Chapter Seven: The CIO's in Dixie!

In the days gone by when they had their way,
We used to hear the bosses say:
Look away, look away, look away, union man.

But the CIO's in Dixie,
Hurray, Hurray!
The CIO is going to grow
Away down South in Dixie;
Oh ho, Oh ho, the CIO's in Dixie.
Oh ho, Oh ho, the CIO's in Dixie.

—“Look Ahead, Working Man,” ca. 1938

Skeptical of the Party's new language of unity and pronounced “Americanization,” Alabama labor leaders ignored Communist overtures for a Left-labor alliance. The 1934 strike wave still loomed large in the minds of most labor bureaucrats, and the Party's initial reluctance to alter its old tactics seemed to belie Popular Front rhetoric. As late as spring of 1935, Communist coal miners tried to mobilize rank-and-file support for a national coal strike on April 1, which had been strongly opposed by UMWA president William Mitch. The “April 1st” movement never materialized in Alabama, but two months later the UMWA officially endorsed a national bituminous coal strike. The strike led to a new Appalachian agreement between coal operators and the UMWA in most states affected, but Alabama coal operators refused to adhere to the new settlement and the strike lasted there until November 20. The miners returned to work after Governor Graves persuaded coal operators to give them 50 percent of the requested wage increase.¹

Over the next several months, Communists continued to aggravate Alabama labor leaders by supporting demonstrations and wildcat strikes on WPA projects in Walker and Jefferson counties. The ASFL, whose officers had agreed to discourage relief workers’ strikes on federal projects, felt the Party's actions were disruptive and embarrassing. Through its organ, the Labor Advocate, the Birmingham Trades Council published a bitter series of anti-Communist diatribes beginning in January 1936. One such editorial titled “The Red Menace” described Birmingham's Communists as “emissaries of the Moscow cult [who] have all of the wisdom of the serpent but little if any of the harmlessness of the dove.” In February the advisory committee of the Birmingham Trades Council conducted an investigation into alleged radical activity within the labor movement and alarmingly discovered many “Communists in Alabama with bona fide credentials from the Russian Communist Party.” With an eye toward the upcoming ASFL convention in the spring, the advisory committee appealed to local, state, and national AFL leaders to “help us fight to get rid of the Russian directed Communists.”²

The formation of the CIO in 1935—originally an opposition movement within the AFL led by John L. Lewis—fanned the flames of anti-Communism while simultaneously creating fortuitous opportunities for Communists in the labor movement. Having recently abandoned dual unionism, the Party was hesitant at first to endorse the CIO, especially since its progenitor, John L. Lewis, had long been on the CPUSA's list of archenemies. But for the sake of industrial unionism, Lewis let bygones be bygones and deftly solicited the Communists’ most idealistic and fearless organizers to launch CIO campaigns. Recognizing an opportunity to gain broader support and legitimacy from organized labor, the Central Committee proved its loyalty to Lewis by abolishing Communist shop units and shop newspapers. Moreover, they kept their Party affiliation to themselves and chose to subordinate their larger goals to the immediate needs of the labor movement.³

Lewis's alleged ties with Communists caused noticeable tension during the 1936 ASFL convention in Florence, Alabama. Federation president Robert R. Moore delivered a rousing speech calling for the removal of all Communists from the ranks of organized labor. Tensions were exacerbated, however, when Rob Hall persuaded black veteran UMWA organizer Walter Jones to introduce an anti-poll-tax resolution and a resolution demanding freedom for the Scottsboro Boys, both of which Jones heartily supported. When Yelverton Cowherd, secretary of the resolutions committee, discovered who was really responsible for the two resolutions, he delivered a vindictive polemic against the Communists, which elicited shouts of approval from delegates. Even Walter Jones joined the chorus, dismissing the resolutions he himself had introduced as “an effort to break down friendly relations between white and Negro workers.” With emotions running high, the convention swiftly passed a resolution requiring all Alabama locals to purge their ranks of Communists.⁴

Anti-Communism did not automatically translate into anti-CIO sentiment, however. When the AFL's executive board decided to expel the CIO unions in September 1936, just five months after the ASFL convention, Alabama labor leaders were reluctant to follow suit. Responding to AFL president William Green's harsh denunciations of the CIO, Birmingham labor organizer W. O. Hare felt that a split of this kind would do irreparable damage to the labor movement in Alabama. “You will understand,” Hare explained to Green, “that the labor movement in Alabama is way heavy with CIO groups, and just to jump in and start a fight right at this time would almost mean the entire destruction of the labor movement here.” William Mitch, who was forced to resign as ASFL president after the expulsion, similarly advised AFL leaders that red-baiting “will antagonize the situation and if such tactics are continued, they will be met with similar tactics.” But the warnings were never heeded. A few months after the expulsion, the Birmingham Trades Council announced that John L. Lewis “now works hand-in-glove with the disciples of revolution.” The Labor Advocate did not mince words when it described “America's Public Enemy No. 1” in a blistering editorial: “The CIO under its Communist leaders is a menace to the country. No man's job is safe; no man's investment is safe, and no single American institution, from the courts on down to the schools, is safe so long as the CIO is allowed to operate in defiance of law and order.” The Communist issue even forced CIO supporters into a position of attacking Communism in order to prove the union's loyalty. The Birmingham Southern Labor Review, a tireless advocate of the CIO, earnestly condemned Communism: “We believe that Communism, like other alien creeds, is antagonistic to America and American ideals.”⁵

The strongest condemnations of the CIO came from outside the labor movement, serving as a potent reminder that anti-Communism and anti-labor repression were inextricably linked. In Gadsden, Alabama, an industrial town in Etowah County where the Party's influence had always been negligible, vociferous anti-Communist sentiment nearly destroyed the CIO's early efforts to organize rubber workers employed by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. In 1936, a Gadsden rubber workers’ local that had originally been chartered as an AFL federal local, opted to join the URWA, a CIO affiliate, and launched a massive campaign to unionize the entire plant. The campaign began free of incident, until a wave of sit-down strikes in rubber plants in Akron, Ohio, fueled suspicions that the URWA was a Communist-dominated union. The Gadsden City Council passed several anti-Communist ordinances prohibiting racially mixed assemblies with the alleged purpose of overthrowing the government or destroying private property, and vigilantes punished a few local URWA members. Violence and community opposition prompted local organizers to invite URWA president Sherman H. Dalrymple to Gadsden to assist with the campaign. At his first public engagement in Gadsden, Dalrymple was dragged from the podium by vigilantes, beaten, and pelted with rotten eggs. A few days later, several URWA organizers were assaulted and the union's office was ransacked.⁶

After the NLRB outlawed Goodyear's employee representation plan in 1937, the Gadsden plant sponsored the Etowah Rubber Workers Organization to counter the URWA. ERWO president Jimmy Karam sought to discredit the URWA and the CIO with accusations of Communist domination. “Stalin is the head of Russia,” Karam declared, “and John L. Lewis is trying to be the same thing here. Communists are working here every day using the CIO as a cover up.”⁷ More accurately, Karam himself used the threat of Communism as a cover-up for mobilizing community opposition to the URWA. Indeed, the Party did not become directly involved in the affairs of Gadsden rubber workers until the summer of 1937, when black Communist Andy Brown visited the area to investigate these incidents of antilabor violence. Representing the Hod Carriers and Common Laborers Union of Birmingham, Brown was kidnapped and beaten after he made several inquiries into earlier beatings. Local police found Brown lying in the street and delivered him to a local doctor who insisted on knowing “if I were a CIO organizer—if I had been to Russia, and whether I had read the propaganda of the Communists.” When Ebb Cox conducted a follow-up investigation, he too was kidnapped and beaten.⁸

Under the auspices of the NCDPP, Joe Gelders organized a delegation of Alabama ministers and journalists to investigate the situation. Gelders had hoped that a committee of respected citizens could convince the people of Gadsden that the Communist issue was merely a ruse to weaken the CIO's organizing drive in the rubber industry. One of the delegates, the Reverend A. M. Freeman, agreed that anti-CIO propaganda was “a red herring, a subterfuge, to drive public attention from the methods being used by industry to strip the workers of their rights as American citizens.” The committee's efforts not only failed to penetrate the wall of anti-Communism, but Gelders himself narrowly escaped being the next victim of antilabor violence after a mob of irate citizens surrounded his hotel room. In the end, the URWA did not sign a contract with the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Gadsden until 1943.⁹

Gadsden was a unique case, however, because the vast majority of rubber workers were white and none of its organizers appeared to have been Communists or even sympathetic to the Left. In other CIO unions, where blacks constituted a majority or a large minority of the rank-and-file, charges of Communist domination were more than a red herring for union busting. As we have seen time and time again, anti-Communism was also a veil for racism. Less than two months after the Florence convention, ASFL counsel John Altman (whose firm, ironically, had been retained by the NAACP two years earlier in behalf of Willie Peterson) stated unequivocally, “Organized Labor in Alabama will not tolerate social equality between the whites and the blacks advocated by the Communists. ... It will be the ruination of Organized Labor.” Altman even accused William Mitch of practicing “what the Communists preach on Negro equality in the ranks of the United Mine Workers and Organized Labor.” Birmingham NAACP leader W. C. Patton, himself a staunch opponent of Communism, observed that the CIO's Red reputation developed because “the motives and objectives of the CIO did not concur with the philosophy of those who were Klanish.”¹⁰

The Alabama CIO had its share of Klanish bureaucrats, but their willingness to organize black workers was motivated by pragmatism, not idealism. The union's success depended on support from the black working class, the base of Birmingham's unskilled industrial labor force. Yet, in order to deflect accusations of Communism, the CIO had to somehow deemphasize the issue of race—a difficult task given the large percentage of black industrial workers, the dominant and increasingly vocal presence of blacks in the union, and the interracial prerequisites of industrial organization. The CIO organizing drive was further complicated by the fact that many of its most willing and able organizers were Communists.

The steel industry was perhaps the CIO's greatest challenge because of the interracial composition of its labor force and the vigilance with which its owners opposed unionization. Launched during the summer of 1936, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee agreed to take over the nearly defunct locals of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers. William Mitch was appointed Southern regional director of SWOC and Birmingham attorney Noel Beddow was the committee's choice for regional executive secretary. Although Beddow was not an experienced labor organizer, he had served as chief compliance officer for the NRA in Alabama. To the chagrin of SWOC administrators, steel companies frequently exploited racial divisions in an effort to weaken union solidarity. Company propaganda portrayed SWOC as a “nigger union” and, at least for the first few years of its existence, effectively kept most white workers from joining. And in addition to company-sponsored vigilante violence, municipal laws were sometimes invoked to break the union. Since SWOC prohibited segregated locals, municipal and company police often arrested black and white union officials for violating city segregation laws.¹¹

Black workers were the union's strongest adherents during the formative years. Indeed, Birmingham blacks tended to view SWOC's campaign as a crusade for racial justice: as early as January 1937, the NAACP organized several rallies in support of SWOC, and a handful of Birmingham's most prominent black clergymen offered church space for union meetings. Even AME bishop B. G. Shaw called on blacks to “enter wholeheartedly the labor unions” only months after SWOC was launched. As Rob Hall put it, for blacks the CIO drive “was like a second coming of Christ.”¹²

Once in the union, many black steel workers refused to accept a passive role in SWOC affairs, taking every opportunity to assert themselves. This active, sometimes aggressive presence of blacks caused resentment from some white rank-and-file members and provoked accusations of Communism from several corners. Recalling his early years as a SWOC organizer, Hosea Hudson recorded in his memoirs some two decades later that his local was looked upon “as Red because in that local there was a big group of [militant] Negro members that would stand up and make their [voices] heard in their meeting in the face of some of the white [supremacists].” Yet, the most vocal and “militant” contingent of black workers in SWOC were Communists. Among the leading Communists on SWOC's payroll in 1936 were Ebb Cox, who was also a local UMWA leader; Joe Howard, an active Party organizer since 1931;and C. Dave Smith, formerly of the Tarrant City Relief Workers League. Other Birmingham Party members were elected by the rank-and-file to responsible positions within SWOC. In February 1937, Hosea Hudson was elected recording secretary for Ensley Local 1489. Black Communists tended to be more vocal than other union members because most were well informed about labor issues and had had experience speaking in public and administering meetings. Black Communist Henry O. Mayfield, a leading CIO organizer in both coal and steel, remembered that black workers “trained the white workers in the struggle.” “Sometimes we did not know how to vote on a motion or make a motion. Some of the men serving on grievance committees could not read or write; but they knew what to talk about when they met with the boss, and they were ‘tough’ and would never back down. During contract time the Negro workers took the lead in working out the contracts. The few white workers in the locals were afraid to attend meetings or serve on committees.” In order to maintain smooth relations within the union, however, Communists in the CIO kept their political affiliations to themselves, although this did not stop them from developing distinguished reputations in the labor movement. As one ex-steel worker succinctly put it, “If it wasn't for Ebb Cox ... we never would have got a union.”¹³

Black workers, who constituted nearly 50 percent of Jefferson County's steel workers, had much to gain from SWOC's success. They were not only the lowest paid—earning sixteen to eighteen cents an hour in the mid-1930s—but were almost always either trough men or line men or were assigned to common tasks such as trash detail, labor gangs, or ditch digging. With few opportunities for upward mobility, black workers toiled ten to twelve hours per day in over one-hundred-degree heat, frequently amid toxic and combustible galvanizing materials. Moreover, arbitrary definitions of skill often masked racial discrimination; it was not uncommon for a black worker considered unskilled to train whites in skilled jobs, although the former would continue to receive wages commensurate to common labor. Therefore, while SWOC appeared to offer blacks a vehicle for upward mobility in the workplace, skilled white workers (at first) saw the union as a threat to their occupational status.¹⁴

For these reasons white workers were initially reluctant to join SWOC, but as winter approached, an unexpected turn of events compelled a change of heart. In October 1936, seventeen thousand employees of TCI's predominantly white company unions threatened to strike for wage increases. Small increases were granted the following month, but many of the company union members were dissatisfied with the agreement and defected to SWOC. By December, some SWOC members felt emboldened enough to test the waters. On Christmas Eve 1936, black steel workers at Birmingham's American Casting Company, led by Communists Joe Howard and C. Dave Smith, organized Alabama's first sit-down strike in history. The strike ended a few days later, after company officials agreed to a substantial settlement that included a 20 percent wage increase and time and a half for overtime.¹⁵

Despite the strike's stunning success, SWOC leadership promptly fired both Howard and Smith, ostensibly for acting without authorization. The harsh, punitive measures meted out to the two Communist leaders had more to do with the sit-down tactics than the strike itself. A few weeks after the incident, William Mitch and Noel Beddow testified before a legislative committee to discuss a bill being introduced that would have made labor unions liable for property damaged during a strike. Although Mitch opposed the bill, he used the opportunity to clearly state his position on sit-down strike tactics. “If sit-down strikes are used in Alabama,” he told the committee, “I will do everything in my power to get the workers to leave the property.” Noel Beddow, who scorned the use of sit-down tactics, testified that new legislation was not necessary since existing laws could be applied in those circumstances. SWOC's official position on sit-down tactics, however, did not seem to concern Birmingham's steel workers. On February 4, the day after Mitch and Beddow had registered their opposition to sit-down tactics, 420 black workers employed by the Birmingham Stove and Range Company shut down their machines, dropped to the shop floor, and refused to budge. Mitch and Beddow swiftly intervened and persuaded the strikers to leave the premises, although they failed to convince them to return to work. When the strike was finally settled a month later, the employees won substantial wage concessions, union recognition, and a workweek reduced from fifty-six to forty-five hours.¹⁶

In the long run, however, unauthorized strikes and sit-down tactics were rare occurrences in Birmingham's steel mills. Within a relatively short span of time, SWOC won recognition from most Alabama steel companies and gained the necessary strength to negotiate contracts without having to strike. More significantly, sixteen days after John L. Lewis had negotiated a union contract with Myron C. Taylor, chairman of the board for U.S. Steel, TCI followed suit, signing its own contract with Mitch and Beddow on March 18, 1937.¹⁷

The political climate in the South made it virtually impossible for Communists to work openly inside most CIO unions, the one exception being the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. A union with a longstanding radical tradition, Party organizers, for the most part, had operated openly within Mine Mill since 1934. Unlike the UMWA under William Mitch, Mine Mill began the CIO era in an especially weakened state, having lost a series of strikes in 1934. While most white ore miners chose the company-controlled Brotherhood of Captive Miners, Mine Mill slowly rebuilt itself almost exclusively with black support. More blacks were elected to leadership positions within Mine Mill than any other CIO union, and its policy of racial egalitarianism remained unmatched. The preponderance of blacks partly accounts for the union's progressive policies with respect to race, but the growing influence of Communists, especially after the election of Reid Robinson to international president in 1936, also helps explain the union's increasingly leftward shift. Originally an anti-Communist, Reid subsequently altered his views and moved within the Party's orbit during the Popular Front, eventually appointing Communists to local and regional leadership positions within Mine Mill.¹⁸

Sit-down strike, American Casting Company, Birmingham, 1937 (courtesy Alabama magazine)

Having disbanded its mine units and rank-and-file committees, the Party now influenced Mine Mill from top to bottom. Some of the union's most eminent leaders in Alabama were Communists, including Mike Ross, Alton Lawrence, and Van Jones—all of whom had been either elected or appointed to union posts during the Popular Front. Mine Mill officials occasionally invited local radicals to union meetings as guest speakers, openly engaged in nonunion political activity, and even sent some of their organizers to the Highlander Folk School for training.¹⁹ White ore miner Homer Wilson later testified before HUAC that he had been fully aware of the Party's role in Mine Mill, but he “felt that there wasn't any fight on between me and the Communist Party at that time. I didn't really know that the Communist Party was part of the State Department of Russia. I thought it was a group of people who were actually trying to better the working class of people in this country and so therefore I didn't fight them, but I just went along and recognized that they were there and give them the right to exist at that time.”²⁰

Wilson's testimony reveals a stark disparity between his personal experiences and HUAC's blanket description of the Party's presumed agenda. Individual Communists had impressed Wilson by their overall concern for the general welfare of working people in and out of the union. Van Jones, Mike Ross, and Alton Lawrence attempted to tackle several political issues affecting Alabama's working class—issues that would eventually become central to the CIO Political Action Committee's agenda. Late in 1938, Van Jones developed labor committees to investigate, and possibly draft, pro-labor legislation for the state of Alabama, and he continually lobbied state legislators on behalf of organized labor.²¹

Energized by new leadership, Mine Mill in Alabama called its first strike after two years of relative silence. The strike was sparked by the announcement of a company incentive plan that would have resulted in the dismissal of at least two hundred workers. Soon after miners walked off their jobs on May 31, 1936, mine operators in Bessemer locked out union members and evicted most strikers from company-owned homes. Red Mountain erupted into violence as gun battles raged between striking miners and deputies escorting members of the Brotherhood of Captive Miners. Denied WPA assistance and lacking a sufficient strike fund, Mine Mill was forced to concede defeat a few weeks later. TCI officials retaliated as soon as the strike ended, firing 160 returning ore miners without explanation.²² Nearly a year later, when circumstances seemed hopeless, the NLRB ordered TCI to reinstate the discharged miners and to pay back wages amounting to $102,050. The NLRB decision led to Mine Mill's first collective bargaining contract in Alabama, signed on October 6, 1938. Not surprisingly, the contract increased union support and attracted dozens of white workers who had defected from the Brotherhood of Captive Miners. But the union's problems were far from solved. TCI simply hired more white miners and enforced segregation practices with greater vigor, and the brotherhood adopted a brand new face in 1939 when it changed its name to the Red Ore Miners and affiliated with the AFL, thus giving it the kind of legitimacy it could not have earned as a company union. Mine Mill remained primarily black and therefore vulnerable to company tactics of racial polarization and red-baiting that would last well past World War II.²³

The Central Committee's decision to dismantle its rank-and-file committees and subordinate the Party's broader goals to the needs of industrial unionism undeniably opened doors for individual Communists, who otherwise might have been ostracized by all but a few rank-and-file militants. But in the long run, such a policy cost the Party dearly, both in numerical and political strength. As several scholars have suggested, the Party's loss of identity within the CIO hastened its eventual downfall in the labor movement after World War II. By assuming primary roles as New Deal labor bureaucrats and dutiful organizers, most Communists became indistinguishable from other labor leaders. Industrial workers, therefore, really had little incentive to become Communists and devote time and energy to an organization that merely preached the CIO's message.²⁴

The zeal with which Communists threw themselves into CIO organizing also exacted a costly toll from the Alabama cadre, especially black Party organizers. Fifty years later, Hosea Hudson declared simply that “everyone got soaked up in the union.” As Communists devoted more and more time to building the CIO, the Party's role as an autonomous organization seemed less important. Yet, Alabama Communists active in the CIO did not give up the principles that had attracted them to the Party in the first place, nor had the Party's “loss of identity” rendered it an irrelevant vehicle for black working-class opposition. As Rob Hall explained, during the CIO era the “Party became smaller,” not because blacks “abandoned the Party,” but because “the Party's work was in the CIO.”²⁵ Behind Hall's words lay a very complicated story that has as much to do with the peculiar nature of Southern black working-class radicalism and the CIO's social character as anything else, including the Party's own failings.

Black Birmingham Communists, for the most part, did not (and often could not) become pure union bureaucrats in the way that their comrades had in Northern and Western CIO unions. Leaders of the Birmingham Industrial Union Council were still far more conservative compared with the rest of the country, particularly on issues related to racial equality. (When Communists presented resolutions at the first CIO convention in Birmingham endorsing federal antilynching legislation and urging the state of Alabama to drop the case against the Scottsboro defendants, both resolutions were summarily rejected by the CIO executive council.) In this respect, although black Communists had to hide their political affiliations, they nevertheless remained outspoken rebels on racial issues. And because the CIO was, by necessity, an interracial movement whose most supportive base consisted of African-Americans, individual Communists secured considerable rank-and-file support for their agenda. Both Mine Mill and the UMWA, for example, launched mass voter registration drives in an effort to increase black and poor white political participation, and several Mine Mill locals organized voter registration workshops that were intended to inform union members of their legal and constitutional rights.²⁶

The CIO's stand on these issues and the realization that black workers could exercise some power within their unions, especially Mine Mill, SWOC, and UMWA, did more to wed Communists to the labor movement than Party directives. Indeed, for many black radicals the CIO was just another Communist auxiliary, leading some Communists and ex-ILD militants to confuse union meetings with Party meetings. Hosea Hudson remembers that, “a lot of these members who weren't developed, went in the CIO and the white folks talking to members in the CIO like we was talking to them in the Party. And they thought they was Party people, talking about ‘Comrades!’ A whole lot exposed themselves. . . . These red-baiters and Ku Kluxers exposed a whole lot of our people.”²⁷

The CIO's progressive agenda as well as its strength relative to the CP probably convinced many radicals to devote all of their time to union work. But most veteran black Communists who also held leadership positions in the labor movement did not separate CIO work from Party work. Individuals such as Hudson, Henry O. Mayfield, and Andy Brown urged union members to join the anti-poll-tax campaign, register to vote, read the New South and the Daily Worker, and attend nonunion political functions. On the other hand, some Birmingham Communist leaders and many more rank-and-file activists felt Party work and union work were irreconcilable. Some very capable Communist organizers quit the Party because the CIO, in their opinion, offered better opportunities for personal and community advancement. Ebb Cox, for example, left the CP almost as soon as he had become Birmingham's highest-ranking black CIO organizer, and his newly acquired role as the labor movement's leading black voice (he even had his own column in the CIO News Digest titled “Negroes in the Labor Movement”) compelled him to adopt a cool stance toward the Communist Party. Occasionally he endorsed CP positions on social and political issues, but he clearly avoided taking stands that would jeopardize his status. For Cox, the CIO was not only more effective as a vehicle for social contestation, but it fulfilled personal aspirations that would have been out of his reach had he stayed in the Party.²⁸

The CIO appealed to the Party's rank-and-file in other ways as well. Union organizers escaped the kind of brutal repression that had threatened the lives of Communists years earlier, and CIO members—especially whites—did not have to pay the dear price of social ostracism that continued to be exacted from Party members. But perhaps the greatest inducement, particularly for black working people, was the CIO's unique social and cultural environment—a milieu that blacks themselves helped to create. Black workers transformed SWOC and Mine Mill at the grass roots in the same way they had altered the Communist Party during the early 1930s, but the impact was far greater in the industrial labor movement. The CIO's most radical industrial union, Mine Mill, absorbed the very black religious traditions that had informed many Alabama Communists. In the course of an average meeting, the predominantly black locals would pile into a sympathetic black church and preface union business with a religious hymn, slightly altered to fit the occasion (“Bill Mitch is Our Leader / We Shall Not Be Moved”). The religious spirit spilled over into speeches and discussions, as is evident in the following description of a Mine Mill meeting in Bessemer:

It was an “open meeting,” and Brother Harris (formerly minister) was there to preach a sermon on the goodness of unions and why people ought to join them. His was the shouting, epigrammatic style of the evangelist. If you substitute “God” for “union,” “devil” for “employer” and “hell” for “unorganized” you would have had a rousing sermon. The illustrations, minus their profanity, might well have been used to show the power and goodness of God instead of the union. And his “why not join” was so much in the church tone, I was afraid he was going to have us sing the hymn of invitation.

During the CIO's formative years, Mine Mill members forced several company preachers out of business, hired their own pastors, and built their own churches, and a few men of the cloth held responsible positions as union organizers, many of whom worked closely with known Communists.²⁹

Like the Party, the CIO in Birmingham was enveloped by the black community's tradition of song. “We'd sing at the union meetings,” recalled Bessemer iron ore worker Anderson Underwood, “we'd just be singing at the union. There's just be a crowd of folks there, and we'd just sing and have a big time.” Rooted in the same gospel past that begat Party songs such as “The Scottsboro Song” and “We Got A Stone,” CIO members added familiar spirituals such as “Hold the Fort” and “We Shall Not Be Moved” to the union's vast repertoire, frequently altering the lyrics. During the late 1930s, SWOC even had its own labor vocal group known as the Bessemer Big Four Quartet. Made up of black gospel singers who had sung with the West Highland Jubilee Singers during the 1920s, the Bessemer Big Four Quartet performed at union meetings and was heard occasionally on local radio broadcasts.³⁰

Singing eventually became the Alabama CIO's cultural cornerstone, and members from all over the state were encouraged to articulate the union's message through song. A woman who sat on the union label committee of the Birmingham Industrial Union Council put new lyrics to the hymn “Near the Cross” and came up with “The CIO Workers Song.” One stanza expressed both the optimism and the importance of solidarity in the struggle to improve conditions:

Strength and power, it will mean
to all that join the union.
Stand with the masses great and
strong, say I joined the CIO.
CIO, CIO, That is the organization,
Watch the conditions all around
Since we joined the union. . . .³¹

On the picket lines CIO organizers added lyrics to simple nursery rhymes or popular songs in order to incorporate as many people as possible into the social act of singing, thus constructing a sense of solidarity that could not have been generated simply by holding signs or marching in circles. Ironically, Southern labor activists took a few songs traditionally deemed racist or distasteful to blacks and transformed them into radical union songs. “Dixie” was reborn as “Look Ahead, Working Man”:

Now we're all together in the CIO
They cannot keep our wages low,
Look ahead, look ahead, look ahead, Union man.
For the time has come when we take our stand,
With union men throughout the land,
Look ahead, look ahead, look ahead, Union man.³²

The Communist Party's national and international connections undoubtedly contributed songs such as “Internationale,” “Solidarity Forever,” and countless others to its locally derived musical repertoire. The same can be said for the CIO. The links between union locals and the emphasis on national and international solidarity allowed for greater cultural exchange. One song based on the melody of “Tah Rah Rah Boom Dee Ay” migrated from the North and West and eventually entered the red ore mines of Birmingham:

Tah rah rah boom dee ay
Ain't got a word to say
He chizzled down my pay,
then took my job away.
Boom went the boom one day.
It made a noise that way.
I wish that I'd be wise.
Next time I'll organize.³³

The Highlander Folk School was perhaps the CIO's richest source for Southern labor songs. The school's educators not only trained labor organizers from across the South but collected, disseminated, and often wrote labor songs. The vast majority of these songs were unaltered spirituals such as “Couldn't Hear Nobody Pray” and “Come on to the Buryin’,” but radicalized hymns were quite common. “Stand up For Jesus” served as the melody for Ethel Comer's “Stand Up! Ye Workers,” a lively tune reminiscent of the IWW:

Arise! Arise! Ye toilers,
The strife will not be long;
This day the noise of battle
The next the victor's song.
All ye that slave for wages
Stand up and break your chains!
Unite in ONE BIG UNION
You've got a world to gain!³⁴

In essence, the CIO in Birmingham was not just another federation of labor organizations. Unions such as SWOC, Mine Mill, and the UMWA evolved during their formative years as broad-based social movements, enriched with Southern cultural traditions and fortified by an unusually pronounced civil rights agenda. Ironically, although Communists helped pave the way for such a movement, a somewhat radicalized CIO negatively affected the continued growth of the Party in Birmingham. As the Popular Front tended to deemphasize its radical agenda, the old Alabama Third Period militancy was partly reborn again within the ranks of the CIO. Of course, when we compare their broader goals and strategies, the Communists remained to the left of CIO leadership, but the lines between the two were becoming increasingly blurred. Yet, the CIO offered activists strength in numbers, security, interracial unity, and legitimacy—goals that Alabama Communists had hoped to achieve through the Popular Front. It should not be surprising, therefore, that black Communists—regardless of their level of dedication to the Party—devoted more time and energy to the CIO, thus contributing to the decline in black participation in the Party. Most Birmingham blacks who left the Party during the Popular Front were not disillusioned with the goals or ideals of the movement; they simply found a better vehicle through which to realize these goals. For some black working people, the CIO was the first real alternative to the Communist Party; for others the CIO became the Party.

Nevertheless, Third Period radicalism did not die entirely, nor did the CIO consume the energies of every Alabama radical. Indeed, as local Communist leaders sought to befriend Southern liberals or become labor bureaucrats, the spirit of the underground stubbornly persisted in the rebellions of WPA workers and in the protracted struggles of the SCU.