Excerpt from "Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell about Life in the Segregated South."
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@ Alabama Department of Archives and History, 624 Washington Avenue, Montgomery, Alabama 36130
Description
In this passage Leon Alexander, a coal miner and union organizer in Alabama, recalls living and working under Jim Crow laws and his early efforts to fight them. He discusses father's work in the United Mine Workers and the unsuccessful miners' strike of 1922; his education in segregated schools ("They were separate, but the equal part was a joke."); the different tasks assigned to white and African American employees in the mines; the efforts of the United Mine Workers of America to organize in Alabama and attempts by the companies to set up their own unions to undermine the national organization; the companies' exploitation of racial tension among employees ("They are using you all against each other. That is what the company's good at. As long as they can keep you divided, they can hound you like they wanted to."); and an incident in which he openly challenged the separate water fountains for employees at U.S. Steel in the 1940s. At the end of the passage he briefly mentions Bull Connor as police commissioner in Birmingham.
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600 Ppi Tiff
2001 2001 00 00
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