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The Labor Movement in the U.S. South: Unions and Union Leaders

Published Resources

Archival Resources

Southern Tenant Farmers' Union Records, 1934-1991
The Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, organized at Poinsett County, Ark., in 1934, was especially active in Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas. The Union spread into the southeastern states and to California, affiliating off and on with larger national labor federations, and maintaining headquarters at Memphis, Tenn., or, from 1948 to 1960, at Washington, D.C. It has become successively the National Agricultural Workers Union and the Agricultural and Allied Workers Union.

Textile Workers Union of America. South Region Records
In 1901, the United Textile Workers of America (UTW), was formed as an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In 1937, the Committee for Industrial Organization (later the Congress of Industrial Organizations or CIO) formed the Textile Workers Organizing Committee (TWOC). In 1939, locals from the TWOC and the UTW merged to form the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA). The TWUA led numerous organizing campaigns in the union-resistant South, desiring to help textile workers achieve higher wages, health insurance, and other benefits, and to insure fair labor practices. In 1976, the TWUA merged with another textile union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, to form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), which was affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

Daniel Augustus Powell Papers
Daniel A. Powell was born on 29 July 1911 in Wilson, N.C. In 1945, he became the Southern Director of the Political Action Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. When the CIO merged with the American Federation of Labor in 1955, the AFL's League for Labor Education joined with the CIO's PAC to become the Committee on Political Education (COPE). Powell then became director of COPE Region 5, roughly the same territory he had covered for PAC. Powell served in that position until his death on 6 August 1983.

Clyde Johnson Papers
Clyde Johnson was a union organizer, carpenter, and writer. The collection documents his involvement with various unions, most affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and his research into several industries that have an impact on organized labor, especially housing, construction, timber, and logging. Of note are materials related to organizing campaigns and strikes conducted by Johnson for the Sharecroppers' Union (SCU) in Alabama and Louisiana, 1935-1937; the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) in Colorado and Texas, 1937-1941; the Oil Workers' International Union in Texas, especially in Baytown, 1941-1943; United Electrical Local 610, 1947; University of California at Berkeley, 1967-1968; and Johnson's term as the business agent for United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, Local 550, Oakland, Calif., 1961-1966.

Jim Wrenn Papers
Jim Wrenn is a white labor organizer, civil rights activist and researcher. The Jim Wrenn Papers, 1977-2018, document labor organizing, a sanitation workers strike, community building, civil rights struggles, and Martin Luther King Day celebrations in Nash and Edgecombe Counties, N.C. Organizations include the People's Coalition for Justice, the Consolidated Diesel Company Workers Unity Committee, the Carolina Auto, Aerospace & Machine Workers Union--UE 150, the Phoenix Historical Society, Inc., and the Bloomer Hill Community Center in Whitakers, N.C. Materials include newsletters, video recordings, speeches, writings, and digitized scrapbooks of photographs, clippings, and news releases.

North Carolina Federation of Teachers Records
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) was founded in 1916 in Chicago, Ill. It was affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, which merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955 to form the AFL-CIO. The North Carolina Federation of Teachers (NCFT), also known as the American Federation of Teachers - North Carolina, was formed in the mid-1970s as the state affiliate of the AFT. It is distinguished from its main rival organization, the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE), which is affiliated with the National Education Association (NEA), in that it only represents teachers and other school-related personnel who do not serve in a supervisory capacity.

International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, Local 182 (Hickory, N.C.) Records
In 1958, a group of workers at the General Electric Company plant in Hickory, N.C., proposed forming a labor union to improve working conditions and rates of pay. Although met by strong opposition, the workers won an election to organize. In 1961, the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (IUE), CIO, chartered Local 182, an affiliate of IUE District 1, to serve the plant. In 1997, General Electric determined that the Hickory factory was no longer profitable, shut it down, and moved the work to Monterrey, Mexico. Records, 1961-1997, of the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, Local 182 (Hickory, N.C.), document the labor union's political, business, and social services to electric industry workers at the Hickory, N.C., General Electric Company plant.

"Union Justice Now!" Poster

Poster which reads "Union Justice Now!""Union Justice Now!" poster from the 1968 Sanitation Workers Strike in Memphis, Tenn., which Martin Luther King Jr. was leading at the time of his assassination in April 1968.

From the Memphis (Tenn.) Sanitation Workers Strike Placards (#05748), Southern Historical Collection.