On October 9, 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review a Tennessee state Supreme Court order revoking the charter of the Highlander Folk School. This allowed the state to shut down the greatest
In the South, the answer may well be no. Almost a year ago, the roaring chants echoed in the streets: Defund the police! Abolish the police! The tide of public opinion spurred some of the nation’s m
One of the huge problems in the American labor movement has long been the extreme difficulty of large-scaling organizing in the South. Despite the herculean efforts of some great organizers, many of w
In 2014, the United Auto Workers attempted to organize the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Despite tacit neutrality from the company, Tennessee politicians and right-wing funders used open
This is the grave of Lucy Randolph Mason. Born to an elite Virginia family in 1882 (she was a direct descendant of George Mason), Mason dedicated her life to improving the lives of poor southerners, w
The historian Keri Leigh Merritt has an essay in The Bitter Southerner, always a good site to read, that discusses the ways that elite whites used power over poor whites to ensure that they did not un
I really like this essay by a white southerner who grew up around Ku Klux Klan relatives and who now realizes the Confederacy was a rich man’s con job on the South’s white working class, m
The International Association of Machinists had hopes to organize Boeing’s plant in South Carolina, which exists precisely because Boeing executives wanted to bust the unions in their Seattle pl