Various Authors

Good News from Chattanooga: Paul Baicich & Tom Smucker on Operation Dixie (21. C.)

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The UAW victory at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is not simply impressive; it is HUGE. With 3,613 ballots counted, some 73% of the workers voted in favor of union representation. (The final total was 2,628 votes in favor of joining the UAW, and 985 votes against.)

Clearly, the union gained the confidence of the VW workers after impressive UAW strikes and contract victories last year at “The Big Three.” This election in Tennessee has been closely watched because the union has struggled for years to organize foreign-owned auto operations in the South.

Will Mercedes-Benz in Alabama be next? Could be: Those workers vote next month.  — Paul Baicich

…

It’s even better than you think.

I just got back from the biennial (except-for-covid) Labor Notes conference in Chicago. Years ago a gathering of labor dissidents and left-wing dreamers, over the last decade it’s become a site to celebrate some actual union victories: West Virginia and Chicago teachers, my own Local’s 2016 NYC Verizon strike. Two years past, as a sign of changing times, along with Bernie Sanders, two newly elected union presidents—Teamster’s Sean O’Brien and UAW’s Shawn Fain—addressed the Labor Notes convention in person.

As this year proved, that change was not a desperate gamble, but a promise. On Friday morning, UAW members were confidently predicting the big win in Chattanooga that materialized that night at 8 pm, and the conference was abuzz with talk of future victories at auto plants across the south.

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If Gaza’s Children Starve, Israel Will Lose Its Moral Legitimacy Forever

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An editorial in Haaretz…

The fighting in Gaza must stop. Not tomorrow. Today.

All available resources must immediately be directed to stopping the unprecedented famine that is underway in that embattled sliver of land that has already seen unspeakable suffering. As bad as the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 was, the people and government of Israel must now recognize that today not just the country’s security but its legitimacy are at stake as never before.

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Brothers Under the Skin (Redux)

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Wesley Hogan’s felt appreciation of Tracy Chapman’s Grammy duet with Luke Combs (here) sent your editor back to another crossover move by the Man of Country, Morgan Wallen. I’m reposting the video of his duet with Lil Durk (along with a short comment on it below). Wallen’s & Durk’s mannish boys’ stance seems backward compared to Chapman’s and Combs’ progressive politesse. Yet the rougher guys’ vernacular — “I’d’ve stayed my ass at home” — brings home the less than colloquial lyrics — …”I’ll get a promotion…we’ll buy a bigger house and move to the suburbs” — that undercut (slightly) Chapman’s attempt to make a song of the people, by the people, for the people. You need to keep an ear out for how underdogs talk now if you mean to write to/for them. I’m glad Wes Hogan is out to make sure we don’t forget C’ and C’s award show turn, but Wallen’s & Durk’s forgotten collab belongs to a river of song that runs below all the Broadways in this world — deep beneath the attention of the gentility.  B.D.

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Double-Play: C. Liegh McInnes & Peter H. Wood on Baseball and Color Lines

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At the world’s fair of the 1900 Paris Exposition, W.E.B. Du Bois, Daniel Murray, and Thomas J. Calloway organized the Exhibit of American Negroes to represent the history, culture, and institutions of their people. (The Paris world fair was a celebration of ruling ideas of progress intended to uphold “achievements of the past century and propel development into the future.”) The Library of Congress online archive has collected the photographs, charts and other materials curated by Du Bois et al. Looking through the files, among the images of black laborers, students, mothers, organizers, homes and churches, a picture of Morris Brown College’s black baseball team resonated with a young African American man, a century on.[1] Du Bois, or perhaps Calloway, must’ve seen how this tableau of a true team evoked more than stats or won/lost records ever could…

Your editor sent Peter Wood this photo after reading how Jackie Robinson’s example helped propel Wood on his path to writing books like Black Majority and Near Andersonville. The photo also went to First contributor C. Liegh McInnis since he’s a baseball fan with deep feelings for the Negro Leagues as well as a certain distance on Jackie Robinson and the ideal of integration.

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Talk Therapy (or Lip Service)?

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Twitter dialogue between…

Fania Oz-Salzbarger [“Mom, Israeli, Jewish, humanist, History prof. Loving daughter of Amos Oz. Tel Aviv U (BA, MA), Oxford U (D.Phil), Uppsala U (Dr. h.c) Democracy must win.”]

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Ambassador Majed Bamya [“Deputy Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the UN, New York. Palestinian from Yaffa. Refugee. The time for freedom is always right now!”]

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Breathless

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SNCC is a non-fiction film made by Danny Lyon about his giddy time inside the “beloved community” that took down Jim Crow. Lyon, who was born wild, maps the movement of mind that led young radicals to dump (what one blissed out poet of revolutionary dawns termed) “the meagre, stale, forbidding ways/Of custom, law, and statute.” (You can watch SNCC here, one tap away, at Lyon’s Bleak Beauty blog.)

Picking up on an invite from John Lewis, who’d become his friend-for-life, young Lyon stepped off from the University of Chicago to join the Southern freedom movement in 1962. James Forman, SNCC’s executive secretary, saw that Lyon’s eye might have its uses for an organization that needed to make Americans all over the country feel the struggle for Civil Rights down home. Lyon became SNCC’s first/echt official photographer. His movie’s narrative rests on hundreds of his 35mm still pictures (many of them never shown before) and a soundtrack of recordings made inside black churches in the early 60s.

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UAW-D Beats Bosses (& the Doomy Left)

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Rad twitterers stuck on gestural politics have missed what might turn out to be a watershed moment in the history of America’s class struggles. While nobody with any sense is proclaiming a New Millennium for this country’s workers, there may be a new conjuncture around the corner. Thanks to the UAW, as well as Teamsters at UPS, who have won the largest victories for American labor in a half-century. It’s imperative that would-be leftists NOTICE what’s happened in factories and warehouse (and delivery trucks). With a little help from Labor Wave radio, you can listen below to an interview with historian (and former UAW staff organizer) Erik Baker, who has addressed the UAW’s recent wins in Jewish Currents, “Revaluing the Strike.”

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Hatikvah

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Yuval Noah Harari has been on tv and the web often since Oct. 7th. He sometimes seems too smooth for this moment. (He’s come across as glib to more than one sharp observer.) Yet and still, I hope he’s a voice for the “saner softer polities” that Hardy once invoked way way back at the beginning of the 20th C. Harari has allowed in his brief talk below that most Israelis and Palestinians are too immersed in their own pain right now to care about the suffering of anyone outside their own tribes, but “outsiders” have no excuses: “Don’t be intellectually lazy. Don’t be emotionally lazy. Don’t just see part of this terrible reality…Keep a space for future peace, because we can’t keep that space now…”

Here’s Harari’s recent essay in The Guardian.

Use Him

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In February 2023, music producer Ian Brennan traveled to Mississippi to record with the prisoners of the notorious Parchman Prison, which has a rich musical history. (Former inmates include Son House, Bukka White, Mose Allison and Elvis Presley’s father, Vernon Presley.) The bureaucratic process behind Brennan’s visit took over three years: “Granted approval a little more than a week before, Brennan caught a red eye flight to be there on a Sunday morning for the few hours he was allowed to record.” Parchment Prison Prayer belongs to the honorable tradition of song-catchers searching for unchained melodies in penitentiaries.  This time around, Brennan may have caught at least one song for the ages…

“I give myself away,” sings the vocalist to his personal Jesus (as he makes the piano chime), “so you can use me.” That’s the gospel truth.  The singer/pianist is the only Parchman prisoner/performer recorded by Brennan who chose to remain anonymous.

Loss is More (Ali Siddiq’s Latest)

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Ali Siddiq does some of the best acting I’ve ever seen in his new standup show. The whole thing is full of felt WTF’s that have made him America’s reigning ghetto existentialist. Like post-accident Richard Pryor, Siddiq consigns comedy to the ashes when he relives the loss of his half-sister, Ashley Rae Mitchell, who died when she was eight years old. Per Siddiq, her exit had a killer upshot: “I’m so dead inside I’m a fucking monster in the streets.” Siddiq isn’t being slick. He’s not out to excuse his own crimes even as he makes art out of collateral damage.

You can cut to the “chapter” where Siddiq recalls the death of his baby sister below (beneath the video of his whole show).

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Ren & Band

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“Hi Ren,” per Scott McLemee above, might be the best intro to the range of talents that’s made virtuoso Ren a trauma-stomper for his own gen and plenty of elders. (McLemee also twigs to Ren’s rap.) Right now, though, I prefer hearing our Rennaisance boy-prodigy play with Big Push, the band he’s busked with in recent years. Their live performances are shot through with plain joy in musicking. When they do “Paint it Black” or “Johnny B. Goode” or “Guns at Brixton,” I flash back to mid-60s battles of bands. Ren and Big Push haven’t covered “Gloria“ yet but I’m sure it’s in their future…

A couple videos of Ren and friends pushing the feeling:

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Nation Time

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In his novel To Asmara, Thomas Keneally — the author best known for Schindler’s List — offered a compelling portrait of Eritrean caregivers amid an agonizing armed struggle for independence. I flashed on his fiction as I watched the short film (below) made by Times reporters embedded in a Ukrainian medical unit close to the front lines. The film is less romantic than To Asmara. Unlike the Eritrean heroes of Keneally’s novel, the Ukrainian doctors are not paragons. When they must care for a Russian prisoner of war, they do the job but…well, you’ll see. For now, let’s just stipulate the Ukrainians are not saints like Keneally’s fighters and healers. (Or, saying it another way that might speak to longtime First readers, there’s nobody like Fr. Frechette in this unit.)

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Labor History Happening Now

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Your editor forwarded on the following passages from an informative piece by Michael Tomasky to First‘s…labor caucus:

Nobody seems to have noticed this, but over the course of the spring, the country’s four leading freight rail carriers agreed to grant the vast majority of their workers paid sick days.

Everybody remembers what happened last December. The workers threatened to strike over such days, among other issues. President Biden, generally very friendly toward labor, made it illegal for the workers to strike. He was criticized by unions and workers and fellow Democrats and liberal media outlets, this one included.

None of that criticism was wrong at the time. But it wasn’t the end of the story.

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