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LABOR, RACE, AND THE MISSISSIPPI PRESS Claude Ramsay, the crusty, barrel-chested president of the Mississippi AFL-CIO from 1959 to 1986, delivered a stem-winder of a speech at the University of Mississippi in 1966—a time when the fires of the civil rights struggle were still burning—that included a snapshot history of the labor movement, a discussion of the twin legacies of Samuel Gompers and Eugene Debs, and a withering analysis of how the state’s political and business leaders had failed working Mississippians. His best shots, however , came in a blistering indictment of the Mississippi press. “The press in Mississippi has to be rated as the worst in the nation,” Ramsay told his audience. “This is especially true as far as the Hederman papers in Jackson are concerned. The Jackson Daily News and Clarion-Ledger have probably done more to retard this state than any other single institution . These papers have for years kept the ‘race issue’ alive and have added more fuel to the flames of racial hatred.”1 Reaching deep into a well of frustration, Ramsay let loose with the kind of fiery tirade that Mother Jones and William “Big Bill” Haywood would have applauded. “Several of their columnists should be in mental institutions for they would have to be mentally unbalanced to write some of the rot that they do. Organized labor has received special treatment from these papers. A good high school debate topic would be ‘Resolved, that the Hederman press hates Organized Labor more than it does the Negro.’” The Hederman family-owned newspapers in Jackson reflected the attitudes of most of the press as well as the political, business, and religious leadership in Mississippi toward labor and race. In Jackson it had been that way ever since Major Fred Sullens, the fiercely anti-union editor of the Daily News through the first half of the century, began writing editorials in 1907. The attitudes didn’t change when Sullens passed the baton to writers like Jimmy Ward of the Jackson Daily News. No less a fire-eater Chapter 5 86 87 Labor, Race, and the Mississippi Press was his counterpart at the Clarion-Ledger, columnist Tom Ethridge, who called CIO and United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther a “leftist” and a “fuehrer.” The newspapers tagged Ramsay a communist sympathizer and berated him for trying to link labor with racial integration. A line on an old ballad of the International Workers of the World says, “You ain’t done nothing if you ain’t been called a Red.” Certainly Claude Ramsay was called “red” and worse during his tenure as Mississippi ’s top labor leader. He was attacked in the media, denounced on the floor of the state house of representatives. A former Klansman once admitted that he’d been contracted to kill Ramsay. “They’d call me up and threaten me,” Ramsay told the author during a 1981 interview. “I kept a double-barreled shotgun on the floorboard of my car, and I told them I’d take at least two of them with me.”2 Ramsay faced a solid phalanx of opposition to his efforts in both the labor and civil rights movements. Nowhere was the opposition stronger than in the state press. When the United Rubber Workers tried to organize Southbridge Plastics in Corinth in 1964, the Daily Corinthian had this to say in a November 9, 1964, editorial headlined “Let’s Send Them Packing!”: “Their only concern is with the increased dues they rake in whenever a new plant is unionized. . . . Harassment of management and costly shutdowns will be a probability. Naturally companies looking southward to escape such harassment will not give Corinth a second glance. . . . A NO vote for unions is a YES vote for industry and progress.” A similar view was expressed by the Tupelo Daily Journal during a 1965 organizing effort at Monroe Manufacturing Company in nearby Aberdeen . After comforting readers that “no union can have (an employee) fired from his job for not belonging to (a union)” and warning against “men like Martin Luther King” who criticize plants for moving to the South to avoid unions, the newspaper had this to say in its August 12, 1965, editorial: “For once a union gets a hold on any plant, every eligible worker therein will be forced to join it, pay dues to it, and make himself subject to its fines and authority, including possible ouster from his job if he disobeys its rules. . . . We have...

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