As part of the University of Maryland and Georgia State University’s “Advancing Workers Rights in the American South: Digitizing the Records of the AFL-CIO’s Civil Rights Division,” project, we digitized 20 labor films that provide insight into the intersection of labor and civil rights history. This blog post intends to highlight one such film, “Our Struggle in the South,” directed by Bill Neebe and produced for the Amalgamated Meat Cutters & Butcher Workmen of North America (AMCBWNA) of the AFL-CIO in 1969. The film depicts a strike by meat packing workers against Lorenz Neuhoff and his meat packing plants in Clarksville, Tennessee; Quincy, Florida; and Montgomery, Alabama. The value or “lure” of digitization is the content, increased accessibility, and preservation. (Yaco, 2014) The value of digitization lies in releasing this historically significant content from near obscurity. This film and many others serve as invaluable primary source windows into the opinions of workers whose stories are often not included in dominant, well-established historical narratives.
The film begins with footage of workers picketing the home of Lorenz Neuhoff in Roanoke, Virginia, with clips of workers identifying workplace issues. “Cheap wages hurt everybody,” one worker says, while another adds his opinion that Lorenz Neuhoff is “the most vicious of the vicious packers.” According to the January 11, 1969 issue of the AFL-CIO News, “striking meat cutters from four states picketed the palatial home of Lorenz Neuhoff here during the holidays to call public attention to their struggle for union contract benefits at Neuhoff meat packing plants.” Strikers “braved heavy rain and near-freezing temperatures to remind Neuhoff of the refusal to bargain with their union.” The strikes began on April 16, 1968 at the Clarksville, Tennessee plant, and workers at the Alabama, Montgomery plant went on strike on September 21, 1968, with workers at the Quincy, Florida plant joining a week later on September 28th.
Beyond the picket line, this film includes footage of union representatives meeting to discuss the strike, and the broader campaign goal of organizing the South, explaining the importance of these strikes for efforts to organize the South against “an anti-union, union busting, racist employer” like Neuhoff. The film also shows organizing efforts at other Neuhoff plants in Salem, Virginia; Union City, Tennessee; Miami, Florida; and Kinston, North Carolina, while workers in Clarksville, Quincy, and Montgomery are on strike. In Salem, company management photographed organizers and workers to intimidate them and undermine organizing efforts. The film includes an abundance of powerful testimony from workers into wages, conditions, and safety concerns. At the Union City plant, a tank house explosion killed two workers, and the film includes a graphic description of the incident. “Our Struggle in the South,” striking worker Howard Chester states, is one for decent wages, and “it is time we got together, organized, and did something about it.”
The strike was settled on July 15, 1969, according to the July 19 issue of the AFL-CIO News, in an agreement that included a .55 cent an hour wage increase, and “other standard contract features which management had previously opposed.” A few weeks later, in the August 2 issue of the AFL-CIO News, president Meany notified all affiliates that the boycott against Neuhoff, along with boycotts against Shell Oil and Shell Chemical companies, as well as Coleman Co., had been terminated. President Meany claimed that all cases were successful, and that in each case, “the boycott provided concrete help to the strikers,” adding that he and the unions appreciated the “display of unity and full-scale cooperation.”
According to the May 10, 1969 issue of the AFL-CIO News, available here, the film was released by the Meat Cutters in the Spring of 1969, months before the strike was settled, to “tell why labor is boycotting Frosty Morn, Valleydale and Reelfoot meat products wherever they are sold.” The AFL-CIO News article serves as an advertisement for both the film and the campaign, noting that it is available for free through the Meat Cutters education department, and emphasizing the widespread labor support for the ongoing “Don’t Buy” campaign. And in the July 5, 1969 issue of the AFL-CIO News, there is an article about the radio station WCNH in Quincy, Florida, and their refusal to sell air time to publicize the campaign against Neuhoff, and the ongoing strike, while allowing Neuhoff’s company to purchase air time for advertising his products.
In this recent episode of the Power at Work blogcast, I featured two documents (above) related to the film and campaign against Neuhoff from this folder in AFL-CIO president George Meany’s papers. The first document is a pamphlet, published by the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America as a “public information service.” Seeking broad support, the pamphlet asks readers to “Please respect our picket lines!” and to boycott “products of the Neuhoff empire” until a union contract is signed. The second document is a telegram to William Schnitler, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, from Thomas J. Lloyd, president of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen from October 1968, urgently asking him to wire J.M. Moore, Secretary of the Georgia State Federation of Labor during a convention meeting in Savannah, notifying him that the AFL-CIO is “supporting our all-out efforts to organize and a consumer boycott against Neuhoff chain of meat packing plants now on strike.” These documents were selected to highlight the broader solidarity of the campaign, and the emphasis on public service announcements via pamphlets that accompanied a freely available film to help garner support for striking workers, and the broader effort to organize the South. Additionally, these documents were selected to illuminate one of the many cross-collection connections between our films and other audiovisual material, our collections of papers from different labor leaders, and publications such as the AFL-CIO News.
For more digitized A/V content related to the Advancing Workers’ Rights project, please click here. “Our Struggle in the South,” along with other digitized films and audiovisual content is also available on our YouTube playlist on the Hornbake Library YouTube channel! This film was digitized as part of the “Advancing Workers Rights in the American South: Digitizing the Records of the AFL-CIO’s Civil Rights Division” project, which is funded by a $350,000 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). In collaboration with Georgia State University (GSU), the project increases access to a robust array of records providing insight into the intersection of civil rights and labor movements nationally and in the South. The records include correspondence, newspaper clippings, photographs, audiovisual recordings, and more documenting AFL-CIO work between 1943 and 1999. Explore the links below to discover Advancing Workers Rights in the American South materials across UMD and GSU’s digital repositories. For more information and to see other related digitized material, please click here.
References:
Yaco, Sonia. “The Venus Fly Trap: The Lure and Pitfalls of Digitizing Moving Image Collections.” Presentation. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois. 2014. https://hdl.handle.net/10027/19422
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Alan Wierdak is the archive specialist for reference and outreach in the labor collections, and a recent graduate of both the History and Library Science (HiLS) dual-degree graduate program and the Museum Scholarship and Material Culture (MSMC) graduate certificate program at the University of Maryland.
Special Collections & University Archives 