A Misguided Quest for Legitimacy: The Community Relations Department of the Southern Organizing Committee of the CIO During Operation Dixie, 1946-1953

• Main Author: Sloan, Michael Andrew
• Format: Others
• Published: Digital Archive @ GSU 2006
• Subjects: Religion and Labor Fellowship; Labor; Southern Religion; Militant Truth; David Burgess; Labor unions; Billy Graham; Operation Dixie; Congress of Industrial Organizations; Southern Organizing Committee; John Ramsay; Lucy Randolph Mason; History
• Online Access: http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/history_theses/7; http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=history_theses

This thesis is a study of the Community Relations Department of the Southern Organizing Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations during the CIO’s Southern Organizing Drive, often referred to as “Operation Dixie.” The Community Relations Department was primarily interested in improving relations between organized labor and organized religion, in the hopes that improved church-labor relations would produce a situation more conducive to labor organizing, and reduce attacks on the CIO from religious leaders. This thesis examines the methods utilized by the CRD to achieve this end, and presents an analysis both of their efficacy and of their implementation. Specific programs that are explored are the CRD’s compilation, and publication, of various religiously themed pamphlets, the formation of Religion and Labor Fellowship groups, and the CRD’s relations with various anti-labor newspapers that made use of religious arguments to attack the CIO and Operation Dixie.