Emily Morrell Received the Robert H. Zieger Prize

https://southernlaborstudies.org/page-18074

Won at the Southern Labor Studies Association conference. 

Her paper was called “Southerners for Economic Justice: Labor and the Long Civil Rights Movement.”

In the decades following the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 it appeared as though the Civil Rights Movement ended in legislative victories. Concurrent to this storyline of triumph ran the apparent declension of the labor movement. In the southern United States these narratives of triumph and deterioration merged. However, the convergence of these stories and the experiences of organizers in the South during the last three decades of the twentieth century reveal the holes in the teleological nature of each plotline. This paper explores the rhetoric and tactics of some of those organizers via an analysis of Southerners for Economic Justice, a faith-based cohort of organizers who used their theological commitments and Civil Rights Movement involvement to push the Movement into the realm of workers’ rights in the South’s factory towns. This work shows how a civically minded, ecumenical Protestantism informed organizers’ sense of continuity with the Civil Rights Movement and their commitment to labor organizing in the face of deindustrialization and globalizing capitalism. As workers faced increasingly blatant union-busting tactics and inevitable lay-offs, a productive partnership between Civil Rights veterans and Southern workers emerged.  By emphasizing organizers’ use of religion and their self-conceptualization as people of faith, this work intervenes in the historiographies of labor and the long civil rights movement to show that the story of late twentieth century Christianity goes beyond the demise of the labor movement and the rise of the New Right. The political and social power of the long civil rights movement extended into the late twentieth century as a challenge to racial liberalism and austerity politics in part by capitalizing on the ubiquity of Christianity and the intricacies of power and personal relationships therein.