The Labor Movement in the U.S. South: Worker Education, Advocacy & Labor Law

Harriet Herring Papers
Harriet Herring was a research associate at the Institute for Research in Social Science and professor in the Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The collection includes Herring's writings on labor strikes in Southern cotton mills, life in mill villages in North Carolina, welfare work in mill villages, part-time farming by mill workers, tax support for public schools, industrial relations, and various other facets of Southern industrialization.

The Library also preserves many other materials by or about Harriet Herring, such as oral histories, articles and publications, and newspaper clippings.

Delta and Providence Cooperative Farms Papers
Delta Cooperative Farm, started in 1936 in the community of Hillhouse (later called Rochdale) in Bolivar County, Miss., and Providence Cooperative Farm, started in 1939 near Cruger in Holmes County, Miss., were attempts by Cooperative Farms, Inc., a philanthropically supported corporation, to help southern agricultural laborers out of their economic plight. The cooperatives were organized around four principles: efficiency in production and economy in finance through the cooperative principle, participation in building a socialized economy of abundance, inter-racial justice, and realistic religion as a social dynamic. To these ends, the Delta and Providence cooperatives were to pay African Americans and whites equal wages for work and provided social and other services, most of which were open to neighboring communities.

Bob Hall Papers
Bob Hall (1944-) is a white activist in progressive politics in North Carolina since the early 1970s. The collection documents his investigative research and grassroots organizing work for the Institute for Southern Studies, a nonprofit research and media center dedicated to economic and social justice issues in the South. Topics include North Carolina politics; environmental and economic justice; social change; voting rights; campaign finance and election reform; landfills and hazardous waste dumps in Warren County, N.C.; pollution; farmworker safety, hog farming, poultry farming, and the Hamlet poultry plant fire in 1991; the 1988 labor strike at the Schlage Lock plant in Rocky Mount; the 1974 coalminers strike in Harlan County, Ky.; utility rates; military bases in the South; labor unions, labor strikes, and union-busting; workplace health and safety; government accountability; and several major projects initiated by the Institute, including the North Carolina Alliance for Democracy (NCAD), Democracy South, and the Foundation for Community Encouragement (FCE).

Howard Kester Papers
Howard Anderson Kester was a theologian, educator, and administrator active in Christian movements relating to race relations, pacifism, and economic reform in the South from the 1920s until his retirement in 1970. The collection contains papers related to labor topics, such as: sharecroppers, unions and strikes, and the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union.

Daniel H. Pollitt Papers
Daniel Hubbard Pollitt (1921-2010) was a law professor, civil liberties lawyer, progressive activist, and advocate and defender of civil liberties and civil rights. The collection documents Pollitt's legal career and his scholarly and public service interests and activities. Includes files on employment discrimination; government employee strikes; the reorganization of the National Labor Relations Board, migrant workers, and the Brookside Mine Strike in Harlan County, Ky., among many other topics.

William P. Murphy Papers
William Murphy, a white law professor, was on the law school faculty at the universities of Mississippi, Missouri, and North Carolina. He also worked as an independent labor arbitrator. The William P. Murphy Papers document his work as both a law school professor and as a labor arbitrator. Materials include correspondence, speeches, printed materials, and arbitration case descriptions and background materials. Topics of note include labor law, arbitration, the National Academy of Arbitrators, law school education, campus unrest over the Vietnam War, resistance to Brown v. Board of Education in Mississippi, and a fair housing ordinance in Columbia, Missouri.

Coal Employment Project brochures, from the Neil McBride Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Chapel Hill.

The Rare Book Collection in the Wilson Special Collections Library preserves many labor-related reports and other publications within its Southern Pamphlet Collection.

The North Carolina Collection has many government reports related to labor law, workforce development, and public policy related to employment in North Carolina.