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Object Description
Interview no. | E-0174 |
Restrictions | Interviews may not be published, quoted, or broadcast without permission of Mike Honey until 10 March 2020. |
Project | E.6. Labor: Michael Honey Collection on Southern Labor History |
Project description | Interviews conducted by Michael Honey, 1981-1998, as part of research focusing on the relationship between labor organizing and the civil rights movement in Memphis, Tenn., and elsewhere in the South, 1930s-1980s. Interviewees, African American and white, were workers at the Memphis Firestone plant or life-long social justice and labor activists. The interviews were used to produce Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (1993) and Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (2002). |
Date | May 28 1989 |
Interviewee | Coe, Clarence. |
Interviewee occupation |
Factory workers Labor union members |
Interviewee DOB | Unknown |
Interviewee ethnicity | African Americans |
Interviewer | Honey, Michael K. |
Abstract | Clarence Coe discusses Memphis, Tenn., as a labor town and his experiences in organizing the Firestone Tire and Rubber plant and other workers. Topics include NAACP involvement with organized labor; uneven wages and wage raises and the necessity for integration; the sanitation workers' need for a strike and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s involvement; police and FBI involvement in union activities; current inequalities in the job market, wages, educational system; Richard Routon as union president; conditions and procedures in the Firestone factory; harassment by white coworkers; poverty in Mississippi and relationship to lack of unions there; and E.H. Crump and lasting effect of his leadership on Memphis. Coe also discusses his initiative in promoting workplace integration in the 1950's and 1960's and the threat of violence. |
Citation | Interview with Clarence Coe by Michael K. Honey, May 28, 1987 E-0174, in the Southern Oral History |
Description
Interview no. | restriction |