By Kieran W. Taylor

Posted March 19, 2023

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With unemployment hovering around 10 percent, Sunflower County was an unlikely setting for a show of labor militancy. But for thirteen weeks in 1990, nearly one thousand African American workers struck for higher wages, safer working conditions, and an end to discriminatory managerial practices at the Indianola-based Delta Pride catfish processing company Although it barely registered on the national radar, the strike rekindled the spirit of the state’s civil rights movement and continued the long-running struggle over the value of black labor in the Mississippi Delta.

Shortly after Delta Pride’s founding by a group of white farmer-owners in 1981, the African American women who made up the majority of the workforce began complaining of repetitive motion ailments, insufficient bathroom breaks, and overbearing supervisors who used stopwatches to time workers as they cut and packaged fish. “They hire you, cripple you, fire you,” explained one longtime employee to a reporter. “They treat people like dogs out there. It’s like being back on the plantation.” The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which had limited success in unionizing catfish and poultry plants in the region, soon set its sights on Delta Pride, believing that a victory at the nation’s largest catfish producer would facilitate the organization of smaller processors and bring stability to the industry. In October 1986, despite the company’s efforts to intimidate and fire union supporters, a majority of Delta Pride workers voted to be represented by Local 1529.

In the three years after unionization, however, wages remained only slightly above the federal minimum, and working conditions did not substantially improve. In 1989 the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that Delta Pride had failed to implement controls to reduce repetitive motion disorders, ignored employees’ injuries, and knowingly exposed them to safety hazards. With their first union contract set to expire in the summer of 1990, the workers hoped to raise wages and push for health and safety improvements. The company, still smarting from the union victory, aimed to stall negotiations and break Local 1529.

On 10 September, following several weeks of negotiations, workers voted 410-5 to reject the company’s final contract offer of a wage increase of 6.5 cents an hour. Three days later, more than nine hundred employees walked off the job at the plants in Indianola and Inverness. The strikers’ efforts initially focused on stopping strikebreakers from crossing the picket lines and taking jobs, but by the end of the first month, the union shifted strategy and began framing the strike more broadly as a civil rights issue. Union leaders pulled together sympathetic churches, labor unions, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and carried out an effective campaign to pressure Delta Pride to negotiate. Donations of groceries and cash sustained the strikers, and Local 1529 leaders, among them Sarah White and Rose Turner, traveled across the country, promoting a boycott of Delta Pride and addressing a hearing of the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, D.C.

Delta Pride officials tried to downplay the strike’s racial dimensions and continued catfish production at reduced levels using replacement workers. But a series of miscues in late October forced Delta Pride back to the bargaining table. First, the National Labor Relations Board cited company officials for threatening picketers and encouraging employees to quit the union. The next day a federal grand jury indicted two shareholders for attempting to bribe a union negotiator to end the strike. A nationally televised interview with Delta Pride board chairman Turner Arant on NBC’s Today show may have been the final blow to the company. During a segment on the strike, camera crews followed Arant as he walked proudly around his catfish ponds and through his large family home, where he pronounced that catfish had been very good to him. These scenes were contrasted with an interview with a striker, who spoke of the challenges she faced trying to feed her family of eight and pay her bills on Delta Pride wages. Arant resigned under pressure from the board of directors, and both sides returned to the bargaining table. On 12 December the company and Local 1529 reached an agreement that gave a sixty-cent hourly raise to every worker who had been employed for one year, provided for the rehiring of the strikers, and established a health and safety committee that included workers. The contract was ratified the next day by a 479-1 vote.

Employer-employee relations improved in the years after the strike, though overproduction and foreign competition have forced periodic layoffs at Delta Pride. Several key union leaders have been involved in other efforts to organize workers in the South’s growing food processing industries.

Further Reading

Eric Bates, Southern Exposure (Fall 1991)

J. Todd Moye, Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945-1986 (2004)

Richard Schweid, Catfish and the Delta: Confederate Fish Farming in the Mississippi Delta (1992)

(Reprinted from the Mississippi Encyclopedia)

By Curtis Price

Posted February 16, 2023

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“N” is late again. Our co-workers mock her, saying that when she says she’s parking, she’s really 20 minutes away. But “N” commutes from Arab (pronounced “A-rab,”) a small town on Sand Mountain in Marshall County, Alabama about an hour away.” A-rab,” population 8,000, like much of Marshall County, was a “sundown” town years ago. But few black people had any reason to go to “A-rab”, a down-at-the-heel, insular town with plenty of white picket fences but no jobs.

Today, “A-rab” is different. “Big Chicken” – the sprawling poultry conglomerates such as Pilgrim’s Pride, Tyson’s Foods, and Wayne’s Farm – has lured workers from the far-flung ends of the earth. Most of the front-line production workers are Mexican, Haitian, Guatemalan, and Ethiopian (with a smattering of African-Americans and whites from Guntersville and Albertville) and they’ve changed the character of Marshall County Now, Mexican cantinas and taco trucks dot the main highways, and in its many small towns such as “A-rab” too. While in “A-rab,” the Latino population is still under 2% (unlike nearby Albertville, where it is 25%) it’s a change from its historic 100% white. “N’s” daughter is in a relationship with Malik, who “N” likes a lot, a relationship that would have been inconceivable twenty years ago on Sand Mountain.

Like so many people under stress, “N” always seems self-absorbed. And why not? People under stress focus on immediate dangers to their lives and integrity, a supremely rational decision in their cases. The chain-smoking soldier in a foxhole with bullets flying overhead is foolish to worry about contracting lung cancer decades later. Future orientation is a privilege of the stable and satiated, but a luxury for all others. You live in the present because nothing is guaranteed. “N” tells me in an aside that sometimes she is late because she has to scrounge up gas money to make it across Sand Mountain.

She walks with a sharp lean to the left. “My daddy wasn’t able to afford gettin’ my scoliosis treated,” ”N” says. It’s a disadvantage in a job consisting of hard, physical labor and constant moving. She struggles to keep up and you can tell she’s in pain. She’s missing her upper teeth. And no one wants to work with her because of her perceived slowness and being “white trash,” even though they are barely up the ladder of “respectability” from where she is.

We aren’t particularly close but we do talk. She told me life was once sweet, she was married to a man making a good paycheck as a supervisor. Then he descended into pill and meth hell. He was fired and started stealing her pain pills. She divorced, but lost everything and now stays with her daughter, who’s going through issues of her own.

Her pain clinic shut down and she didn’t have insurance to go to a new one because of the cost. “Legitimate” pain clinics reduce their patients to the status of medical sharecroppers. A five-minute visit will get you a quick evaluation and a script good for only 30 days. But it sets someone without insurance back $200 or more, a perpetual circle of dependence guaranteeing they have to rummage up another $200 by hook or crook next month.

 So instead, “N” buys on the black market when she can. She tells me she “babies” her pills, cutting them into smaller pieces so she stretches what she has to get some relief. “N” is counting on getting health insurance after she passes probation, dreaming of getting an operation to reduce her scoliosis. But her spinal curvature can never be cured because she didn’t get that operation when she was younger, when her bones were supple. “N” was working under the table in a corner store and hoping to apply for SSI (Supplemental Security Income), but then the boss hired someone else and thus she had to scramble for a “real” job – but it meant forfeiting her SSI case.

“N’s” particulars are, of course, hers. But her broad situation is the same experienced by all those in the lowest rungs of the segmented workforce, living precariously, unguaranteed, never knowing when they will get laid off, face an unexpected car break-down, or undergo a relationship gone bad. This constant churning prevents any activity beyond basic survival, let alone “politics,” in the broadest sense. She is living under “liquid modernity,” to use Zygmunt Bauman’s seminal phrase, where “everything solid melts into air” ( pace Marx.) This liquid modernity leaves people isolated, alone, and atomized. A first step must be meliorating this churning so that people have stability and space to breathe from back-to-back crises, a necessary precondition for coming to see their problems as not merely personal but problems shared by many others too.

By Curtis Price

Posted January 2, 2023

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Courtrooms are the same, full of heavy, somber colors and uncomfortable pew-like seats, as if you were sitting in the Church of Justice waiting for a sermon from some judicial rector. Here I was, called in for Alabama jury duty. In Baltimore, I always routinely ignored such summons, knowing full well nothing would happen to me. And indeed, nothing ever did. After all, such was the scale of violent crime in Baltimore that violating a jury summons rated about the same, if not lesser, response, than throwing a gum wrapper on the streets.

But this was Alabama and knowing the propensity of vituperative excess in the local courts – a recent case in point, the arrest of an 81 year old woman in Wetumpka for feeding feral cats as part of a trap-neuter-release program, and which the judge refused to dismiss, in intentional spite of public outrage – I complied. After all, I have been stopped by the police more in my six years in Alabama than decades in Baltimore – and once (here) by a cop with a loaded gun pointed at me – that I was afraid if I didn’t show, I’d end up on Death Row. So I dutifully shuffled down to the Morgan County (MoCo) Courthouse, a drab, ugly concrete building that was probably intentionally designed to look exactly like a Stasi-torture center circa 1950s East Germany.

We assembled in a large holding pen – that’s the best way to describe it – until we were divided into three groups and escorted to a courtroom. Given numbers, we were instructed on entering and leaving to line up according to our assigned number when it was barked out. It struck me that we in the free world were being treated in the same depersonalized way as inmates in the county jail, stripped of identity and reduced to a number.

The courtroom, predictably, was dark-oak paneled, with the judge’s platform elevated above the rest of the chambers, as such platforms always are, to give the impression that the judge is above and remote from mere human concerns in his impartial dispensation of justice. To the right, was a long table with two white lawyer-types in suits and ties, and a younger black guy, dressed in business-casual and perhaps in his 30s, sitting in-between.

At first, I thought he was a paralegal. Only later, when the judge asked the jury to look at this person to determine if anyone knew him, did I find out that this slightly built man was, in fact, the defendant, accused of capital murder. The defendant had a slightly-receding hairline, a thin build, and sensitive face with a high forehead, hard at first impression to square with the charges leveled at him. He looked like a student cramming for exams. But he was charged with being part of a two-person home invasion, drug-related, which had led to a father being shot to death in front of his children – an automatic eligibility for the death penalty or life in prison without parole in Alabama.

The rest of the time was spent in rather tedious preliminary jury questioning. What affected me, in response to a prosecutor’s query if anyone had a relative who had been entangled in the criminal justice system, was how so many people, probably half, raised their hands. One woman had a mother who was murdered and her father was in jail on a life bit. Another had a cousin that was doing time for dealing. Others had relatives that were either stabbed – or stabbers, shooters – or the shot.

Likewise, the questions about current occupations revealed a great deal. One man was a mechanic, but unemployed and taking care of his dying father. Others were disabled from blue-collar jobs such as trucking and machine-operator. I found it moving to hear of so many struggles and hard circumstances, and while it would be a mistake to over-generalize from such a small sample, Decatur being an overwhelming proletarian town, I couldn’t help but think that crime, prison, and disability being so much part of peoples’ lives is a fairly accurate representation of much working-class life in the U.S. these days.

Finally, came the question from the judge that I was expecting: “Is there anyone in the room who is opposed to the death penalty?” Three people, including myself, raised hands. He went one-by-one and repeated the question and asked for a yes or no. The two others replied in a muffled, barely-audible voice, “yes,” as if confessing some dark, shameful secret. When it came to me, I stood up and loudly said, “Your honor, I am opposed to the death penalty in principle and in the interests of transparency, I am also opposed to life in prison without parole too.” The judge squinted at me and said, “Are you saying if I ordered you to apply the death penalty you would refuse?” I said, “Yes.” I heard an audible gasp somewhere in the room and I could feel the silence of all eyes focusing on me. It was hardly an Atticus Finch moment, but in this era of reduced heroism, it’ll do. For a split second I was afraid, this being Alabama, that the two burly, buzz-cut deputies lurking in the corners, would whisk me off to some cell in the bowels of the courthouse. But the judge took it in stride, and went on to other issues. (The judge, probably in his late 40s, had long black curly hair that looked ever so much like the mullet worn by Billy Ray Cyrus in “Achey Breaky Heart” and maybe my memory is deceiving me, but I swore he was wearing brown cowboy boots under his robe.)

As a fact, I am opposed to the death penalty in squalid cases such as this one, where poor impulse control, adrenaline, fear, greed, and the whole tangled mix of human emotions lead to horrible crimes in which the wheels of a cold, clinical court system grind on, imposing death by impersonal bureaucratic fiat. But if this defendant was accused of deliberate genocide killing thousands, I don’t think I would feel the same way. And likewise, I am opposed to life in prison without parole because that is a form of death penalty too – for the guards and other inmates. For someone with no hope and nothing left to lose is capable of anything.

I sat in the cattle-jury pen for another hour before being dismissed and handed a $20 check.

I followed the case as it appeared in the local media because it was a big story in a small town. About ten days later, give or take, and after three days deliberating, the jury set the accused free by unanimous verdict. Later, when I mentioned the case on the job, a co-worker showed me a picture of the defendant. “Is this the man? That’s my cousin!” she said, “He fell in with the wrong crowd…” Her voice trailed off…

Three weeks later, the man accused of murdering another man in front of his children was arrested after a routine traffic stop transporting a gun stolen from the Huntsville police station. As a convicted felon, he is barred for life from ever carrying guns. He now sits without bond in the MoCo jail. I suspect, this being Alabama, that he will not get off so lucky the next time he appears in court.

By Curtis Price

Posted November 19, 20

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It’s change of shift and SK has walked into the break area. She is a woman in her mid-60s, with a white-haired, grandmotherly look, complete with granny glasses and page –boy hair-cut. But when she talks, SK speaks with a toughness and resilience that belies her appearance.  Her co-worker, N, has also come in, but N doesn’t make much small talk. Instead, N curls up in a chair to play online casino games and plot her next trip to the Tunica, Mississippi gambling palaces, perhaps an unintentional comment on the state of working-class consciousness these days. Both are rural, working-class Southern white women used to doing unskilled labor.

SK and I have settled into the type of easy informality that leads to good conversations. She worked for 35 years in a wire factory outside Hartselle, a small town of ten thousand about a half-hour away from Decatur, Alabama. Although Morgan County – where both Hartselle and Decatur are located – is mainly rural, there’s a large swath of heavy industry in Decatur and over 27% of the population work in factories, everything from Wayne Farms poultry to GE and rocket fuel processing. In fact, the Decatur area is number two in the U.S. for the percentage working manufacturing jobs, according to a recent report, a factory town bucking the trend toward deindustrialization. This concentration of industrial jobs even spills over into the rural areas surrounding Decatur such as Hartselle, where small industrial parks dot the flat expanse of cotton, corn, and soybean fields.

SK applied to the Hartselle wire factory when she got out of high school but they told her they didn’t have any openings. However, SK knew they did from friends who worked the line inside and was convinced they didn’t want to hire her because she was a woman. Instead of giving up, she went back and demanded they give her a chance. She got the job.

SK had to deal with the sexism of the men, mainly from the maintenance crew that was key to keeping up production, because if a machine broke down, maintenance could pick and choose how quickly they would get the line up again. To avoid being victimized, SK learnt to do her own maintenance. After a while, she got so good that the maintenance crew would ask for her help in resolving problems.

I asked her if the work was repetitive, thinking of a typical assembly line, and she said it was actually more varied because the nature of the contracts changed. Sometimes she would be spinning thin wire, other times thick cable. SK learnt how to maneuver spools weighing several hundred pounds by herself and described how she would have to monitor a line a hundred feet long. She talked passionately about different aspects of the work, how she learned to tame the wire and make the machines do her bidding. You work the machine, the machine doesn’t work you.

For her, working was a sense of mastery over an impersonal process and she went home every day confident she had won out. This sense of mastery as personal accomplishment and creativity gives her a work ethic that is unusual in this era of bullshit, abstract labor, email-caste jobs. Management tried to promote her, but she couldn’t stand the office politics and demanded to be sent back to the line.

Like most Southern working-class women of whatever race, her life has been full of hardship. She survived two husbands dying young and an accident with an 18-wheeler that left her in the hospital for weeks. She told me about her son, an electrical contractor working unstable gigs, and how, when his wife became pregnant while he was unemployed, had a nervous breakdown because he couldn’t provide for the family. He signed himself into a mental institution after a suicide attempt. When SK went to see him, the staff had him so doped up he could barely respond. She signed her son out on the spot. He recovered when SK got him a job at the wire factory, where he’s now been working for over twenty years. As Langsdon Hughes wrote:

“Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair

It had tacks in it and splinters

And boards torn up

And places with no carpet on the floor…bare

Don’t you fall now

For I’se still goin, honey.

I’se still climbin,

And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”

***

We never talk politics, but it wouldn’t surprise if SK is a Trump supporter, although I don’t see her fist-pumping at a rally screaming “lock her up!” But she knows instinctively that “big-city types” look down on people like her and in this assumption, she is absolutely correct. A rootless, middle-class, hobbyist left focused on posturing, therapeutic expressions of “rage,” and “transgression” just simply has nothing to offer. Instead, SK embodies that sense of “common decency” Orwell rightly pointed to as so characteristic of working-class culture, a culture of “common decency” crossing racial boundaries that still hangs on in many areas of the South even as it has frayed elsewhere. This culture of “common decency,” I am convinced, will be the basis of any future politics of genuine emancipation, should such politics ever arise.

By Kwame P. Dean

Posted September 30, 2022

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Being diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer didn’t come as a surprise. Years of smoking in the cab of a long -haul truck takes all surprise about something like that away. For Johnny, the diagnosis was somewhere between possible and inevitable. He said cancer let’s you know who your friends really are. “You ask for nothing your whole life, only to have people make excuses about why they don’t call.” But he didn’t worry too much about other people before cancer and he wouldn’t start now.

We are early. The fish is yet to go into the outdoor propane fryer. The anti-keto buffet is covered in the kitchen. Drinks are on ice. Only, most of the guests were missing. I’ve never attended this fish fry before so I was probably the only one there who hadn’t heard Johnny’s life story, yet. Being twenty years younger, I certainly couldn’t dispute anything he would tell me.

Johnny grew up next door to my grandparent’s on the raucous north side of town. It was a lower working class neighborhood that didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was. There was a bar called “the brick” on the corner, because the building looked like one, and a brothel across the street.

Johnny grew up when there were physical consequences to messing up and he was a “bad” kid. A self-professed bully who didn’t “mind his mother”, he heard the request to “go to the tree” many times. That meant go and bring back the switch you were going to be beaten with. Once, he dragged a fallen tree limb to his mother and got the smile and reprieve he’d hoped for. “These bad-ass kids today could use some old-fashioned discipline”, he said.

He talked about growing up in our semi-segregated hometown in the early 60’s. He had to learn to deal with white people because he grew up not caring for them much. He asserted his dominance over other boys, and got good in sports at a time when winning became more important than race. He joined the army and got out of town as soon as he could.

By that point in the story, a witness showed up to offer occasional commentary. When the witness, one of the kids Johnny bullied, told him, “I hated you growing up,” the feeling was as fresh as the fish for the fryer. 60 plus years didn’t blunt much.

The years had obviously changed Johnny’s views about white people who were at least half of the people at the fish fry. White wives of black men, including his own, his neighbors, and former drinking buddies made the occasion as mixed as the half and half ice cream that awaited us for dessert. He wasn’t just tolerating white folks anymore.

Johnny didn’t regret much except not being there for the black kids who could have used role models growing up in our hometown. While he was away in the 70’s and 80’s, things had changed there as they had for the country. It was easier to move up and out but not so easy to stay together.

Spending years on the road made self-reflection an occupational hazard. With all of the truck stops, restaurants, and hotels, you were your own constant companion. There’s only so much to distract you from examining yourself. He spoke as someone who come through that for the better. He accepted where he was, what he had done, and the consequences. The cancer was just one more thing to deal with and he accepted that too.

We prayed, ate, drank bottled water and caught up with the events of the year before the fish fry culminated with the release of balloons in remembrance of the recently departed. It had been a tough year with the pandemic as there were almost as many balloons for the dead as there were people to hold them.

I wondered who would hold Johnny’s balloon someday as the soloist sang, “Thank you lord”.

By Kwame P. Dean

Posted August 6, 2022

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As I arrive back in the US for another extended visit, I’m always jolted by the tenor of political speech here. “Pritzger sucks” and “Let’s go Brandon” signs in my rural hometown qualify as legitimate political commentary. I come back to a Republican Party that is embracing Viktor Orbán and Hungary’s democracy light movement. People can vote as long as Orbán wins. Orbán proves you don’t have to use centuries old social grievances to whip up an illiberal mob as the threat of non-European immigrants and their non-European genes is just fine, among other things.

The Republicans have also taken the “see something, say something” notion of mutual surveillance a step further by advocating and rewarding citizen snitches in the classroom to discourage “divisive” teaching and in the very personal business of policing pregnancies.

Living in Germany allows a particular window into the relatively recent past. The existence of the GDR, East Germany, is not that long ago and right up until its demise in 1989, it was a vibrant police state led by their secret police nicknamed the Stasi. I know many who grew up in East Germany. I’ve heard direct accounts of victims of the police state in tours of Stasi prisons. I’ve seen the tools used to spy on neighbors in museums.

Historian David Cook writes that there is evidence that 1 in 30 East Germans acted as Stasi informants…and we don’t have all of the evidence. To put that in perspective 1 in 30 Americans would be nearly 11 million people officially providing information to the state against their friends, neighbors, families, and colleagues.

A scary thought is that we willingly provide advertisers more information than the Stasi could dream of. Big Data and data mining tools allow keepers of massive amounts of information to have insights into our individual lives that we don’t have ourselves. Imagine if they start using all of that for reasons other than selling us stuff.

Beyond the data is the corrosive role of suspicion. In East Germany, suspicion of your neighbor as an informant was obviously warranted. Sometimes people didn’t know they were informing on someone as a story here, or bit of information there shared unwittingly with an informant or undercover agent could be compiled into the picture a Stasi official could use to threaten to destroy a future. Things didn’t have to be illegal, they only had to look illegal to the right decision maker to kill job or educational opportunities.

Is that where we’re headed? Virginia Gov. Youngkin, who used fear of black history to gain political backing, instituted a tip line for parents to inform on teachers. Youngkin’s stated purpose for the tip line is to, “Help us be aware of … their child being denied their rights that parents have in Virginia, and we’re going to make sure we catalogue it all. … And that gives us further, further ability to make sure we’re rooting it out.” The rights parents are denied is the right for their children to be unchallenged and comfortable in the classroom. Maybe it’s the right not to have to answer difficult questions when their children get home from school? Naturally, Youngkin is also fighting to keep tip line data from being made public.

The insidious Texas anti-abortion bounty is even more craven by offering a reward for legal action leading to the conviction of abortion providers or anyone who assists in the provision of an abortion in the state.

As a 2021 article in Vogue described it,

“If an individual were to suspect, say, a Lyft driver of taking a pregnant person to an appointment for an abortion after the six-week mark, said individual could sue the Lyft driver and collect a judgment of $10,000—and a refunding of their legal fees—from the Lyft driver if the lawsuit were successful. “

Of course, the Supreme Court has made the necessity of the provision of six weeks to legally have an abortion obsolete. Idaho and Oklahoma have already followed the Texas bounty model that turns private citizens into potential litigants against people who actively support women’s access to abortion. How many other of the 14 states that currently ban abortion will follow suit is not yet clear. Many other states are using their existing criminal justice systems to enforce their anti-abortion laws.

So it begins again. Some of us know all too well the price of continuous suspicion and friendly neighborhood surveillance. I can only imagine the level of scrutiny union organizers got in the 50’s or get at Amazon today. It’s almost like a black teen in a department store. If public tolerance of tattletale policies continues, we stand to lose the ability to trust others who are in our boat, making it even harder to organize for our interests. Who is interested in that outcome, I wonder?

https://fee.org/articles/10-terrifying-facts-about-the-east-german-secret-police/

https://thevieweast.wordpress.com/2011/07/17/living-with-the-enemy-informing-the-stasi/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/08/va-gov-youngkin-faces-second-suit-over-teacher-tip-line/

https://www.vogue.com/article/how-does-texas-abortion-bounty-work

By Curtis Price

Posted July 4, 2022

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(Reprinted from the End Notes dossier, “That Summer Feeling: The George Floyd Protests and America’s Hot Pandemic Summer, 2020,” https://endnotes.org.uk/dossiers/that-summer-feeling)

Outsiders often lump the South together as an undifferentiated region, but this blanket categorization disguises important differences in culture and politics between Southern states. Mississippi and Alabama, for instance, are radically different from North Carolina and Tennessee despite their geographical proximity and their shared Confederate history. Mississippi and Alabama had different courses of development than the Upper South, where small yeoman farming dominated (in contrast to the Deep South’s large plantations). George Floyd demonstrations took a different form in these states, both desperately poor and sharing a long history of reactionary superstructures dominated by what are called in Alabama the “Big Mules,” landowning and industrial elites that controlled state politics and social life for over a century. To a large extent, they still do.

Alabama has the longest state constitution in the world, going on for hundreds of pages, a thoroughly anti-democratic 1901 document specifically designed to prevent any replay of the 1880s-era multi-racial populist movement that threatened elite power. The extreme centralization encoded in this revanchist constitution has stripped cities of almost any local control, which has kept Birmingham and Huntsville from mothballing Confederate statues or else face a $25,000 fine. The state legislature is currently trying to raise fines to $5,000 a day and hold city officials personally liable for them. The irony of public officials railing at the federal government for trampling on “states rights” and yet not hesitating to apply an iron heel to any expressions of local autonomy is lost on the perpetrators.

Even obscuring a Confederate statue, as Mayor Woodfin of Birmingham did by covering it with plywood, is labeled a crime worthy of state prosecution. Mississippi only removed the Confederate cross bars, enshrined on the state flag for over a century, in 2021. In the Deep South, as William Faulkner – who knew a thing or two about such things – famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

With this background, what was striking is how the George Floyd protests ended as possibly the largest and most widespread demonstrations in each state’s history. In Mississippi, for instance, a protest outside the state capital in Jackson attracted over 4,000 people. A critical difference between the protests during the Civil Rights movement and those that erupted after George Floyd’s death however is that state repression was absent in the latter, so comparing absolute numbers of crowds is misleading when assessing their social impact. During the George Floyd protests, for instance, there were no phalanxes of cops with riot shields and snarling dogs ready to be sicced on protestors. The cops mostly stayed unobtrusive and, at times, even participated by “taking a knee.”

Besides the Jackson demonstration, there were solidarity rallies in Biloxi, Gulfport, Hattiesburg, Tupelo, Meridian, Starkville, and Oxford ranging from a few dozen to several hundred. In Petal, a tiny town outside Hattiesburg, home of the University of Southern Mississippi, large demonstrations of a few hundred took place calling for Mayor Hal Marx’s resignation after the good mayor said he saw nothing unreasonable in how the cops responded in Minneapolis.

In Alabama – more populated and industrialized (Alabama is now an auto industry center because of factory transplants from the North) – protests took place not only in the larger urban cores such as Huntsville, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile but also in many smaller peripheries. In Dothan, for instance, a small agricultural city near the Florida panhandle – the “Peanut Capital of the World,” as the city dubs itself – demonstrations were organized by The Ordinary Peoples’ Society (T.O.P.S), a pre-existing, mostly black working class group already mobilized around police brutality and voting rights for felons. Florence, Decatur, Troy and Auburn also saw sizeable-for-their-size demonstrations.

In contrast with Mississippi, there were confrontations with police in several Alabama cities, the sharpest of which was in Birmingham, where downtown stores were looted after cops stopped an attempt to take down a Confederate-era statue. Mobile also experienced smaller skirmishes with police that were quickly quashed. In Huntsville, which has a larger professional managerial sector because of the city’s reliance on military and aerospace contracts, police still attacked a peaceful crowd after a demonstration went over the allotted time, tear-gassing and arresting many in a pre-emptive strike under the excuse of preventing rumored “Antifa-type looting.”

If most demonstrations in Alabama and Mississippi conformed to the pattern elsewhere, in other cases, the particular contradictions of the Deep South played out.

In Gadsden, a smaller de-industrialized city in central Alabama whose last major employer, Goodyear Tires, had just announced its plant closing and where disgraced far-right Republican senate candidate Roy Moore rides on a horse to vote wearing a Stetson, protests faced different obstacles.

A target for the local BLM was the Emma Sansom statue in downtown Gadsden erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Sansom was so honored for having tended the war-wounds of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who later founded the Ku Klux Klan. Sansom’s descendents wrote a moving open letter supporting removal. But demonstrations at the statue were met by pro-Confederate counter-demonstrators.

Jerome Gunn, a Detroit ex-pat, became known as a leading Gadsden BLM organizer. Before BLM, Gunn ran clothing and food drives for the poor and a soup kitchen for the homeless out of his Gadsden car wash and detailing business. Gunn had also personally paid for hotel rooms for people displaced by a fire at a local apartment complex and for survivors in nearby Jacksonville when swaths of the city were flattened by a tornado outbreak in 2018.

Those good deeds didn’t stop Gunn from getting arrested at BLM demonstrations on dubious charges of “first degree theft by deception,” which many rightly interpreted as harassment for his role in BLM. Shortly afterwards, Gunn’s business was fire-bombed and gutted (the same fate, coincidentally, befell the home of one of Roy Moore’s accusers). The irony, as Gunn pointed out, was that the majority of people he helps are white. No suspects have been arrested – and probably never will.

It deserves mentioning how Gadsden BLM demonstrations, in an inspiring display of cross-issue solidarity, regularly stopped outside the Etowah County Detention Center in Gadsden, which doubles as one of the most repressive holding tanks for ICE immigrant detention, while inmates cheered and banged on windows in support. But such connecting up of different struggles was all-too-rare during George Floyd protests here.

A few dozen miles away in Albertville, a small city of 20,000 dominated by the poultry industry and where mostly Hispanics and Haitian workers recently wildcatted over wages, a George Floyd memorial march attracted over 600 people. Even counting the presence of outsiders from other cities such as nearby Huntsville, this was a huge turn-out.

But the Confederate flag still flies every day outside the Marshall County Courthouse in Albertville. When Unique Dunston, an Albertville BLM organizer, attempted a campaign to remove the flag, the turn-out was tiny and like Gadsden, counter-demonstrators, some armed, came out in opposition. The city refuses to take down the flag.

The focus on removing Confederate statues and flags in the South has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, it’s easy to see how these are visible symbols of an era of white supremacy and a reminder of its continued grip in the South today. Thus, they became an easy target for protests. Yet on the other hand, statues are just symbols of this larger web of social relations and removing them was an easy cathartic gesture that left these underlying conditions intact while giving people a sense of having accomplished “something.”

For this reason, many – but not all – the demonstrations against Confederate statues mostly attracted college-educated whites. This was certainly the case in Huntsville, where protests against the statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the county courthouse were white-dominated, a reflection of the city’s higher than average share of white PMC workers and smaller African American population. The response among working class blacks was more muted. As one African-American Mississippi farmer, a man who limped from beatings during the Civil Rights era, put it, “Those statues? We never paid attention to them. We know we ain’t going back to those days.” This probably reflected the silent opinion of many, who voted with their feet by not coming out.

A further irony is that the Redeemer myth of the “solid South,” the very memory which the statues honor, papers over how the South lost the war in large part because of mass desertion. Towards the end of the war, nearly 40% of Confederate soldiers had gone M.I.A. Not all of these desertions were consciously anti-Confederate – many soldiers abandoned their posts because of family hardship at home and not from a conscious rejection of war objectives.

But enough did. In North Alabama, for instance, an area where big plantations never existed, whole swaths became ungovernable, with multi-year sustained guerrilla warfare erupting against the Confederacy. Secret societies formed within the ranks of the Confederate army that sabotaged the war from within and provided an underground railroad to encourage desertion to Union armies or hiding out from authorities. Du Bois notes this phenomenon in “Black Reconstruction” when he wrote, “the poor white not only began to desert and run away, but thousand followed the Negro into the Northern camps.” Little of this history is known in the South and is unlikely to surface anytime soon.¹

Still, as the situations in Gadsden and Albertville both show, vague exhortations to racial reconciliation and healing can run up against genuine white supremacy (the real deal, not some feigned, promiscuous, au courant accusations where anything under the sun can get labeled as “whiteness” with enough effort) if limits are pushed too far, violating boundaries of what is considered “acceptable” discourse. Under this rubric, slavery gets acknowledged as a wrong – there is little talk anymore about how happy enslaved people were on plantations – but then the topic is quickly changed. Dwelling too much on slavery then becomes a sign of stirring up “trouble.”

The threat of non-state agents of repression enforcing this “acceptable” race discourse, with local authorities predictably turning a blind eye, especially outside the major cities, remains real. It’s all more underground now: there are no visible White Citizens’ Councils with vigilante clout, memberships in the thousands and control of local small-town infrastructure. Yet the fact that these informal networks exist at all highlights the tortured link between the entrenched old South and the slowly emerging new in two states where “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.”

By James Murray

Posted May 21, 2022

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“C’mon and talk to me
So you can see
What’s goin on..”
-Marvin Gaye

I first met ‘Steve,’ when he came to work at our department. Compared to the old-timers we were, ‘the young guys.’ We were never close friends but we got along and worked well together. We both followed the NBA and listened to some hip-hop and neither of us like ‘the old guys,’ at the shop. About once a week we would go to lunch and shit-talk our co-workers and discuss mutual interests.
I knew Steve had experienced a tough childhood. Abandoned by his mother, he had bounced back and forth between Oklahoma and southern California with a chronic alcoholic father, always in extreme poverty, he had spent several teenage years living with his father (literally) in a van down by the river. He seemed to be a survivor though, in an apparent happy marriage with two children. He had a semi-skilled trade and our jobs paid relatively well. He told me once he, ‘Had done a lot of drugs,” in his misspent youth but, “A lot of drugs,” mean different things to different people and its common for
people to be overly dramatic about past debauchery. He didn’t seem like any kind of dope casualty to me. We met up at a sports bar a few times to watch games and I got to know his wife, ‘Shirley.’ She seemed pretty typical and would have a couple of beers whereas Steve didn’t drink at all, being turned off and distrustful of alcohol due to his father’s experience. I ascertained Shirley had trouble keeping a job. I thought she had some anxiety issues, and did not possess great social skills and I realize working-class culture (especially in the south) can be difficult for a woman (or anyone) to navigate if they weren’t raised in it, and sometimes even if they were raised in it. But it wasn’t my problem and I didn’t judge her.
Sometimes Steve would mildly complain about how Shirley would continue to spend money even when she wasn’t working. She pressured him to buy a big, expensive (is there any other kind) pickup they really didn’t need. But lots of people buy vehicles and luxury goods they really don’t need, and he never expressed any animosity toward his wife. I sensed more of a good-natured fatalism than anything else. “I make it, she spends it,” he told me one time. And Steve really was a kind, good-hearted guy. Very little education, formal or informal, but he had the natural sophistication of someone that had grown up struggling and hustling and moving around the country. As far as I could tell, Steve and Shirley were completely irreligious and totally apolitical. As well, mildly culturally liberal in the way followers of pop culture and mass media usually are. I can’t remember politics and religion ever coming up in conversation.
From want or necessity Steve started doing side gigs in the evenings and on weekends. Likable, competent, honest and reliable, he did well, making money and acquiring a client list in short order. I would estimate this was about 2013/2014.
In time he quit our department on good terms to pursue the side-hustle full-time. The old guys at the shop began retiring, one by one. I got a raise, then a promotion, then a ‘position.’ One boss retired and we got a new, better boss, one that I had rapport and mutual respect with. We got new hires. I was doing well, but usually busy and running at110mph most days between 7 and 4. I lost contact with Steve.
Suddenly, it’s summer, 2016. I’m in a McDonalds getting coffee one morning about 6:15 am and I run into Steve. I’m amazed to see he’s wearing a red, ‘MAGA’ hat. At first I thought it’s a joke. It seemed so unlikely. Despite my long-standing politics (anarchist/Marxist/etc.) I myself was sympathetic to Trump. I loved the way he had humiliated and defeated Republican dirt bags like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, and the way he had unapologetically disrespected the GOP’s ‘serious men,’ like John McCain and Mitt Romney. And that summer he was running against an (IMO) psychopathic monster named Hillary Clinton. In such circumstances how could any empathetic reasonable person not be sympathetic to Trump? But my sympathy was ironic and highly conditional. Steve’s support of Trump was serious, embittered, aggressive, paranoic. His entire personality seemed to have changed. No longer laid back with a constant soft smile and good humor he was agitated by the ‘Fake News’ conspiracy and now I saw him as edgy and driven with sole interest, it was all – Trump Trump Trump.
Of course Trump won the big election but my life didn’t change – long work weeks and totally checked out on weekends. I continued to find Trump an entertaining, yet farcical creature. Good for a laugh but completely unserious. Certainly not a fascist and revolutionary, just a clown with a lot of money like Berlusconni. I did not see or hear from Steve for months and months. One day he called me out of the blue and asked if I could help get his wife, Shirley a menial job in the department, I was noncommittal but brought it up to my boss. We both knew her sketchy job history but he said – why not? Give her a chance. So Shirley got hired but I very rarely saw her, and when I did I was in a hurry and just waved or said, “Hi,” We never had a conversation. She seemed to be doing well but I didn’t know any details.
More months passed. Then a year or two. One day I was having coffee and
gossiping with Shirley’s immediate supervisor, ‘Misty.’ “She has some strange beliefs,” Misty told me.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Like some weird religious shit.”
I just laughed. I had never known Shirley or Steve to be religious at all. But I thought the conversion to Trumpismo might have led to a conversion to fundie Christianity.
“She’s obsessed with pedos,” Misty told me.
“Pedos?”
“Yeah bruh it’s weird. She does a good job but all she can talk about is conspiracy shit, pedos, and the Bible.”
“Well at least she shows up.”
“Yeah.”
In hindsight I think Misty was describing some early version of the ‘QAnon ideology,’ but I knew nothing about that then and know very little about it now. More months passed. Steve texted me unexpectedly one night, knowing I am a fairly serious, ‘firearms enthusiast,’ he wanted my advice on which manufacturer’s AR-pattern rifle to buy. His budget was one-thousand. Knowing it didn’t really matter and not wanting to have a long text exchange about semi-automatic rifles I just gave him some answer, “Bushmaster or FN,” I probably told him.
More months passed. Someone told me Steve was now, ‘preaching.’ I could just laugh. “Professionally?” I asked. The person didn’t know the financial details but said Steve was traveling all over the state and region to ‘share his message.’ Someone else told me he was neglecting his business and abandoning half-completed jobs to focus on his politico-religious mashup. He had several lawsuits for ‘Breach of Contract’ pending against him. He and Shirley had pulled their kids out of the public school and were now, ‘homeschooling.’ All of this was interesting and a bit concerning to me but I had much bigger concerns almost every minute of the day and night.
Months kept passing, some said they were picking up speed as the fortunes of Trumpismo ebbed and flowed and ebbed. Covidmania and Lockdown Fever gripped the country. In Oklahoma, any such concerns were a passing phase, and as an ‘Essential,’ I kept going to work everyday like normal. For a few months the restaurants were closed and masks were, ‘Mandatory,’ but then it was all over. Everything open, no masks in sight. I thought Trump’s defeat in November, 2020 was more than a bit suspicious, but again – it’s just not something I cared that much about.
“Did you see the new Paper?” Misty asked me one day, referring to the small-town
weekly newspaper.
“No. Never.”
“Shirley’s husband got arrested.”
“Really? Steve?”
“Really bruh.”
“For what?”
“Possession of methamphetamine.”
“Wow. That’s crazy. He was a religious fanatic the last I heard.”
“I don’t know bruh. I think Shirley’s on it too. She’s been acting real weird. Talking to walls and shit.”
“Oh my God.”
“Be glad you don’t have to deal with her.”
“I am.”
In a few weeks Shirley’s bizarre behavior got her called into the office for a ‘write up.’ When notified of the reason she was there she went wild, throwing pens and inanimate
objects, threatening Misty and others and screaming profanities. She walked out and never returned.
You have to wonder what’s going on in a culture that can take functional normies and their semi-functional spouses and put them on a track that leads through Trumpismo, into religious nuttery, then around the curve into conspiracism and then dump them into methamphetamine abuse. I don’t think Trump’s charisma and manipulative ability, or ancient Bible secrets unveiled, or shocking crackpot political analysis, or the addictive properties of fine Oaxacan ice provide an answer here. I’m
certainly no clinician, not even an ‘expert,’ but the clinician would just write you an antidepressant script and the ‘experts,’ blame it all on racism and ‘white privilege,’ or something. I think people are just so exhausted and burned up and out from these past decades of reaction. They just want to ‘feel something.’ They want to ‘experience something.’ They want to have an explanation. They want to know an answer. They will go into bankruptcy, destroy their families and livelihoods, wreck their own and other’s lives to chase the dream that life might have meaning and value outside the markets
and system of financialization. Of course they’re going to fuck up, there’s a million and one wrong turns and no one has a map here

By James Murray

Posted May 14, 2022

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(A text like this must remain in the arena of “informal history.” There are traditional sources – a few pages in this book or that one, newspaper and magazine articles, law-enforcement reports, etc., but not nearly as many as one might expect considering the sensational nature of some of the events.  There is also an oral history,.. From its peak –  powerful and feared – respected by organized crime organizations across the country – the Dixie Mob has  receded into a shadowy Oklahoma legend.)

“Stories of crime and corruption yes it’s true

Greed and fixed elections, guns and drugs and whores and booze..”

                                               -Drive By Truckers

     Alcohol prohibition did not end in Oklahoma until 1959, but of course there had never been a shortage of strong drink in Oklahoma. Bootlegger organizations and independent moonshine cooks and beer brewers had operated with varying degrees of openness and semi-official protection since before statehood. Everyone in a small Oklahoma town knew who the local bootleggers were, they handed out business cards and operated with regular ‘business hours,’ and made home deliveries. In Tulsa, a city flush with post-war oil, aerospace and manufacturing money, there were some bootleggers who grew rich and well-respected for their “honesty,” and business ethics. Such a popular product as alcohol, distributed illegally on a large scale, had to attract the attention of law-enforcement. And certainly it did, but police officers and Sheriff’s and District Attorneys liked to drink too. The “Good ol boy,” system prevailed. A local alcohol distributor, ‘playing by the rules,’ and willing to make donations to Sheriffs and District Attorney re-election campaigns, and willing to hand out a few bottles of, “Good stuff,” to police officers and deputies ran very little chance of ever being arrested. If church leaders  or business executives started raising a fuss there could be a “Seizure,” arranged – perhaps a stolen car or truck loaded with illegal booze would be located. A newspaper article accompanied by photos would praise the intrepid police work that took hundreds of bottles, “off the streets.” For the bootleggers it was just part of the cost of doing business. This system of corruption held sway for decades.

     The atmosphere of pervasive corruption in Oklahoma law-enforcement was cited as a rationale by progressive lawmakers to legalize alcohol. If Oklahoma was going to be a modern state, fully integrated into the industrial economy the local police in cities and towns had to be professionalized. And that could not happen as long as the vast majority of them were looking the other way to avoid seeing alcohol distribution or even actively involved in such trafficking.

     By several accounts over one thousand bootleggers became unemployed the day the liquor laws changed. Often they had gotten used to living tax and guilt free. Many entered the legitimate world of workaday concern, but some did not. More than a few had seen the end of prohibition coming and had already started venturing into new gray or black market enterprises. Multiple sources report the network of bootleggers around the Tulsa area began morphing into a multi-faceted organized crime organization almost immediately after the end of prohibition.  I would expect they had begun branching out into prostitution rings and gambling enterprises long before 1959, and obviously they had been cooperating with individuals in law-enforcement for decades. But in 1960 the first “crime crews” associated with what would come to be known as the “Dixie Mafia,” were being formed. These crews lacked formality, sometimes overlapping and sharing members, sometimes combining forces and then splitting apart into individual criminal activity and operating independently for months or even years at a time. In Tulsa, a “sphere of influence” that included the surrounding area, especially Sapulpa and Tahlequah , some of the names associated with these crews were Albert McDonald, Donald “Two Jumps” Sparks, Leroy MacManaman, Rubie Jenkins, “Fat Jerry” James, Wayne Padgett, Thomas Lester Pugh and others. Their hangouts were bars on Old Sapulpa Road, a ‘private club’ in Sperry and “dope dens” on Tulsa’s north side. The FBI  noticed a string of seemingly professional, unusually lucrative bank robberies began occurring all over Oklahoma. Burglary was noticed to be becoming professional and organized, and between 1959 to 1961 property crime losses doubled in Tulsa County. Arkansas and Louisiana also experienced suspicious large increases in robbery and theft and Kansas was struck especially hard. The McManahan Gang, or “Northside crew,” stole untold hundreds of vehicles out of Kansas as well as tractors, implements and farm and oil field equipment. Simultaneously Kansas experienced a bank robbery surge that was unprecedented. In the midst of a cyclical agricultural boom Kansas farmers were buying new equipment and vehicles and putting money in their local banks. According to FBI reports the “Tulsa related” bank robberies  were characterized by the use of such exotica as submachine guns, walky-talkys, and souped up modified vehicles. Inevitably the robbers would disregard the cash in the teller drawers and go directly to the safe. Small banks in isolated prairie towns were easy and safe pickings. Sometimes local police would be distracted by arsons or bombings.The investigations languished, unsolved, as previously rare jewelry store heists and safecracking crimes began proliferating in Oklahoma and bordering states.

      It is widely suspected the Italian mafia families in Kansas City and St. Louis were utilized to ‘fence,’ all this stolen merchandise and that these families soon  began employing these Oklahoma outlaws for “off the books,” contract murders. As an intimidation tactic for shaking down bars or recalitarant drug dealers or maybe as a method of impressing an overly ethical District Attorney, or even as a murder weapon, the bomb became a Dixie Mafia signature. Other Tulsa mobsters were gunsmiths, building functional submachine guns out of parts kits as well as firearms suppressors. When car bombs and suppressors began being used in Chicago and New Orleans mafia murders it was assumed the Okies were either there, working personally or had sold the munitions to those cities traditional mafia families.

     All this activity did not go unnoticed. Kansas law-enforcement officials would press on the FBI for answers and learn that gangs were proliferating in Tulsa, but their close-knit and shadowy culture  made gathering evidence difficult. Vernon Glenn, who worked as an OSBI agent in those years, later stated his office began seeing activity that was new to Tulsa and Oklahoma. It was not just that specific crimes had significantly increased. There were obvious patterns. And such patterns indicated organization. Of course there had always been burglary and robbery teams in Tulsa, as well as prostitution rings, gambling and drug dealing. But the OSBI and FBI began seeing signs of organized criminal racketeering – a group or group seeking to gain a monopoly on the drug trade, or local prostitution or gambling. Deciding who could steal what, when and where. This was how the traditional mafia families in New York and the east coast operated. It was something new to Tulsa. Agent Glenn and his peers could tell ‘something new was happening,’ But It took years to figure out who was who in the new Tulsa underground. They were trying to play catch up and the crime crews were moving very fast

     According to numerous sources, rumors of a major murder contract began circulating in 1964. The target would be Martin Luther King and the price was said to be one hundred thousand dollars. This offer was brought to Tulsa and at least some of the locals began taking it seriously. Others were skeptical as no one seemed to know who was guaranteeing the money, and however hated and feared he might be –  King was considered a civilian in the criminal underworld and a very high-visibility target. Reflecting their social background in Oklahoma agriculture or the oil fields almost all these professional criminals were “blue dog” southern Democrats. If for no other reason than it was commonly believed Democratic politicians were easier to bribe or make a deal with. The Republican party in Oklahoma was more associated with the urban managerial and banking elite. In other words, their social betters and traditional antagonists. One notable exception was Donald “Two Jumps” Sparks, a former rodeo bronc rider, he was a vocal follower of the John Birch Society and an extreme anti-communist Republican. One associate remembered Sparks, “Looked like a cowboy, he smelled like a cowboy, he was very polite unless drinking. He was a killer.” Sparks was attracted to the idea of killing King and he and Leroy MacManaman packed a variety of weapons into the trunk of a Cadillac and drove to the southeastern states to stalk the civil rights icon,  They spent more than a month trying to locate and get close to their target but to no avail. King’s movements were unpredictable, the informal security around him was wary and fairly efficient. The would-be assassins were not familiar with the southern cities and had no connections in the local police departments. Unbeknownst to the pair, they were being quietly shadowed by FBI agents, who assumed they were scouting banks to rob. While staying at a hotel in Mobile, Alabama, Sparks and MacManahan were visited by a man claiming to be a representative of a Klu Klux Klan sect. They told him they were planning to abandon the attempt on King’s life and he offered them a thirteen thousand dollar “front,” to continue the effort. They declined the offer and drove back to Oklahoma. Decades later records would be declassified that showed the hotel room had been bugged by the FBI and KKK leader’s conversation with the Tulsans was recorded but never used in any prosecution.

     The robberies, murders and rackateering continued apace for years. Between 1960 and 1970 property and violent crime rates grew six times faster than the population in Tulsa and surrounding counties. A comprehensive list of “Tulsa Dixie Mob,” activity is of course impossible to compile, but examples can be gleaned from local newspapers and OSBI/FBI reports – An old-time bootlegger turned heroin dealer was found in a shallow grave in Chelsea,OK, an FBI informant fingered “Two Jumps” Sparks but there was not evidence.  Bars were blown apart by explosions in Bartlesville and Tahlequah. When the Tahlequah newspaper reported “organized crime” was active in the area the newspaper building was bombed. A triple murder in New Orleans was said to be linked to “Tulsa area criminals,” but that investigation, like so many others, went no where. A bar in Dewey was bombed. An associate of the northside crew was found in a ditch with a bullet in his head. It was believed he was talking too much. Independent burglars and small-time drug dealers began “disappearing.”  Well-known old-school Tulsa thief and writer Bobby Bluejacket said of these racketeers, “They changed the rules overnight. If you didn’t like it, you could be in trouble. People were dying.” Bluejacket and other veteran Tulsa criminals  just left town. An auto dealership office was bombed.  Federal drug agents reported the quality of heroin and dexedrine had increased and the availability of these drugs was consistent on Tulsa streets.

     The looting of cars and agricultural machinery out of Kansas never ended. Cattle were also being rustled, on an industrial scale of  unknown thousands per year. Frustrated by his state’s inability to successfully investigate the usual Tulsa suspects, the Kansas Attorney General commissioned a report in 1970 based on FBI files and intelligence reports. Titled “The Dixie Mafia Intelligence Report,” it explained how “A loose confederation of professional criminals operated in cities scattered throughout the south.” This report explained there seemed to be no formal hierarchy or even membership yet the organization functioned, “Controlling vice rackets, murder for hire and robbery, in a manner most similar to the more familar traditional Italian mafia families.” The report named Biloxi, Mississippi, Little Rock, Arkansas and Tulsa, Oklahoma as the cities with the most active and dangerous organizations and where large-scale racketeering was ongoing. This report received regional and national news coverage. The Report was mostly a compendium of sensational crimes, and figures showing how bank robbery and commercial theft had gained year over year in 1960s Kansas. The invention of the  “Dixie Mafia,” label apparently begins here. In Tulsa, crime crews were named after their leader, “The James Gang,” or “McDonald’s Guys,” or were referred to using geography, “The Northside Crew,” or “Westside Guys.” No one had ever heard of the Dixie Mafia. But local outlaws read the newspapers like everyone else and were happy to adopt the usage. It was (and is) usually slightly modified in Tulsa street language to “Lil Dixie Mafia,” or “Dixie Mob.” There seemed to be an apparent paradox – is a non hierarchical organization an organization at all? How could a loose network conduct large-scale racketeering operations? It was not explained in the report and it has never been explained since. Yet by all accounts that is what was happening. By 1970, the bootleggers forced out of business in 1959 had reinvented themselves and the Tulsa underworld. They were controlling the narcotics traffic, the sex trade and gambling. They had a national reputation for producing contract killers. They had severely compromised the Tulsa Police Department and Tulsa Sheriff’s Office. If and when apparent members were arrested it seemed to have no effect on the organization (or lack thereof) at all. With no head to decapitate, the FBI did not know a successful method of attack. Groups of individuals with familial or friendship ties going back decades are very hard to infiltrate.

     In downtown Tulsa a de facto “Red Light District,” was flourishing. Brothels stood side by side in red brick buildings along East First Street, anchored by the decade’s old “Mays Room” on the corner. Operated by Pauline Lambert, she had apparently negotiated an “arrangement,” with the Dixie Mob, and her place was more luxurious and expensive than those the “good ol boys” owned. A newsstand and coffee shop on ground floors provided a discreet place to buy marijuana, benzedrine or heroin. Other retail drug outlets existed at Greenwood and Archer and scattered throughout the city, sometimes these spaces would also have a card room with games going twenty-four hours a day. All operated quietly but without any fear of police interference. A joke stated the only time you would see a police car on East First Street was when one of the department’s administrators was looking to enjoy a long lunch.

     Once known as “The Queen of Tulsa Bootleggers,” Cleo Epps had provided alcohol to the “best families,” in Tulsa for decades. She counted oil-money heirs and politicians (and police officers) as personal friends. When prohibition ended she purchased a motor court on the west side of Tulsa and cooled her heels on a large ranch illegal booze had purchased for her. By some accounts she did a bit of fencing of women’s clothing and accessories and bought and sold stolen jewelry, but mostly she was retired. The Dixie Mob was a boy’s club and she was an older woman.  Reportedly she was troubled by her former associates’ activity. She knew they were trafficking narcotics and ‘involved with the Italians’ and killing people and she didn’t want anything to do with all that.

     Epps might have faded into obscurity, quietly disapproving of the new era of Tulsa racketeering, but on August 25, 1970 a tremendous explosion rocked an exclusive midtown neighborhood. District Judge Nelson started his car to go to work and the vehicle blew up around him. He was shattered and disemboweled but miraculously still alive. The city was shocked. Who would bomb a district judge? Well, okay, there was only one possible non organizational candidate. But why? Where was the motive? Nelson had just announced his candidacy for District Attorney, and his opponent was to be a well known criminal defense lawyer and Dixie Mob fixer named Charles Pope. Was the attempted murder just to assure the “Dixie Mob connected” candidate, (a Democrat of course), won? It seemed painfully obvious. Except the Democratic nominee almost always won anyway. Was a District Attorney election worth a high-profile attempted murder? Conspiracists said the Dixie Mob had been into Nelson for years and he had tried to renege on a deal. Some wags said Albert McDonald had a new bomb reciepe he wanted to test and one Republican politican was as good as any other for that purpose. Nelson would live, barely. But his career was finished.

     Cleo Epps was thinking the same thing a lot of people were thinking – this had gone too far. She had been friendly with the Nelson family for years. She had been in their home. Attempting to assassinate a district judge in broad daylight in front of his wife and kids? She was mortified. People who would do that would do anything. Epps knew a grand jury was convening downtown to investigate local organized crime. There was one convened every few years and nothing ever came of it.  She called an old friend, a Tulsa Police detective and told him she would be willing to testify in front of the grand jury. She wanted to keep it as secret as possible though. Weeks later she entered the grand jury chambers wearing a wig and ridiculous disguise. Half the people in the room knew her personally. It was a pitiful farcical attempt. Several Dixie Mob figures were in the room and when she entered and they got up and walked out. Perhaps as much out of sadness as disgust. It was widely assumed she had just signed her own death warrant. It would be a case of suicide by Dixie Mob. On the witness stand she told a barely credible tale about seeing Albert McDonald and Lester Pugh stealing dynamite out of a shack on her property. She explained she kept dynamite to blow stumps out of the ground. Many minds were sceptical, Surely Dixie Mobsters had better sources for explosives than stealing an old woman’s landscaping stash. And still no motive was established. FBI agents and newspaper reporters in the Grand Jury room were almost as disappointed as the mobsters who had walked out of the room. Epps was testifying under oath, why hadn’t the D.A. asked her about this murky “Dixie Mafia,” organization? If anyone knew the players she did, but the D.A. had limited his questions to a dynamite theft. Was there a reason?

     The job was offered to two brothers, cowboys from Sperry, but they were hesitant to murder an old woman in cold blood. But Albert McDonald and Tom Pugh had no such qualms. McDonald had known Epps  since he was a teenager and thought she would trust him enough to meet up. Amazingly Epps somehow believed that her disguise had worked, that her testimony in downtown Tulsa would not leave the room. That despite Dixie Mobsters, newspaper reporters and concerned citizens in the grand jury room hearing her implicate McDonald and Pugh that such information would not get back to them. McDonald called Epps saying he had a shipment of untaxed whiskey to get rid of. They arranged to meet in a parking lot off 51st Street.  When she pulled up to McDonald’s Cadillac Pugh got out of the passenger side of the vehicle and held the door open for her to sit in the front next to McDonald. She settled into the seat and Pugh opened the car’s back passenger side door and slid in behind her.  She was shot in the back of the head with a suppressed .22 and they leaned her body over in the seat and wrapped a blanket around her head to hold in the blood. With the warm corpse in the front seat they drove out to the country to hide the evidence. A few weeks later McDonald and Pugh were indicted for bombing Judge Nelson. But there was no evidence, and the only ‘witness,’ (to dynamite possession) was missing and presumed dead. The charges were dropped.

     Nineteen-seventy turned to 1971 with indications that a “Dixie Mob offensive” was underway. An associate of the Kansas City Civella Crime Family  was found in a field by the Tulsa airport with a bullet in his head. A bar on the west side was bombed. The District Attorney in Tahlequah was crippled in a car bomb blast. A previously bombed bar in Sapulpa had been rebuilt and was bombed again. Days later its co-owner was shotgunned to death in his driveway. In February 1971 the Tahlequah Police Chief’s wife asked to borrow his personal car to run errands. When she turned the key the vehicle was blown to pieces. Parts of her body were found on the rooftops of houses down the block from the blast site. Tulsa newspapers reported and editorialized in shocked tones of outrage. They were murdering Police Chief’s wives now, something had to be done. FBI agents flew into the city to bolster the local field office and investigate the multitudinous crimes and a special FBI team was pulled out of the east coast and sent to Tulsa to set up shop with the latest in eavesdropping technology. They soon learned the Tulsa Police Department and Tulsa County Sheriff’s office were none too cooperative. The FBI surmised, (almost certainly correct) that both organizations were severely compromised.

     Albert McDonald was thrown out of a bar in Bartlesville and (as the tale is told) went back after closing time and leveled the building with a bomb. Minutes after the explosion he was pulled over and arrested for drunk driving. The FBI rushed to search and vehicle and it was covered inside and out with bomb making residue but he wouldn’t confess, inisisting the residue must be left over from the vehicle’s previous owner. The search warrrant obtained for his residence was more useful – no bombs were found but evidence indicated his ownership of numerous “Chop shops,” in north and west Tulsa where stolen vehicles were broken down into parts. The FBI claimed he had been involved in the theft of, “More than five-hundred cars and trucks out of Kansas.” Eventually he would be indicted for “Interstate Transportation of Stolen Vehicles.”  While involved in legal procedings regarding the vehicle theft ring  McDonald ( with Pugh as triggerman) apparently murdered Epps. There was no evidence in that case either, But as months dragged by informants were located who would testify that McDonald and Pugh had casually mentioned the murder in conversation.  Eventually they would be arrested and charged with that murder and go to trial. Moments before opening statements were to begin on the trial’s first day an unoccupied service station was blown up across the street from the courthouse. Windows were rattled and cracked and people fell out of their seats from shock, fear and the concussion. Pandemonium reigned in the courtroom as one can easily imagine. The next day a car bomb went off down the street from the courthouse. Downtown Tulsa was placed under a security blanket of police, Sheriff’s Deputies and federal agents the likes of which had never been seen before. A few days into the trial a bomb threat was called into the courthouse and the entire building was evacuated and searched. No bombs were found and local wise acres said it was a juvenile hoax. Everyone knew the Dixie Mob didn’t call in threats. They just set off bombs. Out on bail and on trial for their lives McDonald and Pugh allegedly went on a murder spree of ‘hitting’ those who might provide hearsay testimony next. In short order Tulsa Dixie Mob associates Delbert “Big’n” Self, and Martin “Boots,” Edwards would die via gunshots. Eventually McDonald and Pugh would be convicted of the Epps murder on the basis of circumstantial and hearsay evidence.

     The corruption-busting District Attorney Buddy Fallis had made known while campaigning he would indict corrupt cops and deputies and ‘Fight serious crime!’ And he coyly admitted he was willing to ‘Bend the rules,’ to do that. Charismatic with a rich sense of humor Fallis would go on to have a long career as Tulsa District Attorney. Initially unloved and referred to as ‘Little Caeser,’ (and much worse) in the courthouse and police department, Fallis would wear a bulletproof vest everywhere he went, for years. By 1978 the de facto “red light district,” along East First Street would be shut down. Organized crime cannot thrive without law-enforcement collusion and Fallis would keep his campaign promise by showing no queasiness about charging police officers and Sheriff’s deputies with felonies and misdemeanors. By 1980 the heydey of the Dixie Mob was over. Prostitution was driven completly underground and biker gangs were cutting in on their narcotics traffic. Tulsa was too small a city and Kansas too small a state to make a long career in robbery and commercial theft. The participants began dying, going to prison, retiring or drifting away to greener, more populous pastures. Two (very nonItalian) Tulsa mobsters joined the “Chicago Outfit,” as formal Cosa Nostra “associates.” Others permanently relocated to Los Angeles. Buddy Fallis spoke of several suspected “Murder for Hire,” homicides with probable Dixie Mob participation circa 1979/1980, including one at the then prestigous high-rise University Club apartments. These murders remain unsolved.  As late as the mid-90s relatively large-scale bookmaking enterprises still existed in Tulsa, and debts could be settled in the traditional manner. And “Money was on the street,” in the form of unofficial, no-paperwork, high-interest “vig loans.”  These relatively gentlemanly forms of criminal racketeering were probably the last examples of organized Dixie Mob activity in Tulsa.

By Curtis Price

February 4, 2022

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I’m at the public housing projects in Triana, a tiny, nearly all-black town of about 400 on the outskirts of Huntsville, Alabama. Triana ends at the dark, heaving waters of the Tennessee River. On the other side of the river begins the off-limits Redstone Arsenal, bigger than the city of Huntsville itself, and choked in impenetrable barbwire.  Sometimes you can hear the muffled boom! of weapons testing from Redstone echoing. Sometimes, gators crawl across the road from the fetid swamps a quarter-mile upwind.

My acquaintance has lived here for about a year. He likes the peace of living in the country. The projects themselves are older, one-story apartments. They feel vaguely Spanish, a stucco-pastel of washed-out ochre.  There’s lots of green and a small symphony of katydids buzz and hum. I can’t help but compare them to projects in the North, which look either like army barracks or small-scale prisons.

Back in the early 1800s, Triana was a commercial center in Alabama, its proximity to the river making it an ideal site for trade. Those days are long gone, but going to the Tennessee down Record Road, you can see at this wide juncture in the river’s bend how a natural harbor formed. If you hang around long enough, barges will silently appear and then whirl away, disappearing like river ghosts, carrying grain to poultry farms farther north.

Today, people come to picnic and boat.  Upscale whites from the new luxury complexes sprouting up on the outskirts of Triana are displacing black working-class residents using this stretch of the riverfront for barbecues and picnics.

For generations, the river fed Triana’s poor and working class. It was a free source of fish, the catfish, and bass that filled the Tennessee. Everyone fished or knew someone who fished to put food on the table. Until, 1979, that is.

In 1979, the then-Mayor of Triana, Clyde Foster, an Equal Opportunity officer for Redstone Arsenal and son of a Birmingham steel worker, found out from an anonymous phone call from a journalist that the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) had discovered elevated DDT levels in local fish, forty times the recommended level. When Foster asked “For how long?,” the reporter hung up. No government official had ever bothered to tell Triana.

The source of the DDT was traced to a factory on the far-flung fringes of Redstone Arsenal that had been leased to an outside corporation to make mustard gas and other chemical weapons in 1943. After the war, the plant changed hands and began producing  DDT. The Army documented plummeting bird numbers in the species that used the nearby Wheeler Refuge in the 1950s and finally, shut the plant down in the early 1970s as a result of the growing backlash against DDT and the blot of several fish kills in Spring Branch Creek, which fed into the Tennessee River.

The Olin Corporation, the last owner, had leeched four thousand tons of DDT into the river’s bottom soil. Foster went to the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH), which declined to get involved saying no research indicated that DDT was a health hazard to humans. One doctor at ADPH said he would just as soon sprinkle DDT as sugar on his morning cereal, since both carried the same level of harm.

Undeterred, Foster, a degreed engineer who had helped marshal Redstone Arsenal into the Civil Rights era, managed to interest a CDC doctor in Atlanta. She came to Triana and tested. What she found were high levels of DDT in blood, two to three times the national average. One elderly resident, a retired farmer, had the highest level of DDT ever recorded in a human at 3,300 parts per billion (the U.S. average is 16.5).

The headlines screamed a “Southern Love Canal” and labeled Triana “the unhealthiest town in America.” But it was the South. It was Alabama. And it was isolated, tiny, poor Triana, so interest quickly died and the New York journalists quickly turned their attention elsewhere, as New Yorkers often do when it comes to the South, back to Hollywood starlet scandals, Wall Street gyrations, and Andy Warhol’s latest soup cans, but with Triana briefly having its Warholian turn in the sun of fifteen fleeting minutes of fame.

However, outside of the media gaze, Mayor Clyde Foster fought tenaciously to make sure Triana wasn’t forgotten. Through his efforts and the resulting lawsuits, Olin Corporation was finally forced to pony up a substantial settlement. Triana became an EPA Superfund site, making it eligible for federal dollars. For a couple decades afterward, the river was dredged and the contaminated mud hauled off. Foster wanted a portion of the settlement monies to be funneled into a community clinic that would last for generations. Some accounts of the Triana disaster mention a community clinic set up by Foster.

I asked my friend where he thought the clinic could have been located. He thought it might have been in an abandoned building up from the Dollar General that he said a group of white crack heads was now squatting in. He also whispered darkly that since he moved to Triana, he noticed all long-term Triana residents have yellowed eyes from the DDT, a feature that’s managed to escape me in all my trips there.

I imagined Foster’s clinic would have been in the old log cabin shack down from the Triana library that in the early part of the twentieth century served as one of the few medical clinics for North Alabama’s black community. The clinic was run for decades by a single dedicated doctor and nurse and had been long abandoned. It would be fitting that Foster’s vision of free health care for all Triana residents would continue the work of earlier generations, the original clinic as a tree that would continue sprouting fruit.

But it turns out, that contrary to some published accounts, the permanent clinic was never built. At a memorial meeting sponsored by the Triana Historical Association, Foster’s daughter told me Triana residents wanted individual pay-outs and couldn’t see the long-term benefits of an embedded community clinic. So the settlement money flooded in and quickly went out again, as it always does in poor and working-class communities, which end up just being conduits of monies into other, fatter pockets, and Triana was never fortuned with its own clinic.

However, the other clinic, that old, weather-beaten, one-room shack, is now, after decades of being left to the elements, being restored as a historical site, a long-overdue recognition of its role in Alabama black history. (1)

As I left Triana, driving along Zerit Road, on a finger-like peninsula jutting into the muddy Tennessee waters, I noticed a solitary figure silhouetted against the grey sky, holding a fishing rod. I don’t think personally I would have enough faith in soothing government reports that everything was cleaned up and fish fit to eat.

But the biggest threat to Triana’s future may not come from the river but from the land. The area surrounding Triana is being gobbled up by developers building fancy, cookie-cutter townhouse complexes with faux Olde English names like The Greens at Eastwick. And who knows, considering the never-ending, voracious demand for housing in Huntsville’s metastasizing upscale suburbs, if Triana will slowly get whittled away out of existence in a few decades?

Notes

1. For an overview of Alabama’s larger black hospital movement, see http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-2410