| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South. By Robert Rodgers Korstad. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xiv, 556 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2781-9. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8078-5454-9.)

Black Freedom Fighters in Steel: The Struggle for Democratic Unionism. By Ruth Needleman. (Ithaca: ILR, 2003. xiv, 305 pp. Cloth, $47.50, ISBN 0-8014-3741-5. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8014-8858-3.)

These two books wonderfully illustrate the recentering of labor and modern African American history that has been taking place within the historical profession. By placing black workers at the center of the struggle for a more democratic society, both authors clearly demonstrate that for black workers the fights for industrial democracy and for civil rights have been intertwined.

Robert Rodgers Korstad's study of tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, weaves together the theoretical and empirical studies of tens of scholars with a mass of primary material. The end result is an exceptionally rich work of scholarship. Korstad begins by describing a dramatic strike against R. J. Reynolds in 1943. Sparked by Theodosia Simpson, a black female stem processor, the protest mushroomed into a "walkout of historic proportions" (p. 37) and resulted in an unprecedented agreement between Reynolds and its long-exploited workers. Just as important, the strike illustrated the determination of black workers "to change the structures of power in which they were ensnared," in the plant and in the community (p. 40). After describing this strike, Korstad details how Reynolds gained power over the lives of African American and other working Americans in Winston-Salem in the first place and how blacks accumulated the resources to challenge the corporation and its white allies. Along the way, Korstad shows how white supremacy "rested on class and gender hierarchies as well as racial subordination" (p. 41).

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