(To the right, a 1930s strike banner on display at the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum in Tyronza, Ark.)
I’ve long preached about the need for labor and progressives
in general who want to win over the South to tap into a Southern tradition that
doesn’t get much attention but which is every bit as real as those other,
darker traditions that have held the region back much of its history. I’m
talking about populism, real populism, not the faux kind pushed today by Fox
News, but a rock-ribbed belief that blue-collar, small farmer, black and white and
brown Southerners deserve their seat at the table and a voice in their lives.
You saw that tradition in Myrtle Lawrence, a white, uneducated, snuff-dipping
sharecropper who became one of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union’s best
organizers in the 1930s. She was a major force in rallying the poorest of the
South’s poor to demand their rights as human beings, and to do it she had to withstand the condescending
snickering of white Northern liberals and Southern black activists as well as the
threats of landowners and right-wing politicians.
Today, most Democrats are too weak-kneed and compromised to
reach out to modern-day Myrtle Lawrences who might help turn around the region
that spawned the poisonous Tea Party movement that is pushing the Republican
Party even further to the right.
“Democrats should demand that Tea Party rebels explain why
they are in league with a party that intends to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and
Social Security in order to finance more tax cuts for billionaires,” William
Greider writes in the latest edition of The
Nation. “If common folks ever understand the corrupt nature of the
Republican coalition, we will see a popular rebellion that makes the present
chaos look like, well, a tea party.”
The depth of that corruption can be seen in the current
series running in the New York Times,
“A `Privatization’ Of the Justice System’”, that details how corporations have
sidetracked the nation’s judicial system into corporate-friendly arbitration in
handling consumer and employee lawsuits and complaints.
“All it took was adding simple arbitration clauses to
contracts that most employees and consumers do not even read,” reporters
Jessica Silver Greenberg and Michael Corkery wrote. “Yet at stake are claims of
medical malpractice, sexual harassment, hate crimes, discrimination, theft,
fraud, elder abuse and wrongful death.”
The Democratic Party’s long record of cuddling up to labor
during campaigns and generally ignoring it after the election shows that
working people—whether in the South or beyond—cannot rely on mainstream
political parties. A viable labor movement would do more than anything else to
bring about real revolutionary change.
Labor organizer Tefere Gebre told Facing South’s Chris Kromm recently that organizing the South is
crucial to labor’s future and to the region itself. “The South has become a
dumping ground for the global multinationals. As Americans we feel offended
that multinationals are seeking the South for cheap labor and unregulated labor
and profiteering when they come and set up here.”
Gebre talked about a new focus by organized labor on major
Southern cities like Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Orlando and Miami. All well and
good, but more will be needed. The soul of the South has never been in its
major cities. It’s out in the country and in the small towns and medium-sized
cities. Labor and other progressive
groups have to reach the South’s soul.
Myrtle Lawrence and the STFU did. Their meetings “had come
to resemble a southern evangelical revival more than a labor organization,”
historian Elizabeth Anne Payne has written. “Women … gave testimony about the
power of the STFU in Holiness style, witnessing that the Holy Spirit could
instantly transform lives through the union.”
A revival. That’s what labor needs, and so does the South.
Good preachers, too, and a gospel that champions regular working folks of all
races and stands up to the dark, old, bankrupt traditions and ideas and their hypocrite
apologists.
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