labor movement. Less than 10 percent of all textile and apparel workers in the United States were organized.⁶⁹Frederickson, Looking South, 235. Looking back over the previous thirty years, Bennett Taylor, president of Roanoke Rapids UNITE and one of the many African American workers who worked alongside Crystal Lee Sutton, considered the Stevens legacy with sadness and pride. "J. P. Stevens was, at that time, known as the number one lawbreaker, and for us to organize J. P. Stevens back then," he paused, and took a deep breath, "we made history. I think it's a good legacy. Maybe people don't talk about it enough."⁷⁰Taylor interviewed in "North Carolina Now," UNC-TV, June 25, 2003, accessed at Sutton, ACC, 986.87.

Mary Robinson was an in-plant organizer in Montgomery and president of the West Boylston local. "I was a nice, little old black girl from the country when I started," she says, "but Stevens made me a woman." When Stevens closed the West Boylston plant, Robinson worked at an axle-factory and then as a bus driver for juvenile disciplinary facilities. She organized the bus drivers and janitors and won representation by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. "I try to teach the support personnel what I learned in ACTWU," she said.⁷¹Robinson, Moisture of the Earth, 182, 184, 190. Reflections by working-class women who were leaders in the Stevens campaign echo Taylor's pride and suggest that the Stevens legacy has multiple layers. Crystal Lee Sutton declared that getting involved with the union "gave me an opportunity to be the woman I always wanted to be."⁷²Woman Alive!, Documentary. In the 1970s, after her marriage ended and she left Roanoke Rapids and J. P. Stevens, Sutton worked in a hotel and organized her co-workers at the Hilton Inn in Burlington, North Carolina. Her participation in the Stevens campaign gave her a sophisticated grasp of labor politics and her 1980 speaking tour as the "real Norma Rae" honed her skills. In a speech to flight attendants in Dallas, Texas, in 1987, she called for the elimination of the two-tier wage system, explaining how it disproportionately affected women and minorities and discouraged worker solidarity. At a high school in Graham, North Carolina, she warned students about letting racial differences impede class solidarity, telling them, "Green is the color we all need to be concerned about."⁷³"Crystal Lee Sutton's Union Experience," speech given at Graham High School, October 11, 2000; "Crystal Lee Sutton, the ‘real Norma Rae,'" speech given at the Professional Flight Attendants Union in Dallas, Texas, April 22, 1987. Both transcripts accessed at Sutton collection, ACC, 986.87. She embraced her persona as the real Norma Rae and spoke across the United States, in Canada, and the Soviet Union. Since 1979, "Norma Rae" has become a title of sorts, bestowed on female activists to indicate a woman who is sometimes a feminist, usually a workers' rights advocate, and always a strong-willed leader. Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich nicknamed Ai-jen Poo, the founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the "Nannies' Norma Rae."⁷⁴Barbara Ehrenreich, "The Nannies' Norma Rae," April 26, 2011, New York Times, accessed May 6, 2014, http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/the-nannies-norma-rae. In an interview in 1995, Harold McIver, director of the Industrial Union Department's southern campaigns, continually referred to Sutton as "Norma Rae," suggesting the deep intertwining of movie and memory.⁷⁵Harold McIver, interview by Chris Lutz, Meansville, Georgia, Southern Labor Archives, Special Collections and Archives Department, GSU Library, September 26, 1995.

J. P. Stevens Mill, Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, January 20, 2011. Photographs (above and below) by Donna Longenecker. Courtesy of Donna Longenecker.

Workers such as Mary Robinson regret the loss of their roles as activists. "I sit sometimes and think about all the wonderful people I met during our struggle," Robinson wrote, "and I think I wish that part of it was not over. Life is so short and the good times always go by so fast. But, as long as I can stay close to the labor movement in any way, I will be happy."⁷⁶Robinson, quoted in Dignity: Lower Income Women Tell of Their Lives and Struggles, ed. Fran Leeper Buss (University of Michigan Press, 1985), 244. For Mildred McEwen, working nights at the West Boylston mill made her feel alone and "empty." Two things comforted her: watching the 700 Club and working for the union: "I think working with the union is a real Christian act because you're working for other people, not just yourself. I could do something else, I don't have to be there [but] I want to see it through."⁷⁷Whitley quoted in Buss, Dignity, 241–242, and in Labor Unity, November 1980, 7, Sutton, 986.87, ACC. When the mill closed, McEwen left Montgomery to live with her daughter.

In Roanoke Rapids, the legacy of the Stevens campaign took hold in workers' engagement with local politics. Bennett Taylor, James Boone, and Maurine Hedgepeth became active in voter registration drives and local elections. Between 1974 and 1984, voter registration increased by 20 percent in Halifax County (where the mills were located) and nearby Northampton County. For minority residents, registration more than doubled.

Edith Jenkins, one of the first African American women hired as an operative in the late 1960s, supported the 1973–1974 union drive. In the summer of 1985, she organized other black mothers through the Parent Teacher Association to picket the Weldon school superintendent—a white man in a school district that was 90 percent black—after he fired three black administrators. (Weldon is a small town east of Roanoke Rapids in Halifax County.) In 1992, Jenkins won a seat on the school board. "You've got to fight just to survive around here," she said. "That's how we won the union, that's how I won my school board seat."⁷⁸William Adler, "A New Day in Dixie," Southern Exposure 22, no. 1 (1994): 18.

In 1993, union workers allied with the NAACP to stop a toxic incinerator from being built near a low-income African American neighborhood in Northampton County.⁷⁹Ibid., 24–25. The Stevens campaign had a lasting impact on its participants, especially the women. Their experiences as organizers and leaders motivated them as activists in other political arenas long after the 1980 settlement. Their years as union activists gave them knowledge, skills, and a sense of confidence and purpose that bolstered them long after the Stevens campaign ended.

The union learned lessons from the Stevens campaign that supported later efforts. ACTWU became UNITE in the 1980s and continued to organize in the South. Plant closures made organizing more difficult, but did not completely halt the union's efforts. In one instance, UNITE organizers followed laid-off garment workers in the Miami, Florida, area into their new occupations in nursing homes and successfully organized about 250 workers.⁸⁰Bruce Nissen, "A Different Kind of Union: SEIU Healthcare Florida from the Mid-1990s through 2009," in Zieger, Life and Labor in the New New South, 291. Willie Jones, currently the Southern Region Organizing Director for Workers United, worked in the Cone Brothers's White Oak Cotton Mills in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the late 1970s. Jones recalled that when she began working at the mill, the union's leadership "didn't reflect the people that [they] were actually representing." She credits Bruce Raynor, president of UNITE and Workers United, for the change that occurred in the early 1980s. When he took over as director of the southern region, she noted, "women got a chance and minorities got a chance." Raynor started his career as an ACTWU organizer during the Stevens campaign.⁸¹Willie Jones, recorded interview with the author, January 15, 2010, in author's possession.

Southerners for Economic Justice continued organizing in the Carolinas after the 1980 settlement. Its "job rights workshops" in unorganized plants in the Carolinas developed into the Worker's Rights Project (WRP), which claimed several state legislative victories, most notably a 1986 South Carolina law making it harder for companies to dismiss injured workers. WRP expanded into the Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment (CAFÉ) in 1987, which then broadened to include concerns over immigration, criminal justice, and domestic violence.⁸² Janice Fine, "Workers Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream," February 2006, "Publications," Economic Policy Institute, accessed May 6, 2014, http://www.epi.org/publication/books_worker_centers/. With organized labor under attack from corporations, think tanks, well-funded political action committees, and some state governments, the numbers of functioning labor temples and union halls has fallen across the United States, making projects like WRP and CAFÉ all the more valuable for worker education and empowerment.

Postcard featuring Crystal Sutton, ca. 1979. Courtesy of The Crystal Sutton Collection, The Learning Resources Center, Alamance Community College, Graham, North Carolina.

While the Stevens campaign did not have the effect on other corporations that ACTWU hoped it would, it promoted women's leadership and a more community-based approach that many organizers adopted in the 1980s and 1990s.⁸³Groups like Interfaith Workers organize within and without the formal institutions of the labor movement on issues of wage theft, the right to collective bargaining, immigration and labor laws, and corporate responsibility for workers' safety and public health. See "History," Interfaith Worker Justice, accessed May 6, 2014, http://www.iwj.org/about/history. For a recent essay on the alliances between labor and women's groups in North Carolina, see Jennifer Ferris, "Are you One of the 90,000 NC Women Living on the Edge?," March 19, 2014, Women AdvaNCe, accessed June 3, 2014, http://womenadvancenc.org/are-you-one-of-the-90000-nc-women-living-on-the-edge/. For a recent essay on conservative and corporate alliances against labor and religious organizers responses in North Carolina's "Moral Mondays," see Dan T. Carter, "North Carolina: A State of Shock," September 24, 2013, Southern Spaces, accessed June 3, 2014, https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2013/north-carolina-state-shock. Joe Uehlein worked under Harold McIver, organizing furniture workers in 1979 in Tupelo, Mississippi, in an "experimental organizing project where [we] organized through the churches. We set up the women's organizing project. We were doing all this community stuff, which Harold had no patience for." Uehlein reflects on the changes in the union leadership's attitudes in the 1980s, a change he credits to the 1970s Stevens campaign. In Tupelo he hired two women organizers. "I remember it really clearly," he says, "because when [they] showed up, it was like the talk of the union movement." By the late 1980s, the Industrial Union Department had set up the Women's Organizing Project and female staffers and organizers were more common. "A lot of things led to that, but clearly the J. P. Stevens thing, with Norma Rae the movie coming out, Crystal Lee being the leader, that had a lot to do with it."⁸⁴Uehlein interview. The architects of the Stevens campaign and the working-class women who put themselves front and center to win a contract blazed a trail for future organizers and women workers that has outlasted the mills they organized.

About the Author

Joey Fink is a PhD candidate in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation, "The Many Norma Raes," examines the roles of working-class women in the campaign to unionize the J. P. Stevens textile plants in the Piedmont South in the 1970s. While tracing the connections between the women's movement, civil rights groups, and liberal religious organizations in the labor struggle, Fink explores the local contexts and national platforms in which white and African American textile women became leaders and spokeswomen for a workers' rights movement.

The Vanished World of the New Orleans Longshoreman

A popular tourist attraction in New Orleans today is the "Moonwalk," a brick-paved promenade stretching along the Mississippi riverfront from the Covention Center in the city's Central Business Disrict to the Governor Nicholls Wharf at the downriver end of the French Quarter. Along its length, one finds the Aquarium of Americas, the Steamboat Natchez, and grassy Woldenberg Park. Sitting here on a blanket on a sunny April afternoon during French Quarter Fest, it would be easy to miss that only forty years ago this entire recreational complex was an industrial landscape of wharves and warehouses. Other than witnessing the constant parade of cargo vessels plying the river or driving past the looming cranes of the Nashville Avenue terminal, it is almost impossible to come into visual contact with port activity in New Orleans. This is true despite the fact that the American Association of Port Authorities ranks it as the nation's fifth largest port in terms of total tonnage.¹Statistics on port volume available at American Association of Port Authorities, accessed March 4, 2014, http://www.aapa-ports.org. Automation has transformed global shipping in the last four decades and divorced port activity from the daily lives of the city's inhabitants, a separation that fundamentally altered the social, economic, and cultural landscape of New Orleans. Life on the docks governed the city's tempo for its first two-and-a-half centuries, yet by the next generation, few people will have firsthand memory of the culture of labor and commerce that once thrived along the water's edge.

Mississippi River Moonwalk, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2011. Photograph by Derek Bridges. Courtesy of Derek Bridges.

The scale and speed with which the New Orleans waterfront and its adjacent neighborhoods metamorphosized from blue-collar semi-industrial spaces into upper middle class zones occupied by white-collar professionals, tourists, or self-styled bohemians not only signaled a historical break in New Orleans, it mirrored transformations in modern port cities all over the globe. Ever since humankind began sending bulk goods by sea, the systematic loading and unloading of cargoes depended upon a stable and sizable portside workforce, whether Egyptian laborers in Alexandria stowing sacks of grain bound for fourth-century Rome or New Orleans longshoremen hauling bales of cotton destined for the looms of nineteenth-century England. Automated cargo systems invented in the 1950s ultimately severed this ancient continuum and ushered in what the historian John Lewis Gaddis terms a moment of "punctuated equilibrium" in which "processes that led to particular structures took a distinctive, or abnormal, or unforeseen course."²John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 99–100. By 1990, most ports needed only a fraction of their former workforce to handle the growing volume of global seaborne commerce. We live in the dawning of a new era in the way the world sends and receives goods. To document life on the docks as recently as the early 1960s is to record the final chapter of a story that reaches into antiquity. Today's port cities are writing the opening pages of their unknowable future.

Legacy of Labor

Before the first container ship sailed into the port of New Orleans, bringing with it the incipient automation of cargo handling of the 1970s, over eight thousand longshoremen worked along the New Orleans riverfront. Hauling everything from bales of cotton and rubber to armored vehicles, this small army of men ensured the steady flow of commerce between the Mississippi River and the rest of the world. This was the era of "breakbulk" cargo, when goods came in sacks, barrels, and bales. Ships were smaller and built differently, requiring cargoes to be stowed and unloaded by hand in between irregularly shaped bulkheads. This job had to be done quickly and carefully so as to maximize storage capacity and maritime safety. Hundreds of men organized into gangs of twenty often worked day and night to unload a single ship.

Unionization of the port workforce reached back to the late nineteenth century. The market for physical labor in New Orleans had always been biracial, and it was no different along the waterfront, where black and white cargo handling unions competed for work along the busy river. In 1935, during the labor-friendly Roosevelt administration, the International Longshoremen Association built on this segregated, sometimes contentious, but often cooperative past, by establishing Local 1418 for white dockworkers and Local 1919 for their black counterparts. For most of the twentieth century, labor divided equally between the black and white unions, and while they often performed difficult and dangerous work, both black and white longshoremen enjoyed steady employment at a decent wage. Life as a longshoreman also offered a degree of freedom and social status that most wage earners envied. "You're hired and fired every day," explained retired longshoreman Robert Blake. Once a ship was fully loaded or unloaded, it meant finding more work at the hiring offices of shipping lines that used to be located at the foot of Canal Street, where Harrah's Casino now stands. At first blush, this suggests employment uncertainty, but the opposite was true. With over 150 shipping companies operating during the midcentury heyday of breakbulk cargo, work was plentiful.

The population of New Orleans was at its peak in 1960 with just under 630,000 inhabitants, or almost twice that of the present-day total, all contained within a smaller footprint. With large tracts of the Orleans Parish suburb of Lakeview and virtually all of New Orleans East undeveloped at that time, the population density was double that of today. The city's wharves extended upriver from beyond the Jefferson Parish line at Southport to St. Bernard Parish, which lay far downriver, and the oldest residential neighborhoods in the city concentrated along this "sliver by the river." Dockworkers dominated the first several blocks in from the waterfront where they lived in the ubiquitous "shotgun double" house, situated within hailing distance of the ships' horns. All along the streets that run parallel to the Mississippi River, from Tchoupitoulas above Canal Street to New Levee in the Central Business District and Decatur Street in the French Quarter, one could find seaman's bars and corner joints that catered to the around-the-clock work routine of the docks. This working man's seaport atmosphere originated during the city's founding in the Age of Sail and spread up and down the city's waterfront with every advance in waterborne transportation. The city's explosive growth in the 1820s and 1830s followed the introduction of riverine steam power, while its rise as a produce and grain hub emerged with the advent of steel oceangoing screw steamers in the 1880s. Incremental innovations on the docks improved the pace and efficiency of cargo handling.

Let's Make New Orleans a Safe Port of Departure, 1941–1943. Poster by John McCrady. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZC2-1591.

Motorized conveyor belts replaced human shoulders in the unloading of bananas in the 1920s, just as gas-powered forklifts took the place of mules and carts after World War II. By 1960, the basic guiding logic of loading and unloading cargoes had not changed fundamentally since the late nineteenth century, and it still required a large workforce.

The Sinking Ship

It did not take long for port cities everywhere to feel the impact of the invention of the standardized twenty-foot steel shipping container. Introduced in 1956, this innovation not only rendered much of the world's cargo fleet obsolete, it redefined the basic building block of global commerce. With containers, a crane operator and a dozen skilled loaders might do the job of hundreds of longshoremen in a fraction of the time and cost with substantially less damage to the cargo.³For a detailed treatment of how containerization revolutionized global shipping and commerce see Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Although competing cities grasped the implications of this new technology and implemented sweeping infrastructure improvements, the Port of New Orleans, hobbled by a dock board populated by political appointees who possessed no useful knowledge of the shipping industry, proved slow to adopt facilities capable of handling "the box," choosing instead to bank on its historical geographical advantages in grain, petrochemicals, coffee, and other bulk commodities.⁴The New Orleans Times-Picayune ran an influential eight-part series on the decline of the port in 1982. See Christopher Drew, "Flagship of Area's Economy Losing Out to Hustling Rivals," The Times-Picayune, June 13, 1982. Containers first appeared in New Orleans at an inadequate facility built on the Industrial Canal in 1973, but proved an overall failure. Gantry cranes, designed to lift containers from a ship's deck, did not enter service until 1998. Although the net value of shipping continued to increase during this period due to trade in grain and petroleum, the number of people required to operate the port declined sharply. Meanwhile, more valuable cargoes went increasingly to other cities with better rail infrastructure. As geographer Richard Campanella observes, "great ports no longer really needed great port cities."⁵Richard Campanella, Bienville's Dilemma: a Historical Geography of New Orleans (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2008), 232. Even bananas, the most emblematic cargo of the once powerful New Orleans–based United Fruit Company, left for Gulfport, Mississippi in the 1970s. By 1980, the declining Locals 1418 and 1919 finally integrated, forming the ILA Local 3000, due to both the legally untenable nature of segregated memberships and the poor prospect of survival in the face of declining numbers.

United Fruit Company banana conveyors, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1910. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-det-4a19873.

"I Just Liked to Be in that Number": The Longshoremen Remember

The transformative impact of the port's automation upon the history, culture, economy, and demographics of New Orleans became a topic of conversation in the spring of 2012 between Justin Nystrom, the director of Loyola University New Orleans's new Documentary and Oral History Studio, and Mark Ellis, who served as the secretary-treasurer of the ILA Local 3000 for twenty-eight years. With the support of union president Kenneth Crier, Nystrom structured an oral history project aimed at recording stories of those men who belonged to the last generation of longshoremen to participate in the centuries-old system of breakbulk cargo. The Loyola Documentary and Oral History Studio fuses traditional oral history methodology with the high production value recording found in modern documentaries. These recording procedures afford flexibility in dissemination. Archived as both transcript and ten-bit digital video, interviews serve as source material for textual scholarship and documentary features.

Justin Nystrom and students Kyleah Frederic, Eric Buras, and Kaleigh Macchioand prepare equipment for a recording session, Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana, October 29, 2012. Photograph by Harold Baquet. Courtesy of Harold Baquet and Justin Nystrom.

Longshoremen interviews began in the fall of 2012 as part of Nystrom's senior seminar in oral history taught at Loyola University New Orleans. Nine students each recorded and transcribed one full interview and took turns aiding with technical production during the recording sessions by setting up lighting, microphones, and camera equipment. Successful interviews required students to bridge significant differences in age, economic background, gender, and education between themselves and the interviewees. Students also assembled research folios on the life of New Orleans longshoremen using historical newspapers and other textual sources in order to prepare informed questions for their interview subjects, in addition to more general questions about life on the docks. Other challenges included scheduling. As Mark Ellis observes, longshoremen always worked by the job, not the clock. At the semester's conclusion, the class had recorded six hours of interview footage. A final class project tasked students with identifying themes from the collective body of interviews and editing thematically-linked footage into a focused narrative. This documentary short reflects some of the selections made during their coursework.

A recurring theme in the interviews for On The Waterfront: Conversations with New Orleans Longshoremen is a fond, if nostalgic, memory of life on the docks. "They had a lot of mens, and everything, and I just liked to be in that number," explains longshoreman John McSwain, who came to New Orleans from rural Alabama in 1959 at the age of nineteen to work on the river. James McCleland started at eighteen in 1949, drawn by the atmosphere of the docks where his father spent fifty years. "He wanted me to go to college, and I was hard headed and wouldn't go to college," recalls McCleland, "and he didn't want to bring me on the waterfront, but his boss did, and between them they worked it out." McCleland's father echoes the wishes about college that his son would later express to his own children.

On the Waterfront: Conversations with New Orleans Longshoremen, 2014. Produced by the Loyola Documentary and Oral History Studio.

Stories of accidents also figure prominently in longshoremen's memories. "I mean you can hear a strange noise in the middle of a conversation and hear that noise and everyone knows to just start running," observes Chris Hammond. "Because we know that that noise is something breaking, like a cable snapping." On his first day on the job, John McSwain suffered two broken feet when a crane lowered a "household box" onto them. Later, as a foreman, he witnessed a major collision on the river: "They had a ship collided with a oil barge. And twenty-six mens went down with the ship. Up under the bridge, out there . . . by the Crescent City Connection. . . . Yeah, was Easter Sunday night, we were working out there. Sure was at Julia Street. Julia Street Wharf."

The Longshoremen tell of the tedium of loading 250-pound sacks, the oppressiveness of the heat working inside a ship's hold in the summer, and the relentless pace. But they also tell of the camaraderie of life on the docks, steady work, good wages, and a responsive union. One recalls when Martin Luther King came to speak at the Local 1919 union hall on Claiborne Avenue in 1961, while others remember overcoming fears of snakes and spiders sleeping among the refrigerated bananas. Each expresses keen awareness that the world in which they worked is gone.

The transcribed interviews from this project, along with their accompanying video files, are deposited in the Loyola Archives and Special Collections, to be made available to scholars online through the LOUISiana Digital Library. Additionally, student workers in the Documentary and Oral History Studio are building a Zotero database that will enable other Zotero users to search full-text transcripts and view video files.

The "Sliver by the River"

Today, New Orleans's working riverfront carries on behind a concrete sea wall, cordoned off from the neighborhoods whose rhythms once moved to the steady arrival and departure of cargo ships along the docks. This modern complex has its own rail line and semi-truck express lane, while the cranes and gantries that pluck containers from the decks and hulls of oceangoing vessels employ fewer than five hundred skilled longshoremen. This comparatively compact, efficient, and heavily automated modern port facility replaced the miles of open wharves, which continue to rot and tumble into the river.

Decaying wharves, Felicity Street, New Orleans, Louisiana, 2010. Photograph by Justin Nystrom. Courtesy of Justin Nystrom.

Their decay passes unnoticed in a labor market that has shifted toward the service industry, technology, and tourism, while college-educated professionals convert the shotgun doubles lining the streets that radiate perpendicularly from the river's crescent like the ribs of a fan into stylish single-family homes. Located on the historical high ground, a combination of aesthetics, demographics, and FEMA flood map designations have rendered this "sliver by the river" the most expensive real estate in the postdiluvian city. The transition taking place here is not unlike the sort of gentrification unfolding in the urban centers of other US cities, but the architecture and street grid still bear the imprint of the once relationship between land and river.

About the Author

Justin Nystrom is Assistant Professor of History, Co-Director of the Center for the Study of New Orleans, and Director of the Documentary and Oral History Studio at Loyola University New Orleans.

Introduction

Scott County chicken farm, Mississippi, 2005. Photograph by Angela Stuesse. Courtesy of Angela Stuesse.

It's dusk, and the putrid odor of chickens heading to and from slaughter floats through the warm evening air, just as it has all summer. It is July 2005 and Pablo Armenta, a father of four from Veracruz, Mexico, sits on the makeshift porch of a decaying trailer as he recounts the story of how he came to Mississippi:

Mississippi . . . I think God put it in my path. I was in Florida picking oranges. One afternoon I went to a Cuban store . . . and when I was walking home, a van pulled over, [and this guy says to me,] "Hey, do you want to work in Mississippi?" And I told him, "Well, that depends." So he explained what it was about, a chicken plant, a factory where they process chicken, the work is like this, they pay this much. They were offering housing and everything . . . so yeah, it sounded good to me.¹Pablo Armenta, interview with Angela Stuesse, July 7, 2005, Scott County, Mississippi. In this article we protect most research participants' confidentiality by omitting names or using pseudonyms. In cases where we quote industry representatives and other public or historical figures, we use their real names. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from present-day residents and workers in Scott County are from Helton's fieldnotes, June–July 2003, or Stuesse's fieldnotes, June 2002–June 2008.

Stuesse, absorbed in the story from her rusted metal chair a few feet away, is incredulous: "So they just stopped you on the side of the road and you said yes?!" Armenta chuckles . . .

Yes! So then they said, "Tomorrow we'll come get you around this time." So I told them where I lived, and I talked with my two brothers, and we decided to do it. [The next day] I left. We went in one of those vans you can use to rent furniture, all piled up on top of one another. [I arrived,] worked one week, received my first paycheck, it seemed good to me, and I brought them all here to join me.

The migration that Armenta describes, originating in the mid-1990s, has changed many rural southern communities. Over half a million "Hispanics" moved to the South in that decade, making it home to the fastest growing Latino population in the country at the turn of the millennium. In Mississippi, the "Hispanic" population in poultry industry locales grew by over 1000 percent in the 1990s.²

US Bureau of the Census, "Scott County, Mississippi, General Population and Housing Characteristics: 1990," 1990, accessed on October 13, 2002, http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/BasicFactsTable?_lang=en&_vt_name=DEC_1990_STF1_DP1&_geo_id=05000US28123; US Bureau of the Census, "Scott County, Mississippi, Census 2000 population, demographic, and housing information: General Demographic Characteristics," 2000, accessed October 13, 2002, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/28/28123.html.

Driven by the industry's recruitment of foreign-born labor, by the early 2000s immigration had made Scott County, at the center of this state, home to Cubans, Dominicans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, Peruvians, Argentines, and other Latin Americans. These newcomers joined a society structured by deeply entrenched racial hierarchies and an industry known for some of the lowest paid and most dangerous jobs in the country.³For more on the poultry industry see Donald D. Stull and Michael J. Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2004); Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Kathleen Crowley Schwartzman, The Chicken Trail: Following Workers, Migrants, and Corporations across the Americas (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press of Cornell University Press, 2013). Parallel trends have diversified the demographic composition of other towns across the US South.

Scott County, Mississippi. Data from Wikimedia Commons. Map courtesy of Southern Spaces.

In Scott County's seat of Forest, population six thousand, there are five large-scale poultry processing plants dominating local industry. Local high school football teams compete for the "Golden Chicken" trophy.⁴Chris Allen Baker, "Battle for Golden Chicken Enters Its 80th Year," Scott County Times, October 21, 2009, accessed November 6, 2013, http://www.sctonline.net/news/article_2e8efddf-5c83-5935-9ea3-eac434b9b7cf.html. Typical for poultry-producing areas, many of Scott County's residents struggle to make ends meet, and nearly half of Forest's households earn less than $25,000 per year. Just under 50 percent of Forest's population is African American, approximately 30 percent is white, and almost 25 percent self-identifies as "Hispanic."⁵US Bureau of the Census, "Forest City, Mississippi, Profile of General Population and Housing Characteristics, 2010," accessed December 23, 2013, http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=DEC_10_DP_DPDP1. Scott County, then, differs from some areas of the US South that have attracted large numbers of Latin American immigrants in the past twenty years. Here, these new arrivals have joined workplaces and communities where the largest demographic group is African American rather than white. This compels us to think about the ways in which immigration history in the South is intertwined with the parallel history of African American struggles for equal economic opportunity—particularly how industrial restructuring as well as state and federal agricultural and development policies since World War II have affected these struggles.

Nuevo New South? The Long History of Contemporary Immigration

Since the early 2000s, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to Latino migration to the US South.⁶Arthur D. Murphy, Colleen Blanchard, and Jennifer A. Hill, eds., Latino Workers in the Contemporary South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); Barbara Ellen Smith, "The New Latino South: An Introduction," Across Races and Nations: Building New Communities in the US South (Memphis, TN: Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis, Highlander Research and Education Center, and Southern Regional Council, 2001), http://www.memphis.edu/crow/pdfs/new_latino_south.pdf; Raymond A. Mohl, "Latinization in the Heart of Dixie: Hispanics in Late-Twentieth-Century Alabama," Alabama Review 55, no. 4 (October 2002): 243–274; Sandy Smith-Nonini, "Back to The Jungle: Processing Migrants in North Carolina Meatpacking Plants" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, LA, November 20–24, 2002); Leon Fink, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Jamie Winders, "Changing Politics of Race and Region: Latino Migration to the US South," Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 6 (December 2005): 683–699; Paula D. McClain, et al., "Racial Distancing in a Southern City: Latino Immigrants' Views of Black Americans," Journal of Politics 68, no. 3 (July 2006): 571–584; Heather A. Smith and Owen J. Furuseth, eds., Latinos in the New South: Transformations of Place (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006); Víctor Zúñiga and Rubén Hernández-León, eds., New Destinations: Mexican Immigration in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005); Mary E. Odem and Elaine Lacy, eds., Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the US South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009); Ricardo B. Contreras, "The Nuevo South Action Research Collaborative: A Model of Community Engagement and Service-learning in Eastern North Carolina (Towards a New Type of University-Community Collaboration)," June 10, 2010, accessed October 29, 2013, http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cas/anth/nuevosouth/upload/The-Nuevo-South-Action-Research-Collaborative.pdf; Hannah E. Gill, The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina: New Roots in the Old North State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Laura López-Sanders, "Is Brown the New Black?: Immigrant Incorporation and the Dynamics of Ethnic Replacement in New Destinations" (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2011); and Helen B. Marrow, New Destination Dreaming: Immigration, Race, and Legal Status in the Rural American South (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). Emphasizing the novelty of the new immigrant stream where a black-white binary had long dominated local understandings of race, some scholars dubbed the phenomenon the "Nuevo New South."⁷Fink, The Maya of Morganton; Mohl, "Latinization in the Heart of Dixie"; Natalia Deeb-Sossa and Jennifer Bickham Mendez, "Enforcing Borders in the Nuevo South: Gender and Migration in Williamsburg, Virginia, and the Research Triangle, North Carolina," Gender and Society 22, no. 5 (October 2008): 613–638; Smith and Furuseth, Latinos in the New South; and Irene Browne and Mary Odem, "Understanding the Diversity of Atlanta's Latino Population: Intersections of Race, Ethnicity and Class" (paper presented at Immigration to the US Southeast: Defining Problems, Finding Solutions Conference, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, October 30, 2010). Early descriptive work, by recognizing the significance of ongoing demographic shifts and documenting the challenges faced by new immigrants, laid the foundation for what has become a robust interdisciplinary field of study.⁸For a detailed accounting of the development of this field, see, for example, Winders, "Changing Politics of Race and Region"; Marrow, New Destination Dreaming; and Jamie Winders, Nashville in the New Millennium: Immigrant Settlement, Urban Transformation, and Social Belonging (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013). More recent work has moved away from an emphasis on novelty by demonstrating a longer history of Latinos in the Deep South⁹Julie M. Weise, Corazon de Dixie: Mexico and Mexicans in the US South since 1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming). and by situating long-term residents' reception of recent immigrants within their memories and understanding of local histories, particularly of recent racial struggles like school busing.¹⁰Winders, Nashville in the New Millennium.

Our work corroborates this more sustained critical engagement with history in order to comprehend the complexities of the transnational present. In this essay we seek to contextualize recent immigrant recruitment to Mississippi's chicken processing region within the area's relations of race, industry, work, and labor organizing. We bring together the perspective of Julie Weise and Jamie Winders with work on industrial restructuring and workplace conditions in the contemporary poultry industry. While scholars have often described immigrant recruitment in terms of a split labor market—in which workforce division augments management's labor control¹¹Significant works in this field include Edna Bonachich, "A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism: The Split Labor Market," American Sociological Review 37, no. 5 (October 1972): 547–559; Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); and Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, Transnational Capitalism and Hydropolitics in Argentina: The Yacyretá High Dam (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994).—we demonstrate how local poultry companies relied on racialized strategies to ensure low-cost labor long before turning to immigrant recruitment. We also show how, at least in central Mississippi, the industry's earliest experiments with hiring transnational workers were linked to African American workers' organized struggles for economic opportunity. Our research thus treats immigration as neither entirely new, nor peripheral, to experiences of race and labor in the Deep South.

Rapid Hispanic growth counties. United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. 1987, 1992, 1997 Census of Agriculture and 1990, 2000 Census of Population. Map courtesy of Southern Spaces.

We chart how new immigration to the US South intersects in complicated and sometimes surprising ways with the history of the long civil rights movement, particularly in the late 1960s to early 1980s.¹²On the long civil rights movement, see Jacqueline Dowd Hall, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–1253. A key strand of literature on the black civil rights movement has discussed its intersection with labor histories. A small sampling includes: Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); John A. Salmond, Southern Struggles: The Southern Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Movement (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); and Trevor Griffey and David Goldberg, Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action, and the Construction Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). To challenge the way in which contemporary discourses of "labor shortage" and "work ethic" can mask these intertwined histories, and to better interpret the present situation, we examine the longer story of Latino migration to central Mississippi—dating to the 1970s, rather than to the 1990s as often assumed—along with local memories and archival evidence of African American workplace struggles.¹³A note on methodology: The authors met in 2003 in Scott County, Mississippi, as participants in the Poultry Worker Justice Research Project, an endeavor coordinated by Stuesse and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin. The project laid the groundwork for Stuesse's doctoral research in anthropology, in which she studied how black, white, and new Latino Mississippians are experiencing the changes neoliberal globalization brings to their communities and workplaces, and the implications these have for building worker power in the poultry industry, see Angela Stuesse, "Globalization Southern-Style: Immigration, Race, and Work in the U.S. South" (unpublished manuscript, October 18, 2013), Microsoft Word file. Integral to this work conducted between 2002 and 2008, Stuesse was a founding collaborator of the Mississippi Poultry Workers' Center (MPOWER), see Angela Stuesse "Anthropology for Whom?: Challenges and Prospects of Activist Scholarship," in Public Anthropology in a Borderless World, ed. Sam Beck and Carl A. Maida (New York: Berghahn Books, forthcoming). Helton conducted research focused on the responses of black and white longtime residents of Scott County to immigration, see Laura E. Helton, "Three Hundred Strangers Next Door: Native Mississippians Respond to Immigration, A Report of the Poultry Worker Justice Research Project," Inter-American Policy Studies Occasional Papers, no. 4 (Austin, TX: Inter-American Policy Studies Program, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs: Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 2003). The following year she moved to the state capitol of Jackson, where for two years she worked as a field archivist for the Mississippi Digital Library, a collaboration between six archival repositories to increase access to civil rights-related collections across the state. These intersecting research projects resulted in a coauthored paper presented at the Southern Labor Studies Conference, see Laura E. Helton and Angela Stuesse, "Race, Low-wage Legacies and the Politics of Poultry Processing: Intersections of Contemporary Immigration and African American Labor Histories in Central Mississippi" (paper presented at the Southern Labor Studies Conference, Moving Workers: Migration and the South, April 15–17, 2004). The collaboration also inspired Stuesse to recognize the importance of the area's history in shaping current race and industrial relations, which has since become a central feature of her work. See, for example, Stuesse, "Globalization Southern-Style" and Angela Stuesse, "When Silences Beckon: The Sovereignty Commission's Chokehold on Civil Rights Histories in Central Mississippi, 1956–1973" (unpublished manuscript, June 12, 2013), Microsoft Word file.

What follows is an examination of three interconnected moments in Scott County's history. First, we discuss the conditions and struggles surrounding the incorporation of African American workers into the previously all-white chicken plant workforce in the 1960s. Second, we outline the contours of worker organizing and its suppression in Scott County's poultry plants in the 1970s. Third, we consider efforts to recruit Latin American migrant labor into the plants, first in the 1970s—a little-known but significant moment of transnational labor in central Mississippi—and again in the mid-1990s, when the most recent wave of immigration began. These periods are linked through their relationships to racialized inequality, industrial exploitation, and labor organizing.

Analysis of these moments makes clear how the industry has creatively relied upon exploitable classes of workers to increase profits; established a hierarchy of work in the plants; relegated workers of color in each generation to the worst available jobs; and strategically wielded workers' racial, gender, and other identity categories to limit their collective bargaining power. In particular, the historical denigration of blackness as a social category continues to justify industry practices. This practice of denigration operates through discourses around immigration and work, in recent decades relying upon tropes of the "immigrant work ethic," racially-coded language about "lazy" workers, and the socio-economic category of "labor shortages." We conclude by considering how a deeper understanding of the industry's past might help Mississippi's present-day poultry workers organize for more just and humane working conditions.¹⁴We base our analysis on research carried out between 2002 and 2008 (with the bulk between 2003 and 2005) that included extensive ethnographic fieldwork; oral history interviews; and archival research at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Forest Public Library, and limited private corporate holdings. This project presents significant archival challenges. Rural towns of this size are not regularly covered in major metropolitan and state newspapers (and as discussed in this piece, the county newspaper was under the control of a well-known white supremacist and excluded nearly all coverage of local civil rights struggles). In addition, there are no established municipal archives in these towns, which are only sparsely represented in the collections of the state archives. Finally, corporate archives are often notoriously guarded. While the records of local, family-owned businesses are often lost, we did encounter one family member who kept artifacts of his family's poultry business. The most valuable archival sources we located were the subject files and scrapbooks compiled by local public librarians in Forest and Morton.

"The chicken plant replaced the cotton field": Poultry Plant Desegregation in the 1960s

Poultry plant workers, 1963. Photograph by Mississippi Poultry Commission. Courtesy of Forest Public Library.

The racial integration of the Scott County poultry industry has received little attention. We base our narrative largely on recollections of former plant employees and longtime residents. As late as the early 1960s most Mississippi chicken plants would not hire African Americans. One white woman who spent time in the plants during those early years explained: "Blacks couldn't work anywhere. Not even the chicken plants."¹⁵Interview with chicken plant worker, February 2, 2006, Scott County, Mississippi. Managers staffed production lines almost entirely with white women, a fact that points not only to the long history of racial division in the poultry industry, but also to its gendered contours. While black men found a few jobs—usually heavy, outdoor labor—in poultry, black women were excluded from poultry processing lines (where chickens are gutted, cut, and sliced) that were staffed largely by white women. As becomes clear in discussions of worker organizing, the local industry's racial desegregation revolves largely around African American women.

Telling the story of African Americans' eventual entry into Scott County poultry plants requires that we consider three broad trends in the 1950s and 1960s. First, the industrialization of agriculture and early efforts at vertical integration in the poultry industry led to the mechanizing, standardizing, deskilling, and speeding up of farming and factory work, creating "push" and "pull" factors that led black workers to chicken plants.¹⁶Steve Striffler describes vertical integration as the process "whereby previously independent facets of the emerging industry were brought under the control of a single entity." Striffler, Chicken, 39. For more on the histories of black farmers in the US South, see Gail Myers, "Rhythms of the Land: Africa Came to America," 2013, accessed November 6, 2013, http://rhythmsoftheland.com. In the 1940s, the US poultry industry remained a decentralized operation, founded on household production of eggs and chickens sold in the open marketplace. Since then it has become one of the most highly specialized agricultural sectors, slaughtering more than one hundred million birds every week.¹⁷For more insight into the industrialization of poultry, see David Craig Griffith, Jones's Minimal: Low-Wage Labor in the United States (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Donald Stull, Michael Broadway, and David Griffith, eds., Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); William Boyd and Michael Watts, "Agro-Industrial Just-In-Time: The Chicken Industry and Postwar American Capitalism," in Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring, ed. David Goodman and Michael Watts (London: Routledge, 1997), 192–225; Cedric Chatterley, Alicia J. Rouverol, and Stephen Cole, I Was Content and Not Content: The Story of Linda Lord and the Closing of Penobscot Poultry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000); Stull and Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues; Kathleen C. Schwartzman, The Chicken Trail: Following Workers, Migrants, and Corporations across the Americas (Ithaca: ILR Press of Cornell University Press, 2013). Many labor scholars have discussed these technological changes in the industry, but they have less often connected this history to the civil rights and post-civil rights experience of local African Americans, who came to dominate the industry's workforce following these transformations. While the detailed history of Mississippi processors' vertical integration is beyond the scope of this article, these developments facilitated the industry's exponential growth in production capacity, its declining wage rates (in real terms), and its incorporation of increasingly marginalized populations of workers doing more and more dangerous labor.¹⁸For a more detailed account of the development of Mississippi poultry, see Stuesse, "Globalization Southern-Style."

Jones Co-op, Jones County, Mississippi, 1958. Photograph from Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation Collection PI/2010.0002. Series 2, Image 977. Courtesy of Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

Poultry farm scene with unidentified man, Clarke County, Mississippi, 1956. Photograph from Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation Collection PI/2010.0002. Series 2, Image 276. Courtesy of Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

By the 1960s federal agricultural policy, with the goal of increasing demand for cotton, had created an incentive to keep cotton fields in central Mississippi fallow. Many individuals we spoke with suggested that this policy disproportionately hurt small black farmers, making it increasingly hard for them to make a living. This policy, combined with the rising prominence of the mechanical cotton picker, gave many local African Americans no choice but to trade the fields for the factories. "The chicken plant replaced the cotton field," said a Scott County civil rights veteran. "You have to have work and earn a living, so you have to go wherever the job's at."¹⁹Interview with civil rights veteran, January 31, 2006, Scott County, Mississippi.

A second phenomenon contributing to the racial desegregation of Scott County's chicken plants was the state's Balance Agriculture with Industry Plan (BAWI). Passed by the Mississippi legislature in 1944, BAWI allowed cities and counties to issue voter-approved bonds that would finance the growth of industry using taxpayer dollars. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, elected officials relied on BAWI to lure new industries to Scott County, including furniture plants, garment and textile factories, electric parts manufacturers, chemical companies, defense contractors, paper processors, frozen pastry producers, and others.²⁰S. K. Richmond, "Garment Company Plans to Locate Plant at Carthage," Jackson Daily News, March 1, 1951, accessed at Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi, Subject file: Carthage; "Bond Issues in Canton Favored by Big Margin," Jackson Daily News, March 26, 1955, accessed at Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi, Subject file: Canton; "Sunbeam Clocks Made in Forest," Scott County Times, June, 1970, accessed at the Forest Public Library, Vertical file: Forest; Jack N. Stuart, A Story to Tell, A Farm to Sell: Live the Good Life in Mississippi (Morton, MS: Jack N. Stuart, 1975), accessed at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History; "New, Current Industries Honored at Program," Scott County Times, June 7, 1978, accessed on microfilm at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. One of the more successful cases was the opening of a subsidiary of Sunbeam Corporation in 1962, which produced clocks, electric knives, and electric ice crushers.²¹"Sunbeam Clocks Made in Forest." A BAWI bond of nearly one million dollars facilitated construction of a state-of-the-art, air-conditioned Sunbeam factory, which provided jobs to mostly white Scott County residents for over twenty years. BAWI is crucial to our story because, in bringing increasing industrial development to the area, it created an expanded universe of job prospects for white working women and men, providing them with a greater array of economic options beyond chicken plant work. Local chicken processors also benefited from BAWI, which helped them continue to grow. In the 1960s, with the support of BAWI bonds worth nearly $500,000, R&R Packing Company in nearby Carthage built "one of the most modern and efficient plants in the United States."²²C. T. Ramzy, "Leake County Produce Company," in The History of Leake County, Mississippi: Its People and Places, eds. Mac and Louise Spence (Dallas, TX: Curtis Media Corporation, 1984), 179–180. Meanwhile, back in Forest, a 1963 industrial survey reported that two poultry companies were helping to pay off the city's bonded indebtedness of over one half-million dollars.²³"Industrial Survey of Forest, Mississippi, Especially Prepared for Forest Chamber of Commerce," New Industries Department, Mississippi Poultry Commission, Forest Vertical File, Forest Public Library, Forest, Mississippi, 1963. With processing facilities expanding, production and profit steadily increased. B.C. Rogers, a Scott County plant and the second oldest chicken processor in the country, opened a second shift in this period, increasing its yield to nearly 800,000 chickens per week.²⁴Anita Grabowski, "La Pollera: Latin American Poultry Workers in Morton, Mississippi" (master's thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2003); Anita Grabowski, "Organizing for Change: Labor Organizers and Latin American Poultry Workers, A Report of the Poultry Worker Justice Research Project," Inter-American Policy Studies Occasional Papers, no. 3 (Austin, TX: Inter-American Policy Studies Program, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs: Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, 2004). At the same moment that white workers increasingly found new opportunities elsewhere, chicken plants faced an ever mounting need for cheap labor.

Mississipi's method, pamphlet, n.d. Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

A third factor leading to the desegregation of Scott County's chicken plants was the burgeoning Mississippi freedom struggle, in which African Americans from across the state (and beyond) were inspired to speak and act out against educational, political, and economic inequalities enshrined in the system of white supremacy. The historical record is relatively silent on their activities in Scott County, but it produces evidence of considerable organizing activity in neighboring Leake, Neshoba, and Madison counties.²⁵Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1968); John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Susie Erenrich, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: An Anthology of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (Washington, DC: Center for Cultural Change, 1999); Winson Hudson and Constance Curry, Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002); Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez, Letters from Mississippi (Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2002). In nearby Canton, for example, where 80 percent of residents were African American, an economic boycott commenced in 1964 that encouraged black residents and sympathetic whites to avoid buying from stores and businesses until they agreed to hire black sales clerks, treat black customers with respect, and desegregate their facilities.²⁶"Don't Buy at These Stores," Madison County Movement, newsletter, Madison County Committee on Selective Buying, n.d., Sovereignty Commission Digital Archives, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, SCR ID # 10-55-9-56-1-1-1; Angela Stuesse, "Globalization Southern-Style." Continuing on and off for over five years, the campaign—which specifically targeted the local chicken plant, among other manufacturers and retailers—resulted in the closure of many white businesses that proved unsympathetic to the ideals of racial equality.²⁷"Report on Canton," Council of Federated Organizations, Madison Country, Mississippi, February 26, 1964, Sovereignty Commission Digital Archives, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, SCR ID # 2-24-2-47-1-1-1; "Selective Buying Campaign," Madison County Movement, newsletter, Canton, Mississippi,1964, Sovereignty Commission Digital Archives, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, SCR ID #2-24-3-78-1-1-1; "Selective Buying Starts Again!," Madison County Movement, newsletter, Canton, Mississippi, 1965, Sovereignty Commission Digital Archives, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, SCR ID # 10-55-9-56-1-1-1; "Memo to: File, Subject: Canton Boycott," Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, September 1, 1966, Sovereignty Commission Digital Archives, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, SCR ID #2-24-4-41-1-1-1; "Memo to: File, Subject: Racial Matters and Boycott, Canton, Mississippi," Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, December 2, 1968, Sovereignty Commission Digital Archives, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, SCR ID #2-24-4-65-1-1-1.

In Scott County, our research uncovered a more muted approach in which intrepid black residents and their progressive white allies united in voter registration efforts.²⁸Stuesse, "Globalization Southern-Style." Elsewhere, Stuesse has argued that civil rights activism was less publicized—and likely much more circumscribed—in Scott County in large part because of the political power of Erle Johnston, a local businessman who invested in poultry processing and ancillary industries, owned the local newspaper for over forty years and eventually became mayor of Forest. A self-proclaimed "practical segregationist," Johnston was one of the key architects of white Mississippi's segregation movement during the 1960s, first as Public Relations Chair and then as Director of the Sovereignty Commission, the state's official weapon against the Civil Rights Movement. The Sovereignty Commission's investigators colluded with local officials to intimidate "race agitators" across the state, and archival evidence shows that they were active in Scott County as early as 1960. Stuesse, "When Silences Beckon." Nearby efforts such as the Madison County Movement's boycott, however, reverberated throughout central Mississippi and, combined with the increased labor opportunities for white workers proffered by BAWI, resulted in some local industries opening the shop floor to African Americans beginning in the 1960s. Still often relegated to the heaviest, most difficult, most dangerous work, African Americans increasingly found work inside on the line instead of being entirely outdoors.

Many of the new manufacturers continued to employ only white workers, whether due to management preference or community pressure. When Sunbeam hired "two colored males for positions formerly held by white personnel" in its Scott County facility in 1965, protestors burned crosses in front of the factory and in the general manager's yard.²⁹"Memo to: File, Subject: Cross Burnings in Forest," Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, May 7, 1965, Sovereignty Commission Digital Archives, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, SCR ID #2-128-0-32-1-1-1. The company reverted to an all-white workforce for many years. One elderly black resident recalls, "A long time they didn't have nothing up there but white folk. And they used to tell you had to have a high school education. But I found out that a bunch of white [sic] didn't have no high school working there."³⁰Interview with Scott County resident, February 9, 2006, Scott County, Mississippi.

Sunbeam cross burning, Scott County, Mississippi, 1965. Mississippi Department of Archives and History Digital Collections, Sovereignty Commission Papers, Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

Despite acts of violence like the cross-burning at Sunbeam, by the mid-1960s practices of workplace segregation had begun to break down. The poultry industry's expansion, the deskilling and intensification of its labor, the increasing availability of new manufacturing jobs to white workers, the waning of opportunities for small black farmers, and increasing pressure from African Americans for equal opportunities in the workplace led to the racial integration of processing lines, to which employers had been adamantly opposed.³¹"Industrial Survey of Forest, Mississippi"; "Sunbeam Clocks Made in Forest"; J. Rogers, "The Legacy of B.C. Rogers," Rogers Report 3 (Fall 1989), accessed at Morton Public Library, Morton, Mississippi.

One of the first African Americans to integrate Southeastern Poultry recalls that "the whites had a walk-out, so they called the blacks in."³²Interview with former chicken plant worker, July 28, 2003, Morton, Mississippi. The way she remembers it, African American workers received slightly less pay than whites and had to stand while other workers sat. These jobs in poultry processing paid more than agricultural, sanitation, or domestic work, a fact companies likely exploited by introducing African Americans as a wedge against potential grievances from white workers. We were unable to uncover additional evidence of growing demands from white workers at this time, but many labor scholars have documented the entrance of black workers into industries precisely when white workers began to organize.³³Griffith, Jones's Minimal; Stull and Broadway, eds. Any Way You Cut It; Boyd and Watts, "Agro-Industrial Just-In-Time"; Chatterley, Rouverol, and Cole, I Was Content and Not Content; Stull and Schlosser, Slaughterhouse Blues. Furthermore, nearly every African American we interviewed who had integrated the chicken plants believed they were paid a lower wage than white workers. Because they received their paychecks in sealed envelopes, they were never able to prove their suspicions.

Women made up the majority of black workers desegregating Scott County's chicken plants in the 1960s. They recall having the more difficult jobs, compared with their white counterparts. Frequently this entailed "cutting buttonholes," which required carefully inserting a knife just under the bird's tail in order to pull out the entrails:

It was white and black folk working along together, but you know, we [black folk] had it rough. You know, some of the peoples quit. I used to stand there and cut oil bags, and the ladies next to me had they hands in there pulling chicken guts out. But nowadays, they tell me they got those machine to do all of that. I would like to go inside of a plant now to see. [The line] was going fast [back then], but they tell me now it go faster. I said, "I don't see how it could!"³⁴Interview with former chicken plant worker, February 9, 2006, Scott County, Mississippi.

Another former plant employee remembered how hard she worked for her weekly $75 paycheck: "Your fingers was sore and your arms and shoulders. And I come home, and lotta nights, I would be so tired. But I held in there. I stayed there and worked."³⁵Interview with former chicken plant worker, January 31, 2006, Scott County, Mississippi.

Before long, there were fewer and fewer white women in the plants with whom to compare salaries or workloads. In the case of Southeastern Poultry, within the first week of opening the plant's doors to African Americans, white flight was so severe that the plant temporarily shut down. One black woman hired the following week says, "They quit because they didn't wanna work with blacks. [So many white workers left,] they couldn't even run the line. But the more walked out, the more blacks they was hiring."³⁶Interview with former chicken plant worker, February 9, 2006, Scott County, Mississippi. Slowly, she and others corroborate, some white workers came back to the plants, but the workforce became, and stayed, majority African American and largely female—a result of a combination of white flight, continued occupational mobility for white women, and increasing black migration from farms to towns in Scott County. With the exception of B.C. Rogers Poultry, which resisted hiring black workers until the 1970s, by the end of the 1960s most of Mississippi's chicken plants were run by white management, overseen by white supervisors, and staffed by line workers who were almost entirely African American.

"It just basically broke the backs of the people": Worker Organizing in the 1970s

In the seventies, social progressives around the country were hoping to harvest the political, economic, and social fruits of the struggle for civil rights. The energy of the civil rights movement increasingly had turned to economic priorities, driven by the understanding that newly-won access to the electoral process granted by the 1965 Voting Rights Act would be meaningful only in the context of adequate job opportunities, wages, and education. These concerns increasingly resonated among Scott County poultry workers. By 1972, they began to organize formally for the first time. The Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) had established its Grass Roots Organizing Work (GROW) Project, an anti-racist organizing initiative that sought to help black and white workers improve their economic conditions.³⁷Bob Zellner, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement (Montgomery, AL: New South Books, 2008); Robert Analavage, GROW: A New Movement in the White South (New Orleans: Grass Roots Organizing Work, 1967), accessed at Mississippi Department of Archives and History; "Memorandum on the GROW Educational Center," Box 4, Folder 42, Z 1738.000 S, Campbell (Clarice T.) Papers, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Led by Bob Zellner, formerly of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), GROW had been organizing pulpwood haulers and wood cutters since the late 1960s. One of its chapters was located in Forest, and many of the haulers' and cutters' family members worked in poultry. Encouraged by the organizing efforts of their husbands and brothers and fed up with management's refusal to provide breaks after one woman working the line urinated on herself, black women at Southeastern Poultry walked off the job in 1972. GROW sent two organizers to Forest to support the poultry worker mobilization, and that year they, along with local workers, formed the independent Mississippi Poultry Workers' Union (MPWU).

Tonny Algood, a white Mississippian and recent college graduate, was one of the MPWU organizers in Forest. Nearly all local workers and organizers involved in the MPWU had moved or passed away by the time we conducted this research in the early 2000s, but Algood shared his memories in an interview. The first year his position was funded through a grant of the Greater Jackson Area Committee, but by year two, he was dismembering chickens at Gaddis Packing Company to pay his bills while helping the area's poultry workers organize. By year three, Fred Gaddis, the corporation's owner and Forest's mayor for nearly forty years, knew who he was: "They ended up laying me off after they tried to work me to death,"³⁸Tonny Algood, interview with Angela Stuesse, February 28, 2006, Mobile, Alabama. he recollects. The MPWU won National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections at both Southeastern Poultry and at Poultry Packers, and it was in the process of organizing Gaddis Packing Company when the plant's ownership changed hands.

Organizing poultry workers proved difficult for many reasons: the state's "Right to Work" laws weakened unions; poultry tycoons and white segregationists dominated local politics and weren't afraid to use violence and intimidation to maintain their power; the rural landscape meant people lived and worked over a relatively large geographic area; no core group of workers had union experience; and companies were in the midst of constant transitions and mergers.³⁹The federal Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, for which southern business interests lobbied intensively, weakened labor protections under the National Labor Relations Board, which was initially established by the Wagner Act in 1935. This new legislation empowered states to determine if employees at unionized workplaces would be required to join the union. Under "Right to Work" legislation, currently enacted in twenty-two states in the South and West, every individual worker can choose whether or not to pay union dues and become a member. In such "open shops," while all workers are protected by the collective bargaining agreement and unions are required to represent all workers equally, often only a fraction of these workers are dues-paying members. As a result, unions in "Right to Work" states typically have fewer resources, crippling their ability to sustainably organize and represent workers. Ida Leachman, "Black Women and Labor Unions in the South: From the 1970s to the 1990s," in Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance, ed. Marguerite Waller and Jennifer Rycenga (New York: Routledge, 2000), 385–394. Where workers did successfully organize, plant management resisted contract negotiations.

Soon, employees at Poultry Packers went on strike in hopes of forcing their employer to the bargaining table. They sought support for the strike by reaching out to activists:

Poultry workers seek support during strike, Baltimore Afro-American, May 27, 1972. Courtesy of the Baltimore Afro-American.

The Mississippi Poultry Processing Industry saw its first strike this month in Forest, where 72 of 200 $1.60 an hour workers demanded a 15 cent raise, collective bargaining, pay during breakdowns and two week paid vacations. The plant is 80% Black. Poultry Packers, Inc., the second largest employer in the county, promptly fired all the strikers. Food and checks may be sent to Ms. Merle Barber, c/o Mississippi Poultry Workers' Union, Rt. 2, Box 11, Forest, Miss.⁴⁰"Delta Ministry Report," May 1972, Charles Horwitz Papers, Tougaloo College Civil Rights Collection, T/014, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

According to Algood, the plant's white workers did not strike. In fact, new white workers came on as strikebreakers to cross the picket line. Mississippi's engrained divisions made it impossible for the union to organize across race.

"I think a lot of 'em were just afraid to speak out at all," recalls Algood. "You know, it was still a very hostile environment at that time, and I think a lot of it was fear. For years and years you had the whites who were in leadership, telling the poor whites that they were better off than the blacks. And there were certain privileges allowed to them that were not allowed to blacks in Mississippi. [So they just] weren't willing or were unable to see how they would benefit or what they had in common with black workers."⁴¹Algood, interview. In Algood's analysis the white workers, with slightly better jobs on the line and with racial privilege, perceived they had more to lose by striking (and by standing in solidarity with people of color) than did the newer black workforce.

He recalls an incident on the picket line in which a driver hauling chickens tried to run over a striking worker while pulling out of the plant's gate, and she was forced to dive into a ditch to avoid getting hit. Later that day, the same driver mumbled something at Algood and then "slung gravel all on me" on his way into the plant. The next thing Algood knew, the 250-pound driver had knocked Algood's slight frame to the ground and was towering over him. At least two police officers witnessed the incident. "I looked up and the police officers had their shotguns out," Algood says, "and they had 'em trained not on the guy, but on the strikers, just threatening 'em to go ahead and take one move and they would empty their shotguns off."⁴²Algood, interview.

Algood and other strikers went to the police station to make a report, where an officer threatened to beat him up. The police chief told him, "We're getting some calls saying they gonna get that white boy. I don't know who they are, but I know they're real rough people." He told Algood that no one would be able to recognize him by the time they got through with him.⁴³Algood, interview. Like so many civil rights organizers in Mississippi who came before him, Algood began sleeping on the floor of his home and obtained a gun permit.

With state-sanctioned violence and strike-breaking tactics, by 1974 Poultry Packers successfully forced workers back into the plant without a contract. The company hired Kullman, Lang, Inman and Bee, a New Orleans law firm with a reputation for dragging out contract negotiations and beating its opponents by attrition. A young lawyer took the Mississippi Poultry Workers' Union as her very first client upon moving to Mississippi in the early 1970s. She represented the MPWU and participated in the contract negotiations with Poultry Packers. The contract negotiations were "very painful," she remembers:

This guy would come up from New Orleans, we'd sit in a room, and the workers would present proposals. They would describe circumstances that justified why they needed better break policies or why they needed better pay and safety conditions—all of that. And it was just a total stonewall. I mean, the guy is just sitting there saying, "Uh-huh. Uh-huh." Their strategy was just to sit there and wait us out. It was such a depressing experience, 'cause it was so clear that they weren't gonna agree to anything.⁴⁴Interview with lawyer who represented the MPWU, December 16, 2005, Jackson, Mississippi.

The employer and its law firm never budged. They offered only the status quo, and the workers refused to sign a contract on those terms. "It just basically broke the backs of the people," says Algood. "[They] couldn't afford to continue just staying out. There was no real strike fund."⁴⁵Algood, interview. The MPWU continued to negotiate after the workers returned, but the workers never got a union contract. After the incident on the picket line, Algood couldn't get hired anywhere in Forest. By late 1974 he moved away. The first organizing effort in Mississippi poultry, and quite possibly the most radical to date, was over by 1975.

In the decade that followed, numerous union organizing attempts failed at plants in Morton, Hazlehurst, Laurel, Jackson, and other poultry towns. Sanderson Farms in Laurel, a processing stronghold one hundred miles to the south of Scott County, stands out as an exception. There, the largely black female workforce self-organized, and a prolonged strike garnered the support of the AFL-CIO, leading to affiliation with the International Chemical Workers Union (ICWU).⁴⁶"Striking Poultry Workers Seek Change in State Law," Clarion-Ledger, June 17, 1979; "Striking Truckers Shut Down Mississippi Poultry Plant," Clarion-Ledger, June 17, 1979, 1A; David Moberg, "Puttin' Down Ol' Massa: Laurel, Mississippi," in Working Lives: The Southern Exposure History of Labor in the South, ed. Marc S. Miller (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 291–301; Christine Lutz, "The Sanderson Strike" (paper presented at Southern Labor Studies Conference, Birmingham, Alabama, April 15–17, 2004). Their efforts did result in a contract, albeit a weak one that received little sustained support from its international union. These events received considerable national attention.⁴⁷Pamela Smith, "Black Women's Struggle Against Sanderson Farms Far From Over," Philadelphia Tribune, September 18, 1981, 11; "Little Town of Laurel Hosts Historic March," New Journal and Guide (Norfolk, Virginia), June 11, 1980, 9; Colman McCarthy, "Striking a Blow for Unions in the South," Washington Post, May 18, 1980, H2; William Serrin, "200 Mississippi Women Carry On a Lonely, Bitter Strike," New York Times, February 17, 1980, A12; Warren Brown, "Unions Take Up Where Marchers Ended," Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1979, L18. Companies around the state spent large amounts of time and energy to undercut growing labor unrest, aiming to keep the union out at all costs.

Organizing by African American poultry workers in the 1970s grew from the seeds planted by the Mississippi freedom struggle. Companies defeated these organizing attempts though a careful blend of racialized social control developed over Mississippi's history and the newly emerging sensibilities of neoliberalism. The industry's management employed intimidation, threats, bribes, and lies to instill fear in workers and defeat most NLRB elections over the next two decades. Pitting black and white workers against one another, as happened at Poultry Packers in Forest, became central to economic restructuring.⁴⁸Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). This rising economic, political, and cultural logic soon led to Mississippi poultry's recruitment of immigrant labor as a form of labor control.

"Our Hispanic Project": Migrant Recruitment in the 1970s and 1990s

In 1977, Scott County's B.C. Rogers poultry plant began to recruit Mexican workers from El Paso. Company officials defended this initiative by arguing, "There was no labor available to us here."⁴⁹"Morton Plant Gets Workers from El Paso," Scott County Times, September 21, 1977, accessed on microfilm at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Presaging sentiments and tropes still common today, a former manager offered further explanation in our interview: "People didn't want to work," he reasoned. There was a lot of "absenteeism and welfare," and there "just wasn't enough people."⁵⁰Interview with former poultry plant manager, June 16, 2003, Morton, Mississippi. However, B.C. Rogers had trouble retaining the migrant workers it recruited in the 1970s and stopped its efforts after a few years. Perhaps this experiment failed because management "didn't understand the changes for [workers they brought to Mississippi]," as a different manager from that era suggested. "More or less they were left on their own when they came. They weren't accustomed to this culture and society, so most of them left. It was very, very hard for them."⁵¹Interview with former poultry plant manager, January 24, 2006, Scott County, Mississippi.

The defeat of a union organizing attempt at B.C. Rogers in 1980 meant that the company managed to maintain enough power over its workforce to continue reaping profits without the expense of migrant labor recruitment, at least for the time being. One of the former managers we interviewed credited early welfare reform efforts, however, not tighter labor control, as key to the industry's success. When asked why the company stopped recruiting migrant workers, he replied, "The labor got better; the government got better about making people work."⁵²Interview with former poultry plant manager, June 16, 2003, Morton, Mississippi. Though B.C. Rogers' experiment with migrant labor in the 1970s was short-lived, this episode, now thirty-five years in the past, represents an early attempt at leveraging new opportunities for labor control just as neoliberal globalization began to take hold. It also helps us to contextualize the conditions that led to the most recent wave of immigration.

By the early 1990s, B.C. Rogers had acquired three new processing plants and expanded its production to a night shift, upping working hours to sixteen per day. It exported 54 million pounds of chicken annually to Russia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean.⁵³J. Rogers, "B.C. Rogers' Exports Cover A Lot of Ground," Rogers Report 6 (2 Summer 1992), 1, 2, 8, accessed at Morton Public Library, Morton, Mississippi. The economy was growing, but wages and opportunities in poultry remained stagnant, and management faced problems filling vacancies. The plant began busing in around 450 workers a day from surrounding counties. The local paper ran a series of stories about the area's low unemployment rate and reported that it had become difficult for local poultry producers to staff late shifts because of labor shortages.⁵⁴See, for example, "Getting Along: Importation of Labor is a Sign of the Time," Scott County Times, April 20, 1994, accessed on microfilm at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The term "labor shortage" is also used by industry executives reflecting on that era; they cite 90 percent turnover rates, 50 percent absenteeism on the night shift, and three hundred employment vacancies on any given day. Nearly twenty years after its initial experiment with migrant labor, these concerns led B.C. Rogers to South Texas in search of new workers.

In 1993, B.C. Rogers manager Luis Cartagena was charged with recruiting workers from South Texas.⁵⁵The remainder of this section on immigrant recruitment into Scott County and surrounding poultry towns is borrowed from Stuesse's book manuscript, where it is featured in greater depth. Stuesse, "Globalization Southern-Style." He recalls:

I would go by plane to Brownsville. I would arrive on a Tuesday. I would go to the Employment Commission of Texas and on Wednesday I would just interview. A lot of people. And just like that, I decided right then and there. "You go, you go," like that. And I had chartered a bus. [I would tell them], "Tomorrow the bus leaves for Mississippi." Thursday. Then on Thursday I would fly back to Mississippi. On Friday I was here waiting for them with money, housing, everything.⁵⁶Luis Cartagena, interview with Angela Stuesse, January 31, 2006, Scott County, Mississippi.

At home after a long day of work, Scott County, Mississippi, 2004. Photograph by John Fiege. Courtesy of John Fiege.

Cartagena says he brought between seven and eight hundred workers from South Texas over a period of six months, but few stayed. He reasons that the deal was too sweet, as the company initially offered two weeks of housing, rent free, plus ten dollars a day for meals. People came but would leave after two weeks. Turnover continued to soar, and management couldn't figure out how to get it down.

B.C. Rogers refocused its recruitment efforts elsewhere—in Miami. A former CFO remembers that it was a television program that sparked the idea that would forever change the landscape of Mississippi poultry. He recalled:

John [Rogers, owner of B.C. Rogers] was [watching a] program [one Sunday] about immigrants and Hispanics in Miami, which didn't have enough work . . . because there were so many and not enough jobs. [So] he asked me to go to Miami and see what I could do to bring them. . . . And that's what started it! . . . We had a Cuban friend that owned a business there, so I set up an office in his company, and we would advertise in the local newspaper. It worked great, because after only one week, being there, we brought a Greyhound bus full of Hispanics. And we'd bring them every week, fifty-something a week. . . . [And this was the beginning of what] we called our Hispanic Project.⁵⁷Interview with former B.C. Rogers CFO, January 24, 2006, Scott County, Mississippi.

Pablo Armenta, whose story opens this essay, became a Mississippian thanks to the Hispanic Project, as did thousands of other migrants from across the Americas.

Providing jobs was not a problem, but providing for workers' basic needs, starting with housing, proved more difficult. Rental properties are in short supply in the rural South, and in the early 1990s most landlords did not want immigrant tenants, refusing to rent to B.C. Rogers. The company began to purchase housing, and within a few years it owned 166 trailers and houses in the areas around its plants. While Cartagena states that he typically housed two people to a room, for an average of six people per house, workers who remember the "early years" recall regularly sharing a one-bathroom trailer with nearly a dozen people. The company charged each employee $25 a week for housing, plus $20 for transportation to and from work, plus $12 for its optional weekend transportation service that taxied people to the supermarket, laundromat, and church. Earning wages of approximately $6.50 an hour, workers' take-home pay after these paycheck deductions was typically under $200 a week. A union organizer at another poultry plant that adopted similar practices after B.C. Rogers set the precedent remembers, "The [workers] would make they money, but . . . when [the plant] just was taking it out for this, that, and the other, when they'd get they check sometime . . . they didn't have nothing left."⁵⁸Interview with union organizer, May 10, 2005, Scott County, Mississippi. Interviews with workers, advocates, and former executives suggest that the Hispanic Project earned up to $1,000 per month from each rental property.

Ready for the night shift, Scott County, Mississippi, 2004. Photograph by John Fiege. Courtesy of John Fiege.

By 1998, B.C. Rogers had changed hands, putting an end to the formal Hispanic Project. In its roughly four years of operation, the Project had recruited nearly five thousand workers to two neighboring towns with a combined population of under ten thousand. Approximately 80 percent of workers brought under this program were Cuban. The other 20 percent were mostly Central American. Most did not stay, but some did. More importantly, migrants kept coming. The company's new human resources manager, a Mexican American, re-initiated recruitment from South Texas, and Mexicans—from the newer sending areas of Mexico's southeast—began arriving in greater numbers by the turn of the millennium. Recruitment from Florida continued, now through a third-party contractor paid by the head to transport workers to Mississippi.

In addition, most other Mississippi poultry operations in the area began their own recruitment efforts in Florida and Texas. One plant offered to pay $600 to any employee who recruited a new worker for a minimum of three months. An entrepreneurial Peruvian capitalized on the opportunity. He advertised in a newspaper in his hometown of Arequipa. If you had a tourist visa to enter the US, money to purchase a plane ticket, and a desire to work in poultry processing, he would bring you to Miami, then to Mississippi, and guarantee you a job. Today agronomists, engineers, librarians, and psychologists from Arequipa are working in Mississippi poultry.

Family members collect remittances, Comitancillo, Guatemala, 2006. Photograph by Angela Stuesse. Courtesy of Angela Stuesse.

By 2000, most of Mississippi's chicken plants were operating around the clock. The vast majority of workers coming from Florida were no longer Cuban; they were from Argentina, Uruguay, and other South American countries. Economic decline and political unrest in their home countries, coupled with the lack of steady work in Miami, led these visa-overstayers to piece-rate work in chicken processing. In early 2002, however, the US State Department realized that a disproportionate percentage of Argentine tourists were not returning home, and it revoked Argentina's (and soon after, Uruguay's) participation in the "Visa Waiver Program."⁵⁹United States Department of Justice, "Department of Justice Terminates Argentina's Participation in Visa Waiver Program," http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2002/February/02_ins_090.htm, accessed February 4, 2014. The "Visa Waiver Program" is an agreement between the United States and select countries that allows nationals from those countries to enter the United States without applying for a visa. They simply fill out entry paperwork on the airplane and present it to immigration authorities upon arrival, and they typically have permission to visit the United States as a tourist for up to six months. By the end of that year, South American migration from Miami to Mississippi had screeched to a halt. Many migrants had come with families, however, and deeming Scott County a safe place to raise children, have stayed.

In the years that followed, the majority of new migration into the chicken plants came from Comitancillo, a small municipality in the highlands of Guatemala. The first to arrive in town left farmwork for chicken processing, attracted to the indoor and year-round work. They saved money and sent it to family members to make the journey across Mexico, through the desert, and ultimately to Mississippi. By 2005 this practice increased the size of the migrant population in Carthage, just north of Forest, to over one thousand. In subsequent years they began dispersing to Scott County, Canton, and other nearby areas.

Today Mississippi's poultry workers are Americans from nearly every part of the continent. They are black, brown, and occasionally white; men and women; campesinos and former blue- and even white-collar workers; speakers of English, Spanish, and a handful of indigenous languages. Vastly different histories, cultures, and experiences have created both tensions and alliances within and between groups.⁶⁰Angela Stuesse, "Race, Migration, and Labor Control: Neoliberal Challenges to Organizing Mississippi's Poultry Workers" in Latino Immigrants and the Transformation of the US South, ed. Odem and Lacey, 91–111.

"The labor's here but the jobs don't want to pay": Why This History Matters in the Present

Consider the visceral realities of chicken plant jobs. Poultry slaughter, dismemberment, and packaging represent some of the country's lowest paid and most dangerous work. Over the years, companies have "deskilled" plants and sped up production through technological advances. The average worker now repeats the same movement up to 30,000 times per day. The deboning of a chicken thigh that used to take three cuts of a knife, requires just one. It's not any easier, especially with a dull knife; just faster. Virtually every worker who has labored in a chicken plant ten years or more can vouch for untreated repetitive motion injuries and can show permanent deformities caused by the work.⁶¹Sarah A. Quandt et al, "Illnesses and Injuries Reported by Latino Poultry Workers in Western North Carolina," American Journal of Industrial Medicine 49 (2006), 393–351; Ames Alexander, Kerry Hall, and Franco Ordonez, "The Cruelest Cuts: The Human Cost of Bringing Poultry to Your Table," Charlotte Observer, February 10–15, 2008, accessed February 17, 2008, http://www.charlotteobserver.com/poultry/. Plants are often out of compliance with federal safety and health regulations, and the government agency charged with oversight of these laws, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), is under-resourced and ineffective.⁶²Marc Linder, "Playing Chicken with People: The Occupational Safety and Health Consequences of Throughput Uber Alles," International Journal of Health Services 25, no. 4 (1995): 633–665; Marc Linder, "'I Gave My Employer a Chicken that Had No Bone': Joint Firm-State Responsibility for Line-Speed-Related Occupational Injuries," Case Western Law Review 46, no. 1 (1995): 33–143; Stephen Labaton, "OSHA Leaves Worker Safety in Hands of Industry," New York Times, April 25, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/25/washington/25osha.html. Stuesse spent many days in Mississippi translating in hospitals and doctors' offices for workers with lacerations, amputations, and crippling back injuries. Workers describe being cheated out of pay, verbally abused by supervisors, and denied bathroom breaks—of being forced to relieve themselves in their clothes while on the line.⁶³For detailed testimony and analysis of the health, legal, and labor organizing consequences of denied bathroom breaks, see, for example, Marc Linder and Ingrid Nagaard, Void Where Prohibited: Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Anne Lewis, Morristown: In the Air and Sun. (Appalshop documentary, 2007); Fran Ansley, "Talking Union in Two Languages: Labor Rights and Immigrant Workers in East Tennessee," in Transforming Places: Lessons from Appalachia, ed. Stephen L. Fisher and Barbara Ellen Smith (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 164–179; Stuesse, "Globalization Southern-Style." Aside from being the only major employer in many rural towns, poultry companies give their workers virtually no incentive to stay.

Hauling chickens to slaughter, Scott County, Mississippi, 2004. Photograph by John Fiege. Courtesy of John Fiege.

Given what's at stake for people who spend much of their daily lives in chicken plants, in what ways does the history of Scott County's poultry industry allow us to better understand the social problems of the present? First, it demonstrates a pattern in which the industry has repeatedly sought out the most vulnerable workers and has exploited them for monetary gain. In each moment, poultry plant work has represented an improved work opportunity—a "step up" for the newest class of workers: white women; black women and men; Latin American immigrants—which has allowed processors to pay them less and work them more than the group they joined or replaced. Second, the new class of workers faces the least desirable work the plant has to offer—from "cutting buttonholes" in the 1960s to "deboning" today. Plant management has historically organized the production line according to race, gender, and other forms of difference and has skillfully encouraged and exploited these real and perceived distinctions in order to limit workers' affinities toward one another. Third, earlier moments illustrate that when these "new" classes of workers have organized for higher pay and improved working conditions, or even for dignity and respect in the workplace, employers have aggressively silenced their efforts. While outside the scope of this article, Stuesse has documented similar opposition to and destruction of labor organizing among the largely immigrant workforce in Mississippi poultry's present.⁶⁴Stuesse, "What's 'Justice and Dignity' Got to Do with It? Migrant Vulnerability, Corporate Complicity, and the State," Human Organization 69, no. 1 (2010), 19–30; Stuesse, "Globalization Southern-Style." Fourth, understood historically, the exploitation of poultry workers operates at its most fundamental level upon the denigration of blackness as a social category. It is to this final point that our analysis now turns.

In the industry's early years, blackness was used as the rationale for excluding an entire class of workers. By the 1960s, it led to workers with darker-hued skin being relegated to the most difficult and least desirable jobs. During desegregation efforts, workers' blackness served as the excuse for white supremacists to terrorize African Americans and their allies, as with the cross burning that followed a short-lived attempt at racial integration at Sunbeam. Once efforts to integrate the plants succeeded, white women workers fled to new racially-segregated work opportunities, and a workforce comprised of a majority of black women received lower pay in exchange for greater production. When these workers tired of their treatment at work and sought to organize, local whites, backed by state power, again terrorized them. But in the current moment in which recent Latin American immigrants are the newest exploited class of poultry workers, why does blackness matter? The answer has to do with the relationships between immigration, race, and work in popular discourse.

Injured worker, Madison County, Mississippi, 2004. Photograph by John Fiege. Courtesy of John Fiege.

Scott Countians of all persuasions are unanimous on one front: they all agree that "one thing about 'Mexicans' is that they will work."⁶⁵Interview with Scott County resident, July 1, 2003, Forest, Mississippi. Some residents, however, couple this characterization with a harsh critique of US-born workers, without acknowledging that immigrant and American-born workers have different motivations to work in the plants. "Well, it wasn't exactly a labor shortage," one local official reported, "What you have is some people who would rather stay home than work."⁶⁶Interview with Scott County official, July 18, 2003, Forest, Mississippi. Descriptions of immigrants as "hard workers" are often accompanied by references to native-born workers—who are mostly black and often women—as "lazy." "[The immigrants] have been so much more workable and willing than blacks," one white woman explained, "They are much more humble and don't feel like the world owes them something."⁶⁷Intreview with Scott County resident, June 20, 2003. These comments echo local poultry companies' linking of labor shortages and welfare in the late seventies, which reflected a growing national discussion about the "black underclass"⁶⁸Michael B. Katz, "The Urban 'Underclass' as a Metaphor of Social Transformation," in The "Underclass" Debate, Views from History, ed. Michael B. Katz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3–23. and failed to recognize that black workers across the state had real grievances against the poultry industry. Moreover, allegations of black worker laziness reflect the gendered nature of popular tropes such as that of the "welfare queen," which presume black women's sexual licentiousness and desire to stay home and "make babies" rather than "work."⁶⁹Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo' Mama's DisFUNKtional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997); Kenneth Neubeck and Noel Cazenave, Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card Against America's Poor (New York: Routledge, 2001).

Indeed, many African American residents have suggested that it is necessary to ask why more local workers do not seek jobs in chicken plants. Unlike most local middle-class whites, the majority of African Americans of any class in Scott County have worked in processing plants, had a family member working on poultry lines, or faced the prospect of plant work at some point in their lives, even if only for a few days. They possess more knowledge of the industry's practices, and from their perspective, "labor shortage" is shorthand for the industry's refusal to adjust working conditions and wages to retain employees. As one woman put it, "If they were paying ten or twelve [dollars] an hour, people would be coming from all over the county for those jobs."⁷⁰Interview with Scott County resident, July 1, 2003, Forest, Mississippi. A black elected official echoed this sentiment: "[Immigrants] were brought in for cheap labor, not a shortage. The labor's here but the jobs don't want to pay."⁷¹Interview with Scott County elected official, July 28, 2003, Morton, Mississippi. For many black residents, then, "labor shortage" is not merely a race-neutral economic term for a period of low unemployment, but is instead a pejorative way to talk about the available labor pool. It delegitimizes individuals' reasons for avoiding dangerous conditions and poverty-level wages in the plants while disregarding the industry's violations of federal labor law, health and safety regulations, and human rights.

But where did black workers go when Latin Americans entered Mississippi's chicken plants? While it is impossible to quantify answers to this question, anecdotal evidence provided by local residents suggests that the increased use of immigrant labor has both tightened poultry plants' control over native-born workers and driven these workers toward other opportunities within Mississippi's continually changing industrial and service economies. As Americans' appetite for white meat grew in the 1990s, the poultry industry expanded in Mississippi, as it did in other areas of the country. This expansion increased the number of low-wage jobs in chicken plants for native-born and immigrant workers alike, and it suggests that Scott County's African American population may not have experienced the sorts of displacement that populations in other industries and elsewhere in the country have reported.⁷²This conclusion is supported by Jamie Winders, whose monograph Nashville in the New Millennium documents that "the general economic context of immigrant reception was relatively good in new destinations in the South" (21). More generally, scholars disagree over the extent to which immigration has resulted in African American displacement from the labor force. For a richly cited account of the debate, see Angela Stuesse, Cheryl Staats, and Andrew Grant-Thomas, "As Others Pluck Fruit Off the Tree of Opportunity: Immigration, Racial Hierarchies, and Intergroup Relations Efforts in the United States" (unpublished manuscript, July 16, 2013), Microsoft Word file. Barbara Ellen Smith argues that the debate itself is flawed in its neoliberal acceptance of a zero-sum competition, its failure to account for unequal power dynamics between employers and workers, and the often quite nuanced analyses of workers themselves. Barbara Ellen Smith, "Market Rivals or Class Allies? Relations between African American and Latino Immigrant Workers in Memphis" in Global Connections and Local Receptions: New Latino Immigration to the Southeastern United States, ed. Fran Ansley and Jon Shefner (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 299–317. In addition, as southern localities—in competition to offer generous incentives to prospective employers—have successfully attracted automobile manufacturing to non-union rural areas, new kinds of opportunities have appeared in Scott County. Although not large enough to sustain the vast plant that Nissan opened in nearby Canton in 2003, Scott County has seen the appearance of small-scale parts manufacturers operating on subcontracts with or as subsidiaries of Nissan and other automakers. We met some African American former poultry workers who found employment on these small shop floors, not for substantially higher wages but in less dangerous conditions. And finally, new fast food franchises and a Super Wal-Mart came to Forest in the mid-2000s, and these, too, represented more desirable work—if, again, not higher paid work—than poultry processing.

For US-born workers who remained in the poultry industry, the arrival of immigrant labor seems to have restricted their strategies for coping with harsh plant conditions and lack of benefits such as vacation or paid sick leave. According to local residents, back when poultry plants were struggling to fill production lines, it was relatively easy for a worker to quit a job one day and then find work—at the same or a different plant—whenever she or he was ready to return.⁷³Interview with Scott county resident, July 29, 2003, Forest Mississippi. This flexibility, which gave individual workers some modicum of control over their working lives in an industry that otherwise thwarted workers' efforts to collectively participate in determining their working conditions and benefits, disappeared with the arrival of fully-staffed production lines.

For most US-born poultry workers in the region, chicken plant work is just one iteration of a string of low-paying jobs in canneries, catfish, nursing homes, timber, assembly plants, housekeeping, and retail. The typical immigrant worker in Mississippi poultry is undocumented, unfamiliar with workplace rights, and often supporting family members abroad. As the industry knows, while US-born workers might be more likely to refuse speed-ups, join a union, walk off the job, or report grievances, they may also have difficulty communicating their perspectives to Spanish-speaking colleagues. As a result of these differences in workers' experiences, mutual misperceptions emerge. "Hispanics are too willing to work for low wages, and they're taking our jobs and forcing us to work harder," is a typical comment Stuesse has heard in discussions with black poultry workers. Without an understanding of the structural constraints impeding the economic mobility of people of color in the US, immigrants find it difficult to empathize with black workers' complaints and "everyday acts of resistance"⁷⁴Maria Patricia Fernández-Kelley, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry on Mexico's Frontier (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). to workplace problems. "Blacks can take long breaks and are not disciplined when they come to work late," was a common complaint Stuesse heard in her interviews with Latin American immigrants.

These different perspectives illustrate that the phrase "labor shortage" is as socially-constructed as it is economic. Rooted in tropes of individualism and personal responsibility, the discourse that praises the "hard working immigrant" reverberates with that which critiques African American workers for a lack of "work ethic." Placing the industry's present in dialogue with its past, the case of Scott County, Mississippi, enables us to see more clearly how the ongoing denigration of blackness—in other words, the persistence of white supremacy—continues to shape prospects for working class people of color today.

Conclusion: Understanding Immigration through Local Histories of Race

"Welcome to Forest" sign, Forest, Mississippi, 1963. Photograph by Hugh Shankle. Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Hugh Shankle Collection, PI/COL/1981.0066. Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

In our research, we have found that when Scott Countians—immigrant or native, black or white—talk about immigration, they often talk in terms of race. One white resident explained, "You know, if the blacks had worked harder in the first place, they never would have had to bring the immigrants in."⁷⁵Interview with Scott County resident, June 20, 2003, Forest, Mississippi. Suggesting a counter-history, an African American resident recalled "the whites left for more money, so they brought in blacks. Then when blacks wanted more money, they brought immigrants."⁷⁶Interview with Scott County resident, July 28, 2003; Helton, "Three Hundred Strangers Next Door," 18. As these comments suggest, and as Winders'⁷⁷Winders, Nashville in the New Millenium. work in Nashville attests, people do not discuss immigration in isolation, but in the context of their experiences of a broader set of racial, economic, and political issues in their everyday lives. Whether described explicitly in racial terms or in coded phrases such as "labor shortage" and "work ethic," these responses underscore the need to examine changing demographics of populations in terms of local histories of race and workplace organizing. Since Scott County's most recent "labor shortage" in the mid-1990s, the degree of new immigrants' acceptance by Mississippians has been shaped in large part by the history of change and struggle among local whites and blacks, companies and workers.

Examining key moments in Mississippi poultry's recent past demonstrates that it is not sufficient to explain migration by pointing to the "pulls" of economic expansion and industrial restructuring. By overlaying the history of transnational labor recruitment in the poultry industry with the history of African Americans' experiences in the chicken plants—from the types of jobs they were first assigned, to their efforts at unionization in the 1970s—we begin to see what is hardly new about the Nuevo New South. As Weise argues, new immigration or tropes of cosmopolitanism should not facilitate "historical amnesia."⁷⁸Julie Weise, "Dispatches from the 'Viejo' New South: Historicizing Recent Latino Migrations," Latino Studies 10, nos. 1–2 (2012): 54.

Demographic shifts in Mississippi's poultry plants have not happened accidentally. To the contrary, they were propelled by specific state policies, driven by deliberate corporate practices, and fuelled by public discourses around race, work, and deservingness. When workers began to organize, the industry sought new horizons—first locally, then internationally—to maintain a large and expendable pool of disempowered low-wage workers. These racialized practices of labor control have served the industry well, dividing workers, weakening prospects for collective bargaining across difference, and keeping labor costs down.

Live hang, 2005. Cartoon by Mike Konopacki. Courtesy of Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons.

As labor leaders in Mississippi began to recognize a decade ago, the successful future of their ongoing efforts for social and workplace justice may hinge upon alliances with the newest minorities.⁷⁹Stuesse, "Race, Migration, and Labor Control." A deeper understanding of the industry's localized past reveals parallel struggles with regard to workplace justice, social inequality, and racialized systems of oppression—a compelling basis for collaboration across race and difference to create a more just and humane workplace.⁸⁰Despite the many compelling reasons Latin American immigrant and African American workers may have to collectively organize, there are as many or more obstacles impeding their unity. While beyond the scope of this paper, some of the key literature on this topic focused specifically on the US South includes Jennifer Gordon and R. A. Lenhardt, "Citizenship Talk: Bridging the Gap between Immigration and Race Perspectives," Fordham Law Review 75 (2007), 2493–2519, Paula D. McClain et al., "Black Americans and Latino Immigrants in a Southern City: Friendly Neighbors or Economic Competitors?" Du Bois Review 4, no. 1 (2007); 97–117, Helen B. Marrow, "New Immigrant Destinations and the American Colour Line." Ethnic and Racial Studies 32, no. 6 (2009); 1037–1057, Smith, "Market Rivals or Class Allies?"; Stuesse, "Race, Migration, and Labor Control." At the same time, it also makes clear that different points of entry into US systems of racial inequality and low-wage work mean that distinct constituencies of poultry workers experience and interpret workplace abuses in unique ways. Scholarship that helps us better understand the historical, structural, and personal rationale for these differences can help build long-term collaborations that respect, and do not erase, such differences.

About the Authors

Angela Stuesse (Ph.D. University of Texas, Austin 2008) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. Her research and teaching interests include neoliberal globalization, migration, race, human rights, and methodologies of activist research. She has conducted research in the US-Mexico borderlands and in the newer borderlands of the US South. Her current work investigates the intensification of immigrant policing in Atlanta, Georgia with an emphasis on racialized effects and community responses. She has published in the journals American Anthropologist, City & Society, Latino Studies, and Human Organization, among others. Her book manuscript, Globalization Southern-Style: Immigration, Race, and Work in the Rural U.S. South, explores how new Latino migration into Mississippi’s poultry industry has impacted communities and prospects for worker organizing.

Laura E. Helton is a Predoctoral Fellow at The Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia and a doctoral candidate in history at New York University. Her research and teaching interests include the politics of race and memory, print cultures of the long civil rights movement, and social histories of the archive. Her dissertation, entitled "Remaking the Past: Collecting, Collectivity, and the Emergence of Black Archival Publics, 1915–1950," examines the construction of African American archives in the first half of the twentieth century. A professional archivist, she has processed collections for the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Mississippi Digital Library.

Acknowledgements

Stuesse and Helton thank the many generous people in Mississippi who opened their homes and memories to us over the course of our research. This project was supported by the Center for Inter-American Policy Studies at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas; the Ford Foundation's Diversity Dissertation Fellowship; the School for Advanced Research; and the University of South Florida's College of Arts and Sciences. Southern Spaces thanks the Baltimore Afro-American for their gracious permission to include a digital reprint of the 1972 article, "Poultry workers seek support during strike," the Forest Public Library for permission to reprint images found in their vertical files, and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for permission to reprint images from their collections.