Grassroots Organizing Work (GROW)

This paper examines an interracial labor organizing project in the Southern pulpwood processing industry. The project was organized by two white former members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in response to the organization’s directive that white activists conduct antiracist organizing in white communities. It was ultimately funded by the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF). GROW’s strategy was to convince poor white Southerners of their common interests with black Southerners through labor organizing and, in turn, to transform their racial attitudes. Due to the successes of the classical civil rights movement, including the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, as well as the mobilization of white antiracist activists, the project succeeded in building interracial coalitions and winning modest gains for pulpwood haulers. This paper joins existing 1970s labor and New Left historiography while also interrogating the historiography of civil rights unionism and interracial coalition building in the Deep South.Master of Art