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White
workers of the South…
GREETINGS
Let
us become…you and I,
One single hand
That can united rise
To smash the old dead dogmas of the past-
To kill the lies of colour
That keep the rich enthroned
And drive us to the time-clock and the plough
Helpless, stupid, scattered, and alone-as now-
Race against race,
Because one is black,
Another white of face.
-
from Langston Hughes, “Open Letter to the South”
Billy Mitchell has drawn the parallel recently in
the Blanket between the so-called ‘poor
white trash’ of the American South and the Protestant
working class here in the north. And in many ways
it is an analogy that fits: callously abandoned in
social and economic terms by the rulers of a society
to which they have so enthusiastically proclaimed
their loyalty over many, many years; sneered at, manipulated
by, and regarded with a mixture of pity and contempt
by “respectable” elements in their “own
community”; and diverted from pursuing joint
struggle alongside their fellow workers from the Falls
or the Short Strand by their entanglement in a deep-rooted,
reactionary historical tradition, like the Southern
white working class during the civil rights era they
are too easily held up as “the culprits”
in the recent upsurge of sectarian barbarism.
The
“culprits” in the American South were in
reality both scapegoats and victims. Having acquiesced
to or-more often-lent a hand in the centuries-long
oppression of African-Americans-first under slavery
and later under the formal system of segregation known
as Jim Crow-the Southern white working classes suffered
worse poverty than their counterparts anywhere else
in the United States. For all their white “supremacy,”
they lived shorter, more sickly lives, worked longer
hours for lower wages under more dangerous conditions,
spent more time in jail and less time in school, and
found themselves more firmly under the thumb of their
“betters” than whites anywhere else in the
U.S.. Having been raised to fever pitch by white politicians
who warned of the spectre of “negro supremacy”
and clamoured for an end to the “nigger vote,”
large numbers of penniless, landless, jobless whites
went to the polls at the end of the 1890s and voted
to deprive blacks of the ballot. For many it was the
last election they ever participated in: they woke
up to find that they, too, had been purged from the
electoral register.
As
in Belfast during the 1907 dock strike or the Outdoor
Relief Riots thirty years later, there have been episodes
in Southern history when those on the bottom managed
to overcome, for a brief moment, the divisions that
had been foisted upon them from above. Black and white
sharecroppers came together in the 1880s and the 1930s
to protest against the misery the large plantation
owners and the bankers subjected them to; black and
white dockworkers struck together in the port of New
Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century and timber
workers did the same in East Texas and Louisiana through
the first two decades of the twentieth; Alabama miners
armed themselves and fought pitched battles with coal
operators’ private armies, the state militias,
the Ku Klux Klan, and whoever else the bosses threw
up against them, and their counterparts in Tennessee
led an armed, year-long rebellion that targeted the
stockades where employers penned in their mostly black
convict laborers, setting the convicts free whenever
they got the upper hand.
The
rulers of the South took pride in their military prowess
and were not shy about dragging out the hanging rope
or the Gatling gun. In every case, though, these attempts
by poor Southerners to pull together against the weight
of Southern history were defeated not mainly by physical
force, but by the strength of the bosses’ ability
to play the race card. When the interracial Brotherhood
of Timber Workers attempted to organize Louisiana
in 1911, the lumber barons who made their fortune
pillaging the forests of the Southwest and exploiting
the blacks, whites, and Mexicans who inhabited them
took comfort in the knowledge that “there is
one strong point that could be used effectively against
[the BTW], if properly handled, and that is the negro
question. No order can succeed in this country or
in this section…where the negroes and whites
are allowed to affiliate together on an equal social
basis and if this information was judiciously disseminated
it would have a splendid effect in breaking it up.”
Alabama coal operators tried to rally the public to
their side by pointing out that the miners’ union
“treats negroes and whites on the basis of social
equality,” a practice that they considered “an
affront to our southern traditions.” Those whites
who managed to see through the race-baiting and who
stood alongside blacks (rotten Prods?) were denounced
as “nigger lovers” and “race traitors,”
expelled from their own “communities”, physically
attacked and occasionally lynched.
On
the other side of the colour line, among black Southerners,
these episodes of working class unity were too fragile,
too short-lived to lift their despair or their pessimism
about whether white workers in substantial numbers
would ever break free from the spell of the race demagogues.
They turned, very often, to defensive or individual
strategies for survival or they gave up hope of ever
tasting freedom and fled northward in their millions,
or took to whatever chemical means might numb the
pain or to a religion that promised them that their
suffering in this world would be compensated by a
glorious day of reckoning in the bye-and-bye. When
the black nationalist Marcus Garvey came to them with
a message of “Up You Mighty Race,” or when
a half a century later, the Civil Rights and Black
Pride movements emerged to tell them that they were
the equals of anyone and that, moreover, “Black
is Beautiful,” they responded-as one might expect
them to-with enthusiasm, conviction, and self-sacrifice.
The
triumph of the Civil Rights movement and the abolition
of legal inequality was a massive step forward, but
it left a good deal of unfinished business. If, in
1963 or 1964, there had been even a respectable minority
of white workers in the South who had been won to
the fight against racism, who rejected the appeal
to the “traditions” of the white South-its
obsession with race-in favor of an interracial, class
perspective, things may have turned out much differently.
In the American South, as in the north of Ireland,
the fundamental division was not between white and
black (Protestant and Catholic), but between the rich
and the poor of both races. But their attachment to
a historical tradition that-like Orangeism-had been
very deliberately cobbled together by local elites
to guard against the possibility of a challenge from
below meant that the “poor white trash”
too often saw in the Civil Rights movement a threat
to their own precarious status. And although a full
understanding of that chapter in history makes it
clear that it was the white ruling class of the South
that oversaw the planning of “massive resistance”
to black demands, the truth is that very many poor
whites, deluded by the trappings of white “cultural
heritage” (the Confederate flag-mostly forgotten
until the late 1950s, made a comeback during this
period as a symbol of segregationist defiance), enlisted
as cannon fodder in the campaign to put blacks back
in their place.
Today
in the American South formal, legally sanctioned racial
discrimination has been abolished. A number of cities
once notorious for racial outrages now boast of having
black mayors and black police chiefs. But little has
changed for those on the bottom. Segregation and racial
inequality persist. And the South remains, as it has
been since the Civil War, a low-wage haven for American
and multinational companies who stand to profit from
the divisions that have been handed down through history
and who want to benefit from the pro-business tilt
of state governments (anti-union laws, no costly social
welfare provisions, no environmental regulations,
low corporate tax rates, etc.). “The antagonism
between the poor of both races is easily explained,”
the escaped slave Frederick Douglass once wrote. “They
have divided both to conquer each.”
Powerful
lessons in that for socialists in this part of the
world who are itching for a chance to challenge effectively
a status quo that doles out poverty and misery to
working people on the Shankill and the Falls, that
won’t take care of our sick or elderly, that
wants to hand the education of our children over to
corporate profiteers, that talks piously about the
need to fight sectarianism (they really only want
to hide it; it does not horrify, but only embarrasses
them) but won’t provide decent housing for all,
that pontificates hypocritically about violence as
it prepares to drag us into war without end, war with
the very big bombs against the very poor. We need
to build a new tradition-or rather revive a long-forgotten
one-a tradition that sees through their elaborate
tissue of lies and smashes the “dead dogmas of
the past”.
Brian Kelly’s Race, Class, and Power in the
Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921 is available in
electronic form at: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/epub/books/kelly/toc.html.
He is a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party
in Belfast.
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