Oral History Interview with Don West, January 22, 1975. Interview E-0016. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007).
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Abstract
Activist, leftist, poet, and ordained minister Don West remembers a lifetime of union and civil rights activism in this interview. West's father, determined to give his children the education he never had, left his home in the mountains of Georgia for cotton country, hoping to support his family with sharecropping and send his children to local schools. West's family brought mountain values with them when they left their home, and those values—independence, respect, hard work, and faith—shaped West's life as a Christian left-wing activist. West worked his way through his undergraduate and graduate education, earning a doctoral degree in divinity from Vanderbilt University while acting as a labor organizer in high-profile strikes, including the 1929 cotton mill strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, and the coal strike in Wilder, Tennessee. West describes some of his experiences in union organizing. Hounded by local and federal law enforcement, as well as by journalists and even members of the Communist Party, West moved from community to community, allying himself with unions and other organizations across the South, infiltrating mines and meeting with governors, distributing literature, and teaching. This interview offers a detailed description of activism and organizing in the South of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, a region torn between traditions of white supremacy and anti-unionism and the need for social and economic progress.
Excerpts
A mountain family moves to Georgia cotton country
The Berry School seeks to indoctrinate poor whites with white supremacy
Tensions over organizing efforts at the Berry School
Expulsion after protesting strict rules at Lincoln Memorial University
Comments on mountain culture
Leading a funeral service for a slain union leader
A black intellectual's disdain for poor whites
Describing leaders of the Underground Railroad
Elements of the Communist Party's efforts to free Angelo Herndon
Arrested with fellow Communists in Philadelphia
Harmony between leftist politics and Christianity
Internecine battles between progressive thinkers
Disillusionment for 1930s activists as their efforts fail
Workers' rights efforts greeted by harassment
One mining union embodies egalitarian mountain spirit
Trying to transform small labor movements into one larger movement
West faces harassment after organizing mine workers
Pressure on Kentucky's governor yields progress on wages
Opposing racism in the New Deal with help from a Pentecostal minister
Continual activism and continual harassment
Ralph McGill Red-baits West
Communists and Progressives clash
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