When Dick Reavis, now an associate professor of English at N.C. State, was working with the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, he thought he and his fellow organizers were the first people in history to fight for equal opportunity. Now, however, he has come across a forgotten four-page tabloid newspaper called The Southern Worker that proves there were people fighting for racial equality in the South as long ago as the 1930s.
In 1965 and 1966 Reavis was a voter registration worker in Marengo County, Ala. At that time African Americans were only allowed to vote if they could pass a literacy test. Moreover, these tests were only given one Tuesday a month, only about 20 applicants could try a day, and very few people passed. Reavis worked to prove that it was unreasonably difficult for a black person to register to vote, among other things.
“The problem is they were trying to arrest us all the time we were doing this,” Reavis said. “I ended up going to jail, I believe, six times, six or seven, on charges like vagrancy or disturbing the peace. And at one point I was sentenced to six months of hard labor.”
Reavis found a reference to The Southern Worker a few years ago in the footnote of a book, Hammer and Hoe by Robin Kelley and, after reading a microfilm copy of the publication in the library, immediately connected with it. Even though it was written and published in the 1930s, every issue argued for racial equality.
“Those of us who were integrationists from the South thought that we were freaks and accepted that critique, because we didn’t know there was anybody like us,” Reavis said. “But this newspaper says, ‘Oh yes. You had ancestors. You represent a lineage….’ I looked at it and I said, ‘Gee, there’s nothing new under the sun, it’s just in the ‘30s they got beat.’”
The Southern Worker was published by the Communist Party in Chattanooga, Tenn., but its readership covered the whole South, including North Carolina. The paper shone a spotlight on lynchings or trials in which race was a determining factor no matter where they took place.
The Southern Worker was illegal – not because it was published by the Communist Party, but because of its stand on racial equality. Its writers and readers therefore had to take precautions. For example, the front page claims it was published in Birmingham, Ala., instead of Tennessee, and its editor Solomon Auerbach wrote under th e pseudonym James S. Allen.
“It stunned me,” Reavis said. “It brought up all the questions from the right of black people to serve on juries to racial intermarriage. It didn’t blink at anything.”
The newspaper even referred to groups of white Southerners who were engaged in the fight for equality.
“You look at The Southern Worker and you find out that not only were there blacks, but there were whites in the ‘30s that opposed Jim Crow. And you know, if I had to pick a set of grandparents, it would be them,” Reavis said.
Reavis also began to pull other newspapers from the day to compare the events reported and check The Southern Worker’s accuracy.
“I found that The Southern Worker didn’t distort the facts,” Reavis said. “It had ordinary concerns. It was not that ideological.”
This was a surprise, as other Communist papers, like The Daily Worker, regularly published heavily slanted propaganda.
However, while Reavis has found a few minor references to the newspaper’s existence in older scholarly works, it had been all but forgotten by history. He thinks that as the Civil Rights movement evolved it tried to play down its early ties to communism, and The Southern Worker was pushed aside and buried.
“If you read textbooks or take courses today they are going to tell you that the Civil Rights movement was begun by the Supreme Court when it ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education in ’54, saying that schools should be integrated,” Reavis said. “So the government started the Civil Rights movement, and then Dr. King and Rosa Parks took it up; that’s the official story.”
But that’s not the complete truth – through his work with The Southern Worker Reavis has been uncovering evidence for what is known as the Long Civil Rights Movement point of view. This view argues that the Civil Rights movement was started by the people and had been going on underground for years before it fully emerged.
The Southern Worker is also valuable for the information that it gives us about the Great Depression. Its third page was always filled with letters from the people talking about the racial and economic issues of the day.
“When I looked at those letters I saw the Depression,” Reavis said. “This was testimony from the horse’s mouth. Those letters enchanted me because they were the unedited words of ordinary people.”
Although we can study The Great Depression from statistics and other sources, these newspapers give an unembellished and shocking view of daily life, making them invaluable resources.
Soon after discovering it, Reavis decided The Southern Worker needed to be indexed and began a three-year project of tracking down and preserving each issue. After acquiring the microfilms by ordering them from various libraries, he found the original filming institution had lost about 20 issues. However, he continued to look, unearthing paper copies in libraries in Alabama and enlisting the help of the Marxist Internet Archivists. There are only two issues still missing; Reavis thinks they may be lost forever.
Reavis recently posted The Southern Worker available freely online and said he is optimistic that The Southern Worker is such a valuable source that historians and professors who teach about the Civil Rights Movement will begin using it.
