The Southern Key: Class, Race & Radicalism in the 1930s/40s

Join us for this launch of Michael Goldfield's book 'The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s'. The failure of the last great upsurge of working class struggle and radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s to create an independent working class party has shaped US politics for almost a century. At the heart of that failure was the Congress of Industrial Organization’s (CIO) inability to organize the US South. In his The Southern Key, Michael Goldfield argues that the South is the key to understanding the evolution of working class organization and politics in the US in the 20 th and 21 st centuries. Utilizing archival and secondary sources, Goldfield demonstrates that conservative “southern culture” was not an obstacle to successful industrial unionism and class politics in the region in the 1930s and early 1940s. Instead, it was the deadly mixture of hostility to radicalism and racism in the labor movement that undermined industrial unionism in the South. Rather than a multi-racial labor movement confronting the structures of white supremacy and Democratic Party rule, the failure to organize the south left African- American workers isolated in their struggles for social and political equality in the l950s and 1960s, providing a fertile environment for racism in the white working class, both north and south. Join us for a discussion of Goldfield’s Deutscher Prize short-listed book. Participants: Ahmed White, University of Colorado-Boulder, and author of The Last Great Strike Charles Post, City University of New York, and currently researching the United Rubber Workers-CIO in the 1940s and 1950s. Michael Goldfield is a former civil rights, anti-war, and in-plant labor agitator, Professor Emeritus and currently Research Fellow, Fraser Center for Workplace Issues, Wayne State University, Detroit. He is the author of numerous articles and books on race and class, including The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States, The Myth of Capitalism Reborn, The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics, Labour, Globalization, and the State, and most recently, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s. PLEASE NOTE: All events for HM Online are free to register, however we would ask comrades who are able to please consider supporting the Historical Materialism project. Please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL, who are currently offering a 25% discount on individual subscriptions, valid until the end of the year. To use the offer, quote the discount code 70997 when subscribing at: www.brill.com/hima Also, please consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism book series through Haymarket Books. For $25 per month, this subscription gets you every new title from the Historical Materialism series when it is released (as long as your subscription remains active) plus a 50% discount on *all* Haymarket books titles via our website. Non-US subscribers will be charged an extra $20/month for international shipping.  https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/894-haymarket-book-club-historical-materialism-series ***For the duration of the conference, all HM titles in paperback will be available for a 50% discount via the Haymarket website*** https://www.haymarketbooks.org/series_collections/1-historical-materialism