Michael Goldfield is professor emeritus of political science at Wayne State University and the author of The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s.
Many explanations of the United Auto Workers’ recent loss at Mercedes in Alabama don’t hold up under scrutiny. To understand the challenges the UAW ran into, we need a historical perspective on attempts to organize in the US South.
The union organizing campaign currently underway at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama could prove to be the most important labor fight in the South since the failure of Operation Dixie, the movement’s last large-scale push to organize the South in the late 1940s. The story of that historic effort holds lessons for the struggle today.
The Communist Party USA, which turned 100 this year, has left behind a complicated legacy, filled with great victories and terrible blunders.