Probably the next biggest impact that was tremendous, that's going to
influence the South most is the civil rights movement. This brought into
play the tremendous power of blacks when they're organized. They see it
translated into plants. Take Lundy's for instance. Lundy's back in 1958,
fifty-nine, we had an election there and what had happened, we organized
that, had about eighty-five percent signed up, but the international
told me, don't go to an election. We can shut him off in New York, we
have him by the balls. They had him, at the time, had him right where it
hurt. We waited, we waited better than a year, a year and two or three
months, and then we shut them off. And then came Landrum-Griffin in that period, in 1959, and our guys were so scared
because of the provisions on the secondary boycott, that they wouldn't
move up in New York, we couldn't get them to move. The international
said we can't get them to do anything because they're scared, and the
international's scared too. Nobody knew how they were going on the law
at that time, and so they said go ahead with an election, and we went
ahead, and we lost it by fifteen votes. A change of eight votes would
have won it for us. At that time about one-third were Indian, about
one-third white, and about a third were black. Today, eighty percent are
black. One of the reasons there is a big change in the atmosphere in the
whole town, the whole attitude in the town, back in those days
vice-presidents of banks went out visiting workers to get to them, very
frankly. If you vote for this union, or if we suspect you do, your
mortgage is coming due at a certain point, you better be right on time
with your payments, or you're in trouble.
We had merchants visiting. They used to come along on the street and pass
Manny, they searched Manny's car, and Millard Barbee's° car. They used to search everybody's car two or
three times a week if you were around that area. They would pick up
workers who were going to work, walking down the street, blacks,
Indians, whatever they were, whites, pick them up, the cops would, and
take them in and say, now look, god damn it, you're drunk. I'm going to
tell you right now, the next time you get drunk if you're with that
union, you're in trouble. This is a fantastic
pressure to keep on for a year, a year and a half. Don't forget, we went
through a year of organizing before we had to wait a year.