Business, Labor and Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century Charlotte
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University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2014 "A Good Place to Make Money": Business, Labor and Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century Charlotte Julia Gunn University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Gunn, Julia, ""A Good Place to Make Money": Business, Labor and Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century Charlotte" (2014). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1299. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1299 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1299 For more information, please contact [email protected]. "A Good Place to Make Money": Business, Labor and Civil Rights in Twentieth- Century Charlotte Abstract North Carolina, long regarded as among the most politically progressive states in the American South, has also maintained the lowest union membership rate in the nation. This dissertation attempts to explain this paradox by examining civil rights, labor, and the politics of economic development in Charlotte--a city that would eventually become the nation's second largest banking center after New York. In recent years, civil rights scholarship has focused increased attention on the movement's emphasis on economic justice. At the same time, labor and business historians have become interested in the role of business interest groups in undermining organized labor and the New Deal order. This dissertation bridges these two often-divergent bodies of scholarship by looking at public employee unionism, the politics of racial moderation, and the development of pro-business governance in the urban South. Public employees became the face of the American labor movement in the second half of the twentieth century, yet surprisingly little has been written on them--an oversight especially pronounced in literature on the Sunbelt. However, the fates of public and private sector workers were deeply intertwined and telling the story of one without the other leaves an incomplete narrative of post-World War II labor history. One only has to examine the primary opponents of public sector unions--businessmen and their organizations--to appreciate that even if public workers were not waging war against capitalism, capitalists were nonetheless waging war against the public sector. Drawing on labor union records, government documents, court cases, personal papers, newspapers and oral histories, this dissertation argues that the same politics of moderation that stymied civil rights activism in North Carolina became an indispensable tool for undermining and neutralizing organized labor and worker protest in Charlotte. Through the lens of public employee unions and the campaigns waged against them, this study traces the evolution of racially moderate, anti-union politics that have fundamentally reshaped the American political landscape. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group History First Advisor Thomas J. Sugrue Keywords Anti-unionism, Charlotte, Organized labor, Public workers, Sunbelt, Urban History Subject Categories United States History This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1299 “A GOOD PLACE TO MAKE MONEY”: BUSINESS, LABOR, AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHARLOTTE Julia Elizabeth Gunn A DISSERTATION in History Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2014 Supervisor of Dissertation Thomas J. Sugrue, Professor of History Graduate Group Chairperson Ben Nathans, Professor of History Dissertation Committee Kathy Peiss, Professor of History Bryant Simon, Professor of History Adolph Reed, Professor of Political Science “A GOOD PLACE TO MAKE MONEY”: BUSINESS, LABOR, AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHARLOTTE COPYRIGHT 2014 Julia Elizabeth Gunn This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ny-sa/2.0/ For my parents iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS During my time at the University of Pennsylvania, I have received tremendous generosity and support. First and foremost, I would like to thank the University of Pennsylvania for funding my studies through the Walter Annenberg Fellowship, a Critical Writing fellowship, and two summer dissertation research fellowships. I was also fortunate to receive external funding from the North Caroliniana Society, the Southern Historical Collection, and the German Historical Institute, which introduced me to a dynamic and engaging group of scholars in Washington, D.C. Numerous archivists and librarians also helped facilitate my research. At the J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections at UNC Charlotte, Marilyn Schuster deserves special recognition for her willingness to answer an unending stream of emails and help me tackle research questions from afar. At the Charlotte-Mecklenburg downtown library, the assistance of Tom Cole and other librarians proved indispensible. Also thanks to the staffs of the Southern Labor Archives, the Rubenstein Library and Historical Archives, the North Carolina State Archives, and the National Archives for Black Women’s History. Many thanks are also due to Joan Plonski for all that she does as department coordinator. Like many histories of the recent past, oral histories gave this project necessary depth and I am indebted to those who allowed me to interview them for this project. I would especially like to thank Tom Brewer and Lee Abernethy for facilitating interviews with some of the retirees of Local 660, Charlotte’s firefighters union. Thanks also to Bob Middleton, Bob Summey, Jim Black, Shane Nantz, and Lee Abernethy for sharing their recollections of the union’s history. I am grateful to Eileen Hanson-Kelly who shared her experiences working as a union organizer in Charlotte and directed me to a promising cache of unprocessed archival holdings in Atlanta. As I traveled to and from North Carolina visiting archives, I also incurred many debts along the way. Harriet and D.G. Martin graciously welcomed me into their home in Chapel Hill on numerous occasions, as did the Cordles and the Eakers in Charlotte. A special thanks to Dustin Taylor, who helped me track down legal documents and names of people involved in the Atkins case. Over the course of my academic career, I have had many wonderful teachers. In high school, Lou Gallo’s European History class first sparked my interest in studying the past. At Washington University, I had the good fortune of crossing paths with some phenomenal professors who were both model mentors and scholars. In particular, I would like to thank Lester Spence, Paula Lupkin, Garrett Duncan, Marvin Cummins, and Henry Berger. I am particularly grateful to Joseph Heathcott, who first introduced me to urban history and whose generosity continued in the years after I left his classroom. Joseph helped me navigate the daunting graduate school application process while simultaneously introducing me to some of St. Louis’ best coffee shops and Vietnamese food. The New School is lucky to have him. I would also like to express my gratitude to the many exceptional professors in the Penn history department. My greatest debt is to my advisor, Tom Sugrue. My dissertation in no way resembles what I originally proposed, but with Tom’s steady guidance and iv encouragement, I hope that I have molded it into something more interesting. I have also been fortunate to work with Kathy Peiss, whose careful reading and thorough comments have improved my work immensely. Adolph Reed and Bryant Simon came late in the game, but at a crucial juncture. In addition to being a brilliant scholar, Adolph lived in North Carolina and worked with some of the people I write about, enabling him both to save me from numerous mistakes and to point me in more interesting directions. Bryant Simon was generous enough to lend his Southern History expertise to the project, despite being immersed at the time in all things Taney Dragons. I also want to express my gratitude to Michael Katz, who passed away the week of my dissertation defense. Michael’s incisive comments during the early stages of this project unquestionably changed it for the better. Michael’s brilliance was only matched by the generosity he showed toward his students; he set the bar high for aspiring historians and will be missed. Scholars outside of Penn also generously offered constructive feedback on this dissertation. Special thanks to Charlotte experts Steve Smith and Tom Hanchett, who followed the project from the beginning and offered excellent advice along the way. Cindy Hahamovitch, Jay Driscoll, Eric Arnesen, and other members of the DC Working Class History Group also read portions of this dissertation, as did Joe McCartin and Joe Slater. I could not have asked for a better group of labor historians to read my work. While at Penn, I have been surrounded by a tremendous group of graduate school colleagues. Julie Davidow, Reena Vaidya Krishna, and Katrin Schreiter have been better friends than I have deserved. Chase Richards, too, has been a wonderful friend and an equally wonderful dissertation reader—he has saved me from more mistakes than I would like to count. I am also grateful to the members of the 19th Century Reading Group who helped me think broadly about