Operation Dixie Launched to Unionize the South, Met with Violent Corporate Resistance

The Congress of Industrial Organizations launches Operation Dixie in spring 1946, the most ambitious post-World War II campaign to unionize industry in the Southern United States, particularly targeting the textile industry across 12 Southern states. A permanent Southern Organizing Committee is appointed including top officials of the United Auto Workers, United Electrical Workers, Textile Workers’ Union of America, and Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. Veteran Steelworkers’ Union organizer Van Bittner is named director with Textile Workers’ Union Vice President George Baldanzi as his right-hand man. The campaign is backed by millions of dollars and more than 400 professional organizers, with the Steelworkers and UCWA contributing $200,000 each, Textile Workers $125,000, and Auto Workers, UE, and CIO headquarters each contributing $100,000.

The campaign immediately encounters violent corporate opposition, with corporations and state and local governments working to entrench white supremacy and sow racial division. When a majority of workers at a small textile company in Jasper, Alabama sign union cards, the company fires them all and closes the plant when workers strike in response. Grove Stone and Sand Company in Black Mountain, North Carolina fires its entire second shift when they organize. Two women organizing with the CIO in Tennessee are confronted by a mob of over 150 men and ordered to leave town. Every anti-union campaign launched by corporations or governments highlights the supposed threat to white workers posed by Black workers, playing upon deeply racist myths. The Committee’s work is plagued by charges of communist sympathies, opposition by the Ku Klux Klan and others to the CIO policy of establishing racially integrated locals, employer opposition including violence, intimidation and collusion with public authorities.

Operation Dixie fails largely due to Jim Crow laws and deep-seated racial strife making it difficult for Black workers and poor whites to engage cooperatively for successful union organization. The passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 additionally undercuts the campaign, making it easier for employers to obstruct union organizing drives by inhibiting the right to strike and allowing prohibition of closed shops. The unique political and social culture of management and labor relations in the South proves a powerful obstacle to traditional appeals for class solidarity. Though officially continuing until 1953, Operation Dixie is largely defeated in its first months despite devoting massive sums of money and years of effort. The CIO’s defeat is a contributing factor in the decision of the traditionally more radical trade union federation to merge with the conservative American Federation of Labor to form the AFL-CIO in 1955. In the long-term, the failure to end the South’s status as a low-wage, non-union haven impedes the ability of the union movement to maintain strength in the North and becomes a contributing factor in the decline of the American union movement in the second half of the 20th century, establishing the “Southern Strategy” template that corporations and Republicans continue to exploit.