The Southern Movement: challenges, gains, frustration

 Thanks much for the good words and additional feathering out, Sam (Friedman).  You know the score very well indeed.  I might add that, a few years ago, Sam presented me with a copy of his  Teamster Rank and File: Power, Bureaucracy, and Rebellion at Work and in a Union, New York, Columbia University Press, 1982.  This fine nuts-and-bolts book, hardly a stuffy academic work in any sense, reflects a great deal of direct grassroots research -- carried out very productively by Sam.  (BTW, when I knew Chuck and Pat, they were members of FOUR -- Federation of Union Representatives.  That always "acid-tested" union higher-ups!)

This of mine stems from an earlier post which I'm presently expanding.  For our List purposes here, I've abridged my current version considerably.

Into the Southern Movement of the 1950s and 1960s came earlier activist and some  left radical legacies: Wobbly traditions in the very old days, the sharecropper unions and CIO efforts in the 1930s, the then continuing Mine-Mill [I.U.M.M.S.W.] legacy from the 1930s onward (particularly in the iron mining sections of Alabama), the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (predecessor of SCEF) in the '30s and '40s especially, and much more.  Some of the people who soldiered in the emergent Southern Movement of mid-century were old-time left radicals, and  some were much newer and  much younger aspirants (in due course, some  Red Diapers). The great majority of the people in the Movement -- wherever they came from, locally or otherwise -- had no especially radical background but many certainly had those instincts -- had to have them! -- and some, as the struggles and the Sixties moved on, did emerge as consciously -- but usually non-sectarian -- left radicals. (In the cruel and valiant realities of the Southern Struggle, an ecumenical perspective (radical or religious or both) made damn good sense.

Most of those -- consciously radical or otherwise -- who were actually on the front lines (as well as some canny and experienced observers elsewhere) had either no faith in the Federal government or had very, very limited confidence in it.  Little Rock was before my Southern time but the Eisenhower administration was, after all, the outfit which failed -- indeed, almost always refused -- to enforce the 1954 Brown desegregation decision and thus gave the white Citizens' Council and Klan movements the breathing and moving room to organize  widespread and oft-bloody massive resistance.  

The Eisenhower action at Little Rock came belatedly; and stemmed in part from Federal fears of an out-of-control racial fire and  also from the concerns of "sophisticated" business interests vis-a-vis "a bad business image" for Arkansas.  In the 1962 Ole Miss (University of Mississippi) situtation -- the admission of the first Black student (Mr. Jim Meredith)  to any previously all-White Mississippi educational institution at any level -- the Kennedys, who had dragged their feet again and again on the Southern civil rights issues, dallied endlessly in a game of political patty-cake with utterly racist Governor Ross R. Barnett and his circle of hard-line segs.  The result was a rapidly insurrectionary Mississippi which saw many killings of Blacks in the summer and fall of 1962, as the crisis at the University moved to a sanguinary climax.  I, myself, saw the rapidly growing armed White mobs milling at Jackson in mid and late September, harangued by Council fire-brands -- climaxing as an armed throng of many thousands in downtown Jackson just hours before the bloody Ole Miss riot erupted at Oxford to the north.  Federal marshals and thousands of Federal troops came too late to prevent the deaths of two, injuries to hundreds, the destruction of much of the University.  

With their eye on the '64 elections, the Kennedys dragged their feet on civil rights issues thereafter and, in the very bloody Jackson Movement days in the spring of 1963 (the most massive  grassroots upheaval in the state's history) did everything they could -- through the Justice Department and the utterly and consistently vicious FBI -- to undercut the militantcy of the Jackson campaign.  The Johnson administration was certainly no better.

There were very positive changes which eventually emerged: breaking the hard-lines of resistance to social change, the achievement of the right to organize and dissent and the  development of widespread local leadership, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965,  the beginnings of desegregation and some integration, widespread Black political participation and activism, an end to most open terrorism, a basis for interracial and democratic unionism -- though most unions failed to connect significantly and effectively with the civil rights forces.

But the really radical promise of the Southern Movement of the 1950s and 1960s -- the emergence of a bona fide and substantive American Left did not, of course, materialize.  The social class dichotomies of the Southern Movement,  joined by the integrationist/separatist debates -- all of this in the context of these initial positive victories, much tokenism, and continuing massive economic poverty -- combined to fragment much of the solidarity which had initially characterized the Movement in its springtime.  Behind the scenes, the never-ending manipulative maneuvers of stratospheric corporate liberalism and its more localized appendages, the War,  the machiavellian usage of the Economic Opportunity Act -- and  the FBI and its Cointelpro poisoning and hatchet-jobbing -- all had an extraordinarily destructive impact. Much of this all was certainly going on nationally on a myriad of fronts.

When the grassroots organization, extraordinary  courage and sacrifice, and the solidarity  and militancy  of the Southern Movement created massive pressures on the status quo,  "cost factors" forced the Southern economic power structure [which was always, even in the more provincial settings such as Mississippi, involved with all sorts of national and international capitalist dimensions] to make grudging concessions to the 20th Century,  and forced the Federal government into taking some positive action.  All of us involved in the Southern Movement -- and all of those who really supported us, whatever their brand of radicalism or whatever might be -- helped to directly make a very substantial beginning and helped ignite and fan all sorts of other movements.  But there is a long way to go on all social justice fronts -- and certainly to the goal of bona fide socialism.  Every movement -- Native rights, radical, labor, civil rights and all others reaching to the Sun -- is  built on the wreckage and remains of its predecessors.  
It's time now to look ahead -- "many looks to the future." The Enemy remains the same and very much at hand;  and the Goal -- genuine democracy and socialism -- shines Over The Mountains Yonder.  And we can all get there -- and I'm confident that we will.
Hunter Gray (Hunter Bear)    My own book -- under my original name of John R. Salter, Jr. -- on an important part of the Southern struggle is Jackson, Mississippi: An American Chronicle of Struggle and Schism (new enlarged and updated version from University of Nebraska Press, 2011.)  I'll be happy to recommend many other solid ones should anyone wish to contact me directly.

 Hunter Gray (Hunter Bear)


HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´ 
and Ohkwari' 

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´ 
and Ohkwari' 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)
 
See the Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded much in May/June 2012 -- and also some photos.)
 
For the new, just out (11/2011) and expanded/updated
edition of my "Organizer's Book," JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- 
with a new and substantial introduction by me.  We are now at 
the 50th Anniversary of the massive Jackson Movement of
1962-63.
http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm
 
Ghosts  (Near death experience in Sycamore Canyon Wilderness --
with an Arizona labor note): http://hunterbear.org/ghosts.htm