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 it.
Workers march in a May Day parade in 1946 in New York City. (Bettmann / Getty Images)
This interview was conducted for Organize the Unorganized, a podcast from the Center for Work & Democracy and Jacobin magazine about the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
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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 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.
William P. Jones is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota and the author of many articles on Operation Dixie. He is also the author of The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South (University of Illinois Press, 2005) and most recently The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (Norton, 2013).
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.