Ken Lawrence oral history interview, 2010-05-27 and 2010-05-28

MODIBO KADALIE: Here we go, we're live. What's today's date?

MATTHEW QUEST: Is it May 26th?

KADALIE: Twenty-seven.

KEN LAWRENCE: Twenty-seven.

QUEST: OK. Well, good morning. My name is Matthew Quest; I'm a professor in the History Department at Georgia State University. And today we're conducting an oral history with Ken Lawrence. Ken Lawrence -- the subject of this oral history will be Ken Lawrence's experience as a member of the Southern Conference Educational Fund, or known as SCEF, S-C-E-F, and his journalism, his labor journalism and activism in the Deep South as a writer for the Southern Patriot newspaper. So we're going to begin by introducing Ken Lawrence. You might want to sit here, and then you'll be centered.

KADALIE: I got you. No, no, you stay right there. I got you.

QUEST: You got it? OK.

LAWRENCE: I'm 67 years old. I grew up in Chicago, and today I live in 00:01:00Pennsylvania, rural Pennsylvania. We're holding this session at the Pennsylvania State University library, which is generously providing space for us. This library happens to be the depository that has my collection of political protest memorabilia, which I donated a year ago, and they've been very generous, and we're grateful to them for that. I moved to the South after being a seasoned activist in Chicago for some years throughout the 1960s, actually beginning in the late 1950s, as a Young Socialist, as a civil rights activist, as an anti-war activist. I had been a member of the Young People Socialist League and the Socialist Party, and I had been a member of the Facing 00:02:00Reality organization, which was centered in Detroit and is best known politically as the followers of the West Indian Marxist, C.L.R. James. When I went to the South, I went after having done a lot of work in solidarity with the defense cases of a number of black draft resisters who opposed the Vietnam War, and one in particular, my friend Walter Collins, was at that time on the SCEF staff, and it was at the time in 1971 that he was going off to prison for draft refusal that he urged me to relocate to the South. It happened that Carl and 00:03:00Anne Braden, who were the executives who ran SCEF from the headquarters office in Louisville, Kentucky, who knew of my work because of Carl's work in particular on Walter's case. So when I indicated my desire to take a staff position with SCEF, they knew of my work, they knew of my writing, and they were receptive and offered me the position.

QUEST: OK. Well, what we'd like to do now that Ken has given us this introduction is to get a brief outline of his experiences as a journalist, as a labor journalist, in the Deep South, a survey of the type of labor struggles 00:04:00that he covered, and then we'll try to survey some specific ones chronologically from 1971 to 1975. But if you had to give a broad overview of the representative types of workers' struggles you experienced and documented, maybe you might want to just briefly just introduce...

LAWRENCE: OK. Let me first make a few general comments about the political framework that I was approaching this work from.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: I think that --

QUEST: (inaudible).

LAWRENCE: Right. Matthew is pointing out to me (laughter) it would be helpful to list the political influences, the people who influenced me and the writings who influenced me, and the most prominent work, C.L.R. James, as I mentioned before. 00:05:00A comrade of mine since my teens was George Rawick, professor of sociology and history, who is best known probably for his work on slavery, American slavery. I was greatly influenced by the writings of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and the writings of the great American black historian, leader, W.E.B. DuBois. In particular, what this meant was that I was trying to apply theories of how best to practice radical journalism in a way that was certainly unconventional 00:06:00compared to, let's say, the older, larger left party theories of agitprop, as they called it, agitation and propaganda. I wasn't trying so much to agitate in the sense of provoke people to action as to reflect what they were themselves engaged in, to share their experiences with other people similarly situated, and to hope that the workers' movement as a whole could grow based on those self-generating experiences of organizing a struggle and often a victory. Now, 00:07:00this is in keeping with C.L.R.'s theory that the most important thing that leftists can do is essentially hold up a mirror so that the working class can see itself. But the Gramscian element is that -- is the insight that in the United States in particular and in most advanced countries, the ruling class does not rule primarily by force of arms, but rather by cultural control, by hegemony was his term, and by "hegemony," what Gramsci meant was that the entire people, not just the ruling class itself, tends to view society and the way society operates and legitimacy through the eyes of the ruling class and to accept its terms rather than -- and often in contradiction to the very interests 00:08:00of the people who were exploited and oppressed. And so part of the problem is therefore to get people not only to view themselves in struggle and the problems they face and the solutions that they're coming up with and how other people similarly situated approach them, but also in the course of those struggles to overcome this hegemony that holds them back and to empower them by being able to conceive themselves as exercising power on their own behalf. That's something almost unique to Gramsci, I think, among Marxist theoreticians, and yet it's a critical element of this. Another influence that was important to me was a very 00:09:00obscure document called "A Worker's Inquiry" that Karl Marx wrote, which was a set of a hundred questions Marx said should be posed to workers as a way of building socialism. And I actually published an edition of that pamphlet in English so that people could become familiar with it, people of my generation, because it had all but disappeared since the previous edition had fleetingly appeared back in the 1930s, and before that, I don't know, probably not since the nineteenth century had it been really known. So this was -- it was a blend of these views, the view of reflecting working-class experience and struggle, of 00:10:00being able to challenge hegemony, bourgeois hegemony, by allowing people in the course of this reflection to be able to see a different possibility, new horizons, new ways of exercising power over their own conditions, and, schematically, at least for me, almost my cheat sheet was this pamphlet by Marx that taught me how to interview people, what questions were important to ask in the course of that. So that was my theoretical framework when I moved to the South, but I had no idea what I would encounter. You know, I was moving to Mississippi, which was, compared to Chicago, a foreign country. Even when George 00:11:00Rawick came to visit, he said he needed an interpreter because things were so different.

QUEST: And that's significant because George is a renowned scholar for chronicling and compiling the WPA slave narratives, which you assisted in editing for the Mississippi volumes.

LAWRENCE: That's correct.

QUEST: Now, George is famous for also writing an essay in Radical America on working-class self-activity, where he insists [leaders] in that essay that the unions don't organize the workers, but the workers organize the unions.

LAWRENCE: That's right.

QUEST: And this premise of George as well as your experience with him in gathering the slave narratives, how did this, if at all, inform your method of looking at labor struggles in the Deep South? Is there a connection?

LAWRENCE: Well, there's a connection, and it's really, more than anything, 00:12:00in this context -- it's important unto itself, I would say that. I think probably as an enduring project, I think the work I put in on the slave narratives may have more permanent value than the labor journalism that I did, so I don't want to make -- I don't want to trivialize that in any way. But in this context, I think that the lesson I learned above all was the problem of integrity of interviewing. If you read my introduction to the Mississippi slave narratives, what you'll see is what we discovered in the course of finding the earliest versions of interviews that had been done with ex-slaves in Mississippi was that they differed greatly from the texts, the edited texts, that had been sent to the Library of Congress that George discovered when he first published them. And some of the most interesting and valuable experiences of the slaves, 00:13:00and particularly both the cruelty of slavery and the rebellion against slavery, had essentially been purged by editors, by WPA writers, before the edited texts were sent to Benjamin Botkin in Washington. Now, Botkin was a good man, you know, and very sympathetic, and was really the guiding light of the project, but he was no better than his subordinates in terms of what the product was. And this was quite a lesson, you know, that the interviewer has a great obligation to avoid tampering with what he's being told by the person being interviewed. 00:14:00You know, I may or may not like what this worker's experience is -- I may even be skeptical about some of it -- but my most important duty is to report it faithfully, and then if I have some comment to make, I can do that some other way, and you'll see in the course of my writing that we did occasionally, for example, write open letters. But we were not imposing political correctness on our subjects, and I think that that greatly differentiates my work from traditional left-wing writing, where the purpose is to write the party line and to act as though the most militant workers are the ones who are most faithfully 00:15:00carrying out the party line.

QUEST: So a real quick addendum to that idea: even though someone like C.L.R. James and his associate, who you were friends with, Martin Glaberman, couldn't be said to have an orthodox left approach to labor journalism, they too had their own line, one could say, that sometimes they imposed on their labor journalism.

LAWRENCE: No question about it, but you also --

QUEST: But you were critical of theirs as well?

LAWRENCE: I was indeed. In fact, I don't think that they would had agreed with what I said about the lessons that I took from Gramsci.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: I don't believe that that was part of their political arsenal at all. I want to stress, though, that by the time I moved to Mississippi, I was not a member of any political organization, and during those entire five years 00:16:00-- because Facing Reality had dissolved a year before, and I did not develop a new ideological affiliation until sometime after I left the SCEF staff.

QUEST: OK, after 1975?

LAWRENCE: After 1975. Although I freely admit and make no apology for the fact that I retain my allegiance to my comrades and my contacts with them and I discussed what I was doing, but I was in no sense a disciplined cadre or, you know, the usual radical party member.

QUEST: OK. So while we're going to try to keep in mind this insight into your method on labor journalism, particularly when we look at some of the specific oral history, if we can call them transcripts, and some of the journalism that 00:17:00you wrote in the Southern Patriot, let's look at one more influence. My understanding is W.E.B. DuBois, particularly his Black Reconstruction, is influential on your approach to labor journalism, and what I'm thinking about in particular, although I might be wrong -- I'll just ask the question -- he has certain conceptions in his study that focus on the dichotomy between the black workers' experience and the white workers' experience --

LAWRENCE: That is correct.

QUEST: -- as well as the importance of seeing the framework of the general strike as a way of imagining the self-organization of black workers in the South during the period.

LAWRENCE: Right, but remember that the general strike -- yes, the framework of Black Reconstruction is first he describes the black worker, then he describes 00:18:00the white worker, and then the general strike. The general strike is not what might be imagined by people whose roots politically are in the Russian revolution or the Cuban revolution or something like that. He's talking about the slaves spontaneously, massively, putting down their tools and leaving the plantations and massively migrating to the Union lines and essentially paralyzing the Confederacy --

QUEST: And the plantation economy.

LAWRENCE: -- by taking away its entire labor force. And that's a concept that's difficult for many Marxists to assimilate because there's no party directing it. You know, it's not the implementation of a strategy, it's something that springs from the bottom up and takes all the political leaders by 00:19:00surprise. The generals try to send the slaves back: "No, no, we don't want you in our lines. We haven't got food for you" and so on. "Go home." Lincoln doesn't want it to happen because he doesn't want to lose the border states, which he fears he would lose if he even acknowledges an emancipation policy.

QUEST: So then we can make the leap to the period that you're doing this journalism, the labor journalism, in the seventies. Would you say that in some respects, the self-organization of the black workers themselves in an attempt to build small, independent unions is a confrontation with the trade union hierarchy or bureaucracy that is not excited about organizing or encouraging or facilitating black autonomy among...?

LAWRENCE: I would, but I wouldn't say it that way.

QUEST: OK, how would you put it?

LAWRENCE: I would say this: I mean, first of all, the importance of those DuBois insights is not to be taken by surprise when things happen in ways that traditional leftists don't expect. Now, the significance of those independent unions is not necessarily their independence. In other words --

QUEST: Oh, OK.

LAWRENCE: In other words, nobody set out to create an independent union for its own -- for its independence -- for the sake of independence.

QUEST: So they don't conceive of themselves as dual unions?

LAWRENCE: Right.

QUEST: OK, gotcha.

LAWRENCE: But what they're doing is they're trying to figure out, How do we create an organization that can further our interests collectively? And if the traditional unions that you would think ought to be there turn their backs on 00:21:00them because they're too small or too isolated, you know, they don't add enough dues or enough clout or whatever, they don't have a choice. So it's not as though they are independent as a matter of principle, it's they're independent because they don't have that choice. And this is -- the peculiar thing about this is if you look back historically at the great strikes that became so controversial to leftists as so-called dual unions, you find the same thing is true. It's not that Harlan County miners wouldn't have welcomed a national union, (laughs) you know, in 1933 or whenever, 1928, you know, or Gastonia mill-hands or any of the many militant working-class struggles that 00:22:00were led by independent trade union unity league unions that eventually became part of the CIO when the CIO finally caught up to them, really, is what happened.

QUEST: They're happy to be caught up to.

LAWRENCE: Right, right.

QUEST: From your observations.

LAWRENCE: Right. So I think that often this simple reality gets trapped by the ideological baggage of the older debate, and so what's a fairly simple, straightforward reality becomes complicated by that. So you have (coughs) -- excuse me -- so you have a situation where an independent union rises up, actually in the case of pulpwood haulers, it carries its message across four or 00:23:00five states, at one point is -- has a strike that's spread all across four states of the Deep South. And it's not until two or three years later that some left-wing party leader comes along and points at it and says, "Hey, that's dual unionism; you're not supposed to do things that way." (laughter) You know, I mean, it's kind of -- it's funny to talk about now. It wasn't so funny at the time, you know, because it gets testy when those things happen. But when you're there, you're not thinking about, 'Gee, whiz, this is great to be independent', you know, what you're thinking is, 'We want every ally we can get.' And in fact we did get some of the big lumber unions -- not in the South, but in the Pacific Northwest -- to send 00:24:00solidarity representatives and so on, not to try and hijack the project but to bring whatever material support and assistance they could provide. It was terrific. So again, I don't think that the best elements of the traditional unions care whether it's independent or not either. All they care about is fellow workers engaged in struggle and needing whatever help and solidarity they can get.

QUEST: OK. Well, let's -- let me just briefly say that already Ken has mentioned the experience of pulpwood workers -- I know that he said that there was a strike that spread across four states, but there were specifically organization of what we have debated -- we're already calling into question what we might call independent unions and try to look critically at that. So in 00:25:00general, he has covered a wide variety of labor struggles -- citrus workers and sugar workers in Florida; pulpwood workers in Mississippi; he has looked at the textile workers in the Farah strike in Texas; a wide variety of wildcat strikes in Atlanta, including department-store workers and small factory workers; he's looked at poultry plants. So there's a wide variety of labor action we can examine, and perhaps we might go through his experience -- he's also been involved in some anti-racist, civil rights, and anti-repression activism in his journalism. So why don't we survey some of this chronologically and begin with his experiences in 1971, and he can place some of the articles that he wrote in 00:26:00context in his organizing, if that's OK.

LAWRENCE: That's OK. I actually would like to add one more point to the previous point before we move on to that, just --

QUEST: No problem.

LAWRENCE: -- so I don't have to come back to it later. The other thing to say about independence is that it didn't -- being independent did not prevent these unions from having the same internal conflicts that traditional unions did, and the one that springs to mind as the worst that I experienced was among the pulpwood cutters, there were real layers of privilege. The tree-lengthers were much richer on the whole -- they had much more expensive equipment, they were driving much greater distances and getting much higher pay for their wood 00:27:00than the people who were cutting cord wood and taking it to the local wood yards. And originally, when the union, when the Gulf Coast Pulpwood Association was first set up, the first president of the union, James Simmons of Alabama, believed that the best strategy for organizing was to do it through the tree-lengthers because they were traveling the greatest distances, and therefore they had the potential to spread the union farther faster than these guys who hauled to their local wood yard or to Masonite or to the paper companies in their community in their small trucks, you know, with cut-up cordwood. But what that meant was that Simmons was largely neglecting the mostly black workers who 00:28:00were -- yeah, who were cutting the smaller wood and who were really the heart of the industry. And this struggle erupted quite apart from the organizers; the leftists who were helping, you know, were to a large extent blindsided by this, but eventually it was the lower strata that took control of the union and elected one of their own members as the president, moved the headquarters to Jones County, Mississippi, to Eastabuchie, which is a rural pining woods county, and really transformed it into a much more militant, independent union. So being independent didn't somehow immunize them from the contradictions of more 00:29:00traditional and more bureaucratized unions, it just took a different form.

QUEST: It's interesting the details you just offered. Is -- am I mistaken, or these race and class struggles within this independent union, are they all -- is that full story documented in your journalism, or --

LAWRENCE: No.

QUEST: -- you didn't cover some of those distinctions, right?

LAWRENCE: No. It's not in the public journalism. You probably will find reference to it in minutes of SCEF board meetings, because -- and in reports from the GROW project, the Grassroots Organizing Work office in New Orleans, because they were the ones who were in day-to-day contact with the leaders of the Gulf Coast Pulpwood Association, and they were the ones who most intimately felt this clash. My reportage, such as it was, was devoted not so much to the organizing but to the strike action, and by then this particular contradiction 00:30:00had been pretty well resolved. But I think that that's an important point, lest you romanticize the independence of avoiding some of the problems. It didn't avoid any of the problems.

QUEST: I see. We'll have a chance to come back to the broader pulpwood struggle and woodcutters' struggles, but that time period -- are those strikes taking place from 1971 to '75, or a specific year? Before we go into, like, a chronological approach, can we kind of situate your experience of the...?

LAWRENCE: The pulpwood strikes?

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

LAWRENCE: There was one that was already ongoing when I joined the SCEF staff in 00:31:00'71, and then they struck again, much more massively, in '73.

QUEST: OK. So maybe we'll come across these details again in the chronology. But if it's OK, we can shift now to the beginning of your activism and your labor journalism in the Deep South in 1971, and I believe the first struggle that you come across, or that you're documenting, is a bus thing in Nashville, Tennessee, and maybe some police bru- -- anti–police brutality work.

LAWRENCE: Right. I think time to take a break and...

QUEST: Take a break, OK.

QUEST: OK, so we're back with Ken Lawrence. This is file two of our oral history interview about his experiences with Southern Conference Educational Fund, his labor journalism for the Southern Patriot, and we're about to begin 00:32:00a chronological survey of his experiences, particularly with the year 1971.

LAWRENCE: Right. Now, '71 was when I began, and I had not yet moved to Mississippi. I didn't really move until almost the end of the year, in November. But my first report was from Memphis -- no, from Nashville -- Nashville, Tennessee, for the opening week of the schools. And this was when school desegregation by busing began throughout the South, and we just picked Nashville as the example of many places, partly because Nashville had been the scene in the fifties of some really ugly confrontations with violent racists, and one of the schools had been bombed. But the real story from Nashville, aside 00:33:00from just the novelty of school busing, was that there was no story, that despite a lot of racist rhetoric in the run-up to the opening of schools, when schools opened, things went fairly smoothly, all things considered -- no violence, no nasty confrontations. It took a while, of course, for the children to become accustomed to the new situation. But you have to remember, the crazy part about it is that for all the cursing of busing by the racist forces, actually black children had been bused miles for generations and passed school after school that they were not allowed to go to school at, (laughs) in order to 00:34:00keep the schools segregated, so the outcry against busing for desegregation was pretty hypocritical on the part of the whites. And I think at a certain level, people were just tired of the stalling. Remember that the Supreme Court decision was in 1954, and here we are in 1971, finally, after all that time, getting some action. So that was my first report from the South. (coughs) Excuse me. I also did some reporting on police brutality in Memphis, and it was significant, of course, because Memphis was the place where Martin Luther King was assassinated just three years before then, and so the fact that the police were being 00:35:00notoriously violent against the black community, but also against political activists, was a pretty ominous sign. But there was quite a mass protest and marches and so forth, and actually with the outside spotlight on Memphis, as always, that had a mitigating effect, and so basically the protesters won, but not without some pretty serious losses until they fought back. The other reporting that I did, which I did for many years after that and continued even after I left the SCEF staff, concerned the Republic of New Afrika, which had 00:36:00been attacked by the Jackson police and the FBI in their headquarters. They had launched an armed attack on the RNA, and the RNA people fought back, survived, and went through a long series of state and federal criminal trials. And it really wasn't until Jimmy Carter became president and with his rhetoric of human rights that we were able to free the Republic of New Afrika Eleven largely by involving Amnesty International around the world and protesting that essentially the hypocrisy of the Carter administration. Where do you get off talking about human rights and you've got these people in Mississippi in 00:37:00prison solely for their political beliefs and actions?

QUEST: If we could just clarify a little bit, I know your colleague George Rawick, in his personal archive, he has a letter to some of his friends and the Facing Reality group explaining to them that the Republic of New Afrika people are not, in his words, crazy or odd, but they are serious people. And for those that aren't familiar with the Republic of New Afrika, if one listens closely to what you're saying, it could appear that on the one hand, they are political activists being repressed for I guess their freedom of association or speech, but on the other hand, where is this republic, some people might ask, or -- if you could clarify their ideas.

LAWRENCE: I'm going to show you...

QUEST: Oh, (laughs) OK.

LAWRENCE: I'm going to answer that... [SILENCE] This was exactly the problem that I had. I had to find a way --

QUEST: To explain to the public.

LAWRENCE: -- to explain to people who were not familiar with Black Nationalism, who had been essentially brainwashed by the Mississippi politics, political leaders, and by the newspapers and so forth, that yes, these were violent, crazy people, and so on. And so this was the leaflet that I produced about the case, and it evolved. The first part of it was explaining the facts of the case, titled "Mississippi: Old and New." And when I went around talking to people 00:39:00about the case, the next thing that they said was, "Well, these people want to throw us out of our own state and take it over." So I had to then summarize what the Republic of New Afrika actually stood for. Now, each page of this resulted from correspondence between myself and Imari Obadele, the RNA president who was in prison at the time.

QUEST: And he just passed away a couple of weeks ago, a few months ago, yeah.

LAWRENCE: Right. And so this was my summary of, What is the Republic of New Afrika? Well, the next thing was what you just said: you know, well, these are all crazy people, you know, and --

QUEST: Just want to be clear, I didn't say it, but --

LAWRENCE: No, no, no.

QUEST: George -- right, right, there was a sense that we had to clarify to the public what their perspectives were.

LAWRENCE: Right, right. So the next thing I did was to write short biographies of each of the Eleven --

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: -- so that people could realize that these were highly respected, educated people, you know, who normally would be people you would expect to look up to and so forth, they were not by any means marginal, and so on. And then so the last thing I got was the argument from white people: "Well, they wouldn't want our support anyway." So then I got Imari to address a direct letter to whites thanking them for their support, and this became my handout in my --

QUEST: RNA work.

LAWRENCE: -- in my RNA work. And, you see, I opened a SCEF office in Jackson 00:41:00just for the purpose of this campaign, and so that's... And you'll see, all the way through my Southern Patriot writing, I reported on the cases as they unfolded in court and the struggles to free them. But this --

QUEST: Good to see that --

LAWRENCE: That's where it began, so...

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: So that's how I got my baptism in the Deep South movement, but my territory, my assignment, was to report on struggles throughout the Deep South, which was defined as the territory from Miami to El Paso, essentially. And so over the next four years, you'll see that my reporting covers each of those areas -- Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, and, to a 00:42:00certain extent, Arkansas and Tennessee as well, but mainly the Deep South states along the Gulf of Mexico. OK, you want to cut a break while I...

QUEST: Yeah, let's do that.

LAWRENCE: -- dealing with my articles in 1972. The first report continues the Republic of New Afrika saga, which, as I mentioned, actually you'll see all the way through my writings in the Southern Patriot. I went to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to check out a situation where there had been a confrontation between a Muslim group and the police in which there was a confrontation that ended up 00:43:00with two sheriff's deputies and two blacks dead and all the rest of the Muslims who were there and some bystanders arrested and a lot of protests going on. And of course there were the usual conflicting accounts of what had actually happened, although the community seemed convinced that the police had attacked this Muslim meeting without provocation and that the people who were attacked fought back. But the only weapons present were the police weapons, so the two deputies who were -- who ended up dead were killed with their own weapons. So whatever the facts of the story, it was a confrontation that energized the whole 00:44:00civil rights and black nationalist community in Baton Rouge, and I reported on all of that.

QUEST: Ken, when you say "Muslims," are they of a particular...?

LAWRENCE: I think they were orthodox Muslims; I don't think they were --

QUEST: Nation of Islam?

LAWRENCE: Islam. I'm pretty sure that they were religious, traditional Muslims who happened to be black.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: Next, I went to Florida to cover two situations. One was a strike in a paper mill at Port St. Joe, Florida, which was a traditional union, and the other was the Farm Workers organizing in the orange groves. This was when it was still the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, before it became officially recognized, AFL-CIO full-fledged union. The interesting thing about the Port St. 00:45:00Joe case was that it was a union local of the papermakers' union that had been forcibly desegregated by court order. In other words, there was a black local and a white local, and they had never met together until they were forced to by the courts. So this court-ordered situation resulted -- was quickly followed by this strike where for the first time, the black and white workers were meeting together. You know, they hadn't known each other before. And there was a situation when I was interviewing people there where the white workers were sheepish and ashamed because they had, as one of their gestures of defiance when 00:46:00they were still struggling for segregated, separate locals, they had donated part of their treasury to George Wallace's campaign, and now here they were relying on their black fellow workers for the leadership in this really bitter confrontation and were apologizing (laughs) all over the place for it. So it was one of these transitional situations that must have been repeated a thousand times across the South in the late sixties and early seventies, but was my moment to experience the situation when reality finally sinks in that the world has changed and that people have to have a different attitude toward one another and begin to come together on a human level.

QUEST: It seems that that story is an example where your different philosophical influences are in play and you can interpret the story through them. It would seem that hegemony is both in play and C.L.R.'s argument, perhaps, against hegemony is in play, because in C.L.R.'s essay on "Revolution and the Negro" from 1939, he's very clear, and from his perspective -- and this is where Martin Glaberman gets it -- the idea that, well, perhaps hegemony, or if hegemony means a type of false consciousness, it doesn't really exist because the workers have all the prejudices and flaws, and through their experience, the attitudes -- through the struggle, their attitudes are transformed. So here we have an example where the white workers clearly, a short time ago, were animated in their actions by racist politics and then through your recording of their 00:48:00transformation, they seem to through the struggle have come to different conclusions.

LAWRENCE: Yeah, but see, but actually, Neville and Marty are wrong about that.

QUEST: I know, you -- oh, you -- OK, so your perspective is they're wrong in that theory.

LAWRENCE: They're wrong, and the theory that they're opposed to is wrong. This is not a situation of false consciousness -- that, they're right about.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: This is a situation of dual consciousness.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: We carry in ourselves both the bourgeoisie's view and our own, and it's a constant clash not between the external -- Marty had understood this in every other -- you know, if you talk to Marty about Marxist philosophy, or C.L.R., both of them would tell you that the Hegelian dialectic refers to 00:49:00internal contradictions, not contradictions with the external world. That's --

QUEST: That's true; they've written that.

LAWRENCE: -- the essence of Marty's critique of Mao's philosophy, is that Mao locates the contradiction between the worker and the external force when actually it's the contradictions internal to the working class that need resolution. Well, this is a perfect example of that. It's an example of dual consciousness on the part of those white workers, because they're both self-styled, acknowledged, George Wallace racists and proletarians who came to understand that as proletarians, their interests were not with this alien idea 00:50:00that they carried around as their own, but with their fellow workers.

QUEST: I'm sympathetic to the idea that a major aspect of racism is bourgeois ideology, but would you say also that there's aspects to racism that the working people have to take responsibility for themselves as they haven't -- as their own ideas, or would you say --

LAWRENCE: Sure, sure, absolutely.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: But there's also an even more important distinction between white supremacy and racism. You know, it's not the racist ideological form that's the barrier, it's the practice of white supremacy in all these areas of life, you know.

QUEST: So it's not the individual prejudice, it's the institutional forms that...?

LAWRENCE: Right, right. And, you know, it's not that there's a separation 00:51:00between them, but if you're going to carry on a struggle that's serious about winning, you have to struggle against the material reality, and in the process change the ideology, but moralizing about the ideology outside of a struggle over an actual material aim is -- I mean, I'm not saying don't do it -- there's moral virtue in it -- but as a political strategy, it leaves much to be desired.

QUEST: I understand. Would you like to transition now to the Farm Workers?

LAWRENCE: Yeah, I want to talk about the Farm Workers, because the Farm Workers are a fascinating case. This is one of the most delicious encounters I can remember. The Farm Workers went into Florida to organize in the orange groves, and the reason why they wanted to organize the orange groves was because it was 00:52:00a perfect target, just like grapes in California were, or lettuce. The orange groves were owned by Coca-Cola, you know, the Tropicana orange juice. You know, what a fabulous boycott target, you know, if it turned in... So they had it all figured out. They had a research team at New College in Sarasota, headed by one of the people who had been in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. You know, they brought their whole arsenal in, and César came to Florida to lead this organizing drive. Well, actually, what happened (laughs) was not surprising: Coca-Cola folded and signed a contract, so no boycott materialized, and that was over. But what happened was down the road in south Florida, these sugarcane 00:53:00field hands, who were not part of the program that César and his union had in mind, walked off the job spontaneously and went on strike and asked for the Farm Workers Union to support them.

QUEST: How do you say the name of that -- of the workplace owner for the sugar works? Is it Talisman?

LAWRENCE: Talisman, yeah.

QUEST: Talisman, OK.

LAWRENCE: Right. And Talisman was, as I reported, owned by multimillionaire William D. Pawley, Sr., who was the former U.S. ambassador to Peru and Brazil and was one of the people who had organized the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. So a lot of his workers were Cubans, Gusanos, who had participated in the Bay of Pigs, had been captured by the Cubans, who had been ransomed, essentially, in 00:54:00the -- remember that tractors program to --

QUEST: Well, the Marielitos are later. There was a tractor --

LAWRENCE: Yeah, there was a -- the Cubans had requested so many tractors in exchange for freeing the captured invaders. So I don't remember exactly how it went down, but anyway, so they -- these strikers were Cuban right-wingers -- you know, this was what was so funny about it -- and here they are with bullhorns on both sides, the ones in the field and the ones on the picket line, taunting each other about how what you did impliedly wrong, you know. I mean, surrealistic for a reporter to come in and see this, and certainly not what a leftist has in mind 00:55:00about a strike, let alone a spontaneous strike that drags in a union that had no intention of getting involved in this.

QUEST: So, do I understand -- it's the Jamaican migrant workers, sugar workers, who are -- there's a shouting back and forth between them and the Gusanos --

LAWRENCE: Well, the --

QUEST: Who are workers or managers?

LAWRENCE: Well, there were Jamaicans and Cubans on both sides, but the --

QUEST: Oh, I see, the anti-communists and the pro-Castro...

LAWRENCE: But once the strike began, then the company began using Jamaicans as strikebreakers.

QUEST: OK. The citrus strike or the sugar...?

LAWRENCE: No, no, the sugar strike.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: And so on. But in the course of this, a student -- I think I've got this right -- a student who volunteered for the -- for picket-line duty at the 00:56:00factory gate was run over by a strikebreaker driving a truck through the picket line and killed. But anyway, so this was -- this was the context of this strike. All these aspects that were just bizarre, unusual. And so I was there reporting on this, interviewing people from all the different sides. While I was down there, I stayed in the homes of some of the citrus workers. I stayed with some 00:57:00of the union members in Homestead, which you were just talking about off-camera. I stayed in the union office in Miami. It was really a -- remember, I'm only a few months into this job, and, you know, this is really interesting. So my first worker interview is an interview with one of those Cuban strikers who was a truck driver for the plantation. You'll see that in there. So that was my baptism in Florida, was my encounter with the most interesting...

QUEST: And again, these events were in March 1972, were written in March 1972?

LAWRENCE: They were reported, yeah, so it would have been a little earlier than that.

QUEST: OK, OK.

LAWRENCE: Because we were, you know, a monthly paper, so we had pretty long lead times to deadline. My next report concerned the Rhodesian chrome boycott at Burnside, Louisiana, and you're familiar with that report. This is actually the one where I met Alex Willingham. It's the April '72 report, and...

QUEST: And for many years now, Alex Willingham is a political science professor and was in the South at this time.

LAWRENCE: He was at Southern University.

QUEST: At Southern University.

LAWRENCE: He was an instructor at Southern University.

QUEST: And now he's in New England?

KADALIE: Yeah, he was at Atlanta University.

QUEST: Atlanta University, yeah.

KADALIE: And now he's at Williams College.

QUEST: Right, and then at Williams College in Massachusetts.

LAWRENCE: Right, but he had been involved in the (inaudible) boycott, so this was --

QUEST: Oh, in Massachusetts? So there is a linkage.

LAWRENCE: Right.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: So this would -- you know... And the Dock Workers Union leadership, Black Dock Workers Union leadership, was fully supportive of the boycott, so it was extremely effective. At the same time, I went farther along the coast to Franklin, Louisiana, where municipal workers were on strike, and I reported a couple of times on their struggles. I went there actually with Virginia Collins, Walter Collins's mother, who had been on the SCEF staff in the fifties and sixties, and this was a more traditional labor situation, but also one that 01:00:00needed and benefited from outside solidarity. And this was also the time when I first reported on the independent Mississippi Poultry Workers Union in Forest and published an interview with one of the poultry workers, David [Micks?], about why they struck. Now, this is another situation where, kind of like the Florida sugar workers, the workers had no union experience at all but were fed up, went out on strike, and it was the strike that led to the organization, rather than some union organizer going in and recruiting members and so forth. So, again, this business of independence -- if they had not gone on strike, what 01:01:00would they have done, you know? If they had gone to the Meat Cutters Union, they probably would have been turned away; they probably would have been regarded as too small and trivial, or else the union would have gone to the company and signed a contract over their heads for a dime-an-hour raise and proclaimed victory and so forth. But actually they won considerably more than that by doing it themselves. It wasn't until long afterward that any leftists came around and decided that that was due a union. So that was an interesting experience. Nineteen seventy-two was an election year, and I had fun with that because -- I 01:02:00was not a McGovern supporter and certainly not a Nixon supporter, but this was the year when Maoism was a fad and China was opening up, and so I wrote a leaflet that was kind of my fun political project called, "Can Mao Tse-tung Get Richard Nixon Reelected?" But I also reprinted an article from the Atlanta Constitution magazine called "The Man Behind McGovern's Money," which told the whole career of Morris Dees, going back to when he had been a George Wallace supporter, and circulated that. And my own reporting, you remember, was about 01:03:00left parties, and I actually -- the only left party that came to get on the ballot in Mississippi was the Socialist Workers Party, so I agreed to be a presidential elector for the SWP for Linda Jenness and Andrew Pulley in 1972. But I reported on all the left party candidates in the South. I thought that was a good thing that they were showing independents, and I was of course well aware that a lot of leftists were supporting McGovern and wanted to discourage that. You know, I had a good time, but I don't claim any great historical importance 01:04:00to this, but, you know, it's good to see people showing some political spunk. Even going out and petitioning for communist and socialist candidates in the Deep South is quite an experience, so... Actually, while I was doing this I went to Mississippi College in Clinton, which at that time was the largest white, segregated higher education institution outside of South Africa. And I went to a meeting where they had a political candidates' forum for the students on that campus, and the -- one of -- and they had some observers from Britain, Young 01:05:00Tories, and the crazy thing about it was the Young Tory spokesman was asked by the Republican candidate for something or other to make a presentation, and he said, "Well, actually, the candidate who most reflects our political point of view is George McGovern." That brought down the house. And then afterward -- oh, and I got up and spoke from the floor, and I said I had just come form this strike in Laurel, and, you know, I thought that people should be more concerned about the plight of working people than these political campaigns, but actually I was an elector for the Socialist Workers Party candidates, and I wanted Mississippians to know that there was an alternative to the capitalist parties, 01:06:00so on and so on. So then, at the end of the meeting, we went out on the -- this was in the chapel, the huge church on campus, and these kids were fascinated by me. You know, I was like a zoological specimen or something; (laughter) I was so strange to these white kids. And they were smart kids, you know. I mean, they would -- it wasn't their fault that they were raised in these --

QUEST: So they never met anybody who said they were a socialist before or something?

LAWRENCE: Right, right, you know, it was really weird. So then here's what happened that was the defining moment of that encounter.

QUEST: What college, again, was that at?

LAWRENCE: Mississippi College.

QUEST: Mississippi College, OK.

LAWRENCE: One of the kids said to me, "Well, our system is better because we have free speech, and your people don't have free speech. For example, in Cuba, they don't have free speech." And, you know, I [SILENCE] just debated with myself whether it was worth getting into it with him, but it was getting very late, so I said, "Look, I would love to continue this conversation, including about Cuba -- I'm not going to dodge any issues you want to talk about -- but, you know, it's midnight, I'd really like to get home. Give me your addresses and phone numbers, and I'll get back to you, and we can continue this." And none of them would; they were all scared to death. And I said, "Oh, you've got free speech. You're so free, (laughter) and you're scared to death to let me know who you are, what your names are and so on." And that was a shocker to them. They had never thought about it that way. I 01:08:00mean, this was a really interesting experience to me, and since I was still brand-new to Mississippi, really, and these were all, you know, kids from the gentry. You know, they were well-off and privileged and smart and so on, and probably going on to careers in the North, to tell the truth, (laughter) because Mississippi offered nothing for kids like that, really, unless they went into politics or law. But that really was the jolt, you know, that some of them finally were able to see, you know, that maybe there were problems with their own worldview and so on. But I still couldn't get any of them to give me their 01:09:00personal information. OK...the...

QUEST: How much time we have?

KADALIE: It's at 26 minutes.

QUEST: Oh.

LAWRENCE: OK, well, let's finish 1972.

QUEST: Right.

LAWRENCE: My next trip was to Atlanta, where there was a wave of wildcat strikes going on.

QUEST: Now, wait, that was part of a -- did you also do a speaking tour where you networked and met a bunch of people there?

LAWRENCE: I did. I don't have a...

QUEST: Is it written somewhere else?

LAWRENCE: It probably is. It may be in the report on the labor workshop, because this strike wave in Atlanta, which was a wave of wildcats, was largely -- was one of the biggest precipitating factors in us deciding we needed to have a 01:10:00labor conference, so that might be what you're thinking of.

QUEST: You also happened -- I think in passing you met with Cliff Kuhn --

LAWRENCE: Right, I did.

QUEST: -- who was a professor at Georgia State, a labor historian, does oral histories. (laughs)

LAWRENCE: Oh, OK. He wasn't then, he --

QUEST: No, The Great Speckled Bird, maybe, or something else?

LAWRENCE: He was with the Bird and maybe with Southern Exposure.

QUEST: Mm-hmm, OK.

LAWRENCE: Yeah, he's probably got a better memory of it than I do. But anyway, this was another one where I taped an interview [SILENCE] -- no, no, this -- I didn't tape -- this, I got from a Socialist Workers Party guy who taped the remarks of one of the workers --

QUEST: From Sears.

LAWRENCE: From Sears, yeah, that's right.

QUEST: So a department-store strike was one aspect of the wildcat strikes you were reporting on.

LAWRENCE: Right.

QUEST: There were others.

LAWRENCE: Right, and probably the biggest and most important was the Mead strike, the --

QUEST: Mead makes paper?

LAWRENCE: Paper, yeah. These days it's --

QUEST: OK, so we're back here with Ken Lawrence, and we're continuing our survey of his labor journalism for the Southern Patriot. We're going to be focusing on 1972, in particular the waves of wildcat strikes in Atlanta at that time. Go ahead, Ken.

LAWRENCE: Well, the Mead strike was certainly the largest and most dramatic of the wave of strikes that hit Atlanta in 1972, but it was also different from the ones that we've talked about before in that it included among the leadership Sherman Miller, who was an open, public leader of the October League, which previously had been known as the Georgia Communist League, and which later 01:12:00became a part of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). So this was a presence of a Marxist-Leninist organization centrally involved, not peripheral or not a later addition, but instrumental from the beginning of the strike, and partly because of that, it involved all of the civil rights and New Left and Old Left organizations in the Atlanta area in the mobilization and support of the strike. It also was the subject of a motion picture which was made during the time. Hosea Williams was one of the public spokespersons for the strike. So in that 01:13:00respect, the Mead strike probably had more durability and more long-term impact on organizing in Atlanta generally than some of these other strikes that we've been talking about that I had been covering up to that time. It's also significant that Atlanta is a major metropolitan area, whereas so many of these other strikes that I had participated in and reported on up until then were in fairly out-of-the-way places: Forest, Mississippi; Port St. Joe, Florida; Laurel, even, is pretty small compared to Atlanta. And on the other hand, Atlanta isn't exactly typical of the South, either. I mean, you know, it 01:14:00was... Whereas some of these other places -- Port St. Joe, I mentioned, had a pretty open traditional segregationist history up until the moment when the strike began, but Atlanta had a leadership from the time of Ivan Allen's mayoralty where they were trying to present themselves as the city of the future, of the New South, "We don't do things that way anymore" and so on, so in some ways, a wave of wildcat strikes (laughs) is pretty ironic to be... But this was also, this momentum that seemed to be building for working-class militancy was one of the reasons why not long after that, SCEF had that labor conference in Birmingham, and one of the things that resulted from that was this 01:15:00pamphlet of mine, "The Roots of Class Struggle in the South," which is just a transcript of my talk at the labor workshop. And one of the points that I made in that presentation was the interesting historical fact that the Flint Sit-Down Strike in the 1930s actually began in Atlanta, not in Flint, and spread from Atlanta to Flint.

QUEST: How did that happen?

LAWRENCE: Well, it actually happened because the Flint workers were so well-organized and disciplined by their leadership that they were able to contain it until the moment was right for what they thought, whereas --

QUEST: We're talking about Flint, Michigan?

LAWRENCE: Flint, Michigan.

QUEST: We're talking about auto workers?

LAWRENCE: Right, whereas at the General Motors plant in Atlanta, it was not so well-organized, but the intolerable working conditions were no different, and 01:16:00those workers just got fed up and walked out and then came back and sat in, you know, and kind of forced the issue, so then the Flint workers sat down, and the rest is well-known history. But it actually began in Atlanta, which is not well-known history. The fellow that you talked a while ago, Cliff Kuhn --

QUEST: Oh, who teaches at Georgia State?

LAWRENCE: Right. He was one of the few people I met who actually knew that history pretty well, and I think he eventually did some oral histories with some of the people who had been part of that.

QUEST: Now, you also say in this pamphlet that there are certain myths about organizing labor in the South.

LAWRENCE: Right.

QUEST: And do you want to talk about that a little bit? Keeping in mind that this was a presentation you made at that conference in Birmingham in -- what year again? Seventy-two?

LAWRENCE: Well, I think it was '73.

QUEST: Seventy-three? OK.

LAWRENCE: This is toward the end of seventy... Let's just finish this up for economy's sake.

QUEST: You mean, the year 1972?

LAWRENCE: Yeah.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: So the year 1972 closed out with the victory of the poultry workers we had seen earlier in the year going out on strike. This was that same independent union in Forest, Mississippi, and this December issue contains one of my interviews with workers. This one is a composite of three workers telling their story of life in the plant, and it tells exactly how the automated chicken processing takes place in a modern plant, which, of course, was very different from the kind of butchering that was typical only a few years before this 01:18:00happened. You know, factory chicken processing at high speed was really something pretty novel when I published that. So... OK, well, let's -- the labor conference was in Birmingham. It's reported in one of these 1973 issues. It should say in the beginning of the pamphlet exactly when it was. Yeah.

QUEST: May 5th and 6th, 1973.

LAWRENCE: OK, so we are getting a little bit ahead of our story, but that's all right.

QUEST: Well, you're laying out some historical and theoretical conceptions as to what worked.

QUEST: Right. Well, there were several things that I wanted to establish. One was that labor struggles, class struggles, in the South were typically not 01:19:00directed or organized by labor unions, because the earliest strikes were slave strikes, and of course they were forbidden to organize unions. But the other thing that I equally wanted to stress was that contrary to the myth of the backwards South, that actually the South had, yes, the least organized, least unionized states, but it also had the most organized state. West Virginia by far exceeded other states in its unionization and in its militancy -- you know, mostly miners, of course. So that you had these side-by-side examples of the most advanced versus the most backward, to use the caricature terminology that 01:20:00most people on the left viewed things as, which is very different -- I quoted -- what's his name? The guy who was Carter's labor secretary. Uh... What's his name? [SILENCE] Huh, I'm just skipping right over it. Ray Marshall.

KADALIE: Yeah.

QUEST: You remember him?

LAWRENCE: Because he had just --

KADALIE: Yeah, he'd written --

LAWRENCE: -- not long before published a book on labor, on southern labor, and I was showing that everything I had learned about labor in the South was exactly the opposite of what this professor who was the expert on the subject had written in his book. But I think I should back up a minute to mention that one 01:21:00of the things that I had done shortly after I moved to Mississippi was to co-found a project called the Deep South People's history project in anticipation of this kind of thing, that is, my opinion that it wasn't simply, for me, the task of recording and publishing the struggles as they occurred, but also seeing them in their historical context, and if I could, helping other people to see the historical context, because if ever traditions were suppressed and out of sight and out of mind, it's in the South. And so this pamphlet has been just reprinted again and again and again -- you know, not because it's so wonderful but because it's about the only thing there is on the subject, at 01:22:00least in a comprehensive way. And it deals with the Brotherhood of Timber Workers strike in Louisiana, which was an IWW offshoot; it deals with the Communist Trade Union Unity League strikes in the South in the 1920s with the CIO organizing --

QUEST: (inaudible) Angelo Herndon?

LAWRENCE: I think Herndon was in the thirties.

QUEST: It's a little later?

KADALIE: Thirty-six. Thirty-five, '36.

LAWRENCE: He was late enough that C. Vann Woodward was one of his committee members, surprisingly.

QUEST: Oh, I didn't know that.

LAWRENCE: Yeah. But anyway, so this -- and here is where you see me directly citing DuBois as the framework for understanding the antebellum history. The other thing, by the way, I just wanted to say: I think DuBois is not only 01:23:00valuable and unique for the reasons that we tend to say and we've been talking about today, but also, I mean, he views history organically. You know, the Civil War did not begin with the election of Abraham Lincoln and the assault on Fort Sumter; it began in Kansas with the wars between the slavery and anti-slavery forces.

QUEST: Kansas-Nebraska Act, John Brown, and all that.

LAWRENCE: John Brown, you know. And that's so important and so neglected as a way to view history --

QUEST: You've read that book many times, right, Black Reconstruction?

LAWRENCE: Yeah.

QUEST: OK. So don't you think that that's a certain reading that you bring 01:24:00to the book or that this is Jamesian reading of the book? Because I can see that reading and I can bring that reading to the book, but I don't know that he looks at history organically, and one of the things -- you don't see it in most of his other works, and this is his most -- this is the book that centers the working class the most of all his books.

LAWRENCE: OK.

QUEST: And, you know, to say that -- I mean, there's no doubt about it that it's compared to the rest of his books, but he has a "talented tenth" conception --

LAWRENCE: Right.

QUEST: -- most of his career, and it'd just be interest -- I'm interested if you think there's a certain Jamesian reading of Black Reconstruction that's passed among us for those that are sympathetic to it, because I think C.L.R. reads it that way, but I don't think -- I think if you read it all the way 01:25:00through, there's so much on politicians and presidents and senators. It's not a straight labor history.

LAWRENCE: No, but --

QUEST: Uh-huh. I mean, I mean, even in (overlapping dialogue; inaudible).

LAWRENCE: Wait a minute though, I'm going to give you an argument here.

QUEST: OK, I want to hear the argument that I'm getting. (laughs)

LAWRENCE: I can't think of any writer that James has disparaged worse than Howard Fast.

QUEST: In his early journalism?

LAWRENCE: Yeah.

QUEST: OK, because I was about to say, that's the only place I can remember.

LAWRENCE: And yet I think that Freedom Road has the same view of history as Black Reconstruction.

QUEST: What about Herbert Aptheker. James thrashes Herbert Aptheker, too.

LAWRENCE: Yeah, I would -- I think so.

QUEST: Would you agree with that critique more?

LAWRENCE: Yeah, but I'm just saying, so I don't think that our unique 01:26:00political perspective --

QUEST: Amplifies DuBois--

LAWRENCE: Well, or accounts for this reading. Now, it may be that we -- well, I don't feel this obligation. You may feel that C.L.R. should have spent more time being critical of DuBois --

QUEST: Well, he did, but we haven't heard about it. He did with Willy Gorman in Gorman's critical piece on DuBois. In the fifties, they had correspondence. His -- he had correspondence discussing their critique of DuBois. He, in his second American sojourn, clearly is amplifying his love for DuBois in many circles and --

LAWRENCE: It's not just DuBois, Robeson, too.

QUEST: And Robeson, too. And he's critical of Robeson. In fact, he wrote over his underground pen name and was very -- and thrashed Robeson in his earlier, 01:27:00first period CIO journalism. So he changes, without a doubt.

LAWRENCE: Well, OK, but --

QUEST: You know -- you know Willy and them, so you --

LAWRENCE: Yeah, but Willy is a classic sectarian.

QUEST: (laughs) OK.

LAWRENCE: I mean, you know, Willy would go out of his way to pick a fight, you know, needlessly, and I think probably C.L.R. did too in his earlier days.

QUEST: In his earlier conception? OK, so you're saying this is the later C.L.R.

LAWRENCE: I think this is a more mature --

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: -- view. I mean, yes, because I like it. I mean, you know, (Quest laughs) that's a circular argument. I'm not trying -- I'm not saying any more than that.

QUEST: All right.

LAWRENCE: But I do believe that this kind of functioning that I have mentioned to you in other conversations that was characteristic of his arrival in the United States in the sixties and his teaching and his interaction with the various organizations, I think it is a more mature style of functioning. I think 01:28:00he was a sectarian when he was a Fourth International --

QUEST: Or Trotsky -- in the Trotskyist movement?

LAWRENCE: Mm-hmm. And in fact, if you want to read something critically, read the conversations with Trotsky with your bias toward Trotsky rather than toward C.L.R.

QUEST: Oh, sometimes Trotsky has some very sharp points.

LAWRENCE: Yeah, you know, really gets him and pins him down. And there's another conversation with Trotsky that C.L.R. was not a part of -- it was with some of the other American leaders -- about Stalinism that's even more striking in how to function, where it's pretty clear that the American party felt so combative toward its rivals, you know, that they were really violating 01:29:00united front principles in order for really trivial polemical advantage, and Trotsky had no patience for that.

QUEST: OK. Well, just -- just so we can -- I mean, I think that's valuable material for our discussion. I think if we begin with DuBois and we're asking, one, is it -- would you agree that this is his most labor-oriented book?

LAWRENCE: Sure.

QUEST: That it totally breaks with his politics that he generally has otherwise.

LAWRENCE: Right, right.

QUEST: And it's a history book, so it's really not his politics, it's historiography. It -- so, so, so what I'm saying is in a way --

LAWRENCE: OK, but --

QUEST: -- he's telling a story about reconstruction, right?

LAWRENCE: I mean, he's telling -- yes, but he was a Marxist. I mean, he accepted class struggle as the motor force of history. It might not have been central to most of his advocacy writing, because that was not the locus of his 01:30:00particular --

QUEST: Politics.

LAWRENCE: Yeah, or situation, you know, either as the leader of -- as the editor of Crisis, or, you know, as a leading intellectual at Wilberforce or wherever he happened to be, but Fisk -- I don't --

QUEST: He was at Atlanta University too.

LAWRENCE: He was?

QUEST: Yeah.

LAWRENCE: But -- and the other thing about DuBois that you've got to bear in mind in order to make any sense out of this is as long as his chief rival was Booker T. Washington, that necessarily corrupted a lot of the debate, you know, because so much of his energy was devoted to that constant, chronic struggle, because they were -- remember, both men were fighting for the allegiance of 01:31:00blacks across the South, and Booker T. had the great advantage of Julius Rosenwald's money to literally buy allegiance. He bought the town of Mound Bayou, you know, he brought in a factory and so on. All that DuBois had was ideas and programs, and none of the material wealth that Booker T. could call upon in that confrontation. And I think that that seriously circumscribed -- you know, that's not the Atlantic slave trade, that's not the Philadelphia Negro, you know, that's a whole different... So I think, if anything, a black 01:32:00reconstructionist is remarkable for its existence, and we ought to be happy for that.

QUEST: Well, I don't dislike the book, I just think that the reading we bring to it, if we want to give him credit for writing a great history book, I think that many people have, and I think that's wise, and I think we can get insight on labors, you know, labor from it, I just think that sometimes there's a blurring of the lines between him as historian and his political thought, and so what happens is there's a black radical traditional historiography associated with Cedric Robinson -- that's his framework -- that puts DuBois and James together, but DuBois and James politically should not be placed together.

LAWRENCE: Well --

QUEST: -- even in their conception of anti-colonialism, it's very...

LAWRENCE: OK, but C.L.R. didn't write The Black Jacobins too many times either.

QUEST: Well, we could talk about the limits of The Black Jacobins. But anyway -- 01:33:00in fact, that is labor history. But --

LAWRENCE: I know it is.

QUEST: Yeah, (laughs) and we can talk about it. But so in the context of the roots of class struggle in the South, you borrow on DuBois and you highly recommend Black Reconstruction, (laughs) as it says on page nine, and so you're saying that his experience, how he reads reconstruction as labor history foreshadows what, since that's your origins? Slavery and reconstruction.

LAWRENCE: Right, and it foreshadows the wave, the upsurge, of class struggle that we were witnessing, which, looking back today, it's fairly easy to say, Well, this was almost an inevitable outcome of the sixties.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: You know, if the sixties tore down the barriers, you know, the legal and customary barriers in the South, so that most of the white supremacist 01:34:00institutional problems that remained were hangovers, were ideological, but were at least legally in defeat, you know, it opened the door to the possibility of class-unified struggles in ways that had not -- well, that had been rare before, since the end of reconstr --

LAWRENCE: Wasn't I talking about the difficulties that were imposed on DuBois by the conflict with --

QUEST: With Booker T. Washington, yeah.

LAWRENCE: -- Booker T. Washington and so forth? I'm just saying, I think that you have to -- if you're going to critique DuBois, you have to take that into account as an imperative it kind of overlays (electronic sound) everything he 01:35:00was doing, and, you know, I mean, that's not an apology, I don't think, it's just... So in that context... I mean, I don't know, I'm not saying he was insincere about the talented tenth, either. I think that reflected his deepest belief in the fastest way to uplift the people, and especially if you're not somebody who expects an insurgency, you know, that's not a half-bad bargain. So, you know, I -- but yeah, I agree, you know, that you shouldn't romanticize DuBois and make more out of what he wrote than what he 01:36:00actually did, but however you want to see it, Black Reconstruction is a great, insightful milestone, and extremely valuable to this analysis.

QUEST: OK. So that was in 1973 --

LAWRENCE: So this is '73.

QUEST: -- that you presented this presentation --

LAWRENCE: Right.

QUEST: -- that became this pamphlet, and now we're going to talk about the struggles in '73 that you chronicled.

LAWRENCE: Right. The year began with the Farm Workers in Florida and again at the Talisman Sugar Plantation, and this was when I wrote my open letter to César Chávez criticizing him for the campaign to deport the Jamaicans rather than to organize. And I think that's worth analyzing, and particularly given 01:37:00what you can see in these pictures pretty dramatically, the level of mass support for the strikers. You know, it's not as though strikebreaking was unknown. You know, it's not as though there was something unique about Jamaicans, you know, that made them particularly worse than any other organizing problem during a strike. And even though he did answer the open letter by rejecting it, the reality was that the union withdrew that campaign. The staff did not back him, they backed the position that I argued in the letter; the letter was widely reprinted, particularly in the union's home base in California; and I think that there again, you can see the influence of this 01:38:00small paper and one writer, you know, not for any special skills, but just, you know, trying to apply what I understood to be my job as a radical journalist, armed with the theories and the framework that we talked about in the beginning.

QUEST: Mm-hmm.

LAWRENCE: Now, in this issue, the February issue, this is more about the woodcutters' strike, and this is an interview with Fred Walters, who was the president of the Gulf Coast Pulpwood Association, and in it he talks about the whole history of life cutting pulpwood. He himself said he had cut and hauled 01:39:00wood for 35 years before this and so forth.

QUEST: What kind of wood was it? He cut what?

LAWRENCE: Pulpwood.

QUEST: Pulpwood, OK.

LAWRENCE: You know, that's the wood that was made into paper or Masonite, pressed wood. So that's a pretty important worker interview. This was the period when the Raza Unida Party was organizing and actually taking power in Crystal City in Zavala County, Texas. I went and visited them and wrote up their (coughs) -- excuse me -- their struggles, which I found interesting, although I 01:40:00don't think they've been widely replicated. But it was an interesting radical alternative politics in one rural county in Texas. And actually, they did enjoy support among Mexicans in the United States much more widely than just their community. I mean, they had, at least for a time, a fairly wide following, so it was an interesting development, even though I don't think -- to my knowledge it's not something that has reproduced itself elsewhere. The 01:41:00reporting continued on the Republic of New Afrika cases in Mississippi, but this was another case, West Point, Mississippi. This was a group of people, black people, struggling against urban renewal, where essentially the power structure was trying to use the decrepit condition of the housing in the black community as the pretext to eliminate it rather than to provide decent housing, and their struggles against that. (coughs) Excuse me. (coughs)

QUEST: Want some water?

LAWRENCE: Yeah, I do. [SILENCE] Partly it's because my voice is starting to go, so I don't know how much longer we...but let's see what we can do. OK, here we -- this is the May issue, and it has the back --

QUEST: OK, yes, again, my name is Matthew Quest. This is May 28, 2010, and we're continuing our survey of Ken Lawrence's journalism in the Southern Patriot, and we're going to continue now with his journalism as of May 1973.

LAWRENCE: Right. The Southern Patriot is, of course, the monthly newspaper published by the Southern Conference Educational Fund, which we've described in earlier sessions of this interview. May was the issue that described the labor workshop that we talked about extensively yesterday, and that workshop was a direct response to the insurgency that we had seen building momentum, the independent unions in Mississippi and the wave of strikes in Atlanta in particular, and a few others that we've discussed along the way. In earlier 01:43:00issues, I had done two interviews with poultry workers. One was about how they organized and why, and the second one was a composite of how the work occurs in the plant. And in the May issue, I did an extensive interview with Jeffrey May, a woman who worked in the picket line -- in the factor and was participating in the strike on the picket line and so on, and she tells her story. She was a white woman in a largely black workforce, and it's -- so this is yet another one of my interviews where the workers tell the story from their own perspective and we just serve as the intermediary to share it. In the June issue, the front 01:44:00page headline is "Boycott Campaigns are Growing in the South," and this concerns both the textile organizing in the South and solidarity with the Farm Workers Union, particularly the lettuce boycott, and how these were spreading across the South in particular. One of my reports here is a follow-up on that confrontation between Muslims and deputies in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And another development that I had participated in which became important later on 01:45:00was the founding of a southern regional organization of the National Lawyers Guild in Georgia, and I was one of the speakers there and one of the organizers of it, and later on, when the Lawyers Guild held its own labor conference, I presented that paper.

QUEST: That became the essay or pamphlet on American labor in 1974?

LAWRENCE: That's right, so that's the context for that.

QUEST: So June seventy -- or a little before June '73 is when the conference and the pamphlet comes (overlapping dialogue; inaudible).

LAWRENCE: Well, not the conference, it was the organizing conference.

QUEST: (overlapping dialogue; inaudible).

LAWRENCE: Right, it was the organizing conference, and then later the Lawyers Guild held a labor conference, when I presented that pamphlet, that report. In 01:46:00September of '73, I reported on a Tampa union organizing drive. This one was by UE, which is probably one of the most left-wing unions in the country. It was --

QUEST: Electrical workers?

LAWRENCE: Yeah.

QUEST: UE, United Electrical.

LAWRENCE: And UE was the left-wing one that remained independent rather than stay in the CIO during the anti-communist --

QUEST: Purges.

LAWRENCE: -- purges. And UE always has practiced social unionism, so they had a lot of people involved in civil rights activity in the South.

QUEST: Which is similar to 1199 tradition.

LAWRENCE: Eleven ninety-nine would be another example, Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. Those are about really the only -- the main ones, those three unions.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: So this, of course, was a very different situation than any of the others that I had written about before, because on the one hand it is an existing union structure, it's not an independent one, and yet it's a much more radical, democratic organizing style and one that invites political people to be involved in the campaign and so on, and they were, and I think that becomes clear in here. And again, I talked to some of the workers and published a transcript of that interview in this same issue.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: So you see again and again my trademark style of both reporting and 01:48:00letting the standalone interviews speak as the worker's own version of the story.

QUEST: Right, and then you also have the editorials if you want to make a more direct intervention, so...

LAWRENCE: Right, right, right.

QUEST: OK, I see.

LAWRENCE: Yeah. And I think that this -- you know, I mean, it has the appearance, the way we go through it, of being kind of schematic, but I think it was very effective. I mean, I think everybody has to develop a style and some consistency in order for the readership to become familiar with what you're trying to achieve. But I certainly felt very comfortable with this. And I can say this, you know: I was certainly a political minority, as we've said, but nobody ever raised any criticism of this --

QUEST: Style of work?

LAWRENCE: -- style of work, so whether or not anybody else had ever thought of it before, at least they seemed to appreciate the result of the way it worked, 01:49:00and of course that includes strikes and struggles that involve people who otherwise were certainly not in agreement with my political line. So I think it was a pretty effective and successful experiment in labor journalism. In 1973, the --

QUEST: Of October, or before?

LAWRENCE: Well, this is the October issue. The pulpwood cutters (coughs) -- excuse me -- struck again. Remember, they were on strike when I first went to Mississippi in '71, and now two years later, they struck again, and this time they struck all the paper companies and Masonite at the same time over a multi-state area, and so this issue tells the story of the unfolding of that 01:50:00strike. And then this issue also contains an editorial by me and -- with Anne Braden, challenging white people to get involved in defending the Republic of New Afrika people who were still -- except for Imari who was out on bail, the rest of them were still in jail in Jackson. So that was a kind of important moment. Did we discuss this before? Anyway, November '73 was another editorial by -- I think I was the main author, again with Anne Braden and also with Eileen Whalen, who was -- worked in editorial on the Patriot. And this was a question 01:51:00to the miners in Harlan, Kentucky, how it happened that the strike in '73 was -- or the struggle at least -- was all white when historically it had been --

QUEST: Had a tradition of multi-racialism --

LAWRENCE: Right.

QUEST: -- in the union, in the miners.

LAWRENCE: Right, and so it was again one of our attempts to intervene.

QUEST: And what was your assessment? Why was it all white, in your assessment of the...?

LAWRENCE: Well, I'm not sure that we knew --

QUEST: Oh.

LAWRENCE: -- but certainly the racist policies of the corrupt UMW leadership --

QUEST: Tony Boyle (inaudible).

LAWRENCE: Yeah, had really --I don't know whether they intentionally purged blacks or just their collaboration of policies ended up protecting mainly white jobs as the industry shrunk. Remember that the biggest effect of the collaboration was the shrinkage of the union base, you know, that they essentially just allowed the company to automate at will and slash the workforce. You know, just the normal operating of American institutional racism would have made the black workers pay the biggest price of that attrition, so.

QUEST: Were you familiar with the "News and Letters" pamphlet by Andy Philips about when C.L.R.'s group had a base in the mines in '55?

LAWRENCE: No.

QUEST: OK. Well --

LAWRENCE: That was in Illinois, right?

QUEST: No, those mines were in West Virginia --

LAWRENCE: Really?

QUEST: -- in intervention. But we can talk about it later -- I don't want to get you sidetracked -- but I was wondering if it had an influence directly on your mining journalism.

LAWRENCE: No, I actually was aware that the Johnston–Forest group had organized miners in Illinois; I didn't know that they had in West Virginia, so that's news to me.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: OK, the December issue follows up on the Farm Worker boycott. There also is a follow-up on the poultry workers in Forest, Mississippi, which has been a running theme for a few years that we've covered, but the biggest and I think most interesting article in here is about the radical history of Jones County, Mississippi. It's --

QUEST: Did anybody sign that article?

LAWRENCE: Well, I wrote the article.

QUEST: OK, so the history of struggle in Jones County, Mississippi, unsigned, that's Ken.

LAWRENCE: Right. And this is kind of a recapitulation of a television program that we produced on the same subject. Now, remember, this is in the context of a pulpwood strike that's across the Deep South but is centered in Jones County, headquartered in Jones County.

QUEST: Written and narrated by -- that was a radio or...?

LAWRENCE: Television.

QUEST: Television.

LAWRENCE: Yeah, and here's how we got the TV time, which also was a result of an ongoing struggle that preceded all this. So this is good for several reasons. One, it shows you how I was trying to apply my history research to contemporary struggles, to put them in their -- you know, to show how the tradition helped 01:55:00advance the struggle, which --

QUEST: Since you're doing cultural work locally when there's not open agitation around an issue-oriented campaign?

LAWRENCE: Right. But then to be able to plug it in when there is an eruption of militancy --

QUEST: I see, mm-hmm.

LAWRENCE: -- you know, that helps build the struggle, but also this separate article about how we got the television time shows how other struggles that seemingly have no connection to these labor struggles actually wind up playing an important role, you know, that is that we have won access to these television programs through our challenging the racism of the broadcast media and ended up 01:56:00being an important media outlet to reach a much wider audience with our strike reports.

QUEST: So this is in the December '73 issue, but it happened before December '73.

LAWRENCE: Right, right. And then finally, in the December '73 issue, I did an interview with James Skinner about labor struggles in Atlanta that --

QUEST: And he's a member of the Black Worker's Congress?

LAWRENCE: I believe he was.

QUEST: (inaudible) James Foreman?

LAWRENCE: I believe he was.

QUEST: But did you present him that way, or you...?

LAWRENCE: I don't know whether I did or not. I'm not sure that he was wanting to publicize that at the time.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: I just don't remember for sure.

QUEST: OK, gotcha.

LAWRENCE: I may actually still have a tape of the interview. I'm not positive about that. If I do, it's probably going to wind up at Penn State with the 01:57:00rest of that collection.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: So anyway, that gets us through '73.

QUEST: OK. Do you want to stop there and download?

KADALIE: We're going to take a break and download it. That's 15 minutes.

LAWRENCE: OK, yeah, sure, let's do that.

QUEST: -- start with...

LAWRENCE: With January of 1974, and the important thing in this issue -- this has yet another poultry worker's description of his situation, but it's also got an overview of the whole industry, the context of the industry, the context of the town, the history and how the racist state sovereignty commission of the 1960s has an impact on this struggle in the 1970s.

QUEST: One thing, Ken, that I'd like to do -- and we can decide to do it as a separate section at the end -- is that you've written all these oral histories, and to the extent that the oral history is describe the production 01:58:00process, we might want to talk about to what extent it mirrors or not a reading of "The Working Day" in Karl Marx's Capital or a mirror of -- mirroring the "Worker's Inquiry," because every oral history you do doesn't bring up-- out the productive process, it depends on what people are speaking about. And I think with the broiler chicken industry and a couple of others, like the pulpwood one, it really is graphic. And I don't know how you feel about the strength of those oral histories (overlapping dialogue; inaudible).

LAWRENCE: I mean, another possibility is that you might want to compile a reader out of these oral histories, you know, see how it looks and is there enough here when you put them all together to tell a full story in a way that isn't commonly done.

QUEST: Well, we can look into it, but I was just wondering, for our purposes now, is there something you'd like to highlight about this specific oral 01:59:00history --

LAWRENCE: Well, this --

QUEST: -- in the broiler chicken industry?

LAWRENCE: This one, I think -- you know, I haven't studied it in detail in years, but just the way the sequence went -- you know, starting out, my first interview was, what precipitated the struggle that led to the strike? And then they -- my next oral history interview was a composite where they told about how the process of chicken production takes place. And then --

QUEST: Is that what you asked them, or that's what they gave you?

LAWRENCE: Well, that's what they gave me.

QUEST: Oh, they gave you, so they were already thinking -- this group of workers is already thinking in those terms.

LAWRENCE: I certainly asked questions, you know, guided largely by that Marx questionnaire, you know, to provide some focus, but I was pretty modest about intervening once people started talking. You know, I preferred to just let them 02:00:00talk, because you don't want to lose something because you think something in it is more important than they do. I mean, you know, the whole discipline here is to get their story, not what I think their story ought to be. So then the next time I went back, we had Jeffrey May's story of her life, how she became a chicken prep plant worker; you know, with no labor experience, how she ended up engaged in this struggle; and what it meant to her family; and so on and so on. And then here (coughs) -- excuse me -- this is my overview of the importance of the chicken processing industry generally and situating Forest, Mississippi in the larger context, and why it became a focal point of this struggle, and 02:01:00then again, another one of the workers talking about how work in the plant and conditions of work led to this confrontation.

QUEST: So in Marx's "Worker's Inquiry," you could ask them how many breaks you have, and C.L.R. would ask people, "Well, do they let you go to the bathroom?" and stuff like that. It seems like this guy is either answering these questions or has these things in mind already, these specific ideas. Do you remember the guy who you interviewed, the guy's name?

LAWRENCE: This probably tells you here, but if it doesn't...

QUEST: Over on the second page, this guy?

LAWRENCE: Yeah. [SILENCE] I believe it's Matthew Nicks, but...

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: Let me just see if... [SILENCE] No, no, this is a white worker --

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: -- who wanted to be anonymous.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: So I don't remember the identity of this person. It's probably in my notebooks. But no, this is a white worker.

QUEST: OK.

LAWRENCE: Now, one of the things that I want to say, though, is that even though this was a fairly isolated struggle in a fairly small town that had three chicken plants in it, struggles like theirs continued in the poultry industry for years. So while I was still in Mississippi in the 1980s, there was a very famous strike at Sanderson Farms in Laurel, which was another chicken plant.

QUEST: Laurel, Mississippi?

LAWRENCE: Laurel, Mississippi. And one of the company officials was a Klansman, most of the workers or all the workers -- I don't remember now -- were black. You know, so this -- even though some people might raise their eyebrows about, well, how important is this situation that I've been writing about now for three years that was going on in Forest in the larger scheme of things, but in many ways it's a case study of a general situation. And in the Laurel context, of course, it was a traditional union that came in. It was a much bigger plant, a much more sophisticated workforce in the sense of being aware of collective bargaining and more traditional labor union. You know, Laurel is a union town, unlike Forest, and so on, and yet once the struggle erupted into a mass strike, it involved the whole community, which is unusual in labor disputes but typical 02:04:00of the type of social unionism that we were intentionally trying to propagate and which almost spontaneously erupted in many of these southern contexts because they were such close-knit communities, because --

QUEST: Often they married struggles against racism with employee struggles and their work struggles.

LAWRENCE: Right, and the networks that existed were those that they inherited from civil rights–period activity and civil rights organizational structures and, you know, just part of the culture that you don't think about but you just instinctively reach for when the situation calls for it. So even though this is limited to five years in the 1970s, I think it's almost a model of 02:05:00study of proletarian struggle in the South, in the Deep South, at least, over a whole historic period. OK, in February issue, we have another -- an update report on the Republic of New Africa case. In the March issue, I reported on the Farah strike in -- actually, the outcome of the Farah strike in El Paso. This was a struggle that had been going on for a long time -- excuse me -- before I moved to the South, but it was -- it reached its climax during this period, and that was what I reported on there. OK.

QUEST: Would you -- Mississippi poultry workers -- can you explain what indemnity is?

LAWRENCE: There was a situation where a huge number of chickens were contaminated chemically and had to be slaughtered and buried, which was very costly to the industry but particularly costly to the workers because the plants laid them off during this period when there were no chickens to process, and so --

QUEST: And this was reported in April '74?

LAWRENCE: Right, and so in April '74 we talked about how the union had issued demands for an indemnity to the workers who were laid off as a consequence of this contamination, which certainly wasn't their fault.

QUEST: And it's common -- it's pretty common in meatpacking, meat processing industries, that these happen from time to time?

LAWRENCE: Right.

QUEST: Not the layoff, not the cuts in payable -- that might be the case, too -- I meant the problem where sometimes the livestock gets contaminated.

LAWRENCE: Right. Yeah, oh, yeah. And it's all the worse, though, in these days of factory agriculture, you know, where you've got so many animals crammed together in close proximity, they're eating the earlier generations of their own entrails, you know -- I mean, that was part of the problem -- and so you're constantly -- you know, any contaminant that you've got is being concentrated and spread throughout the entire -- you know, traditionally, livestock was spread out, free-ranging. You know, if you had a problem, it was small and localized and easily overcome, but, you know, the more these became 02:08:00factory production and there's assembly line growth, the more dangerous these situations become, and this was an early example of that. In fact, I think that the chicken processing industry may have been one of the first to become so highly automated. Today, they all are. You know, there's no meatpacking in Chicago anymore. You know, it's all done right out in Kansas City and, you know, right by the farms and feed lots, and the beef never range anywhere, you know, they're just fattened up and slaughtered and packaged and so on in close concentration. So yes, whether it's a bacterial contamination or a chemical poisoning or whatever, anything like that can be a calamity for the whole industry and, above all, for the workers in the industry, and so this is kind of 02:09:00a forerunner for a situation that you see more and more today. It was very unusual in those days and actually made the national news, it was so difficult for people. OK, this, in the same issue, was an interview with strikers at the Birmingham Stove and Range Company, a foundry, that mostly hired black women, and these workers also did not want their names to be published because they feared reprisal from the company. And finally, this is a follow-up on -- remember that we, a couple years earlier, had had the Rhodesian chrome ships turned away from Baton Rouge --

QUEST: Louisiana.

LAWRENCE: And now here they are in April of '74 trying to dock in Baltimore, and again, dockworkers mobilized to prevent their unloading.

QUEST: Unloading of...?

LAWRENCE: Of chrome.

QUEST: Chrome.

LAWRENCE: From Rhodesia.

QUEST: From Rhodesia, and so there's a meeting of the labor movement, and, in a sense --

LAWRENCE: Of solidarity.

QUEST: -- the Pan-African movement, African solidarity movement, at that time.

LAWRENCE: Right.

QUEST: OK. And then we were saying earlier, even though you weren't aware of it, that CLR had theorized the idea that there was no need to rely on international law, multilateral government institutions to talk about union rights and sanctions --

LAWRENCE: Well, this was a perfect example because there were all these international sanctions, and the United States was flouting them. (laughs)

QUEST: And so the workers, through their own sanctions at the point of reduction, implemented this.

LAWRENCE: Right, implemented...

QUEST: And this was not like my idealistic imagination, this actually happened --

LAWRENCE: No, this actually happened.

QUEST: -- between '72 to '74 in here in Maryland.

LAWRENCE: Right. No, that's absolutely true, that the international sanctions had been in place, well, since UDI, so since '65, when Ian Smith declared Rhodesia independent.

QUEST: And what's UDI abbreviated?

LAWRENCE: The Unilateral Declaration of Independence.

QUEST: Of independence by Ian Smith?

LAWRENCE: By Ian Smith.

QUEST: Oh, I see. OK.

LAWRENCE: And from that time on -- I mean, the sanctions were technically total. For example, you know -- being a stamp collector, I know this -- mail from Rhodesia was considered unpaid, because in the international community they didn't recognize the validity of Southern Rhodesia stamps. So mail was supposed to be delivered postage due if it originated in Southern Rhodesia 02:12:00because it was considered unpaid regardless of the postage. So everything being exported in any respect from Southern Rhodesia was supposed to be banned by the whole world, and on a technical level, the only country that declared its refusal to obey the sanctions was South Africa, but in fact, the United States was the biggest violator, and several years later, a group that I work with was the group that exposed how the oil companies in England and the United States supplied Rhodesia illegally with oil to keep their industries going. So, you know, it was a wreck. But examples like this, where the workers themselves 02:13:00responded to the appeal for solidarity, which was issued by the liberation movement, in this case, (inaudible), is a dramatic example of the difference between official sanction and proletariat solidarity worldwide. So yes, I think these are exemplary cases that you couldn't ask for better examples. There's a small article here about a cost-of-living strike in Louisville, Kentucky -- no, Louisville, Mississippi, pardon me -- they're spelled the same but pronounced differently. And also this man, Don Cole, who was a member of Progressive Labor Party in Mississippi for many years, we discovered that he was 02:14:00really an undercover agent of the FBI and exposed him too. But he was present at almost everything that happened, every struggle in Mississippi, during all the years I was there up until we exposed him. So this was quite a surprise to many people.

QUEST: Mm-hmm. How are we on time?

KADALIE: This is 18 minutes' worth.

QUEST: And it's not blinking; we're OK? OK, so let's get through the '74, if we can.

LAWRENCE: OK, June, July, Mississippians win boycott victory. It talks about how the large grocery stores in Mississippi agreed to remove the boycotted grapes and lettuce. (coughs) Excuse me. So that's the main article there. In the 02:15:00September issue, my article, my front-page article, "Working People Strikes," is a summary of quite a number of strike actions that were going on in different parts of the South. And I think the main significance of reports like this is this showing that the momentum is continuing, that this was a period of workers' turbulence everywhere through the South during this period. Andy [Heim's?] report is interesting here because, contrary to the experience with the Rhodesian chrome, the South African coal did get unloaded even though 02:16:00it was subject to the boycott, that the power of the coal companies, of the power companies in Alabama was such that they were able to defeat the boycott. October '74 issue is about mass protests in Byhalia, which resulted -- it was a --

QUEST: Byhalia's in Mississippi?

LAWRENCE: Byhalia's a north Mississippi town in Marshall County, not far from Memphis. And Marshall County was at that time, I believe, still a majority-black county. It's north of Oxford, where Ole Miss is. The county seat is Holly Springs, so it has a glorious Old South history going back to Civil War times. 02:17:00But sheriff's deputies killed a black youth, 21 years old, and first the police report said that he had ran into a fence and broke his neck, but then the coroner's report showed that he'd been shot in the back. And this precipitated mass protests and boycotts of the white businesses and led to greatly expanded demands for racial justice in the town. And this report doesn't just -- tells the story midstream, when this insurgency was going on, but the most amazing thing about this struggle to me is the tragic side. This 02:18:00actually went on for years, and the white businesses were so recalcitrant that they essentially committed economic suicide rather than to yield to the demands of the black community, so Byhalia became a ghost town, you know, rather than just grant black people ordinary democratic rights and so on. You know, there aren't many places where that happened. Usually, eventually, civil rights–type struggles prevailed, even if the whites remained grudging about it, but here was one where they preferred to see their businesses fail rather than to give into the majority of the community. It's just unbelievable. The November '74 issue reports the outcome of the RNA trial where Hekima Ana was 02:19:00convicted, and there was another summary article by me about organizing across the South and the different results.

QUEST: Would you say that was specific to that moment in time, like for these summary articles, more thematic? (inaudible)

LAWRENCE: Well, part of it reflects the -- I believe by this time the crisis was on with SCEF that your documents went into it.

QUEST: OK, the Black Panther controversy.

LAWRENCE: Right. And once that happened, we lost most of the staff, you know, because there was a big split. Walter Collins became the executive director, and Eileen Whalen and I became responsible for the entire Southern Patriot. So my 02:20:00reportage was necessarily curtailed and compressed in order to be able to give a south-wide picture while we were in the midst of this crisis.

QUEST: OK. That's the context for that.

LAWRENCE: Yeah. Similarly, in the December issue, we have the book banning in West Virginia and Mississippi that was the cause of struggle. Now, here's another way that I -- well, let me finish this. There's also a report on the failure to convict the people who had -- the government people who had killed students at Kent State and Jackson State during that protest.

QUEST: These were reported in December '74?

LAWRENCE: Right. And finally, I want to show you this. This is unsigned, but this is another way that I intervened. You remember all through the sixties and sev -- fifties, sixties, and seventies -- the railroad companies, you know, every time they negotiated a contract, they would claim that the workers were featherbedding, you know -- that was their term for having cushiony jobs where they didn't have to do anything, you know, and so on, and, if only we could get rid of this excess, this featherbedding, and make the railroad work more efficient, the prices would come down. And it was standard company propaganda. Well, of course, the union answer was that you need all these people in order to run trains safely. You know, if you don't have brakemen and switchmen and so on, you know, you're going to have problems. And so there was a series of train wrecks, and I decided this was too much to pass up, so I did this report 02:22:00like this, showing the pictures and the title, "Do These Look Like Feather Beds to You?" But I did it in a format so that you could literally just copy this as a leaflet, an 8.5 x 11 leaflet, and hand it out. So there's another --

QUEST: Another strategic... Right, yeah.

LAWRENCE: Another one of my attempts to help the struggle with something concrete that could be useful to people (inaudible).

QUEST: Now, you only have -- that's December '74. There's only one or two articles in '75. Why don't we talk about '75 -- we have a couple of minutes on there, right? -- and then we can save what we have and ask a few more questions at the end, OK?

LAWRENCE: OK, the only one I've got in my file here -- I think you've got one more somewhere -- but the only one I've got is the January issue, the 02:23:00reports -- Eileen Whalen reports on the coal conference, and --

QUEST: But unsigned -- that's you?

LAWRENCE: That's me, about Tapson Mawere, the ZANU representative --

QUEST: From Zimbabwe.

LAWRENCE: Right.

QUEST: So the headline, "African Treaty Fighters Speak."

LAWRENCE: Right. This is just a short description of the pamphlet "African Freedom Fighters Speak for Themselves," which I published for ZANU.

QUEST: OK. Were you conscious of any allusions to "The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves," or you weren't aware of that booklet?

LAWRENCE: Oh, I was aware of that booklet. In fact, one of my very --

QUEST: It was just a little oral history, embellished oral history, in the Jamesian style, that's why I'm wondering --

LAWRENCE: That's right, that's absolutely right.

QUEST: -- if you brought that to your African (inaudible).

LAWRENCE: No, I certainly did. "The African Freedom Fighters Speak for Themselves," and I published another pamphlet, which I don't even know if I've still got a copy of, called "African Freedom Fighter Speaks to Mississippians."

QUEST: How would you research and see what I could dig out for you?

LAWRENCE: So -- but yes, that was very different. But what I wanted to say is one of the very first protests I ever participated in as a young radical was I think in 1959 when I participated in Chicago at a picket line at the British consulate to free Jomo Kenyatta.

QUEST: Wow, OK.

LAWRENCE: So my activism on the international issues goes back to that, so this was very familiar turf for me.

QUEST: OK. Well, the one article that stands out to me in '75 is you were reporting on the new miners' contracts -- I believe coal miners in West Virginia but also, if I'm not mistaken, Kentucky. You didn't do a lot of journalism on that, but that's the one byline (inaudible) kind of reporting on that contract. Do you remember that article?

LAWRENCE: Only vaguely. What I remember is what I alluded to a few minutes ago, that Eileen and I were responsible for the whole South reporting. Sandy Gage had been the SCEF staff person with the miners. He became heavily involved in Arnold Miller's campaign against Boyle, and at that point we lost him as a staff reporter, and so we were forced to do catch-up reporting to do the whole southern picture from Louisville by getting on the phone and finding out what was going on and seeing if people would send us photographs and stuff. But that was not our strongest reporting, but it was our duty to at least keep the news flowing, even if we couldn't do it in the depth that they wanted to.

QUEST: All right, well, let's stop there.