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OPERATION DIXIE FAILED BUT PUSHED RACIAL EQUALITY FORWARD  
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William P. Jones, Benjamin Y. Fong
September 29, 2024
Jacobin [[link removed]]


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_ The famous Operation Dixie campaign to unionize the South in the
1940s was mostly unsuccessful. Still, it left a positive mark on
American society. It’s even possible that the civil rights movement
wouldn't have staged the March on Washington without _

Workers march in a May Day parade in 1946 in New York City., Bettmann
/ Getty Images

 

_This interview was conducted for Organize the Unorganized
[[link removed]], a podcast from
the Center for Work & Democracy
[[link removed]] and Jacobin magazine about the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO)._

_Subscribe to Jacobin Radio [[link removed]]
to listen to the series (and don’t forget to rate us five stars so
we can reach more people)._

By the 1940s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) had made
serious progress in its effort to spread unions through the United
States’ largely unorganized workforce. But a major obstacle had
become apparent: the South, a region rife with union-busting and
racial prejudice, was holding the entire US labor movement back. For
the sake of workers there and everywhere, the CIO concluded, the South
needed to be unionized.

In 1946, the CIO launched Operation Dixie, an ambitious and sincere
yet mostly doomed effort to organize the South. In this interview with
labor historian William P. Jones, conducted by Benjamin Y. Fong for
the _Organize the Unorganized_
[[link removed]] podcast, Jones tracks
the rise and fall of Operation Dixie. Jones unpacks what the campaign
teaches us about the intricacies of interracial worker organizing and
the persistent divide between economic liberalism and race-conscious
radicalism.

Benjamin Y. Fong

In general, how would you describe the Congress of Industrial
Organization’s (CIO) record of organizing to overcome racial and
ethnic divides?

 

William P. Jones

For a number of reasons, it has a really vibrant history of
interracial organizing and also confronting racial discrimination and
racial exclusion pretty directly. In the 1930s, when it was founded, a
lot of black activists pointed to it as the way to go and just saw it
as a promising alternative to the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
The AFL had a history of explicitly excluding black workers from
unions. There were AFL unions that had in their constitutions
requirements that you had to be white to join them. There was also
another tendency within the AFL to espouse racial egalitarianism but
to not really follow up on it, to not go out of its way to confront
racial inequality.

So the CIO from its very beginning really distinguished itself as much
more racially egalitarian. I would characterize it as sort of a
race-conscious unionism, a unionism that recognized that race was a
really important part of the American economy and American politics.
And they wanted to confront it head-on and consciously.

Benjamin Y. Fong

What was Operation Dixie?

William P. Jones

Operation Dixie was a campaign that was launched by the CIO. The AFL
also launched a campaign at the same time, along the same lines, to
organize in the South. It was out of a recognition that between the
mid-1930s and mid-1940s, unions had expanded dramatically — more
quickly than they had in any other period in American history — but
that expansion was largely confined to the industrial northeast.

The CIO from its very beginning really distinguished itself as much
more racially egalitarian.

So there was a recognition of the need to extend that growth and the
power of unions into the South, which by World War II was a region
where unions had established some sort of beachhead but still were not
nearly as powerful or influential as they were in the industrial
northeast. The campaign focused on textiles, on lumber, on mining, and
also on the auto and steel industries to the extent that they operated
in the South.

Benjamin Y. Fong

What was the fate of Operation Dixie?

William P. Jones

Well, I think it’s mixed. Some people would say it was a complete
failure. I think the memory of it as a failure is based upon the
assumption that was held by many CIO leaders that the most important
industry to organize was textiles. There were some textile mills that
were organized by it, but it largely had very little impact on the
textile industry. At the same time, I think there were places in which
it was pretty successful. I’ve written about the lumber industry, in
which unions were established that had a big influence on the
industry. There were also places in which CIO unions established a lot
of influence, like in the tobacco industry and in the packinghouse
industry. But those were much smaller than the textiles or lumber.

Benjamin Y. Fong

How would you describe the role of the communists in the CIO?

William P. Jones

The period in which the CIO grew, the period between the mid-1930s to
the mid-1940s, was the period in which the Communist Party had its
fastest growth in the United States. It had a significant influence in
working-class communities across the country. So in that sense, it was
part of a broader upsurge of the Left and of organized labor. The
Communist Party really distinguished itself by having, particularly in
that period, a very strong position in favor of racial equality. It
was probably the only mass, interracial, largely white organization in
the United States that took a very strong opposition to segregation
and racial exclusion and violence.

The people who were involved in the CIO and who were members of the
Communist Party brought that position into the CIO. Most of the
leadership and most of the activists within the CIO embraced racial
egalitarianism — particularly the black members, of course, but many
of the white members too. So in that way the communists weren’t
unique, but it was an organization that had a particularly strong
commitment to racial equality.

Benjamin Y. Fong

Operation Dixie was launched after the war, at a time when the CIO
began to be more intensely anti-communist. Do you think that the
failures of Operation Dixie and the eventual expulsion of the
communists were related?

 

William P. Jones

Well, there was a lot of variety within the CIO at the time. I think
there were two ways in which the question of anti-communism affected
things. One was the increasing intensity of the backlash against the
Communist Party, pretty much following right on the heels of World War
II. During the war, the United States was allied with the Soviet
Union. And so communists weren’t seen as a particular threat then.
But that shifted very dramatically after the war, as the United States
shifted into a more oppositional position in relation to the Soviet
Union. So that’s one broader context in which I think it’s
important to understand the situation.

The other is the fact that Jim Crow was very well-established in the
South. There was a sense that Jim Crow had been challenged both by the
rise of organized labor and by the economic and political disruptions
of World War II, the rhetoric of anti-fascism and anti-racism that
took off after the war. And so the postwar period was one of backlash
both against the communists and against racial equality.

Within the CIO, there were people who took a number of different
positions on how to respond. Some, particularly those who were close
to the Communist Party, felt that it didn’t make sense to give any
concessions to that backlash, that any sort of suggestion that
communism represented any threat internationally, that any suggestion
that the Soviet Union represented a threat to democracy or to the
United States, was a concession to this backlash.

That was a minority position within the CIO. But still many within the
CIO felt that they needed to defend people’s civil liberties, the
rights of people to affiliate with the Communist Party. Many within
the CIO who were not allied with the Communist Party continued to have
a favorable view of the Soviet Union as a nation that had dramatically
addressed economic inequality and had grown its economy and
established working-class power in ways that offered a model for other
countries. So many within the CIO did try to resist this backlash
against communism. At some point, as that backlash grew more intense,
some began to feel that it wasn’t really worth trying to defend
people’s right to join the Communist Party. And increasingly there
was a shift against the Communist Party within the CIO, and that
occurred in the context of the launching of Operation Dixie.

The other question was how to respond to organizing in the context of
a deeply white-supremacist and racist southern society. Some within
the CIO took the position that they would organize people without
attention to race. They would organize around common goals of
workers’ economic justice, what we might think of as economic
liberalism — the idea that people have shared interests in better
wages and better working conditions — and not really talk about race
out of fear of alienating white workers, some of whom were allied with
white-supremacist organizations.

The postwar period was one of backlash both against the communists and
against racial equality.

That was the dominant position within the CIO. The minority position
was that in the context of organizing in a white-supremacist society,
the unions needed to take on the question of race and espouse racial
equality as one of the goals of its campaigns. That tended to be the
dominant position in the unions that had a lot of black members —
the packinghouse unions, some of the sawmill unions, the United Auto
Workers in places where black workers were prominent. Part of what was
happening was that this was a moment in which African Americans were
gaining tremendous influence within the unions. And they were saying,
“Look, I can’t ignore race. I need to take this on as part of the
union fight.” They wanted an ally against racism as well as an ally
against economic exploitation.

So Operation Dixie started in the context of a rapidly shifting
political situation, and a variety of people tried to figure out what
the best way to address these shifts was. And that had to do with the
shifting terrain of communism and anti-communism but also the shifting
terrain of racial inequality.

Benjamin Y. Fong

You’ve written about the difference between the class-based
liberalism and more race-conscious radicalism in the Operation Dixie
campaign. How did that divide manifest?

William P. Jones

In some ways, these are two polar positions that probably did not
exist discretely within individuals. Probably individual organizers
would prioritize race and class in different ways. Certainly within
the top leadership of Operation Dixie, there was a pretty solid
position that they were going to try to avoid addressing race. And
they made a lot of statements saying, “We’re not interested in
addressing racial inequality; that’s somebody else’s fight.
We’re here to build unions.” And I think everybody recognized that
that was a bit of a rhetorical position that didn’t really have any
reality on the ground. You can imagine that organizing in Georgia in
1946, you’re not going to avoid race.

But this was the way in which they talked about it, trying to allay
people’s concerns that this was going to be an all-out campaign
against Jim Crow. That would certainly have touched off an even bigger
backlash than it did. Now one might make the argument that there was
already a backlash — you might as well just take it on — but that
was the way in which people approached these questions. So you can
read articles where CIO leaders are saying, “We’re not going to
pay attention to race; it’s not our issue.” It’s much harder to
find people explicitly saying, “Yeah, we are going to take on
race.” That was a position that came largely from black union
members, for whom the idea of just ignoring race wouldn’t have made
much sense. And so you see it articulated mostly in unions where black
workers have some influence, whether they’re in the leadership or
they’re just a really significant portion of the membership.

Benjamin Y. Fong

Were the manifestations of that race-conscious radicalism more focused
on internal disparities within workplaces and within unions, or did it
have more of a capacious social vision in wanting to eliminate the
biases of Jim Crow society writ large?

William P. Jones

By the postwar period, by 1946 when Operation Dixie was launched,
particularly for black union members, immediate economic issues or
inequalities within a workplace were tied in many people’s minds to
a much broader sense of the need for a really dramatic transformation.
During World War II, black trade unionists were deeply involved in the
March on Washington Movement, which was aimed primarily at breaking
down barriers to accessing jobs in the defense industries.

But it was done in the sense that they were building a national
campaign that was aimed at destroying Jim Crow and undoing the system
of political and racial inequality that existed not just in the South
but nationally. So I think by 1946, most black activists, most union
members in CIO unions, would’ve understood that connection. The
leadership of the CIO also did, as it was very closely allied to the
March on Washington Movement. It took on a campaign for what was known
at the time as fair employment, the idea that people should be hired
regardless of their race or their religion or their immigration
status. And this was a central message espoused by the CIO, much more
forcefully than by the AFL.

Benjamin Y. Fong

You’ve written recently about a campaign to organize public
employees in the late 1940s, which casts a different light on the
CIO’s efforts at that time than does Operation Dixie. How so?

 

William P. Jones

Yes, the public sector campaign was launched at the same time as
Operation Dixie — both at hotels on the Atlantic City boardwalk in
April 1946 — but it took a very different approach to race and
radicalism. While leaders of Operation Dixie emphasized their
political moderation and downplayed issues of race and racism, the
CIO’s United Public Workers of America (UPWA) was led by communists
who emphasized their commitments to interracial cooperation and racial
equality.

In some respects, the campaign affirmed the fears of CIO leaders that
radicalism and racial politics would provoke a backlash, as white
workers peeled away from the CIO and public officials used
anti-communism as an excuse to stop negotiating with the union. This
led to the UPWA’s expulsion from the CIO in 1950. On the other hand,
the campaign won important victories toward both racial equality and
economic justice. Faculty and staff at several historically black
colleges joined the UPWA and secured the first union contracts for
faculty in the United States.

Some eighty thousand federal employees joined the union in the Panama
Canal Zone and pushed the government to end a system of racial
segregation and pay discrimination that had prevailed since canal
construction began in 1904. Unions established by the UPWA also
survived the expulsion and became some of the largest locals of the
American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and the
Service Employees International Union at a time when they emerged as
the nation’s fastest-growing and most racially diverse unions.

So in many respects, the “other Operation Dixie” showed that the
CIO model of radical, race-conscious unionism could survive in the
context of the Cold War and leave a legacy that remains critical to
the American labor movement to this day.

Benjamin Y. Fong

In what ways did the CIO moment pave the way for the civil rights
movement?

William P. Jones

In a number of ways, and I would focus on two. One is just the
involvement of black activists in the CIO who emerged as really
important leaders of the civil rights movement. It wasn’t just the
CIO. Some of the most prominent black trade unionists, like A. Philip
Randolph, who had built a union within the AFL, the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters, did not come from the CIO. Randolph was a vice
president of the AFL and widely recognized as the most prominent civil
rights leader in the United States.

So it wasn’t just within the CIO, but there were a number of CIO
unions in which black activists gained significant influence and power
during World War II: the United Auto Workers, particularly in the
large plants in Detroit, where there were a number of black activists
and workers; several of the needle trades unions, the garment
workers’ union, the clothing workers’ union, and the packinghouse
workers’ union.

It was the frustration of black workers with the limitations of those
gains that really galvanized civil rights activism.

In these places, black workers used the infrastructure of the labor
movement, both the AFL and the CIO, as vehicles for the civil rights
movement. And they turned it into an ally for the civil rights
movement. That would become even more important in the 1950s, as the
union movement became a political powerhouse in the United States.

On the other hand, it was also the frustration of black workers with
the limitations of those gains that really galvanized civil rights
activism. So starting with the March on Washington Movement, the
primary goal of this movement was to fight racial employment
discrimination. And their targets were not just companies and plant
management; their targets also included the union movement.

They wanted the union movement to live up to the espoused ideals of
racial equality. They called, starting in World War II, for the
expulsion of unions that did not allow black workers into their
membership. And this was resisted by the leaders of both the AFL and
the CIO, in part because both of those organizations relied primarily
on white workers for their members and for their support. And so they
were cautious about directly challenging racism within organized
labor.

This led to the formation of the Negro American Labor Council, which
was a formation of black trade unionists in both CIO and AFL unions.
Their first idea was to call in 1960 for a march on the national
headquarters of the AFL-CIO. That would eventually become the 1963
March on Washington.

So it was both the power that they gained in that period between the
1940s and 1950s, but also the ways in which that organizing ran up
against the limitations of racial equality in the labor movement.

Benjamin Y. Fong

What lessons might you draw from the CIO moment for the present?

William P. Jones

There are a number of lessons to be drawn here. One is just the
importance of organizing. I think we’ve gone through a period that
is maybe fading, but coming out of the Occupy movement and evident in
certain elements within Black Lives Matter, where there is an idea
that organizing is not that important, that what’s more important is
mobilization and getting people in the streets to build these mass
demonstrations. And I think one lesson that we see from the CIO moment
is how important it is to have lasting democratic organizations in
which working people are represented, in which working people can
articulate their political ideals and debate them in the context of a
democratic organization. That’s what unions really play a role in.
It’s very hard to replicate that. There are very few organizations
that do that, particularly involving working people.

Another lesson goes back to these questions about the differences
between economic liberalism and race-conscious radicalism. We still
live in a deeply racist society where the vast majority, the large
majority, of the working class is white, and in which racist ideas are
still very solidly rooted within working-class culture. So how do you
organize people who don’t see common ground around race without
sliding into this idea that the answer is just to ignore race? I
wouldn’t say that you just take the CIO as a model and apply it. But
I think looking at that history and understanding how people balance
those tensions and address those questions is really useful for us
today.

_WILLIAM P. JONES is a professor of history at the University of
Minnesota and the author of many articles on Operation Dixie
[[link removed]].
He is also the author of The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American
Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South
[[link removed]] (University of
Illinois Press, 2005) and most recently The March on Washington:
Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights
[[link removed]] (Norton,
2013)._

_BENJAMIN Y. FONG is honors faculty fellow and associate director of
the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University. He is the
author of Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st
Century Binge (Verso 2023)._

_Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a
web audience of over 3,000,000 a month. IF YOU LIKE THIS ARTICLE,
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* civil rights movement
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* Labor
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* Racism
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