We Rebel: Black Women, Worker Theater, and Critical Unionism in Wartime St. Louis

Abstract

Black working-class women developed a powerful and dynamic critical unionism amid the social upheavals generated by wartime mobilizations of the 1940s. The first cohort to more fully integrate the St. Louis garment and apparel industry and its unions articulated a Black labor feminist agenda that made critical interruptions and interventions into industrial labor and liberal racial unionism through resistance and performance. Exposing the racialized and gendered fault lines of shopfloor production, union bureaucracy, racial liberalism, historical memory, and the cultural politics of labor education, Black women unionists opposed the historical narratives of worker theater that drew upon Old South nostalgia and failed to account for their particular economic experiences. By the same token, they enthusiastically participated in performances and cultural programs that reflected their pro-labor sentiment, celebrated their artistry, and strengthened interracial worker solidarity by foregrounding shared political interests. Although integration within the mounting civil rights movement of the 1940s was not the most important agenda item for these working people, they nonetheless made critical contributions to larger civil rights and wartime challenges through their dimensional labor practices.

Keywords::

• Black working-class women
• critical unionism
• ILGWU
• interracial unionism
• racial liberalism
• worker theater

About the Author

Keona K. Ervin is Assistant Professor of African-American History at the University of Missouri, Columbia. She specializes in the study of Black women, U.S. labor and working-class history, and urban history. Ervin is the author of a forthcoming book on Black women’s economic activism in St. Louis from the Great Depression to the Great Society. Her essays appear in International Labor and Working-Class History and the Journal of Civil and Human Rights.

Notes

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H. Paul Douglass, The St. Louis Church Survey: A Religious Investigation with a Social Background (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1924), 219; John T. Clark to George R. Arthur, October 24, 1933, St. Louis Urban League Records, Series 1, Box 9, Folder 1933, Washington University in St. Louis (hereafter cited as UAWU); Nathan B. Young, Your St. Louis and Mine (n.p., 1937), 34; Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 4–5; 7–13; Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Priscilla Dowden, Groping Toward Democracy: African American Social Reform in St. Louis (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011); George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); Kenneth S. Jolly, Black Liberation in the Midwest: The Struggle in St. Louis, Missouri, 1964–1970 (New York: Routledge, 2006); Joseph Heathcott, “Black Archipelago: Politics and Civic Life in the Jim Crow City,” Journal of Social History 38, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 705–36; David Lucander, Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014); Clarence Lang, “Locating the Civil Rights Movement: An Essay on the Deep South, Midwest, and Border South in Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of Social History 47, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 371–400; Tracy Campbell, The Gateway Arch: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, 1764–1980, 3rd ed. (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1998), 436–37; Katharine T. Corbett, In Her Place: A Guide to St. Louis Women’s History (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1999), 218–19, 157, 168–69, 437; Clarence E. Lang, “Community and Resistance in the Gateway City: Black National Consciousness, Working-Class Formation and Social Movements in St. Louis, Missouri, 1941–64” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2004), 534.

Rosemary Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

Dorothy W. Burke, Economic Status of Saint Louis (St. Louis: Welfare Plan Committee, February 1935), 11, 13.

Ibid.

Ibid.

William August Crossland, “Industrial Conditions among Negroes in St. Louis,” Studies in Social Economics 1, no. 1 (1914): 20, 22, 82, 83, 94–95, 97, 101, 121.

Ibid.

Occupational Distribution of St. Louis Female Workers by Color and by Nativity: 1930, Facts and Figures for Speakers on Race Relations, Department of Race Relations, St. Louis Community Council, September 1934, 4, Series 1, Box 4, Folder 12, Fannie Cook Papers, Missouri History Museum Archives, St. Louis, Missouri.

Crossland, Industrial Conditions, 94, 101.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ira de A. Reid, Industrial Status of Negroes in St. Louis (New York: Department of Research, National Urban League, September 1934), 20.

Ibid.

Leslie Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

Crossland, Industrial Conditions, 12.

Black Population by Sex and Age for Census Tracts: 1930, 1930 Federal Census for Metropolitan St. Louis Tabulated by Enumeration Districts and Census Tracts (St. Louis: The Research Committee of the St. Louis Community Council, 1932); Crossland, Industrial Conditions, 30; Paul Dennis Brunn, “African American Workers and Social Movements of the 1930s in St. Louis” (Ph.D. dissertation, Washington University, 1975), 86–87, 90, 100, 110, 111, 112.

Black Population in St. Louis from U.S. Census, 1946, Population and Housing Statistics for Census Tracts, St. Louis, Mo. And Adjacent Area (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1942), 6, Missouri State Employment Service, New Deal and Black Agencies, Missouri File, Special Collections, University of Missouri-Columbia.

Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 1996, org. pub., 1971), 4.

Jeanne Mongold, “Vespers and Vacant Lots: The Early Years of the St. Louis Phyllis Wheatley Branch” (n.p., 1979), State Historical Society of Missouri-St. Louis; Crossland, Industrial Conditions, 6, 7; Black Population in St. Louis, from U.S. Census, 1910–1937, Population and Housing Statistics for Census Tracts, St. Louis, Mo. And Adjacent Areas (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1942), 6, Missouri State Employment Service, New Deal and Black Agencies, Missouri File, Special Collections, University of Missouri-Columbia.

Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75 (1988): 786–811.

Ibid.

Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Andor Skotnes, A New Deal for All?: Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era Baltimore (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1233–63; Sundiata K. Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92 (2007): 265–88; Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Andrew Edmund Kersten, Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Zieger, The CIO: 1935–1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Great Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); LaShawn D. Harris, “Running with the Reds: African American Women and the Communist Party during the Great Depression,” Journal of African American History 94, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 21–40; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Melinda Chateauvert, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); David Lucander, Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014).

Rosemary Feurer, “The Nut Pickers’ Union, 1933–34: Crossing the Boundaries of Community and Workplace,” in “We Are All Leaders”: The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s, edited by Staughton Lynd (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 30–32; Fichtenbaum, Funsten Nut Strike, 15, 16, 17, 20, 34, 58–59; Staughton Lynd, ed., “We Are All Leaders,” 3; Myrna Fichtenbaum, The Funsten Nut Strike (New York: International Publishers, 1991).

Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 13; Feurer, “The Nut Pickers’ Union”; Fichtenbaum, Funsten Nut Strike; Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement from World War I to the Present (New York: The Free Press, 1980), 270–75; Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

1940 Annual Report, St. Louis Urban League Papers, Series 4, Box, 4, Folder Annual Report, UAWU.

Crossland, Industrial Conditions, 94–95.

Ibid.

Ibid.

“Garment Industry,” 10/23/37, Series 4, Box 4, Folder Monthly Report, Industrial Secretary, 1937, UAWU; October 1938 Report of the Industrial Secretary, 2, Series 4, Box 5, Folder 1; “Labor Relations,” 3, February 1945 Report, Series 4, Box 5, Monthly Report, Women’s Division, Field Contacts, 1945, UAWU; Reginald A. Johnson to Mr. Kessler, October 15, 1930, Series 4, Box 6, Folder 20, UAWU.

“New St. Louis Laundry Union Calls Meeting,” August 9, 1933, St. Louis Post-Dispatch; “The Strike of Needle Crafts,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 5, 1933, sl 39, Folder ILGWU: Programs of Theatricals, 1933–1975, Photographs, Newspapers, ILGWU Papers, State Historical Society of Missouri-St. Louis.

Ibid.

John T. Clark to Edna Gellhorn, September 8, 1933, Series 1, Box 9, Folder 1933, State Historical Society of Missouri-St. Louis, UAWU.

1940 Annual Report, 3, Series 4, Box 4, Folder Annual Report, Industrial Secretary (Men’s Division), 1940, UAWU.

Ibid.

“Textile and Garment Industries,” 4, Series 4, Box 6, Folder 1941, UAWU.

Arnold B. Walker, “Household Employment Conference (Urban League),” 3, Annual Report of Industrial Secretary, January 8, 1942, Series 4, Box 6, Annual Reports, Industrial Secretary, Field Industrial Secretary, Women’s Division, 1941, UAWU.

Ibid.

“A Digest of Fields Explored and Services Given by the Urban League of St. Louis: During Twenty-Five Years—1918-1943,” 1–4, n.d., Box 15, Folder 5, Mary T. Hall Papers, Missouri History Museum Archives, St. Louis, Missouri.

“What Happened to the Domestic Servant?” Bulletin of the Urban League of St. Louis 24, no. 2 (June 1943), 4, Box 14, Folder 1, Missouri History Museum Archives, St. Louis, Missouri; Karen Tucker Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired: African American Women Workers during World War II,” Journal of American History 69, no. 1 (June 1982): 82–97; Honey, Bitter Fruit; Shockley, We, Too, Are Americans.

Ibid.

“1941 in Review,” 1, Textile and Garment Industries, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Annual Reports, Women’s Division, 1941, UAWU.

“Garment Industry,” Urban League of St. Louis Industrial News, 25, no. 8 (November 1943), UAWU, Series 1, Box 4, Folder November 1943; Richard H. Jefferson to Clarence E. Mitchell, September 21, 1943, UAWU, Series 4, Box 1, Folder Correspondence, 1943.

1943 Annual Report of the Industrial Secretary, 3, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Annual Reports, 1943, UAWU.

Ibid.

1944 Annual Report, 1–2, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Annual Reports, Women’s Division, Highlights of Annual Reports, 1926–43, UAWU.

“Labor Relations,” 3, St. Louis Urban League Records, February 1945 Report, Series 4, Box 5, Folder Monthly Report, Women’s Division, Field Contacts, 1945, UAWU.

Portnoy Garment Company Log, January 20, 1944, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Portnoy Garment Company, 1943–50, UAWU.

Belle-McKay Dress Company Log, April 13, 1944 and November 27, 1944, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Belle McKay Company, 1943–48, UAWU.

Ibid.

Belle-McKay Dress Company Log, August 14, 1944, 3, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Belle McKay Company, 1943–48, UAWU.

Ibid.

“ILGWU, AFL, Installation of Local 516 Report,” February 28, 1949, Series 4, Box 5, Folder Monthly Report, Women’s Field Secretary, 1949, UAWU.

Ace Uniform Company Log, March 23, 1945, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Ace Uniform Company, 1945–47, UAWU.

Kearnes Brothers Dress Company, Incorporated Log, January 4, 1947 and July 9, 1947, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Kearns Brothers Dress Company, Inc. 1947, UAWU.

Ibid.

“Labor Relations,” February 3, 1945 Report, Series 4, Box 5, Folder Monthly Report, Women’s Division, Field Contacts, 1945, UAWU.

March 1946 Report, 2, Series 4, Box 4, Folder Executive Secretary of the Urban League of St. Louis, Monthly Reports, 1946, UAWU.

Ibid.

United Cap, Hatters, and Millinery Workers Union Log, October 7, 1944; October 20, 1944; October 24, 1944; November 22, 1944; December 8, 1944; December 11, 1944; December 15, 1944; January 5, 1945; January 27, 1945; March 7, 1945; March 29, 1945; June 15,1945; Series 4, Box 6, Folder United Cap, Hatters, and Millinery Workers Union, AFL, 1944–49, UAWU; Percy Ginsburg, Special Notice, n.d.; Percy Ginsburg to “Gentlemen,” August 13, 1945; Valla Abbington to Julius A. Thomas, January 4, 1949, Series 4, Box 6, Folder United Cap, Hatters, and Millinery Workers Union, AFL, 1944–49, UAWU.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Leather and Luggage Workers’ Union, Local 60 (CIO) Log, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Leather and Luggage Workers Union, Local 60, CIO, 1945, UAWU.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Boot and Shoe Workers Union (AFL) Log, March 26, 1946, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Boot and Shoe Workers Union (AFL), 1946–48, UAWU.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Valla Abbington to Ben Berk, November 14, 1947, Ben Berk to Valla Abbington, November 19, 1947, Valla Abbington to Ben Berk, January 23 1948, and Ben Berk to Valla Abbington, January 27, 1948, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Boot and Shoe Workers Union (AFL), 1946–48, UAWU.

Bernard Handbag Manufacturing Company Report, March 20, 1946, Series 4, Box 6, 1946, Folder Bernard Handbag Manufacturing Company, UAWU.

Ibid.

Ibid.

V. Abbington, “International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, A.F. of L., Installation of Local 516,” Series 4, Box 5, Monthly Report, Women’s Field Secretary, 1949 January–May, September, UAWU.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Black Working Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” The Journal of American History 88 (1993): 75–112; James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

Day and Permanent Placements—Women’s Division, 2, Women’s Division, Report of Industrial Secretary, February 1944, Series 4, Box 5, Folder Monthly Report, Industrial Secretary, 1944, all, Jefferson, UAWU.

Ibid.

March 1944 Report, 2, Series 4, Box 5, Folder Monthly Report, Industrial Secretary, 1944, all, Jefferson, UAWU.

Garment Industry, 3, April 1944 and March 1944 Reports, Series 4, Box 5, Folder Monthly Report, Industrial Secretary 1944, all, Jefferson, UAWU.

Portnoy Garment Company Log, January 3, 1944, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Portnoy Garment Company, 1943–50, UAWU.

Portnoy Garment Company Log, 3-16-45, 5-19-45, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Portnoy Garment Company, 1943–50, UAWU; Belle McKay Company Log, October 22, 1943 and August 22, 1944, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Belle McKay Company, 1943–48, UAWU.

Valla D. Abbington to David Portnoy, September 17, 1945, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Portnoy Garment Company, 1943–50, UAWU.

Belle-Mckay Company Log, November 3, 1944, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Belle McKay Company, 1943–1948, UAWU.

Belle-MacKay Report, May 19, 1943 through January 19, 1945, Series 4, Box 6, Belle McKay Company, 1943–1948, UAWU.

Dollies and Birdies Hat Shop Incorporated, May 10, 1944, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Dollie’s Birdies Hat Shop Inc., 1944, UAWU.

Regal Manufacturing Company Log, January 18, 1945 and June 5, 1945, Folder Regal Manufacturing Company, 1945, UAWU.

Ibid.

Regal Manufacturing Company Log, June 5, 1945, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Regal Manufacturing Company, 1945, UAWU.

Ibid.

J. H. Mittaman Hat Company Report, November 17, 1942, April 10, 1943, Series 4, Box 6, UAWU; Investigation-J. H. Mittman Hat Company, 1407 Washington Avenue, April 1, 1942, Series 4, Box 6, UAWU.

J. H. Mittaman Hat Company Log, November 17, 1942, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Mittaman Millinery Company, 1942–43, UAWU.

Ibid.

Lewis and Mathes Company Log, 2, July 1944 Report, Series 4, Box 5, Folder Monthly Report, Industrial Secretary, 1944, all, Jefferson, UAWU.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

“Negro Factory Girls Slow to Join Unions,” Urban League of St. Louis Bulletin, XXIV, no. 5 (September 1943): 1, 4, Mary T. Hall papers, Box 14 Folder 1, UAWU.

Ibid.

Ruth Adler Dress Company Log, June 2, 1943, August 4, 1943, August 20, 1943, September 2, 1943, and September 7, 1943, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Novelty Frocks, Ruth Adler Dress Company, 1943–44, UAWU.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

United Cap, Hatters, and Millinery Workers Log, March 29, 1945, Series 4, Box 6, Folder United Hatters, Cap, and Millinery Workers, AFL, 1944–49, UAWU.

Bernard Handbag Manufacturing Company Log, March 20, 1946, Series 4, Box 6, Folder Bernard Handbag Manufacturing Company, 1946, UAWU.

Doris Preisler, KSD, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Interview, February 14, 1940, 3, Box 1, Folder 6, International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Southwestern Region Educational Department Records, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale (hereafter cited as ILGWU).

“Report of Educational Dep’t, St. Louis, Mo. By Doris Preisler for Five Year Jubilee—Kansas City, Oct. 1939,” Box 1, Folder 5, ILGWU; Doris Preisler, KSD, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Interview, February 14, 1940, 3, Box 1, Folder 6, ILGWU.

Doris Preisler, “St. Louis An Alma Mater,” March, 1, 1939, Box 1, Folder 5, ILGWU.

“Native Intelligence at Work,” The St. Louis Garment Worker, 1 (October 16, 1939), Box 1, Folder 5, ILGWU.

Denning, Cultural Front; John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996); Myles Horton and Paulo Friere, We Make the Road by Walking (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

Marguerite Martyn, “The New Era for Garment Workers,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, December 11, 1935, Box 1, Folder 5, ILGWU.

Dorothy Coleman, “Workers’ Theater Movement in St. Louis,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 8, 1936, Pageant Clippings, Box 1, Folder 5, ILGWU.

“Remembering the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire,” Cornell University, Industrial and Labor Relations School, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/primary/songsPlays/StoryOfILGWUEpisodeV.html (accessed December 8, 2015); Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 2, 21–22, 45–47, 56.

Fones-Wolf, Waves of Opposition, 2, 21–22, 45–47, 56.

“International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union,” n.p, n.d., Pageant Clippings, Box 1, Folder 5, ILGWU.

“Pageant of Unionism Coming to Kansas City Saturday Night, Ang. 29,” Pageant Clippings, ILGWU; “This and That from St. Louis,” Pageant Clippings, Box 1, Folder 5, ILGWU.

“Justice and Greed in Leading Roles at Union Pageant,” Pageant Clippings, Box 1, Folder 5, ILGWU.

Ibid.

Coleman, “Workers’ Theater Movement.”

“‘Surging Forward’: A Pageant,” Pageant Clippings, Box 1, Folder 5, ILGWU; “Surging Forward to be Presented Saturday Night,” August 28, 1936, Pageant Clippings, Box 1, Folder 5, ILGWU; Coleman, “Workers’ Theater Movement”; “Report of Educational Dep’t, St. Louis, Mo. By Doris Preisler for Five Year Jubilee—Kansas City, Oct. 1939,” Box 1, Folder 5, ILGWU; “Pageant Begins to Take Form,” ILGWU Records, Box 1, Folder 5, ILGWU.

“Tomorrow Must be Ours,” Act I, “Tomorrow Must Be Ours,” April 9–12, 1943, 8, 9, Box 8, Folder 6, ILGWU.

“Tomorrow Must be Ours,” Act II, April 9–12, 1943, 8, 9, Box 8, Folder 6, ILGWU.

“Tomorrow Must be Ours,” Act I, “Tomorrow Must Be Ours” Act II, April 9–12, 1943, 8, 9, Box 8, Folder 6, ILGWU; John T. Clark to “My Dear,” 17 March 1943, Series 4, Box 1, General Correspondence 1943, UAWU; John T. Clark to “Factory Worker,” 30 March 1943, Series 4, Box 1, General Correspondence 1943, UAWU.

John T. Clark to “My Dear,” March 17, 1943, St. Louis Urban League Records, Series 4, Box 1, General Correspondence 1943, John T. Clark to “Factory Worker,” March 30, 1943, Series 4, Box 1, General Correspondence 1943, UAWU.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Scott A. Sandage, “A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory, 1939–1963,” Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (1993): 135–67; Raymond Arsenault, The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert that Awakened America (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009); Redmond, Anthem, 144.

“Let Freedom Swing Again,” May 17–18, 1943, Box 8, Folder 8, ILGWU; “Let Freedom Swing” Playbill, March 8, 9, 15, and 16, 1946, Box 8, Folder 8, ILGWU.

“The Sharecropper’s Song.” Words and Music by Mark Silverstone, n.d., Box, Folder 8, ILGWU.

Ibid.

“Let Freedom Swing Again,” May 17–18, 1943, Box 8, Folder 8, ILGWU; “Let Freedom Swing” Playbill, March 8, 9, 15, and 16, 1946, Box 8, Folder 8, ILGWU; “Let Freedom Swing” Script, Lyrics, and Notes, ILGWU Records, Box 8, Folder 8, ILGWU.

“Let Freedom Swing Again,” May 17–18, 1943, Box 8, Folder 8, ILGWU; “Let Freedom Swing” Playbill, March 8, 9, 15, and 16, 1946, Box 8, Folder 8, ILGWU; “Let Freedom Swing” Script, Lyrics, and Notes, Box 8, Folder 8, ILGWU; Redmond, Anthem, 99–139; Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll, The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).

ILGWU Southwest Regional Conference Program, St. Louis, June 1942, Box 1, Folder 6, ILGWU.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 13.

Hunter, ‘To Joy My Freedom; Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem.’”.

Mississippi Revels Information Sheet/Promotional Material, February 15, 16, 17, 1949, Box 1, Folder 11, ILGWU; Doris Preisler to St. Louis Race Relations Commission, ca. February 1949, Box 1, Folder 11, ILGWU.

Doris Preisler to St. Louis Race Relations Commission, ca. February 1949, Box 1, Folder 11, ILGWU.

W. C. Handy, “St. Louis Blues,” performed by Bessie Smith, 1925.

“Congratulations Were Extended,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, n.d., Box 9, Folder 4, ILGWU; “Valentine Show in the Making,” February 14, 1949, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, ILGWU.

Mississippi Revels Information Sheet/Promotional Material, February 15, 16, 17, 1949?, Box 1, Folder 11, ILGWU; Doris Preisler to St. Louis Race Relations Commission, ca. February 1949, Box 1, Folder 11, ILGWU.

“To Give ‘Mississippi Revels’ On Oldtime Showboat,” St. Louis Argus, February 11, 1949, Box 9, Folder 4, ILGWU; Union Art Students, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 4, 1949, ILGWU.

Doris Preisler to St. Louis Race Relations Commission, ca. February 1949, Box 1, Folder 11, ILGWU.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Doris Priesler, “One Friend’s Loving Memories of Rita Oberbeck,” Box 9, Folder 6, ILGWU.

Ibid.

St. Louis Garment Worker, October 16, 1939, Box 1, Folder 5, ILGWU.

“To Give ‘Mississippi Revels’ On Oldtime Showboat,” St. Louis Argus, February 11, 1949, Box 9, Folder 4, ILGWU; “‘St. Louis Blues’ on the Riverfront Again,” n.d., Box 9, Folder 2, ILGWU.