The Southern Faith, Labor and

Community Alliance

Moving Toward a Grassroots
Southern Strategy

(Southern Faith and Labor meeting in Greensboro, NC, January 2006)

To download a copy of our Southern Faith, Labor, and Community Alliance flyer in PDF, click here.

Why “Southern, Faith, Labor & Community?”

Southern: Political, labor, and religious groups have long recognized the influence of Southern politics, religion, and culture on the American imagination, and have each developed different “southern strategies” to direct this influence. The time has come again for movements for social transformation to tap into the political and theological significance of the South—the place where people have been enslaved, lived under lynch law, and long endured economic injustice.  As during the Civil Rights Movement, the authority of that suffering can be summoned now to stimulate the moral consciousness of the entire nation.

Faith:  Any movement must have a vision, a basic strategy, and a tactical plan.  Churches and people of faith have an important role in providing a vision for social transformation.  Calling upon the gospel tradition, as well as the history of struggle, the Black church in particular has the potential to “bring good news to the poor,” to provide a vision of Beloved Community that encompasses economic as well as spiritual wholeness. 

(Ida Leachman, active in the Memphis Furniture workers strike, speaks at a meeting in Memphis, April, 2006)

Labor: The labor movement traditionally consists of organized, structured, self-interest groups. Though the goals of labor organizing can too often imitate the corporate culture with which it struggles, Labor brings a history of effectiveness, a base of support, and a knowledge of strategies and tactics.  If inspired with a broader vision, Labor might be a powerful force for justice for the entire community.

Community: Who should determine the conditions of our livelihood? How can there be a healthy community if people don’t have work to do, aren’t paid adequately, or are not treated with dignity? Fair working conditions and wages are necessary for the well-being of the entire community, and they are the responsibility of the community.   (See Nelson Johnson’s essay on the model of community unionism in the Greensboro K-mart struggle)

(Michael Honey, author of Black Worker's Remember, and J.Herbert Nelson in Memphis, April 2006)

Alliance: These are no ordinary times.  If we are to have a future we must unite around a transforming vision, nurtured by creative love and anchored in a stand for comprehensive justice.   If clergy and people of faith, labor organizers, and workers can come together around a 2006 version of Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign, we can become a catalyst to unify the many strata and fragments of our society.   Dr. King was in the process of leading a bold Poor People’s Campaign for race equality, economic justice, and peace when he was struck down in Memphis.  It is clear that nothing short of the resurrection and expansion of the movement that Dr. King was leading—a poor people’s movement for justice and righteousness—can save the nation from its own blindness, greed, and structural flaws.  We are committed to forging a powerful southern-based alliance of faith, labor, and community as a “load-bearing beam” of such a movement. 
History pushes us, and the future pulls us!   

For more information on the SFLCA, click here.

Recommended Viewing:

At The River I Stand
A powerful documentary examining the 1968 sanitation workers' strike which brought Martin Luther King, Jr., to Memphis at a pivotal point in the civil rights movement.
Distributed by California Newsreel, VHS, DVD, 1993, 55 minutes. Directed by David Appleby, Allison Graham,
and Steven Ross.
www.newsreel.org/films/attheriv.htm

(I Am A Man, photo by Ernest Withers)

_____________________________

Recommended Reading:
Black Workers Remember
By Michael Honey

Black Workers Remember tells the hidden history of African American workers in their own words. Providing firsthand accounts of the experiences of black southerners living under segregation in Memphis, Tennessee, these oral histories comprise a unique primary source and provide a new way of understanding the black labor experience of that era.

_________________________

Psalm for Distribution
Lord,
On 8th Street
Between 6th Avenue and Broadway
In Greenwich Village
There are enough shoe stores
With enough shoes
To make me wonder
Where there are shoeless people
On the earth.
Lord,
You have to fire the Angel
in charge of distribution.
--Jack Agueros

_______________________

Lazarus and the Rich Man
Hamlet, North Carolina (Luke 16:19-31)

That man dressed fine as Sunday every day of the week. Owned Imperial Food Products—
poultry processors. Had a plant right here in town. Every morning, early, the workers would line up at the front gates—mostly women, mostly black folk, some with joints froze up from working those machines, some with emphysema from working the pantyhose factory down the road, but all wanting their babies to eat half as good as what sat on that rich man’s table every evening ‘round supper time. Well, he got to worrying that some folks might start stealing his chicken parts, so he took to locking up the factory doors once the morning shift was in place. The time came when a hydraulic line blew on one of the deep-fat fryers and black smoke filled up the room, followed by grease fire. None of the state-of-the-art, automatic, carbon dioxide sprinklers ever came on. Most folks died at the south end of the building near the walk-in freezer. They had headed for the exit, but it was locked. Then they were drawn on by gulps of cool air. Some died down at the loading dock. Piled up on each other trying to get through the small hole between the wall and the truck blocking the platform. There was Mary Alice Whit.
She was dead. There was Peggy Fairley. She was dead. There was Lillian Mary Wall, who’d only worked chicken a few months. She was dead. And Margaret Banks. When they brought her out, you could already tell she was dead. All in all, there were 25 who died that day. The Hamlet police lieutenant said you couldn’t tell whether the bodies were white or black on account of the smoke; but the angels, who pay no mind to color, came and carried every single one of them up into the arms of Abraham. Now, all of this happened the day after Labor Day. And even though Imperial didn’t allow no organizing in its plants, the North Carolina Textile Workers Union still sent dresses (and suits for the men) to use as burying clothes. At the First Baptist Church the mourners cried out “Lord, Lord,” maybe because in the confusion they had missed the angels. They cried out “Slavery time’s been over! How much longer is it going on?” To which there was just no good answer. What all happened to the rich man was never much covered in the newspapers, but the actual truth is his story’s been told before.
-Rose Marie Berger