Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers & the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous story, fabulous storytelling
Review: In this wonderful book, African American tobacco workers tell their own story of civil rights struggle and union organizing. It is long, but so was the struggle, and I couldn't put it down. Oral interviews give us the black workers' own accounts, sending, for once, the white supremacists to the back of the bus.
Read it. You will find a South you never thought you would find.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating history, important analysis--read it!
Review: This is a terrific book--an important history that brings together a story of race, labor unions, economic change, politics, and culture, but never loses sight of the actual people involved. Very well written--not dry and academic like some history, but also very rich analytically. Buy it and read it!

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating history, important analysis--read it!
Review: This is a terrific book--an important history that brings together a story of race, labor unions, economic change, politics, and culture, but never loses sight of the actual people involved. Very well written--not dry and academic like some history, but also very rich analytically. Buy it and read it!

Rating:
Summary: fabulous story, weak storytelling, whitewashed politics
Review: This is the story of interracial unionism in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in the years after World War II. Korstad clearly reveals that here was a telling, if ultimately uncharacteristic, moment in Southern race and labor politics. The book is long, long, long, and the "riveting prose" promised in the blurbs is nowhere to be found inside the covers of the book. And it seems the author soft-peddles the poisonous power of white supremacy and overstates the political promise of the historical moment. That's understandable, but unfortunate. A deeper sense of tragedy--especially the tragedy of race--would make it better history and better literature. And a strong editor would have helped, too. On the whole, even though this is an important history, it still awaits its historian.