Operation Dixie: The CIO Organizing Committee Papers on Microfilm

Lucy Mason, a social reformer, was concerned with such matters as civil rights, labor legislation, working hours for women, minimum wages, social security and rights of workers.



She served as southern public relations representative for the CIO for 16 years. She was involved in the campaigns of the Operation Dixie organizing drive. Mason was also General Secretary of the YWCA for a period of time and active in several other social and civic organizations.

Operation Dixie was the name given to the CIO's program to bring unionism to the South. Under the direction of Van A. Bittner, the vice-president of the United Steelworkers of America, the CIO's Southern Organizing Committee was established in May 1946. Supported by contributions from some forty affiliated unions, the Committee established programs in twelve states throughout the South. Operation Dixie attempted to organize workers in diverse industries, concentrating on the textile, wood products, chemical, oil and iron and steel industries and on the largest and most resistant employers in a given area.

While its primary purpose was "organizing the unorganized," the Southern Organizing Committee also cooperated with the CIO's Political Action Committees and State CIOs or Industrial Union Councils which sought to attain the parent organizations goals through state and national legislation and electoral reform.

Although by February 1947 324 new locals had been established, the Committee's work was plagued with a variety of problems. Among these were charges of communist sympathies; opposition by the Ku Klux Klan and others to the CIO policy of establishing racially integrated locals; lack of financial support; and employer opposition which included violence, intimidation and collusion with public authorities. In 1953, the Southern drive was reorganized and most of the work of developing and servicing locals was turned over to the affiliated unions at that time.

Consists in large part of the records of the CIO Organizing Committee campaigns to organize workers in four southern states: North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Records from the other states involved in the campaign are no longer in existence.

In addition to procedural matters delineating the business, personnel and financial policies of the Organizing Committee, the CIO's objectives, priorities and approaches to organizing and negotiating are apparent in correspondence, printed matter and publicity materials. National, state and local political issues, jurisdictional questions, including relations between the AFL and the CIO, improved labor and living conditions and relations with other departments of the CIO, as well as with a variety of social reform and friends of labor groups are documented. Legal materials include NLRB documents concerning unfair labor practices, elections, etc. Organizers reports and membership records are among the other types of materials found in the records.