| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Robert Rodgers Korstad. Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 556. Cloth $55.00, paper $24.95.
Southern states tend to rank high in national surveys of good business climate and correspondingly low in worker protection, wages, and benefits. As Robert Rodgers Korstad relates in this clear, sometimes moving, and always intelligent narrative, there are good historic reasons for this situation. The author's focus on organizing efforts at the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (RJR) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, between 1942 and 1950 complements related works on civil rights unionism, especially Timothy J. Minchin's The Color of Work: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945–1980 (2001) and Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960–1980 (1999). Like Minchin, Korstad argues that the southern labor movement is inseparable from the struggle for civil rights.	1
In June 1943, the mostly black and female work force in the stemming department of RJR struck over wages and working conditions. The action represented both a culmination and a beginning. Worker activism had accelerated during the 1930s, facilitated by the Wagner Act of 1935 and increased organizing activity by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). During World War II, the protection of federal labor legislation and the establishment of the National War Labor Board provided workers indispensable tools to challenge management.	. . .

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