New Directions Workshops

Sponsored by the University of New Orleans Program in Justice Studies

Friday, September 20, 10:15 a.m. - 11:45 a.m.

Join the next generation of Southern labor scholars for focused discussions of their pre-circulated papers, each led by expert commenters on their topics. Read some cutting-edge work to get your conference juices flowing before you arrive in Chattanooga!

You don't need to know everything about the specific subject to join a conversation--just put on your peer reviewer hat and jump in to the dialogue with constructive feedback to help some the best (and certainly bravest) graduate students in SLSA revise their papers for future publication. Please join in this act of solidarity as we provide the mentorship that is essential to the growth and future of our field. 

Workshop 1 / Guerry Center 307

Patrick Sheridan, University of Georgia, “Conservative, Exclusive Unionism?: Railroad Brotherhoods on the Texas and Pacific Railway”

Chair / Comment: Scott Huffard, Lees-McRae College

This paper explores labor activism on the Texas & Pacific Railway through the lens of railroad brotherhoods. I look at two main organizations: the General Committee of Adjustment of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the Joint Labor Legislative Board of Texas. The former conducted collective bargaining and dealt with grievance cases for engineers on the railroad. The latter brought together representatives from several different railroad brotherhoods to lobby Texas state legislators. I argue that these two entities challenge our understanding of labor activism in Texas during this era in three key ways. First, the General Committee of Adjustment presents a view of railroad brotherhoods as less conservative organizations than previously thought. By looking at direct negotiations between engineers and managers, we see a more radical strain of activism than was often publicly expressed. Second, the actions of the Joint Labor Legislative Board present a new perspective on how class intersected with Progressive Era activism. I argue that these working-class men should be seen as important participants in the Progressive movement alongside the middle-class activists generally thought of as forming its core. Finally, by looking at cooperation between the brotherhoods, I argue that scholarly emphases on competition between them (particularly the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen) overstate tensions between the groups. An analysis of these two groups thus gives us a broader picture of labor activism on both railroads and in Texas during this era.

Workshop 2 / Guerry Center 308

Carson Eckhard, University of Edinburgh, “'If He Dies, It is But a Small Loss': Carceral Capitalism and Convict Leasing in Florida, 1875-1925"

Chair / Comment: Robert Chase, Stony Brook University

By the late nineteenth century, convict leasing was a booming industry in the South. As Florida grew richer and its captive population swelled, the state became increasingly notorious for a prison system “whose sole object is to make money out of flesh and blood,” as an 1884 article in The Chicago Inter Ocean proclaimed. Lamenting that the vast “majority of prisoners are colored and illiterate...many of them young,” the reporter declared convict leasing “servitude worse than slavery.” This paper focuses on the built and social environments of the Florida convict camp, analyzing the ways in which the conditions of prison camps enabled the penal system to function as both state-sanctioned neoslavery predicated on the exploitation of Black Floridians and their labor and as a driving force in the industrial capitalist development of Florida. Throughout, I argue that the chief goals of Florida’s convict lease system were twofold. Like other states in the South, Florida sought to reimpose the antebellum white supremacist social order and reinvigorate the state’s suffering economy, a motivation that surely accounts for the brutal conditions. of the private convict camps in Florida and elsewhere in the South. However, unlike other states, whose primary economic motivation for the convict-leasing system was to sustain the agricultural economy of the slavery era, Florida principally employed convict-leasing as a means of economically developing the state through the private construction of infrastructure and the rise of the new industries, a function that further exacerbated the cruelties of the practice in order to maximize profits.

Workshop 3 / Guerry Center 305

Omari Averette-Phillips, University of California, Davis, “We have suffered from oppression also”: Black southern women, the Knights of Labor, and Politics”

Chair / Comment: Paul Ortiz, Cornell University ILR School

This essay analyzes the southern organizing efforts of the Knights of Labor, with a focus on Black women within the Order. This essay argues that the overlooked histories of Black women in the US labor movement are necessary to fully understand the Knights of Labor, the political culture of the late 19th century, and, by extension, our current political and labor culture. By working interdisciplinary and using existing histories of women—both Black and white—within the Knights of Labor, as well as drawing evidence from the papers of Terence Powderly, and the reports of the Knights of Labor’s General Conventions, this essay shows just how Black women engaged with both the culture of the Knights of Labor, and freedpeople’s politics of the South, while proposing ways to engage with this history for future scholars.

Workshop 4 / Guerry Center 302

Olivia Barnard, Johns Hopkins University “Pour le Besoin de la Guerre”: The Chickasaw Wars, the St. Ursin, and Louisiana’s Long Middle Passage”

Chair / Comment: Antwain Hunter, University of North Carolina

In 1739, Governor Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville gathered what amounted to the largest army ever assembled by the French in colonial Louisiana. Consisting of three separate factions- one from Canada, one from France, and one from Louisiana- this three-pronged campaign against the Chickasaw Nation is best remembered in the historiography on French colonial Louisiana for its colossal failure, a defeat so devastating that it served as the catalyst for Bienville’s departure from the Louisiana colony forever. At the same time, historians highlight the incredibly diverse military gathered by the French- the Canadian faction alone included warriors from at least fourteen Native nations who traveled hundreds of miles from regions across New France to fight with their French and Indigenous allies. This multiracial narrative, however, fails to include the African and African descended people paramount to French survival. This paper offers, for the first time, glimpses into their experiences. The first section maps entryways into the war for African and African descended men and occasionally women. The next section follows them home from war, to plantations where kin attempted to ease their sickness and suffering. The paper ends arguing that France’s colossal military defeats to the Chickasaw Nation during the 1730s, and the impacts those defeats had on the communities they enslaved, motivated enslavers and administrators alike to support the financing and organization of what became the final slave voyage to French colonial Louisiana. Rather than a spontaneous decision made by a wealthy enslaver, the 1743 voyage of the St. Ursin resulted from disastrous French military campaigns and the devastating toll those campaigns had on communities of enslaved people in Louisiana.