The Long Deep Grudge by Glipin Toni;

Author:Glipin, Toni;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2020-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

21.

Taking the Constant Campaign into the Community

What with tensions running so high inside the Louisville Harvester factory, it might be presumed that during their time off the members of Local 236 would incline toward more relaxing pursuits.

Or perhaps all that shop-floor unrest simply primed them for other contests. Insisting that solidarity had significance that carried beyond plant gates and picket lines, the FE challenged Louisville’s segregationist status quo in public spaces, downtown landmarks, and civic institutions. Sometimes these were official activities sanctioned by the Local 236 leadership; on other occasions they were informal forays launched by a band of especially pugnacious rank-and-file activists. But in both cases the community assaults launched by Louisville’s “stormy petrel” presaged bigger battles that would later reshape the American South.

There is no question that Jim Wright, already disinclined to accept unfair treatment, felt further emboldened by the FE’s civil rights agenda. The 1948 Progressive Party effort, moreover, left him eager to continue the organizing work that he had engaged in around the city. So, in the early 1950s, “each weekend,” Wright said, “we mapped out an area of Louisville to do something in we wasn’t supposed to, was against the law.” The laws they sought to test were those mandating separate, and patently unequal, spheres for Blacks and whites throughout Louisville. The “we” in these instances, as Wright recalled, included a couple dozen African Americans from Local 236 and about seven or eight white members, including Jim Mouser and Charlie Yates. Some white workers, though, joined these excursions not so much because they were up for the fight against segregation, but rather because they were just up for a fight of any sort. One young rank-and-filer named Thomas Pearl “didn’t believe in no Blacks, didn’t want to know what Blacks did.” Nonetheless he frequently accompanied the group because “he liked hanging around to see you break into things, to break down the barriers,” Wright said. And when push came to shove, as it literally did often enough, Pearl mixed it up alongside his union brothers.1

In this era, there was only one city park open to the Black residents of Louisville: modest Chickasaw Park, outfitted with a few picnic tables, located hard against the bank of the Ohio River on the city’s western edge. Whites, however, had dozens of well-equipped, wide-open recreational options. “All the parks for white people—Iroquois, Cherokee, Seneca and Shawnee—were so spacious,” civil rights leader Lyman Johnson wrote in his recollections of Louisville. “Negroes could drive by these parks and see how nice they were. We could even drive through the white parks, but if we got out of our cars, we would be arrested for disorderly conduct.”2

Jim Wright and his compatriots were already experienced practitioners of that sort of behavior. They set their sights on Cherokee Park, originally designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, a bucolic 350-acre expanse enhanced by graceful fountains, a golf course, and stone bridges spanning babbling creeks. But the park’s serenity was shattered when the mixed-race delegation from Local

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