(To the right is a photograph I took of Ray Smithhart in Jackson, Miss., in 2004)
OXFORD, Miss. - My old friend Ray Smithhart would have loved
the irony of union-fighting manufacturer Nissan making a gift of $100,000 to
the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute.
Known in his later years as the “dean of Mississippi’s labor
organizers,” Smithhart worked closely with civil rights martyr Medgar Evers in
the late 1950s and early 1960s, forging a link between the labor and civil
rights movements that Martin Luther King Jr. himself saw as key to the future
of both.
(Medgar Evers)
“Medgar Evers told me I was the first white man who ever
talked to him,” Smithhart told me during an interview the year before he died
at 88 in 2005. “We had good relations.”
That’s why he must be smiling in heaven. Nissan, unionized
around the world but fighting unionization at its plant in Canton, Miss., made
its donation to the Evers Institute last month. “This organization talks about
and looks at youth education, diversity, and racial reconciliation, and those
are the same things Nissan looks at,” Nissan spokesman Jeffrey Webster said.
If Smithhart were alive today, he would likely ask Nissan to
look deeper into Medgar Evers’ beliefs. “All people need their civil rights,
especially the working people,” said Smithhart, who served as president of a
United Rubber Workers local and secretary-treasurer of the state AFL-CIO.
Mississippi and nation are marking the 50th
anniversary of Evers’ slaying with a long series of tributes to the late
activist and field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP. Evers was killed in
front of his home in Jackson, Miss., on June 12, 1963. Events include the
annual Medgar Evers Dinner in Jackson next month. Among those on hand will be Hollywood
actor and labor activist Danny Glover, a vocal supporter of the union effort at
Nissan.
“I think about Medgar Evers,” Glover said at a gathering of
pro-union Nissan workers last July. “He was only 37 years old when he died.
Medgar Evers would be right out here supporting you.”
Activists, community leaders and the United Auto Workers have
been building support to get Nissan to allow a fair election for the 5,000
workers at its Canton plant. Workers say the company is already waging an
intense anti-union campaign within the plant that includes one-on-one meetings
with managers, videos and threats of plant closings and layoffs if workers
choose to join a union.
Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn has opposed unionization at the
company’s plants in Mississippi and Tennessee even though its workforce in
other parts of the world is largely unionized.
The UAW has taken the Canton story to the world. Rallies
have been held in Atlanta, New York, Detroit, and as far away as Brazil.
Hundreds turned out for an evangelical-style gathering at Tougaloo College in
January that featured Glover as well as an array of preachers, students,
activists, and workers.
The $100,000 gift to the Evers Institute may be a sign that
Nissan is feeling the pressure. The company also recently announced a $500,000
education grant to the Canton Public School District. Nissan reported $84.4 billion
in net revenues and $4.37 billion in operating profit for the nine months
ending in December 2012.
Yet things aren’t all rosy for Nissan’s relations with
predominantly black Canton. Efforts by state lawmakers to back a $100 million
plant expansion and supplier support plan in Madison County have rankled local
political leaders, who are still miffed at a state-backed prohibition against
Canton annexing the plant.
Nissan’s cash handouts, welcome as they may be, say nothing
about the fundamental question of workers’ rights, itself a civil rights issue.
Evers died in the cause for those rights. Smithhart, too,
was on the front lines, integrating water fountains, pressuring Jackson leaders
to hire black police officers. In 1962, goons
fired 200 pellets into Smithhart’s car near Ripley. A Port Gibson police chief
told him “no one would hear” from him again if he didn’t leave town.
“I would not let the anti-union forces intimidate me,”
Smithhart said. “I stood my ground, and they did not like it.”
Claude Ramsay, state AFL-CIO president at the time and
another Evers associate, told me this during a 1981 interview: “They’d call me
and threaten me. 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.”
The labor movement “transformed misery and despair into hope
and progress,” Martin Luther King Jr. once said. “The two most dynamic and
cohesive liberal forces in the country are the labor movement and the Negro
freedom movement.”
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