obert Korstad had many places to dig as he researched a historic labor struggle in Winston-Salem, North Carolina--one that pitted a fledgling union of largely impoverished black workers against manufacturing giant R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. He interviewed dozens of union workers and activists who had fought for wage gains and better working conditions throughout the 1940s. He probed federal records. He pored over aging newspaper articles.

He also turned to one particularly precious source of knowledge: his father.

In 1950, Karl Korstad had helped lead a last-ditch, and ultimately unsuccessful, effort to preserve Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers (FTA) at Reynolds. "The union experience was the high point of my father's life in many ways," says Korstad. "He talked about the experiences all the time, and he drew lessons from those days that he tried to pass on to my brother and me."

These days, it's the younger Korstad who is passing along those experiences to a new generation of students and scholars. An associate professor of public policy studies and history at Duke, he is the author of Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South. The book, recently published by the University of North Carolina Press, offers a dramatic account of the Winston-Salem union movement that galvanized thousands of disenfranchised men and women before withering under the pressures of the Cold War. It was a struggle, Korstad contends, that influenced the trajectory of the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and also had powerful implications for labor, women's rights, and the economic and social landscape of the South today.

It's a story told resolutely from the viewpoint of the blacks who made up the majority of Reynolds' work force. And it's one that builds on themes of race and class in previous books by Korstad, who has also written Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World and Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Talk about Life in the Segregated South.

"I wrote this book partly to chronicle the people and events that had been so meaningful to my father and, through him, to me," says Korstad. "But, more importantly, I wrote the book because this heroic struggle was in danger of being lost to history."

Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, praises Korstad for his unique approach in the book--examining the substantial links among labor, civil rights, and the evolution of the Southern economy, instead of treating those issues in isolation. "We often put things in boxes, but one of the great things about this book is it integrates it all into one story," he says.

Yale history professor Glenda Gilmore believes Korstad has transformed an unusual intersection of family history and scholarly interest into groundbreaking work. The book's "strong narrative voice never strays from the workers' point of view, accomplishing what some have thought impossible: a rendering of twentieth-century American politics, labor, and social struggle from the perspective of poor black people," Gilmore wrote in a review of the book. It will become, she continued, "the standard by which future studies of Southern communities and African-American activism are measured."