Industry & Labor Make It Work

INTEGRATION IN THE SOUTH

IN the South's worried soul-searching over desegregation, Southern businessmen have found a new cause for alarm. They fear that the uproar may scare away their star boarder: new industry from the North. In the lead article of its April issue, the Southern Regional Council's New South cautions: "The bright future of the South in industry is being dimmed by racial tensions." pie D. Shelton, executive vice president of the Baton Rouge Chamber of Commerce, warned the Southern Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives: "Boycotts, economic reprisals, incidents of violence--these are new factors which will now be given consideration by industry and business when they consider a Southern location. The South faces a crisis such as it has not met in its lifetime."

In some cases, labor unions have heightened the sense of impending crisis. The A.F.L.-C.I.O., which set out to combat racial discrimination as one of the prime aims of the unified labor movement, has offended many Southern unionists and unorganized workers by supporting integration. In Alabama and Tennessee angered locals are threatening to secede from parent unions, demand lily-white, "Anglo-Saxon" unions.

But despite such scattered outbreaks of rebellion, there is no evidence that the integration issue has slowed the industrialization of the South. The chief reason is that industry is the most successful exponent of desegregation in the South, though Southerners are reluctant to admit it. From the steel mills of Birmingham to the docks of New Orleans, the Negro worker, once relegated to menial jobs and Jim Crow unions, is moving steadily across the color bar into skilled jobs and nonsegregated union locals.

In Memphis the International Harvester Co. has had no trouble, though it has been promoting Negroes to skilled foundry and machine jobs since the plant opened in 1948. Lockheed Aircraft Corp., Georgia's biggest employer, has been equally successful in assigning Negro workers to skilled assembly and fabrication jobs at its huge Marietta bomber plant, recently hired its first Negro engineer. In some Southern cities women office workers of both races also work desk by desk. Even in Mississippi, where former Governor Hugh White vowed last year that segregation would be preserved "until hell freezes over," dozens of industries from the North have integrated workers without incident.

In a major breakthrough toward equality of opportunity, Texas oil workers this year have succeeded in abolishing a discriminatory "dual promotion" system, under which Negroes were hired only as laborers and could not compete with white workers for operating jobs. At Beaumont's Magnolia Petroleum Co., the first company to scrap the old system, 32 Negroes have already stepped into operating jobs, while 13 whites have been hired as laborers.

Despite the threats of revolt, A.F.L.-C.I.O. leaders see little danger of mass secession by segregationist locals, mainly because organized workers would be reluctant to forfeit the contracts and bargaining power they have won through international unions. In union affairs and on the job, most organized workers in the South today recognize that equality of opportunity and pay benefits all workers, regardless of race. Drinking fountains, washrooms and cafeterias are usually still segregated in Southern plants--in most cases by state law--but union activities are nearly always integrated. In many locals, e.g., packinghouse, textile, woodworkers, elected Negro officers represent members of both races.

While Northern management and union leaders have led the fight for job equality in the South, many longtime Southern industries that have resisted unionization are also opening up skilled jobs for Negroes. Probably no Southern industry has taken greater strides toward integration than the building trades. White and Negro masons (among the industry's best-paid workers) now work side by side; Negro plasterers even outnumber whites.

Far from boasting about the progress of desegregation, most Southern businessmen still act as though equality were a dirty word. In a typical reaction, a North Carolina industrialist who was discussing plans to broaden skilled-job opportunities for Negro workers, cautioned: "If we got any publicity on this, everyone would be on our necks next morning. The key word is 'inconspicuous.' We've got to do these things just as quietly as possible." Nevertheless, desegregation of industry remains one of the most powerful liberating forces in the South today. And it will continue, since industries are less concerned with emotional considerations than hard economic fact: the South's critical shortage of skilled labor can only be met by training and promoting workers on the basis of capability, not color.

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