Striking conclusion: celebrating the end of the 1947 strike, right; crowds gather, left, outside plant to protest, 1948 Photo:courtesy of Winston-Salem Journal

The book mentions Karl Korstad, a Minnesota native who came south for military service during World War II, only a couple of times--partly because the elder Korstad's involvement with Local 22 came near the end of the unit's existence and partly because Robert Korstad wrote the book to document the workers' struggles rather than to serve as a family memoir. Still, Karl Korstad's passion for social justice clearly informs page after page of the writing of his son. While stationed at an army base in Charleston, South Carolina, Karl Korstad began helping out with union efforts at a local tobacco plant. He eventually landed in Winston-Salem as an organizer and regional director for the FTA. In 1949 and 1950, he was deeply involved with Local 22's work at Reynolds, trying primarily to persuade white workers to join the union. Robert Korstad remembers it as "a pivotal moment in my family's history.''

Indeed, the strong personal bonds that Karl Korstad developed during his work with Local 22 helped persuade him to settle permanently in the South after the union's collapse in 1950. Staying allowed him to keep in closer touch with friends who continued their fight for civil and workers' rights in Winston-Salem. Korstad, who had done graduate work at Syracuse University in the late 1930s and had, at one time, considered pursuing a doctorate in English, chose instead to move his family down the road to Greensboro, where he opened a landscaping and nursery business. (A number of people who had worked on behalf of Local 22 ultimately opened small businesses, Robert Korstad says. For some, that option offered the freedom to earn a living and still have time for activism. For others who had been blacklisted by local employers because of their union work, it was one of the few choices available.)

Robert Korstad, born in 1948, was too young to recall firsthand his father's union work. But he learned of it later from his father and from Robert Black, a black worker and union leader at Reynolds, who was fired after the union's demise, had trouble getting a job elsewhere, and ended up working for the family's nursery business for more than ten years. Both men served as role models for the younger Korstad, who sometimes joined them in their work. They told him stories of the strikes and negotiations and battles to build a union culture. In one instance, Reynolds supervisors tried to discourage white workers from joining the union by tapping into the "linked bugaboos of racial mingling and violence,'' Korstad writes.

Robert Korstad Photo: Les Todd

Robert Black told him, "The company preached to that white worker. They would take them in the office, they would hold group meetings with them in their homes, the white preacher was advising the people: 'You'd better stay out of that union. They're going to turn that thing into open violence. You're going to have to eat and sleep with them black men, your wife and daughter.''' Such stories, Robert Korstad says, helped instill in him a heightened awareness of the tremendous inequities that continued to exist in his own community and throughout the South.

As the younger Korstad grew older, his intellectual fascination with the Winston-Salem union movement also began to emerge. He started to probe the larger context of the events that he had heard so much about over the years, and they became the topic of his doctoral dissertation at the University of North Carolina. By the time of his father's death in the mid-1990s, Korstad had decided to write a book about the struggle. He and his father had traded ideas about Local 22's work for years--not always agreeing, for example, about the strategies the union had used to build up its core base of black members at R. J. Reynolds, while also reaching out to wary white workers there. They had talked about Korstad's hopes to document the union struggle, and Karl Korstad played an important role in helping his son understand the inner workings of Local 22. With his father gone, Korstad's views began to take clearer shape. "I had to, at some point, really develop my own voice and interpretation and analysis of the process," he says. "It was a book I had to write from the perspective of my generation."

The book opens with the events of June 17, 1943--the day that a small group of black women, fed up with the low pay, lack of respect, and overbearing foremen in Reynolds' factories, took action. Angered by the mistreatment of one of their colleagues earlier that day, they returned to the factory floor after lunch and refused to continue working. Their courage proved infectious, prompting a group of male workers in a neighboring room to join in almost immediately. One of those men, thirty-eight-year-old James McCardell, stepped forward and told the foreman, "If these women'll stand up for their rights, I'm with them." Within moments, McCardell, who had felt ill for a week, fell to the floor, dead of a cerebral hemorrhage.

The explosive mix of the work stoppage and McCardell's sudden death, which some workers blamed on Reynolds' culture of pushing employees to their physical limits, caused long-simmering resentment to boil over. News of the strike spread quickly throughout the company's plants, fueling a passion for unionism that had been diligently stoked for years by organizers. Within days, the workers had pulled off the unthinkable: They had shut down the operations of one of America's industrial giants and found themselves sitting across the table from Reynolds executives, demanding changes during a strike that lasted six days. "The willingness of thousands of black workers to walk off their jobs at some risk to themselves and their families represented a rare and remarkable moment in Southern history," Korstad writes. "The walkout, membership drive, and the mass meetings gave them reason for hope. Out of such hope, Local 22 would be born."

By late 1943, Reynolds employees had voted to establish a union. By 1944, the union had negotiated successfully for higher wages, paid holidays, and seniority rights. And, as Korstad demonstrates, the movement rapidly became about much more than merely squeezing concessions out of a highly profitable company. Soon, the union's influence was felt not just on the factory floors but throughout Winston-Salem. Local 22 encouraged increased political participation, registering thousands of black voters. It rejuvenated the local chapter of the NAACP and took the lead in electing a black minister to the city's Board of Aldermen, making him the first black candidate to defeat a white opponent for elected office in the South since the turn of the century. Of Reynolds' 12,000 workers at the time, nearly two-thirds were black, and half were women. Both groups, long forced to the margins at work and in civic life, seized the chance to finally be heard.

"From the outset, the union blurred the boundaries between home and work, sacred and secular, play and politics, consumption and production," Korstad writes. "In a society in which the exploitation of black laborers went hand in hand with their exclusion from politics and most social services, black unionists could hardly avoid linking workplace issues to community concerns." Korstad details those workplace issues, from management systems that consigned blacks to the lowest jobs while reserving the best for whites, to the sexual exploitation of female workers. He quotes Robert Black on the company's environment of sexual harassment: "If there was a good-looking woman, even the black women, in that plant, and even if her husband worked in that same department, and that foreman wanted to pat on her or wanted to play with her or take her out to the office, [he would]. Those foremen would take one of these good-looking Negro women out to his desk and maybe hold her there for an hour, and all of these hundreds of people just looking.''