(To the left is the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C.)
Way back in 1988, I sat across from Strom Thurmond in his
Capitol Hill office in Washington, D.C., and listened as he explained his
opposition to federal anti-lynching laws and any other federal encroachment on
states’ rights during his long career.
“I felt it was dangerous to shift it all to Washington,” the
then-85-year-old U.S. senator and former Dixiecrat presidential candidate from
South Carolina told me. “Lynching was
nothing but murder. All states had laws against murder. … I’ve never had any
feelings against minorities.”
Never mind that Thurmond, who died at 101 in 2003, led the
Dixiecrat revolt out of the Democratic Party in 1948 and into the Republican
Party in the 1960s largely as a reaction against civil rights legislation. Never
mind that he was a segregationist superstar during much of the civil rights
movement.
Thurmond’s disdain for the federal government that provided
him a paycheck through much of his life was in classic Southern tradition. As
far back as the 1830s, another South Carolinian, John C. Calhoun, led the
so-called “nullification” effort to allow states to “nullify” federal laws on
tariffs and other issues. It took a fellow Southerner, President Andrew
Jackson, to put the lid on that campaign after sending troops down to
Charleston.
The tradition is going strong today. Southern conservatives
in Congress deserve much of the blame for the recent federal government
shutdown that cost the economy $24 billion. In the U.S. House vote to re-open
government, 73 Southern Republicans voted “No” and only 18 voted “Yes,”
according to Zack Beauchamp in ThinkProgress.
The much-talked-about Tea Party leading the charge against government speaks
with a decidedly Southern accent.
Yet who have these Southern leaders represented through the
years? Calhoun and his fellow nullifiers risked civil war in large part to
defend planters worried that higher tariffs would cost them British customers
for their cotton. Three decades later, hundreds of thousands of Southern farm
boys went to war to defend the right of those same planters to own slaves.
When Thurmond and his vice-presidential candidate, Fielding
Wright of Mississippi, led the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948, a major plank in their
platform was opposition to organized labor. Like their predecessors, their
hot-button issue may have been race, but they were also determined to protect the
interests of the Southern business and political elite.
Today, the Tea Party rank and file rants against the federal
government, but just try to take their Social Security and Medicare away from
them. Thanks to the demonization of not only Uncle Sam but also labor unions by
Fox News and its counterparts here in Mississippi and elsewhere, the progeny of
those same Southern farm boys who fought for slavery think they now have to
fight for the rights of business owners and corporate CEOs to enrich themselves
at the expense of a docile and voiceless workforce.
A South African delegation led by Cedric Gina, president of
the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa, visited the Jackson,
Miss., area recently and was shocked at the uphill fight Nissan workers in
Canton, Miss., have to wage just to exercise their legal right to a union
election. “We think this is not supposed to be happening in a so-called First
World country, a so-called bastion of democracy,” Gina told me in a telephone
interview. “To be so fearful, the workers, with no intervention. This is not
supposed to be happening.”
NUMSA represents 325,000 workers in South Africa, including
2,000 Nissan employees near Pretoria.
Workers at the Nissan plant in Canton say they have been
subjected to repeated meetings with managers who threaten a plant closure and
lost jobs if they opt to join the United Auto Workers. Although well paid by
Mississippi’s low standards, most of them have gone years without a pay raise
and are subjected to arbitrary decisions by management on health and pension
benefit changes, work hours, and working conditions.
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant has gone on record saying he
supports outside groups that help keep unions out of his state. He’s probably happy now that the
Virginia-based National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation has issued a
special notice to Nissan workers in Canton warning them of the horrors of
joining together and speaking with a united voice.
After a majority of workers at the Volkswagen plant in
Chattanooga, Tenn., indicated their support for a company-and-union-backed,
German-style works council at the plant, the same foundation filed charges with
the National Labor Relations Board alleging UAW coercion. The UAW says the
claims are ridiculous.
A thread that runs through Southern history even stronger
than race is class. The ruling class in the South doesn’t tolerate challenges
to its rule well—whether that challenge comes from united black people or from
united working people.
(This column ran earlier in the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Miss.)
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