As the United Auto Workers (UAW) set their sights again on organizing factory workers in the Deep South, they do so keenly aware of the difficulties campaigning in a center of union-busting reaction. In 2019, bosses at a Chattanooga Volkswagen plant led a vicious anti-union campaign, abetted by Donald Trump’s National Labor Relations Board, that defeated an earlier UAW campaign there. When Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama, waged an audacious effort to unionize in 2021, against one of the largest corporations on Earth, they likewise faltered in the face of widespread interference and intimidation.

At the same time, those warehouse workers inspired many by framing their struggle as a fight for black freedom and for the working class as a whole. The UAW’s latest campaign in the South is backed by a greater momentum after their victory against the Big Three automakers, and a renewed commitment to “justice across the globe,” as the union said when calling for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.

These efforts tap into a long history of radical struggle in the South, including the Alabama Communist Party (CP)’s fights throughout the 1930s to organize sharecroppers, mine and mill workers, and unemployed people in a fight against a brutal regime of capitalist rule and racist repression.