Now, in terms of Bessemer, Bessemer basically is part of Greater Birmingham, so it’s hard to separate the two. These were industrial sections of a state that actually has long and continue to have the largest unionization rate of any Southern state. Now, one of the things that we — we make this mistake of thinking the South as, like, backwards, as conservative, but the South has been the epicenter of the country’s most radical democratic movements, which is why it’s completely, you know, unsurprising that Bessemer, Alabama, would be the place where you would have a kind of renewed labor movement, where the fight against the largest corporation would begin, because the South is where you have long struggles, not just in Alabama, but waterfront workers in New Orleans and Charleston, workers in the rural areas. But in Bessemer, in particular, this is really the home of the International Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union, which was formed in part with the help of the Communist Party.
And I want to really emphasize that what makes the history of Alabama unionization important was the role of the left. You know, the fact is, the reason why we have anti-labor legislation, we have violence against labor in Alabama, what appears to be conservatives, the reason we have Jim Crow and the disenfranchisement of Black people, the most draconian anti-immigration laws, is precisely because those who rule the South know the potential of an interracial labor movement,
— source democracynow.org | Mar 29, 2021