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LABOR, THE SOUTHERN PRESS, AND THE CIVIL WAR THAT NEVER ENDED Ray Smithhart and Robert Bracken, old soldiers of the Southern labor movement, are trading war stories in the conference room of the Mississippi AFL-CIO headquarters on Jackson’s North West Street. This is a long, bumpy stretch of road that runs alongside one of the city’s oldest cemeteries , between crime-and-poverty-haunted neighborhoods to the west and, to the east, an older district of once-genteel homes now in decline. The writer Eudora Welty grew up just a block or so away. They came in from the suburb of Brandon for this May 2004 interview . Smithhart, eighty-seven, lives in a nursing home. Bracken, sixty-six, is retired and lives nearby. Both are battle-scarred veterans full of tales and glad a journalist finally wants to hear them. They tell of fighting beside Medgar Evers and other civil rights leaders during the 1960s, being tailed and jailed by antiunion goons and sheriffs, having guns shoved in their faces, cars filled with bullet holes. They never talked much with reporters because newspapers usually were on the side of the bosses. “They didn’t treat us right at all,” says Smithhart, the dean of Mississippi labor organizers, about the press. “You got the whole community against you, the supervisors, the merchants, the newspapers. You can’t get the message across. What we needed was at least some kind of debate. This would let the employees hear both sides of the issues.”1 Bracken nods and recalls complaining about antilabor coverage to an editor in Mississippi’s Neshoba County in 1972, some eight years after the infamous disappearance and murder of three civil rights workers there. The newspaper was running company propaganda during a local union election. “We told him what we thought about allowing the company to write that crap,” he says, his voice stirring with old, unspent passions. “We let him know how we felt.” Chapter 1 3 4 It didn’t do any good, however. The editor’s response was to call the police, and the union went on to lose the election by a handful of votes. “The newspapers just do whatever the local management tells them to do,” Bracken says. Smithhart and Bracken are native Southerners who’ve been called “outside agitators” most of their lives. They’ve always known what they were up against. No place has seen a bloodier or meaner fight waged against organized labor than the U.S. South. This is the region where labor battles left dozens dead in Kentucky and West Virginia in the 1920s and early 1930s; where more than thirty strikers were shot in Marion, North Carolina, in 1929; where seven striking textile workers were shot to death in Honea Path, South Carolina, on September 6, 1934; where Mississippi labor leader Claude Ramsay was so often threatened in the 1960s that he kept a shotgun in his car. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed when he came to Memphis to support a garbage collectors’ strike in 1968. In January 2000, state troopers and local police used helicopters , armored vehicles, patrol boats, and attack dogs against picketing dockworkers with the International Longshoremen’s union in Charleston, South Carolina. Clamor magazine called this the “first major labor battle of the 21st century.”2 This longstanding struggle and its warriors both dead and alive attest to a civil war within the South that never ended, and one of the major combatants in this war has been the Southern press. Newspapers—and they’ve been the role model for broadcast and other media—have with few exceptions been decidedly on the side of management. They fought with the same weapons—fear, race-baiting, communist witch-hunting, patronizing appeals to “Southern” traditions—that business and corporate leaders used to quell union activity. Today they’re the role model for the national media as well, and their weapon of choice is a blanket of silence on labor and labor issues. As Mississippi AFL-CIO president Robert Shaffer once said, “You practically have to get out and march with a protest sign to get their attention.”3 In this book, Ray Smithhart, Robert Bracken, and others get to tell those stories that have gone untold for so long. They are part of the larger story of Southern working people, of a struggle replete with villains and heroes and with broad implications for the nation and for the world, too. The seed...

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