Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction: An Introduction

Abstract

“Never take a shit on your own time.” That, according to the lifelong Southern radical George Meyers, was his first lesson, taught to him in 1933 by a helpful co-worker on his first job, at the Celanese textile plant near Cumberland, Maryland. It was his first shift in the spinning department and his stomach was churning from the stench of acetone fumes and the air temperatures of over 100 degrees, so during the “lunch” break (in the middle of the 11:00 p.m.-7:00 a.m. shift) Meyers had dashed to the bathroom. His friend’s emphatic advice may sound amusing with the distance of time, but it was actually a sound and suggestive dictum for a budding activist. Labor struggles always return to the regulation (even legislation) and exploitation of bodies, as crystallized in the slogan from a Harlan County, Kentucky, miners’ strike in 1974: “The Duke Power Company May Own the Brookside Mine but They Don’t Own Us.” Further, who “owns” a worker’s time is one of the foundational philosophical puzzles of capitalism. Meyers’s friend was sincerely urging him to act in his own class-based self-interest, through what we must recognize was a job action that, while small, revealed the power relations in industry at the most basic level.