International Teamster, 1946

The Teamsters have a long history of speaking out against injustice, and in 1946 an editorial was written in the International Teamster condemning the Mississippi victory of Theodore Gilmore Bilbo to the U.S. Senate.

In the run-up to the election, Bilbo openly warned that blacks who dared to vote did so at their own risk. As a result, only a handful of the black population went to the polls to choose their representatives. As the editorial stated, through his threats, Bilbo had violated the U.S. Constitution, and the government should have stepped in to rectify the situation. This was because “Federal troops should be sent anywhere that armed supervision is necessary to guarantee the basic rights of citizenship. That’s what the Revolutionary War was about, and the Civil War.”

The editorial also shrewdly pointed out that blacks wouldn’t be the only ones to suffer because of Bilbo’s election win: Poor whites would also experience hardship because, like the blacks, they were denied education to provide a cheap and docile labor supply for the Mississippi aristocracy that owned the mills and plantations.