Miss Lucy's Mission
Mission, Miss Lucy's
Miss Lucy's Mission To Win These Rights, by Lucy Randolph Mason. Harper. 206 pp. $3. Reviewed by David S. Burgess THIS mild looking, soft spoken gentlewoman inherited from her forebears in...
...This is the deeper message which undergirds the seemingly cheery account of many sordid events...
...Workers, particularly in the textile mills, began to organize...
...She marched on the picket line, bandaged up the bleeding heads of the wounded, and spoke words of encouragement to the disheartened...
...She confronted timid preachers with the Biblical demand for spiritual freedom even for the most lowly...
...Unlike the North, where the battle for organization has largely been won, the South is still the battleground between unorganized workers and determined employers...
...For amidst the battle, which is far from won and at times seems far less successful than a few years ago, she has maintained a spiritual serenity...
...In the atmosphere of strikes, Miss Lucy—as she is commonly called— moved and worked...
...She visited wayward sheriffs to remind them of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights...
...Miss Mason tells of past victories and defeats, but she does not dwell upon them...
...She tells rather of the continuing struggle—of three beatings in 1952, of employer terror in 1947, of obvious denials of Negroes' rights only yesterday...
...Miss Lucy tells their individual stories, and in the end the reader will understand why the blood and sweat and persistence of these men were the seeds of a new way of life for all Southerners...
...In these words Eleanor Roosevelt describes Miss Lucy Randolph Mason, daughter of an Episcopalian clergyman, former YWCA secretary, and for the past 15 years a laborer in Southern vineyards in behalf of the CIO...
...Lucy Randolph Mason has not only written a history of the CIO in the South...
...And in the conflagration which began then and continues today, organizers were beaten, striking workers evicted from their company-owned homes, and the forces of the "law" prostituted themselves to the purposes of industrial magnates...
...Then she takes the reader to the South of 1937 where paternalism and low wages stunted spiritual growth and increased subserviency among the workers...
...That year the CIO battle began...
...This fact is made abundantly plain...
...She has also added an interpretation of what this movement has done to enrich the lives and free the spirits of Southern workers...
...Among her close associates were the new leaders of the Southern labor movement—humble men who had come out of the shop and had emerged as guiders of the movement in the times of crisis...
...To Win These Rights is her story of the last decade and a half...
...Reviewed by David S. Burgess THIS mild looking, soft spoken gentlewoman inherited from her forebears in Virginia a fiery fighting spirit and a passion for justice and truth...
...And the result of the modernity of this 70-year-old writer is that the reader has a vicarious feeling of participation—not in ancient battles, but in a struggle of today and tomorrow...
...In simple, lucid style she tells how her religious upbringing and early background laid the basis for her present work in the labor unions of the South...
...Negroes tasted their first freedom...
Vol. 17 • April 1953 • No. 4
