The Labor Movement in the U.S. South: "Laborlore"

Laborlore is a concept developed by folklorist and union organizer Archie Green. It refers to the expressive culture, customs, and rituals of laborers which help form group identity, including: work songs and vernacular music, stories, occupational language, crafts, and other working-class practices. Archie Green's extensive collection of papers is housed in the Southern Folklife Collection in the UNC Chapel Hill Library.

Archie Green Papers
Archie Green (1917-2009), a white folklorist, labor historian, and public sector advocate, graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1939 and then worked in San Francisco shipyards, served in the United States Navy in World War II, and was active in several labor organizations. He earned an M.L.S. degree from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. Green joined the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1960, where he was librarian and later served also as an instructor in the English Department until 1972. In 1973, Green took on a creative role at the Labor Studies Center in Washington, D.C., in part assisting with the Smithsonian Institution's Festival of American Folklife and labor participation in the Bicentennial celebrations. At the same time, he produced sound recordings, conducted fieldwork, and wrote extensively. He was active in the John Edwards Memorial Foundation and in the movement to establish the Center for American Folklife (1976). Green retired from the University of Texas at Austin in the early 1980s to San Francisco, Calif., where he continued to work collaboratively with many individuals and institutions dedicated to the study of folklore and the preservation of folklife. Archie Green died in March 2009. The collection includes correspondence, subject files, research materials, writings, photographs, audio recordings, moving images, and other materials pertaining chiefly to Green's professional activities, circa 1955-2008. Materials reflect Green's interests in the study of folklore; occupational folklore, with special emphasis on songs relating to textile workers, railroad workers, coal miners, and cowboys; labor history, especially the 1919 riot in Centralia, Wash.; early country (hillbilly) music; sound recording archives; folk musicians; and production and collection of sound recordings. There are also materials relating to Green's research and teaching activities and participation in professional associations, music and folklore festivals, and the faculty labor union at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Guy and Candie Carawan Collection
Candie Anderson and Guy Carawan, a white couple married since 1960, met as a result of their mutual involvement in the civil rights movement. The Carawans have been involved in the work of the Highlander Research and Education Center (formerly the Highlander Folk School) in Tennessee, an institution that supports and provides educational resources for progressive social and political causes in the South. The original deposit of materials is chiefly audio tapes and corresponding field notes that reflect the Carawans' efforts to document the cultures of various groups of people in the South and elsewhere, beginning in the early 1960s. Included are historically significant speeches, sermons, and musical performances recorded during major civil rights demonstrations and conferences in Nashville, Birmingham, Atlanta, and other southern cities; field recordings of worship meetings, songs, stories, and recollections from Johns Island, S.C., that document the African American heritage of the rural South Carolina Low Country; recordings of interviews with residents of south-central Appalachia concerning problems associated with coal mining and rural poverty; recordings of performances by Appalachian musicians, among them Hazel Dickens; recordings of remarks and musical performances by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax; a discussion between Guy Carawan and Studs Terkel; recordings of performances by Mayne Smith and Martin Mull; and recordings of Latin-American, Celtic, Australian, and Hungarian vernacular music. Corresponding field notes include song lists, transcripts, box lists, memos, and photocopies of original audio housing.

Si Kahn Collection
Si Kahn (1944- ) is a white folk singer and songwriter, community and labor organizer, civil rights and social justice activist, and the founder and retired executive director of Grassroots Leadership. The collection contains songbooks and song sheets with original lyrics; organizational records; printed items and publications; name and subject files; newspaper clippings; t-shirts, pin back buttons, and posters; and audio and video recordings. Organizations represented in the collection include Save Our Cumberland Mountains, United Mine Workers of America, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, and AFL-CIO. Materials reflect Kahn's musical career and his work and interests in student activism, unionism, community organizing, voting rights, health and safety of textile workers and coal miners, and environmental justice. Union materials document his work on the 1970s campaign to organize in J.P. Stevens textile plants across the South and the 1974 Brookside coal miners' strike in Harlan County, Ky. Audio and video recordings consist of interviews, musical performances, recorded folk music, lectures, and other events recorded or collected by Si Kahn, as well as demos, masters, work tapes, and live recordings of Si Kahn.

Student Action with Farmworkers Collection
The collection contains documentary projects and corresponding fieldwork created between 1999 and 2003 by college students who completed Into the Fields internships conducted in North Carolina and South Carolina by Student Action with Farmworkers, a nonprofit organization. Oral history interviews, photographs, videos, audio recordings, and publications document the life stories and experiences of farmworkers, many of whom migrated from Mexico and Central America to the southeastern United States. Topics explored in the students' documentary projects include farmworkers' foodways, oral literature and storytelling, folklore, religious beliefs and practices, holiday traditions and celebrations, life in migrant worker camps, the labor movement, and traditional arts, crafts, music, and dance. Many items in the collection including transcriptions of oral history interviews are in Spanish.

Myra Page Papers
Writer, union activist, and communist Dorothy Markey (nee Dorothy Page Gary) was born in Newport News, Va., in 1897. Under the name Myra Page, Markey was an active political journalist and writer in the 1930s. In the early 1940s, she taught writing at the Writers' School sponsored by the League of American Writers in New York City. During the 1950s and 1960s, she wrote and published the juvenile biographies. Dorothy Markey died in 1993.

Highlander Research and Education Center's Audiovisual Materials
Audiovisual materials created and compiled by the Highlander Research and Education Center, formerly known as the Highlander Folk School, a social justice leadership training school and cultural center located outside of Knoxville, Tenn. Highlander was founded in 1932 by white activists and educators, Myles Horton, Don West, Jim Dombrowski, and others as an adult education center based on the principle of empowerment. In the 1930s, Myles Horton and other Highlander members worked towards mobilizing labor unions across the southern United States, and later in the 1950s worked closely with civil rights leaders to host workshops and training sessions, laying the groundwork for many of the movement's initiatives, including the Montgomery bus boycott, the Citizenship Schools, and the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Cover of Working Women’s Music: The Songs and Struggles of Women in the Cotton Mills, Textile Plants and Needle Trades by Evelyn Alloy from the Irwin Silber Papers, Southern Folklife Collection, UNC Chapel Hill.