Southern Struggles: The Southern Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Struggle (review)

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Reviewed by: Southern Struggles: The Southern Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Struggle Kieran W. Taylor Southern Struggles: The Southern Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Struggle. By John A. Salmond. Gainesville, FL: The University Press of Florida, 2004. 212 pp. $55 hardback. In this brief synthesis, southern labor historian John Salmond explores the "grim continuity between the drive of southern white textile workers for economic justice and that of black southerners for racial equality." He notes that both social movements emerged from the initiative and energy of local leaders and drew upon shared traditions of Christianity and regional culture. White textile workers and African American activists also faced a common enemy and suffered brutal reprisals at the hands of police officials, labor spies, and vigilantes. Lastly, they both looked to the federal government for relief and received significant, if belated, assistance through the 1935 Wagner Act and the civil rights bills of the 1950s and 1960s. While Salmond stresses these continuities, he acknowledges that the "greatest tragedy" of southern history was that poor whites were unable to overcome their racism to ally with black workers in a broader movement for social justice. In the case of the textile mills, "class never proved stronger than race, not even for the briefest of moments." For points of comparison, Salmond revisits the textile strikes in Marion, North Carolina (1929), Honea Path, South Carolina (1934), and the late 1960s civil rights movement in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Each of these campaigns unfolded along similar lines, drew critical support from outside organizations, and ended tragically in violence perpetrated by mobs or militias acting on behalf of local elites. Five thematic chapters extend the analysis beyond these three communities, and it is on this score that the book works best, incorporating the insights of recent work by Robert Korstad, Charles Payne, and Timothy Tyson, among many others. Salmond also demonstrates a sharp eye for important anecdotes that have not yet made it into the canon of either the civil rights or labor narratives. The story of the White Citizens' Council's harassment of Savannah postal worker and NAACP activist W. W. Law, and the 1964 police beating of U.S. Army Lt. Emanuel Schreiber for being married to a black woman are two such examples. The book is very readable, but the non-specialist might be overwhelmed by the narrative sweep that includes brief discussions of Operation Dixie, Robert Williams, the Communist Party in Alabama, and the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen. Ultimately, Salmond gives us a story of lost opportunities considering the tremendous continuities between [End Page 131] the textile organizing drives and the civil rights movements. He leaves to other scholars, however, the more complex and compelling problems of the southern struggles' discontinuities—problems that have led others to explore southern race and identity, Cold War politics, and state repression. Kieran W. Taylor University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Copyright © 2005 the West Virginia University Press, for the United Association for Labor Studies