| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Timothy J. Minchin, The Color of Work: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2001).

IN THE COLOR OF WORK, Timothy Minchin points out that the paper industry has received "very little attention" (2) from labour historians, even though it was a major industrial employer, especially in the South, for most of the 20th century and was almost 100 percent unionized. It thus offers the opportunity to analyze the role trade unions played in relation to questions of racial discrimination and civil rights, and to address the "class-race" debate that has animated labour historians in recent years. Minchin's main focus is the experience of black workers in the southern paper industry. He documents the conditions they faced and the struggles they waged in rich detail. But he also pays close attention to the role of employers, unions, white workers, and the state in developing, and partially dismantling, the industry's rigidly segregated regime.

Although Minchin challenges some of the class-essentialist premises that have characterized the "new southern labor history," his engagement with the increasingly acrimonious literature engendered by the broader class-race debate is, for the most part, cautious and limited. Nonetheless, his book offers a formidable — often devastating — challenge to those historians who have praised the progressive role of (predominantly white) unions on issues of civil rights and who have perceived that alleged role as the logical outcome of what some have called "working-class interracialism." Moreover, Minchin provides a ringing vindication of the black union activists who ultimately turned to the federal government to seek redress of their longstanding grievances. Bitter experience, over many years, had taught them that instances of "working-class interracialism" were few and far between. On the contrary, black workers' demands for equality, in the workplace and the larger society, usually encountered massive resistance from management, white workers, and white unions. Thus, as a black worker from Moss Point, Mississippi, recalled, "We couldn't do it by ourselves. We had tried everything. We had to go through the government." (107)

Drawing on more than sixty oral history interviews he conducted in the late 1990s, and on the court documents providing the testimony of African American plaintiffs in the many lawsuits that threatened to overwhelm the paper industry and its unions after 1965, Minchin paints a vivid portrait of segregation in the workplace and of black workers' growing determination to overturn the system that kept them subordinate. "When I first went there [in 1951]," Sidney Gibson recalled of his long experience at the International Paper Company (IP) plant in Natchez, Mississippi, "you didn't do anything but whatever a white person didn't want to do." (33) Or as State Stallworth, from IP's Moss Point plant, put it, "We got all the low-paying jobs and the hard jobs and the back-breaking jobs and the dirty jobs." (34) Gibson and Stallworth were not exaggerating. Blacks were uniformly assigned to the "dirty" jobs in the "processing" segments of the industry, while whites worked at "clean" jobs in production and maintenance. In the "black" jobs there were no significant opportunities for advancement; African Americans were assigned to "lines of progression" that led nowhere. But in the "white" jobs, there were complex lines of progression that offered opportunities for significant upgrades in pay and skill.

"National" corporations such as International Paper and Crown-Zellerbach were every bit as relentless as "local" firms such as the St. Joe Paper Company of Port St. Joe, Florida, in enforcing this discriminatory regime. But what about unions? During the upsurge of unionism in the 1930s and 1940s whites organized their own racially exclusive locals. When blacks also demanded the right to organize, they were shunted into separate and unequal locals of their own. Given the larger pattern of segregation in the region, and the fact that whites made up 80 to 85 per cent of the industry's workforce, unions served to reinforce the status quo, or, in Minchin's words, to "formalize and codify patterns of segregation that companies had initially established." (26)

Does this mean that the black locals were powerless, or worse? Certainly not worse. Minchin points out that black unionists, many of them World War II and Korean War veterans, had begun to agitate for change long before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But their unions were, he acknowledges, "something of a paradox." (73) They provided a forum in which black leadership could develop. Moreover, they became vehicles of effective protest when they joined forces with civil rights organizations and federal agencies. But within the framework of the industry and its international unions, they were ultimately powerless to effect change.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial (and gender) discrimination in employment, became the legal weapon black paper workers wielded against the companies and unions that kept them down; and the NAACP and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission became their greatest allies. To those who would lament this "race-based" strategy, Minchin offers a compelling rejoinder. Although a few whites did offer covert support for their black fellow workers' demands, "working-class interracialism" was largely a fantasy in the southern paper industry; and the regulatory state, for all of its deficiencies, was an indispensable ally of the forces of change.

One of the most telling themes of The Color of Work is the character and scope of white resistance to black demands for justice. For white papers workers, as for so many southern whites, the civil rights revolution was "like Armageddon." (171) When black workers and their allies began to develop affirmative action programs that threatened to dismantle segregation in employment, whites "thought it was the end of the world." (172) But they fought, often viciously, to defend their turf against black encroachment. When new plantwide seniority agreements finally made it possible for veteran black workers to transfer to more skilled and better-paying jobs, they encountered so much harassment (and, sometimes, sabotage) that many returned to the departments and positions they had been eager to abandon. When employers finally opened up "white" cafeterias, shower rooms, and recreational facilities to black workers, whites often boycotted the integrated terrain. As a black worker at Crown-Zellerbach's Bogalusa, Louisiana, plant recalled, "They stopped using the bathrooms, ... they quit taking a shower. We moved in, they moved out." (136) All the while the companies and the unions hastened to inform their white constituents that they had acted to enforce new federal mandates only because they had to — because continued defiance of the law would mean the loss of valuable government contracts and, hence, white jobs.

If there is room for more than passing criticism of Minchin's book, it comes at the points where he engages, or fails to engage, the existing literature on what he calls the "interracial unionism debate." (2) In his relatively few references to this debate, Minchin sometimes seems to be reinventing the wheel — that is, he fails to acknowledge the extent to which his evidence reinforces, and his arguments coincide with, the work of other scholars. For example, he pays little attention to the scholarly work and historical role of Herbert Hill, who served as labour secretary of the NAACP for more than a quarter of a century and was a key figure in building the alliance between black workers, the NAACP, and the EEOC that Minchin discusses in such illuminating detail. Even before he left the NAACP in the early 1970s, Hill had developed a formidable scholarly reputation, and he has since become a major critic of the "new labour history." Minchin does make several brief references to Hill in his text and notes, but considering the fact that The Color of Work bears out — and validates — not only Hill's scholarly perspective but the strategies he developed as a civil rights activist, the references are few and far between.

Moreover, several studies of the steel industry, including my own, have expressed a perspective that is remarkably similar to Minchin's. In December 1986, Robert J. Norrell's pioneering article on "Caste in Steel" appeared in the Journal of American History. Although there were differences between the paper and steel industries — there was only one union in steel and it was, formally at least, "integrated" — Norrell demonstrated that the contracts negotiated by the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) served to ratify, and sometimes intensify, the patterns of racial inequality that had long prevailed in steel, and that black workers ultimately felt compelled to turn to federal agencies — and against the USWA — in their struggles for justice. My own book, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (2001), was not available to Minchin when he was writing The Color of Work, but in the early and mid-1990s I published several articles and essays that served to reinforce his evidence and conclusions—so much so that reading The Color of Work and listening, especially, to black workers' testimony therein, offered a vivid echo of familiar voices and parallel histories.

Ultimately, none of these criticisms are meant to deny that The Color of Work is an important book that merits a wide readership among labour historians and other scholars of class, race, and the American South. Timothy Minchin has already published one award-winning book, Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry (1999). The Color of Work is a worthy successor.


Bruce Nelson Dartmouth College

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