The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America

4. Religion Applied

4. Religion Applied Williams relished the chance to apply the ancient definition of religion, “to bind you to something,” to Memphis workers. Through the revolutionary gospel, he hoped to stitch factory workers into CIO unions and achieve power through unity, the promise of Pentecost. Over the summer of 1940, Williams conferred with allies Harry Koger and Myles Horton about strategies for educating urban workers. In the final plan he sent to UCAPAWA head Donald Henderson, Williams recommended four staff members to run the sessions: Owen Whitfield, Zella Whitfield (to do important “womens work”), Harry Koger, and Winifred Chappell, the former faculty chair at Commonwealth College. On the banks of the Mississippi at the Inland Boatmen’s Hall, these organizers planned a ten-day leadership training school to begin on August 5.1 I The Memphis they entered in 1940 operated under the long shadow of two powerful white men: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Edward H. Crump. Forrest symbolized the Memphis of the past: a city built on unfree African American labor that became the largest market in the mid-South for slaves and cotton by 1850. He sought to protect its status. During the Civil War, Forrest infamously ordered his Confederate soldiers to massacre dozens of black federal troops who had surrendered as prisoners of war at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. After the military defeat of the Confederacy, Forrest helped launch the Ku Klux Klan to thwart interracial political alliances of workers, who during Reconstruction had managed to elect a reform mayor. Forrest’s strategy succeeded, and he was rewarded with accolades. By 1905, when a statue was unveiled in a city park that depicted Forrest as a military hero on horseback, even the New York Times put aside its former nickname for him—“Fort Pillow Forrest”—to claim that he had “won quite as much appreciation in the North as in the South, though in the former, of course, the appreciation was a little slow in finding expression.” National reconciliation around white supremacists like Forrest in the 1890s had allowed the construction of Jim Crow in Memphis alongside federal toleration for the violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.2 The imposition of Jim Crow allowed for the division of the workforce by race and gender, which set the stage for Crump. Born in Mississippi, Crump came of age in Memphis alongside Jim Crow. He first became mayor in 1909, and although he would step down from this position several times between 1909 and 1940 to pursue other political and business interests, nobody doubted who really ran the city. “Boss” Crump built a well-oiled Democratic Party political machine based on competing but loyal voting blocs. On the one hand, he catered to business leaders through the office of the County Trustee, which encouraged certain mortgage and insurance deals. On the other hand, Crump gave ordinary citizens concessions so long as they stayed in their economic and racial places. This meant reaching deals with the local AFL unions and with African American leaders in exchange for votes. Always willing to bend Jim Crow, Crump’s machine often paid poll taxes so that African American allies could do their bit at the ballot box. In the 1927 mayoral election, for example, Memphis’s black press hailed Crump’s handpicked successor, Watkins Overton, because seven thousand black voters provided the margin of victory. In return, Crump opposed the city’s hard-line white supremacists, denounced lynching as damaging to the city’s economic fortunes, and brought thousands of jobs to Memphis by promising a plentiful labor supply to lumber and cotton processing firms, as well as to national corporations like the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company and Ford Motors. He consolidated his power during two terms as a congressman in the early Depression years when he fashioned a strong relationship with New Deal Democrats, including President Roosevelt. Crump supported the National Recovery Act so long as it did not raise minimum wages for black workers, and he backed the Works Progress Administration while requiring Memphis workers to make political donations in exchange for employment. To President Roosevelt, Crump delivered Tennessee votes for the Democratic Party, and that was what mattered.3 The city that deferred to Forrest and Crump seemed a poor beachhead for an interracial labor movement, but the same Mississippi River location that 114 c h a pt er 4 made Memphis a...