D. Caleb Smith, Mount Holyoke College

Description

“From Strikes, Marches and Pickets to Title VII Precedents” is set in Bogalusa, Louisiana, a rural community dominated by the Crown Zellerbach Company and the Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Current scholarship on the town’s Black freedom movement is dominated by discussions of armed self-defense, street protests, and violence. Scholars only discuss Black labor activism against Crown’s Bogalusa management in passing or within larger discussions of the southern paper industry. Historians do little to situate the leadership of Black workers such as Robert Hicks and A.Z. Young within the broader grassroots context or offer a transparent critique of government intervention and the class-action lawsuits that followed.

Black workers in the Crown Zellerbach facilities first sought federal aid under Executive Order 10925, but investigations by the PCEEO left racially discriminatory operations intact. Crown’s defiance to the 1964 Civil Rights Act exhausted government agents and resulted in nothing more than frustration for Black workers. This chapter threads street protests alongside the stumbling blocks and failures of federal agencies before analyzing three precedent-setting Title VII cases: Oatis v. Crown Zellerbach (1968), U.S. v. Local 189 (1969), and Hicks v. Crown Zellerbach (1970).

About the Presenter

D. Caleb Smith (he/him/his) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and an affiliate of the Critical Race and Political Economy Department at Mount Holyoke College. His research explores the intersections of African American, civil rights, labor and legal history. His scholarship appears in the Africana Annual, American Journal of Legal History, Labor History, Left History, Louisiana History and Southern Spaces. His research has been supported by the American Society for Legal History, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Five College Consortium, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, and the New Orleans African American Museum.

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This event is free to all faculty, grad students, and interested members of the public, but all participants must register in advance. Space is limited, so please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend.

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About the Labor History Seminar Series

The Labor History Seminar provides a forum for works-in-progress that explore the history of working class people, communities, and culture; class and state policy; unions and popular political movements; and other related topics. The seminar emphasizes works that deal with gender, sexuality, race, migration, and the social history of work.

The seminar’s co-sponsors are the history departments of DePaul University, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago, Loyola University Chicago, and the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA).

Co-coordinators are Peter Cole (Western Illinois University), Colleen Doody (DePaul University), and Liesl Orenic (Dominican University), and Steven Reich (James Madison University).