Atkins Joseph B - Covering for the bosses: labor and the Southern press

Many people played important roles in bringing Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press to completion, too many to name them all. However, I would like especially to thank the following, and their names come in no certain order: Bill Tapscott, Vivian Centenio, Bill Russell, D. Peters Wilborn Jr., Tony Bartelme, Chris Marston, Robert Shaffer, Martin Fishgold, Tim Shorrock, Chris Kromm, Karen and Michael Sheerer, Nikki Neely, Matt Rahn, Sander and Alice Margolis, Bill Chandler, Ellen Meacham, Jim Lumpp, Michael Atkins, Rachel Atkins, John Atkins, Evi Womble, Elizabeth Payne, Peter J. Roberts of the Southern Labor Archives in Atlanta, Ronnie Martin, Samir Husni, and the University of Mississippi College of Liberal Arts and Department of Journalism. I would also like to thank the books reader, Randall Patton, as well as Seetha Srinivasan, Walter Biggins, and the rest of the staff at the University Press of Mississippi.

From Tobacco and Textiles to an Iglesia on Main Street

It is the first anniversary of my fathers death, and Ive come home with my brother, sister, and mother to put flowers on his grave. We spend much of the rest of the day and evening on a nostalgia tour through the gritty, blue-collar town I grew up in.

It seems that every other building or house in Sanford, North Carolina, is a landmark in our personal historythe boarded-up elementary school across from the textile mill where my father worked, the Pentecostal Holiness church where my grandfather once preached, the dairy bar where we teenagers hung out every Friday night, the movie theater where I saw Go Johnny Go! and Thunder Road and where blacks had to watch from the balcony, the parking lot that used to be the pool hall where we pretended to be Minnesota Fats and Fast Eddie.

Theres the house where D. O.s wife hung herself, I remind my brother. Every Southern town has its gothic tales. My fathers fishing buddy found his wife in the living room after coming home from a hard day at the mill.

I grew up in a town of about 15,000 or so, and nearly every family I knew was tied to either tobacco or textiles. It was a dry (no bars, no cold beer) town, the seat of (Robert E.) Lee County, in the dead center of North Carolina. It had a political boss, Mayor E. L. Fish Fields, an old-line segregationist who nevertheless later helped corner the black vote by giving away sacks of fish from his ice store. I remember my teenaged self buying illegal beer from hizzoner at that ice store. The town had a salty-talking, tough-as-nails, moneybags, skinflint newspaper publisher, too. I worked for him, covering local business as well as a half dozen other beats. No union stories, he told me soon after I was hired. I dont recall ever writing one, dont even recall if a union existed in the area, so I guess I made him happy.

The more I see the more I realize that Thomas Wolfe was right. You cant go home again. If you try, you could find yourself more lost than Ralph Stanleys rank stranger. Southerners wrestle with this.

The Sanford we are seeing from our rented car is like the setting for a film noir, or maybe a Barry Hannah storya town of fine, Victorian homes gone to seed, motorcycle gangs parked on the front lawns, eyeing passing motorists, a town thats wet now but with little lonely bars where everyone stops and watches when a stranger walks in.

Most noticeable are the Latinos. Official statistics say theyre 19 percent of the population, but theyre everywhere. I see them tending the giant vegetable garden across the street from my old high school, working at construction sites, operating the corner store where I used to buy candy and ice cream. Theres an iglesia on main street, and a Mexican restaurant practically every block or two. Sanford made national headlines back in 1997 when immigration agents broke up a ring that had smuggled in deaf and mute adults and children from Mexico to peddle trinkets on the streets.

Just forty miles to the north is the high-tech, Ph.D.-laden Research Triangle, a yuppie heaven where Southern accents are getting harder and harder to find. Sanford is way off the edge of that North Carolina. No shiny, high-rise think-tanks here, no Milton Friedmanspouting intellectuals or technocrats who worry about stock values.

But dont kid yourself. This is part of a New South of sorts, a New South thats beyond the horizons of Wall Street investors or sun-seeking snowbirds, a New South where the grandchildren of sharecroppers and tenant farmers are trying to adjust to new, dark-skinned neighbors from an even deeper South, where the old values of hard-gained goods square off against the high-rolling lure of lotteries and casinos, where the temptation to slip into an old, familiar malaise is ever-present and still to be resisted, that dark piece of the Old South thats still there and may never go away.

Ray Smithhart and Robert Bracken, old soldiers of the Southern labor movement, are trading war stories in the conference room of the Mississippi AFL-CIO headquarters on Jacksons North West Street. This is a long, bumpy stretch of road that runs alongside one of the citys oldest cemeteries, between crime-and-poverty-haunted neighborhoods to the west and, to the east, an older district of once-genteel homes now in decline. The writer Eudora Welty grew up just a block or so away.

They came in from the suburb of Brandon for this May 2004 interview. Smithhart, eighty-seven, lives in a nursing home. Bracken, sixty-six, is retired and lives nearby. Both are battle-scarred veterans full of tales and glad a journalist finally wants to hear them. They tell of fighting beside Medgar Evers and other civil rights leaders during the 1960s, being tailed and jailed by antiunion goons and sheriffs, having guns shoved in their faces, cars filled with bullet holes. They never talked much with reporters because newspapers usually were on the side of the bosses.

They didnt treat us right at all, says Smithhart, the dean of Mississippi labor organizers, about the press. You got the whole community against you, the supervisors, the merchants, the newspapers. You cant get the message across. What we needed was at least some kind of debate. This would let the employees hear both sides of the issues.

Bracken nods and recalls complaining about antilabor coverage to an editor in Mississippis Neshoba County in 1972, some eight years after the infamous disappearance and murder of three civil rights workers there. The newspaper was running company propaganda during a local union election. We told him what we thought about allowing the company to write that crap, he says, his voice stirring with old, unspent passions. We let him know how we felt.

It didnt do any good, however. The editors response was to call the police, and the union went on to lose the election by a handful of votes. The newspapers just do whatever the local management tells them to do, Bracken says.

Smithhart and Bracken are native Southerners whove been called outside agitators most of their lives. Theyve always known what they were up against. No place has seen a bloodier or meaner fight waged against organized labor than the U.S. South. This is the region where labor battles left dozens dead in Kentucky and West Virginia in the 1920s and early 1930s; where more than thirty strikers were shot in Marion, North Carolina, in 1929; where seven striking textile workers were shot to death in Honea Path, South Carolina, on September 6, 1934; where Mississippi labor leader Claude Ramsay was so often threatened in the 1960s that he kept a shotgun in his car. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed when he came to Memphis to support a garbage collectors strike in 1968. In January 2000, state troopers and local police used helicopters, armored vehicles, patrol boats, and attack dogs against picketing dockworkers with the International Longshoremens union in Charleston, South Carolina.