Huffpo's James Moore: A Kid from Car Country

[Bozita]

James Moore
Posted November 21, 2008 | 04:30 PM (EST)
A Kid from Car Country

At 35,000 feet, northbound up the Mississippi River Valley, the roads below appear as footpaths running beyond the eye's reach. They are paved, of course, but many of them served as migratory trails that carried millions of southerners north of the Mason-Dixon to work in the car factories and steel plants of the Post World War II automotive boom.

The Dixie Diaspora was composed of African-Americans and low income whites leaving the uncertainty of farming for a regular paycheck on assembly lines in factory towns like Flint, Detroit, Saginaw, and countless other Midwest cities now derisively referred to as The Rust Belt. African-Americans, of course, were motivated by both the economic considerations of farm labor and the additional aspiration of less racism.

The car industry made America the planet's economic power and the people who stood the line and bolted on tires and dropped engines onto chassis and snapped on fancy trim are the workers who carried the country on their back. After fighting to save the world from oppression, they took up the fight for fair wages, health care, and retirement pensions and built history's greatest labor movement.

My parents, a sharecropper father from Mississippi and an immigrant mother from Newfoundland, were forced to abandon the land of the South for the line of the North. Daddy came home from the war hoping to farm but sharecropping was a modern form of indentured servitude and indoor plumbing and electricity had great appeal for my Ma. When a boyhood pal rolled into the cotton patch in a new Buick he bought with his wages from a job at Fisher Body in Flint, my parents destinies were altered.

Daddy had about $680 after the last season's cotton had been sold and he bought four bus tickets to Flint after getting a promise that our family could sleep on the floor of a friend's apartment. They arrived on a Saturday and Monday morning Daddy went and stood in a line outside of the Buick Motor Division Plant #36 and his farm boy muscles got him a job doing heavy lifting. He had dreamed of growing long rows of cotton and corn and riding horses and fishing in Mississippi but he was going indoors away from the sun.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/a-kid-from-car-country_b_145602.html