Thinking about the South (older post, still very timely)

UNIONS AND THE SOUTH [EXCERPTS FROM A COLLOQUY]  HUNTER BEAR

I have only a bit more, at this point at least, on the South and unions.
The topic has generated some very solid input on the Redbadbear list -- and
a helpful comment or two on ASDnet.  But the most impressive characteristic
of ASDnet is its oft-silence.

I know the South [its many variants and its many "New Souths"] very well
indeed and I have for decades. I went to Mississippi in 1961 for the
Movement and remained in the hard-core South until 1967. I've been in many
of its jails, was sometimes badly and very painfully beaten, almost died
there.  Two of my children were born in the South.  My oldest grandson, here
with us, is one-half Mississippi Choctaw [Neshoba and Leake counties.]  My
collected papers are held by Mississippi State Department of Archives and
History, I'm a Life Member of Mississippi Historical Society, and I have
discouraged an effort or two to rename a short street in Jackson for me [my
former name of John Salter.]

I have several basic points on Dixie:

[1] It is not, simply, the "rest of the country exaggerated."  It's
regionally unique and, despite the changes of the past several decades, it
remains unique.  The heritage of chattel slavery, the War and the
Occupation -- all of this and much more continue to function as an effective
skeleton hand to this very moment.  But there is also the grand legacy -- the high courage and the vision -- of the Civil Rights Movement.

[2]  Tough as the South is -- and it can be very brutally tough -- it can
certainly be cracked. It's been  much cracked on other things -- e.g., civil
rights.  You had to be "down there" -- behind the Cotton Curtain -- in, say,
1961 to understand how ostensibly impregnable the "dominant" dimensions of
social geography certainly appeared.

[3]   You start cracking NOW.  To wait until the political landscape of the
United States has changed until you launch Normandy-for-Dixie will, as I
noted a day or so ago,simply be tantamount to waiting until the Ice Age has
melted. [There were many nay-sayers who advised and warned the incipient
Civil Rights Movement to wait -- and wait -- and wait.  The Movement did not
wait.]

[4]   We would all agree that  organizing  every working person into an
effective union is absolutely compelling.  That applies to the South -- as
it does everywhere else.  But there is also a very special reason for
organizing Dixie from one end to the other.  That region, for various and
generally well-known reasons, has exerted a disproportionately negative
influence on the United States as a whole [and well beyond.]  If it isn't
effectively unionized, it'll continue to do so forever.

[5]   Finally, the South can be very surprising.  When it moves, it can move
[for better and worse] with a passion and rapidity unnerving to some
Yankees.  Some of the finest and most committed Anglo union activists that I
know in the Mississippi of today, were once very militant members of the
White Knights and the United Klans and comparable groups.

In my response to the recitation of the standard AFL-CIO "line" -- i.e,
organizing is solely the responsibility of the internationals, the AFL-CIO
itself has limited funds, etc etc -- I made several points yesterday, among
them:


"AFL leadership to some extent, very much that of CIO, and certainly AFL-CIO
and IUD [CIO] at various  points over time have provided funds, technical
and even direct organizing staff, and have stimulated and coordinated
large-scale organizing campaigns.  Never enough, ever -- but in some
situations, some. Point is, almost all dimensions of mainline unionism
backed out of the South in any on-going fashion -- because it is indeed
tough and expensive."

There are a number of classic examples of top-level money and other
resources coming "down" directly from top-level "federation" sources into
the grassroots to supplement and stimulate efforts by the internationals --
even to the point of sometimes engaging in its own direct organizing.
Certain "federal local" structures emanating directly from AFL -- in time,
turned over to the appropriate internationals -- come immediately to mind as
does the classic matter of Lewis and other top CIO activists directly hiring
and utilizing a myriad of bright young Left-wingers [ socialists and
communists] to not only,  in its very springtime,  launch the initial
momentum of CIO but also to continue that momentum at various points in a
feathering-out sense.  Examples of this top-level-oriented grassroots
activism faded [but not completely] during the the Cold War period -- and the
increasing retreats by mainline labor's leadership-- and beyond.

There are also, of course, examples of one well-established international
organizing workers for another: e.g., Mine-Mill organizing teachers for AFT
in such settings as Montana and Arizona-- before the top AFT leadership
panicked-- and then turning them over to AFT.

But, even if all of these precedents and more of related nature did not
exist, there's every reason for the AFL-CIO from its "federation peak" to
pour money and staff and all other appropriate resources into intensive and
long-term grassroots union organizing.

I  made the point yesterday, "AFL-CIO  certainly has a great deal of
money -- as witness its many very substantial non-organizing project
expenditures."

As simply just one of many examples --  a fiscally mountainous one -- each
major election has seen  AFL-CIO channel 30 or 40 million dollars into
various Democratic party campaign coffers.  While the Wellstones may be well
worth it, there are many others who are not.

And, without discounting the importance of work with Congress and state
legislatures -- to a point and only to a point -- it's obvious that anytime
those settings become the key "organizing arena" for Labor, Labor is in the
Okeefenokee [Swamp.]

Grassroots organizing at the point of production is Genesis and, until
American Labor genuinely goes back to that and takes the initiative with
creativity and militancy and vision and long-term endurance, the Bosses will
continue to call the basic shots.

We can and must -- and will -- return to that Genesis.

Fraternally [if hastily] --

Hunter Bear

Hunter Gray  [ Hunter Bear ]
www.hunterbear.org  ( social justice )
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´


A BIT MORE:

FROM HUNTER  BEAR:

Yours is a very good question, Christopher.  This response of mine is not
organized sociology -- but just some rather hasty thoughts.

A quick answer -- and one not meant to be either curt or snide -- is that a
person really has to live in the South to understand its still-continuing
and very substantial distinctiveness. I mean live in it, not just travel
through it a time or two, or read academically about it -- or see GWTW.  I
ought to add that the first adult book that I ever read, in the third grade,
was my parents' copy of GWTW and I read every single word of it, especially
liking the burning of Atlanta and the shooting of the Yankee and Rhett's use
of "damn."  But I did every word of The Great Fantasy -- and it may have
helped me understand the very strange region I entered in 1961 as Adversary
and to which I now often return.

And I don't mean DC or Maryland or Delaware, for example, or Miami as far
as that goes. I'm talking about the Real South -- from East Texas across and
'way up well into Virginia, most of Kentucky to the Gulf Coast [and most of
Florida, for sure].  That's how the South -- Deep and Middle and Border and
Urban and Rural -- stands today.

Much cotton / tobacco / other crops -- and relatively pervasive chattel
slavery -- made up the economic basis of the South for centuries.  This was
not the case in the Southern mountains and adjoining hills -- but it was the
general situation.  Much of that agricultural base still continues and, even
today, the sharecropper system [which replaced outright slavery] is still
frequently found despite automation.  And even now, it is not uncommon to find many rural Southerners of various races whose geographical identity is not that of the "state" or "the nation" but their county [or, in the case of
Louisiana, parish.]  Some still rarely travel beyond their county or parish
borders.

The use of chattel slaves in the Northeast never came even remotely close to
the Southern System in numbers, economic significance,  and socio-cultural
influence, and longevity-of-practice.  And both the North and the South --
and all the other sections of the country of course -- feature pervasive and
continuing wage slavery.  But open feudalism in the classic agrarian sense
is still much around much of the Deep South and class distinctions are
extremely sharp -- and economic inequities are certainly most profound in all of Dixie. One could certainly argue, sadly and convincingly, that the "new industries" entering the Southern context or developing therein do so with very uniquely [industrial] feudal dimensions!

The South, as I've alluded, is still very provincial   And it's extremely
religious -- the most generally fundamentalist region by far. It's also
extremely violent, often pervasively so.  Examples:  So-called "lawmen" at
all levels can still be quite violent -- often very much in the case of union
organizers in rural and small town settings.  Grade school and high school
kids throughout the South are currently subjected to even more corporal
punishment  -- a practice I strongly oppose -- than, say, we were in small
town Northern Arizona.

 The very Southern vocabulary often, as a 19th century observer remarked
then, "drips with manslaughter."  A very dear friend for now more than forty
years, and an extremely close colleague in the hottest of the Movement
struggles, recently commented to me about another very dear lady and mutual
acquaintance:  "I'd like to ram my .38 right down  her [Miss L___'s]
Goddamned throat."  Both of these ladies are in their eighties.

That was just friendly talk -- but the homicide and aggravated assault rate
is indeed extremely high.


The South is also an area where, to use the Mississippi expression, "Black,
White, Chinese, and Choctaw [and, of course, by extension other ethnicities]
usually know a great deal about one another and where, despite the various
shadings of racism and ethnocentrism, there are frequently very close ties
across racial lines -- especially in the rural, small town, small city
[gemeinschaft] settings. [Some of those ties, though not formally recorded
necessarily, are by blood.]  You don't find this kind of closeness, say, in
much of the broadly urban/industrial Northeast or even in many other areas.
In some ways, the whole State of Mississippi, say, is still one big small
town. And that applies to much of the rest of the South at least.

And the South continues to be heavily shaped by the legacy of the Civil War
and the Long Occupation [Reconstruction.]  No other Euro-American section of
the 'States, big or small, ever even remotely had that experience.  As
someone so accurately tagged it all, it's still the "Blazing Scar."

The traditional flag of Mississippi contains the flag of the Southern
Confederacy.  There was a very heavy vote a year or so ago in
Mississippi on the matter of replacing the old flag with an attractive new
one -- sans the Stars & Bars.  The proposal was overwhelmingly defeated --
large numbers of Blacks, including many of very strong civil rights bent,
voting against the proffered change.  For better or worse, the old flag
still flies high.

The Civil Rights Movement is a grand and glorious legacy -- and it also,
still, involves a great deal of continuing activism.  That tradition, and its
continuing vital and living pieces and on-going thrust, offers much to union
organizers and union organization. Low-income poor Whites -- and they abound in the South, as elsewhere -- are quite reachable with the Union Gospel. And now, much more than ever before, they're willing to work with all of the others in the  world of the "Black, White, Chinese and Choctaw."

The South is colorful and exciting -- and I like it.  Especially the Deep
South.  I could tell a million stories about it -- as it was then and as it
is now.  And it's still very much the South.

Where else could I have a long and congenial supper with a former [and by
then vastly changed] top leader of the Mississippi White Knights of the KKK
who, with his equally zealous father,  had once put out a nicely printed
mass leaflet-style death list across the South with my name and photo [and
that of a few others]?

Or, where else could I go into a small grocery store one night, and ask the
old White man and his kid for "a dozen eggs" -- and, this is what
transpired.  The old man was puzzled. "What did y'all say?" he asked.   

"I'd like a dozen eggs . . . sir" said I.

His face darkened.  "What?" he asked.  I started again --

The kid suddenly beamed, brightened.  "Oh, he means Ay-yegs, Pa! He wants a
box of Ay-yegs."

The old man beamed happily.  "Ay-yegs!" said he.  "Ay-yegs!"   And he got me
a "box."

I don't have a Yankee accent.  I have a soft, rural Arizona accent.  But we
don't say, Y'all -- we say You-all.  And we do say Eggs.

Yours - Hunter [Hunter Bear]


HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)

I have always lived and worked in the Borderlands.

See my piece ON BEING A MILITANT AND RADICAL
ORGANIZER -- AND AN EFFECTIVE ONE (Mississippi et al.):
http://crmvet.org/comm/hunter1.htm

The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded in Fall 2012. Photos. Material on our Native
background.) 

See the new and expanded/updated edition of my very well-reviewed 
"Organizer's Book" -- the inside story of the massive Jackson
Mississippi Movement, the murder of Medgar Evers, and more.
And with my new and very substantial introduction:
http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm