Robert Rodgers Korstad's dramatic story of tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, during the 1940s and 1950s, reveals the intricate connections between a local struggle for better wages and working conditions and the broader fight for racial democracy and civil rights. On June 17, 1943, a group of black women at the Reynolds Tobacco plant stopped work, rejecting the authority of a dictatorial white foreman and expressing long-simmering anger over speed-ups, dangerous working conditions, and unjust wages. With the help of organizers from the left-leaning United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), hundreds of black (and a few white) workers at Reynolds built Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers of America (FTA-CIO). Korstad eloquently tells us how the FTA succeeded. He points to the temporary convergence of factors, an active federal government in labor relations, the labor movement's aggressive Southern Front, and the move in the urban South toward white supremacy with “a lighter touch” (376) that created a moment of extraordinary opportunity for “working-class blacks [who], through their participation in the labor movement, were in the vanguard of civil rights efforts of the 1940s.”(422)

Korstad brings a deft touch to both historical description and analysis. From interviews, newspaper accounts, and records of unions, government agencies, business associations, and community organizations, he reconstructs the immediate circumstances that sparked two hundred black women in the stemming department to rebel against race and class privilege on the shop floor. He captures the ingredients that added to the confrontation's intensity, including the tragic death of a black worker and details like the weather, factory layout, and the demands workers made based on their rights under wartime collective bargaining agreements.

Stepping back from the narrative, Korstad describes the Reynolds Company's rise to the pinnacle of the American tobacco industry and its formative influence on Winston-Salem. He describes how an all-white planter-industrial oligarchy, segregation, and taboos against social equality determined the contours of daily life. Korstad also highlights employment relations on the shop floor where a “racial and gender division of labor . . . both structured and reflected social relations in the larger society.”(94) Since the antebellum era, Korstad explains, black women had performed the sorting, picking, and stemming work, while black men did the heavy lifting. White workers entered tobacco production in the 1870s, just in time to claim the more desirable work of cigarette manufacturing. The company protected these customary racial privileges and gender divisions by segregating the workforce and reserving promotions only for white workers.

The main focus of Civil Rights Unionism is on black workers and the connections between union and community. Winston-Salem's black neighborhoods were both a refuge and a resource for organization and leadership. In a segregated and tightly knit world, black workers worshipped, worked, relaxed, and organized together. In daily resistance against foremen's arbitrary authority, black workers created “an ethic of mutuality.”(115) Moreover, they learned about the shortcomings of top-down unions interested only in organizing white workers during previous efforts—after the First World War and in 1937 and 1941—to organize the tobacco plants under the American Federation of Labor. Additional events such as the Communist defense of the Scottsboro Boys, public hearings of the National Recovery Administration, and local voter registration drives opened workers' eyes to new allies and opportunities to challenge Jim Crow. By 1943, Winston-Salem's African-American community was primed to take up the fight alongside UCAPAWA's leftist organizers.

Local 22's rise, Korstad contends, represented an “institutional flowering and political expansion [that] flowed directly from the efforts of local people” and brought tangible success.(399) The FTA's first contract with Reynolds gave workers improved wages, a grievance procedure to check the foremen's authority, a seniority system, and even unpaid maternity leave for women. Success in the workplace created momentum for a larger political movement. Local 22 was the driving force behind increased voter registration drives and Kenneth Williams's 1947 election to the Board of Aldermen, which marked the first time an African American defeated a white opponent in an election held in the South since the late nineteenth century.

Local 22 and its wider social movement did not last into the 1950s, and, Korstad argues, its demise reveals the potent combination of white supremacy and “an extraordinary feat of political repression.”(9) After 1943, with the union's increasing power and the growing influence of racial liberalism, Winston-Salem's white business and political elite resorted to corporate welfare and employee representation plans to moderate white workers' militancy. Similarly, white politicians in the city could not stop the union-led political campaigns; instead they limited black political power by annexing white suburbs and gerrymandering districts. At the same time, Reynolds managers, the local white media, and competing unions waged a devastating red baiting campaign reinforced by the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigation of Local 22. Significantly, Korstad points out that Local 22's own “strategic blunder[s]”(352) made the union vulnerable to this “redwashing.”(417) When union leaders refused to sign anticommunist affidavits required by the Taft-Hartley Act and backed Henry Wallace's presidential campaign, he argues, they isolated Local 22 from both the CIO and Winston-Salem's black middle-class. In 1950, Local 22 lost a National Labor Relations Board election to a no union vote by only sixty-six ballots. For Korstad, the fact that almost half of Reynolds' employees still supported Local 22 reveals the most tragic implication of his story: that surviving grassroots radicalism would be stunted by the “narrow . . . range of ideas and leaders” in the second half of the twentieth century.(417)

Korstad's explanation of the immediate and long-term causes and consequences of the civil rights unionism in Winston-Salem is exceptionally convincing and comprehensive. There remains, however, a lingering question as to the roles white workers played inside or outside the movement. Korstad does not focus on white workers because, he contends, their attitudes were not central to the union movement's defeat. Yet, the reader finds little illustration of white workers' roles in maintaining their privileged access to the highest-paying skilled jobs, or explanation of why the few white workers who joined the union did so. Additionally, in his celebration of a short-lived civil rights unionism, Korstad draws a distinct line between “uplift” and “social change.”(377) Concerned more with the decline of radical potential than with the contours of pragmatic racial politics, Korstad implies that an absence of class solidarity limited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Korstad effectively shows why, during the later movement, “the key institutions . . . were not the trade unions but the black church and independent protest organizations.” But this does little to prove his claim that movements for economic equality after 1965 would have been more successful if not “hamstrung by the institutional and cultural rifts between the civil rights and labor movements and by the divisions between the haves and have-nots within the working class.”(12)

Local 22 represented the potential for civil rights unionism led by black workers to extend the aspirations of the New Deal era into the Second World War and postwar years. Korstad's work reinforces the conclusions of historians such as Robin Kelley, Michael Honey, and others who show that the labor movement's Southern Front did indeed create “the ‘free spaces' in which the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s would grow.”(9) In the end, though, qualitative changes in the tobacco industry's “racial capitalism” and the practice of white supremacy in Winston-Salem were more important than the union's roller coaster ride through collective bargaining. Korstad's careful and riveting history recovers “the alternate social vision of the 1940s”(12) destroyed by institutional racism, anticommunism, and corporate power.