Symposium on Daniel Letwin: the Challenge of Interracial Unionism*

Labor History, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2000 Symposium on Daniel Letwin: The Challenge of Interracial Unionism* (This symposium was conceived and organized by Alex Lichtenstein) Exploring the Local World of Interracialism ALEX LICHTENSTEIN** One of the more compelling moments of my undergraduate days was attending David Montgomery’s lecture on 19th-century coal miners (for many would-be lefties, auditing Montgomery’s lectures was de rigueur). With his characteristic exhortatory cadences, Professor Montgomery made us know that no color line existed underground, for in the dangerous dark of a coal mine, black and white miners depended on one another for their very ¼ livesÐ hmm! It is a testament to Montgomery that one of his graduate students, Daniel Letwin, could produce a book that indicates how much more complex the reality was for black and white miners alike in the Jim Crow South. Though the work process certainly shaped the terms of both interracial camaraderie and con¯ ict in the mines, so too did diverse factors above ground: the social structure of community in coal-mining camps, the prevailing ethic of race relations in the post-Reconstruction South, the reigning political economy, the power of capital to recruit and control labor, including convicts, and even the role of the federal state in labor relations. In The Challenge of Interracial Unionism Letwin sets himself a dif® cult taskÐ not just to demonstrate the existence of interracial cooperation among coal miners in Alabama’ s Birmingham District (others have done that) nor to chart the persistence of racial antagonism among the same workers (others have done that as well), but to strike a balance between these poles. Indeed, it might be noted at the outset that in the last 30 years no single postbellum Southern industrial community has been as extensively studied or documented as the Birmingham District, the coal and iron center of northeast Alabama. Of course there is the pioneering work of Paul Worthman (noted in Alexander Saxton’s symposium contribution below), and the by now infamous and increasingly stale debate provoked by Herbert Hill’s dissection of Herbert Gutman’s initial exploration of the Alabama United Mine Workers’ (UMW) interracialism, carried on by each of their partisans, a debate summarized and expanded by Letwin with admirable even-handedness. Other articles and books have examined the District’ s urban history, detailed the use of convict labor, charted the rise and fall of a single *The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878± 1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). **Alex Lichtenstein is Associate Professor of History at Florida International University in Miami, and author of Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (1996). 0023-656X print/1469± 9702 online/00/010063± 28 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of The Tamiment Institute 64 A. Lichtenstein industrial concern, covered race relations among iron and steel workers, unearthed the history of the local Communist party, and looked at the Civil Rights movement.1 Thus the contribution of The Challenge of Interracialism to this literature can be weighed on two scales: what new insights does it bring to the study of the Birmingham District, and what, if any, questions does it leave for future scholars to pose? The empirical heart of Letwin’s book looks at coal miners’ labor organizations and political activities in four eras: those characterized, ® rst, by the rise of the Greenback Labor Party and the Knights of Labor, and then the brief ¯ are of Populism, followed by the crystallization of segregation, and ® nally World War I. Previous accounts of Alabama’ s coal miners considered one, or at most two of these periods. Letwin’s broad chronological scope allows him to demonstrate the persistence of an interracial impulse among organized miners, one that arose before the advent of the UMW and lasted for over three decades (he leaves to others to explore its resurgence in the 1930s). Most signi® cantly, he argues that changing external circumstances rather than ª an internal collapse of interracialismº (188) conditioned the success or failure of this impulse at particular conjunctures. This approach allows Letwin to contrast the pre- and post-Jim Crow eras. With the Greenback-Labor and People’s parties as vehicles, black and white miners brought their grievances to the ballot box as well as the picket line. But with the triumph of white supremacy in Alabama, and black disfranchisement, came the de- politicization of the miners’ interracial efforts. Also highly original is Letwin’s recognition that the ª Birmingham Districtº actually consisted of congeries of communities, ranging from a major urban area to isolated rural coal towns. Many scholars, myself included, have inaccurately spoken of the ª Birmingham Districtº in one breath as if it constituted a single, undifferentiated entity, rather than an area encompassing several counties in northeast Alabama. Although we still could learn more about how race relations differed in, say, a company town in Walker county, and a working-class suburb of Birmingham proper, like Pratt City, Letwin has pointed the way here to a new and signi® cant set of variables. Similarly, his work reminds us that the structure and actions of capital profoundly in¯ uenced the possibilities of interracialism, but there remain unanswered questions about the com- parative racial policies of smaller commercial coal operators mining for the open market 1Actually, the documentation of Birmingham’ s industrial history began at its apogee, with Ethel Armes, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama (Birmingham, 1910). For representative examples of the historiography of race and labor relations in Birmingham see Paul B. Worthman, ª Black Workers and Labor Unions in Birmingham, Alabama, 1897± 1904,º Labor History, 10 (1969), 375± 407; Herbert G. Gutman, ª The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America,º in Julius Jacobson, ed., The Negro and the American Labor Movement (Garden City: Anchor, 1968), 49± 127; Herbert Hill, ª Myth-Making as Labor History: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America,º International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2 (1988), 132± 200; Carl V. Harris, Political Power in Birmingham, 1871± 1921 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977); Alex Lichtenstein, ª `Through the Rugged Gates of the Penitentiary’: Convict Labor and Southern Coal, 1870± 1900,º in Melvyn Stokes and Rick Halpern, eds., Race and Class in the American South Since 1890 (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 3± 42; Robert David Ward and William Warren Rogers, Convicts, Coal, and the Banner Mine Tragedy (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1987); W. David Lewis, Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District: An Industrial Epic (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1994); Henry M. McKiven, Jr., Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama,1875± 1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Robert J. Norrell, ª Caste in Steel: Jim Crow Careers in Birmingham, Alabama,º Journal of American History, 73 (1986), 669± 694; Judith Stein, ª Southern Workers in National Unions: Birmingham Steelworkers, 1936± 1951,º in Robert Zieger, ed., Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 183± 222; Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Glenn Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Symposium on Daniel Letwin 65 FIG. 1. Dust Jacket from Daniel Letwin’s book The Challenge of Interracial Unionism, published by The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. 66 A. Lichtenstein and the vertically integrated ª captiveº coal mines of corporations like Tennessee Coal and Iron, companies that confronted the ª labor questionº under very different circumstances. Analytically, Letwin moves the debate about interracialism among southern coal miners forward several giant steps with a host of sharp and novel insights that, for once, actually attempt to explain the sources of ª collaboration between the racesº (134), as he carefully calls it, rather than just documentÐ or refuteÐ its very existence. Most compelling, to my mind, is his insistence that the line between legitimate and illegit- imate miners did not distinguish between black and white so much as between insiders and outsiders. Thus striking miners of both races found common cause in the belittle- ment of scabs, black and white. The other demarcation was between free and convict miners, the latter de® ned by their unfree status rather than their race (even though almost all of them were African-American). Indeed, given its status as an exceptional feature of the Birmingham District’s labor force, the importance of convict labor as a catalyst for interracial solidarity cannot be overstated. Although less so here than in his 1995 Journal of Southern History article,2 Letwin also argues that the highly masculine world of coal mining proved conducive to interracialism. The very fragility of the bridge across the color line became clear, he contends, when enemies of the union invested the bugaboo of ª social equalityº with the threat of black± white interaction across the gender line, as they did to defeat the strike of 1908, extinguishing the UMW in the Alabama coal® elds for nearly a decade. Finally, Letwin contends that Alabama coal mining developed in such a way that blacks and whites secured a foothold in the labor force simultaneously, making racial cooperation a possibility by creating an ª insiderº culture of established and experienced miners. Is this, then, the last word on interracialism among Alabama miners? Hardly. Given the impressiveness of Letwin’s research, it seems unlikely that anyone will discover any new documents (although Nancy MacLean’s comment below suggests otherwise), but Letwin’s multilayered explanatory model provokes a set of new questions, some of which I have already suggested.

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