1. My thanks to Nelson Lichtenstein for his helpful comments on an early version of this article. Quote and details on Red Davis from interviews, St. Louis, 26 Jan 1983 and 14 Jan 1986.

2. See Hosea Hudson's comments on the emergence of the Communist party from underground as the result of the second New Deal and the entrance of the CIO into the South, in Painter, Nell Irvin, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (Cambridge, 1979), 245–46.Google Scholar Klehr, Harvey documents significant growth of southern party membership in this period, in The Heyday of American Communism, The Depression Decade (New York, 1984), 275–78.Google Scholar

3. Highlander, founded by Socialist Myles Horton and other leftists in 1932, became a learning center for successive generations of southern activists, and continues to carry on today. Like the Southern Conference, Highlander refused to bar communists and emphasized the indivisibility of labor and civil rights causes. Both organizations were bitterly attacked by authorities. See Krueger, Thomas A., And Promises to Keep: The Southern Conference for Human Welfare, 1938–1948 (Nashville, 1967)Google Scholar, and Klibaner, Irwin, “The Southern Conference Educational Fund: A History,” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971.Google Scholar See also Adams, Frank with Horton, Myles, Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The idea of Highlander (Charlotte, N.C., 1975).Google Scholar

4. Bernstein, Irving provides a summary account of the 1934 textile strike in Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 (Boston, 1971), 301–15.Google Scholar Surprisingly, no detailed history of the 1934 textile strike, the largest general strike to that point in American labor history, currently exists.

5. No thorough history of the radical and working-class movements of the South during the 1930s has yet been written. For an introductory treatment, however, see Dunbar, Anthony P., Against the Grain, Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929–1959 (Charlottesville, Va., 1981)Google Scholar, and Klehr, Heyday, 273–78, 333–40. Cochran, Bert, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (Princeton, N.J., 1977)Google Scholar, has accounts of the southern textile strikes, 34–38, and “bloody Harlan,” 52–56. Both Klehr and Cochran provide jaundiced accounts of Communist activity. Dunbar gives a more balanced and positive assessment of left activity, as does Martin, Charles H., “The International Labor Defense and Black America,” Labor History 26 (Spring 1985): 165–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Helpful first-hand accounts by participants include Hosea Hudson, Narrative, by a black Communist leader in the Birmingham's steel industry, and Garland, Jim, Welcome the Traveler Home: Jim Garland's Story of the Kentucky Mountains (Lexington, Ky., 1983)Google Scholar, by a leader of the Harlan strike. Tindall, George Brown, The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945 (Baton Rouge, 1967)Google Scholar, provides a dispassionate overview of early labor movements, chapter ten.

6. See Mason's, Lucy Randolph account of the southern CIO, To Win These Rights, A Personal Story of the CIO in the South (Westport, Conn., 1970, reprint of 1952 ed.).Google Scholar Tindall demonstrates that incidents of violence in the South decreased substantially after passage of the Wagner Act, Emergence, 523–31. Ingalls, Robert P. also reveals a decline of violence against organizers in Birmingham after the CIO victory against U.S. Steel in 1937, in “Antiradical Violence in Birmingham During the 1930s,” Journal of Southern History 47 (11 1981): 521–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Violence against organizers continued unabated in many communities, however. Martin, Charles H. documents the violence against rubber workers in Gadsden, Alabama in the late 1930s, in “Southern Labor Relations in Transition: Gadsden, Alabama, 1930–1943,” Journal of Southern History 47 (11 1981): 545–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Numerous cases in the files of the Worker's Defense League, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, document continued violence in the South.

7. The rise of Boss Crump is documented in laudatory fashion by his biographer Miller, William D. in Memphis During the Progressive Era, 1900–1917 (Memphis, 1957)Google Scholar, and Mr. Crump of Memphis (Baton Rouge, 1964). Steinberg, Alfred, The Bosses (New York, 1972)Google Scholar, treats Crump in a less kindly fashion. The Roosevelt administration did not put effective pressure on the Crump machine to stop its violations of civil liberties until after the 1940 presidential election.

8. The Memphis SP practically faded out of existence in the 1920s. In the early 1930s it operated out of a Jewish fraternal center operated by the Workmen's Circle. The organization remained all-white and seems to have evaporated in the late 1930s. In eastern Arkansas, however, the SP developed a mass base and established the Southern Tenant Farmer's Union. Socialist Party Scrapbook, Memphis Public Library. For detailed documentation of the racial system and the labor movement in Memphis, see Honey, Michael K., “Labor and Civil Rights in the South: Black Workers and the Industrial Labor Movement in Memphis, Tennessee, 1929–1941,” Ph.D. diss., Northern Illinois University, 1986.Google Scholar

9. See Marshall, F.Ray, Labor in the South (Cambridge, 1967)Google ScholarPubMed, for a discussion of the factors holding back unionization in the South, 3–19, and for an overview of the CIO in the late 1930s, 182–201.

10. Wages in Memphis remained “pitiful” until the CIO organized there, according to Robert Tillman, president of the Memphis International Typographic Union during the 1930s. Workers at Fisher Body made 10 cents an hour in 1936. Interview, Memphis, , 24 02 1983.Google Scholar

11. For an overview of the struggle to organize the CIO in Memphis, see Biles, Roger, “Ed Crump Versus the Unions: The Labor Movement in Memphis During the 1930s,” Labor History 25 (Fall 1984): 533–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar My information on the Bass case comes from Justice Department file 134–72–2, Record Group 60, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

12. McCallister, Frank, Worker's Defense League, to Henry Schweinhaut, 11 09 1940Google Scholar, Justice Department file 134–72–2. Southern Conference Director Howard Lee wrote to Roosevelt, Franklin, 21 12 1940Google Scholar, in a public protest against Crump repression, while the Southern Negro Youth Congress complained that Crump represented “the beginnings of an American fascist stronghold within our very borders, with its race hatreds, enmity to labor, and suppression of civil liberties,” Strong, Edward to Roosevelt, , 28 12 1940Google Scholar, “Reign of Terror” file, A–391, 2 ser. 2, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People papers, Library of Congress. Chicago Tribune 2 April 1939.

13. The Lavor Journal, August 1956, provides membership figures and background on the Memphis CIO, U.S. Department of Labor Library.

14. Ed McCrae interview, Nashville, , 6 03 1983.Google Scholar

15. Mason, To Win These Rights, 108–9.

16. The “UMW formula” was established in Alabama, where black miners made up some sixty percent of the Mineworkers membership, as a means of providing identifiable white and black leadership at a time when company officials and white miners alike would have been unlikely to accept blacks as union Presidents. Foner, Philip S., Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1973 (New York, 1974)Google Scholar, notes the application of the UMW formula to the CIO's campaign to organize the southern steel industry, 18.

17. The AAA paid landlords to plow under their cotton crop. Because the law stipulated that tenants should receive a share of the federal subsidies, many planters decided to eliminate their tenants and sharecroppers, forcing hundreds of thousands off the land. For an overview of the AAA and its effects, see Tindall, Emergence Chap. 12, and for detail, Grubbs, Donald H., Cry From the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmer's Union and the New Deal (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1971)Google Scholar and Mitchell, H.L., Mean Things Happening In This Land (Montclair, N.J., 1979).Google Scholar Mitchell quoted by Dunbar, , Against the Grain, 107Google Scholar, and Stith, George quoted in Southern Exposure 1 (Winter 1974): 18–19.Google Scholar Green, James R. explains the rise of the Socialist party in eastern Arkansas as part of the tradition of agrarian socialism, in Grass Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895–1943 (Baton Rouge, 1978).Google Scholar

18. Handcox quote from Foner and Lewis, Ronald L., The Black Worker: A Documentary History From Colonial Times to the Present, vols. 5, 7 (Philadelphia, 1983), 192.Google Scholar

19. H. L. Mitchell led the tenants' union out of the CIO, objecting to the high dues, overbearing leadership, lack of local autonomy, and Communist control he felt existed in UCAPAWA. See various accounts in Mitchell, Grubbs, and Dunbar, and Mitchell's notes in Worker's Defense League, “UCAPAWA” file, Reuther Library.

20. Interviews, photos and personal clippings, Ed McCrae.

21. Local 19 used white business agents because Memphis employers refused to negotiate with blacks. Interviews, Korstad, Karl, Greensboro, N.C., 20 05 1981Google Scholar, Boyd, Leroy, 6 02 1983Google Scholar, Isabel, George, 7 02 1983Google Scholar, Memphis, and Davis and McCrae.

22. In 1948, Local 19 mobilized the black vote to help elect Estes Kefauver to the U.S. Senate, despite Crump's opposition. The National Labor Relations Board election returns during and after the war show Local 19 as the fastest growing union in the small shops of Memphis, NLRB Docket Sheets and election returns, Region 8 Files, Southern Labor Archives, Georgia State University, Atlanta, and Tennessee NLRB files, Operation Dixie Papers, Duke University, Durham. Southern Patriot interview with Local 19 President Fisher, Earl, 10, 1972.Google Scholar Interviews, cited above.

23. Information on Watkins obtained through Freedom of Information Act request, number 250,181, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Justice Department, Washington, D.C. Red Davis described Watkins as a “Denmark Vesey type, absolutely fearless.” Vesey led a famous American slave revolt in 1822.

24. For a full account of this strike, see my dissertation. I drew my material from files of the U.S. Commerce Department, RG 91, and Justice Department file 144–72–0, and FBI file 16–208–1, both in RG 60, the latter obtained under a FOIA request. All in the National Archives, Washington.

25. Lucy Mason documented the reports of murder on the riverfront to MrsRoosevelt, , 9 01 1941Google Scholar, Mason Correspondence, Operation Dixie Papers, Duke. Watkins gave a number of long depositions on his own case, but the Justice Department took no action in any of these incidents other than to investigate.

26. See Marshall's figures on southern union membership, Labor in the South, 267–68.

27. James Eastland's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) came to Memphis in 1951 as part of a CIO-orchestrated campaign to destroy Local 19, leading to the removal of McCrae by his international and unceasing attacks against Earl Fisher throughout the 1950s. See Honey, , “Labor, the Left and Civil Rights in the South: Memphis, Tennessee During the CIO Era, 1937–1955,” in Erickson, G. and Joel, J., Anti-Communism, The Politics of Manipulation (Minneapolis, 1986)Google Scholar, and “Focus on Memphis,” in Ginger, A. and Christiano, D., The Cold War Against Labor (Berkeley, 1986).Google Scholar For an account that places the southern CIO and the race question in broader perspective, see Honey, , “The Labor Movement and Racism in the South: A Historical Overview,” Racism and the Denial of Human Rights: Beyond Ethnicity, Berlowitz, M. and Edari, R., eds. (Minneapolis, 1984), 77–96.Google Scholar

28. Earl Fisher of Local 19 and Leroy Clark, president of the Memphis Furniture Union, and Memphis NAACP president for a time, played roles in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Black workers who gained experience in the labor movement in other parts of the South, such as E. D. Nixon in Montgomery or Asbury Howard in Birmingham, also played significant roles in the civil rights movement. See comments by Harris, William H., The Harder We Run: Black Workers since the Civil War (New York, 1982)Google Scholar, on Nixon, 144, and the importance of black workers to the civil rights movement, 121–22. See also Huntley, Horace, “Iron Ore Miners and Mine Mill in Alabama: 1933–1952,” Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1977Google Scholar, on the early role of black workers in paving the way for the civil rights movement. One black worker told Huntley, “Martin Luther King had to come, after what the Mine Mill had done” among black workers, 218.