Joseph van der Naald is a PhD candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Organized labor and progressive politics do not fail in the South because of some ingrained cultural pathology. They fail because its interracial labor movement was, and continues to be, systematically suppressed.
Many explanations of the United Auto Workers’ recent loss at Mercedes in Alabama don’t hold up under scrutiny. To understand the challenges the UAW ran into, we need a historical perspective on attempts to organize in the US South.