Color of Work - by Timothy J Minchin (Paperback)

About the Book

Color of Work: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945-1980

Book Synopsis

Histories of the civil rights movement have generally overlooked the battle to integrate the South's major industries. The paper industry, which has played an important role in the southern economy since the 1930s, has been particularly neglected. Using previously untapped legal records and oral history interviews, Timothy Minchin provides the first in-depth account of the struggle to integrate southern paper mills.

Minchin describes how jobs in the southern paper industry were strictly segregated prior to the 1960s, with black workers confined to low-paying, menial positions. All work literally had a color: every job was racially designated and workers were represented by segregated local unions. Though black workers tried to protest workplace inequities through their unions, their efforts were largely ineffective until passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act opened the way for scores of antidiscrimination lawsuits. Even then, however, resistance from executives and white workers ensured that the fight to integrate the paper industry was a long and difficult one.

Review Quotes

This book and Minchin's earlier "Hiring the Black Worker" together make a powerful duet that plays out the story of southern desegregation with all its uncertainties. (James A. Hodges, College of Wooster)

"The Color of Work" is a lucid, well-researched narrative that extends the history of the civil rights movement into the workplace in new and revealing ways. (Thomas Terrill, University of South Carolina)

About the Author

Timothy J. Minchin teaches American history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He is author of What Do We Need a Union For?: The TWUA in the South, 1945-1955 and the award-winning Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960-1980.