Victory at home : manpower and race in the American South during World War II / Charles D. Chamberlain.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chamberlain, Charles D., 1964-

Series:

Economy and society in the modern South.

Economy and society in the modern South

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Employment--Southern States--History--20th century.

African Americans.

Labor supply--Southern States--History--20th century.

Labor supply.

Manpower policy--Southern States--History--20th century.

Manpower policy.

World War, 1939-1945--Manpower--Southern States.

World War, 1939-1945.

Southern States--Race relations.

Southern States.

Southern States--Rural conditions.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (311 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Athens : University of Georgia Press, c2003.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Victory at Home is at once an institutional history of the federal War Manpower Commission and a social history of the southern labor force within the commission's province. Charles D. Chamberlain explores how southern working families used America's rapid wartime industrialization and an expanded federal presence to gain unprecedented economic, social, and geographic mobility in the chronically poor region. Chamberlain looks at how war workers, black leaders, white southern elites, liberal New Dealers, nonsouthern industrialists, and others used and shaped the federal war mobilization effort to fill their own needs. He shows, for instance, how African American, Latino, and white laborers worked variously through churches, labor unions, federal agencies, the NAACP, and the Urban League, using a wide variety of strategies from union organizing and direct action protest to job shopping and migration. Throughout, Chamberlain is careful not to portray the southern wartime labor scene in monolithic terms. He discusses, for instance, conflicts between racial groups within labor unions and shortfalls between the War Manpower Commission's national directives and their local implementation. An important new work in southern economic and industrial history, Victory at Home also has implications for the prehistory of both the civil rights revolution and the massive resistance movement of the 1960s. As Chamberlain makes clear, African American workers used the coalition of unions, churches, and civil rights organizations built up during the war to challenge segregation and disenfranchisement in the postwar South.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: "Is This America?

Chapter 1 Tents, Trailers, and Shack Towns: Mobilizing the Southern Home Front, 1939-1942

Chapter 2 "Empty Sermons": Race and Economic Mobility on the Southern Home Front, 1940-1942

Chapter 3 "On the Train and Gone": Worker Mobility in the Cotton Belt, 1941-1945

Chapter 4 The Segregation Frontier: African American Migrant War Workers in the Pacific West, 1941-1945

Chapter 5 "We're Not Here to Start a Social Revolution": Southern Black Workers Define Equality, 1943-1945

Chapter 6 "The South Needs the Negro": Demobilization and Economic Equality in the South, 1945-1948

Epilogue: "A Virtual Revolution in Negro Leadership"

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612726002

9781282726000

1282726005

9780820327228

0820327220

OCLC:

656841470