The Mississippi State Federation of Labor was organized in 1918 and held its annual conventions until 1957, when it became known as the Mississippi AFL-CIO. The Mississippi AFL-CIO held annual meetings until it switched to biennial conventions in 1962.
Claude Ramsay was born in 1916 in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, where he grew up. He graduated from Van Cleave High School, and attended Mississippi Gulf Coast Junior College in Perkington. Ramsay's labor involvement began in 1939 when he helped organize the first local union of paperworkers employed at the International Paper Company in Moss Point, Mississippi. He served in the military during World War II and returned to his old job at International Paper where he was a shop steward. Ramsay was elected president of the Jackson County Central Labor Union in 1950. In 1959 he was elected President of the Mississippi AFL-CIO, a position he held until his retirement on January 1, 1986. Claude Ramsay died on January 17, 1986, leaving behind his wife, Mae Helen, and six children. He is buried in Hillman Cemetary near Leakesville, Mississippi.
The 1960's saw Claude Ramsay active in the struggle to achieve civil rights and voting rights for black citizens, a stand so unpopular that he developed the reputation for carrying a shotgun in his automobile as a precaution against the threats of racists. In addition to facing desertion of white union members hostile to the civil rights movement, Ramsay was active in the Democratic Party and tried to keep white Mississippians loyal to the national party. He worked closely with Aaron Henry, President of the Mississippi NAACP and a leader of the Democratic Party in Mississippi, and was active in the Freedom Democratic Party, the Democratic Conference, and the Voter Registration and Education League.
Ramsay was Vice-President of the AFL-CIO's Southern Labor School, on the board of the AFL-CIO Appalachian Council, a member of the Mississippi Employment Security Council, and a member of the Governor's Constitution Commission.
Thomas Knight was born in Forrest County, Mississippi. His first job was at the Reliance Manufacturing Company in Hattiesburg, where in 1946 he took a leading role in attempting to unionize the plant. In 1948 the plant was successfully organized by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) and Knight was elected the new local's first President. Knight became an organizer for the ACWA but returned to his old job and the local union's presidency after four years in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
After the merger of the AFL-CIO in the middle of the 1950's, Knight was elected Secretary-Treasurer of the new Mississippi AFL-CIO, a position he held until was elected its President in 1986 after the retirement of Claude Ramsay. Among his many activities, Thomas Knight was a long time director of the Committee of Political Education (COPE), Secretary of the Mississippi Consumer Association, and on the advisory Council of the Mississippi Employment Security Commission
The collection consists of the records of the Mississippi AFL-CIO and its predecessor, the Mississippi State Federation of Labor from 1947-1986. The collection includes President Claude Ramsay’s correspondence (1959-1986); files relating to affiliated unions (1957-1983); records relating to the Congress of Industrial Organization and the AFL-CIO (1952-1985); material relating to Ramsay’s interest in and involvement with local, state, and national government agencies (1960-1983); and subject files relating to a myriad of topics from national politics to local unions. The collection also contains a substantial collection of photographs relating to labor union activity.
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[item], [folder title], [series title], Mississippi State AFL-CIO Records, L1986-26, Southern Labor Archives. Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University, Atlanta.
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the Georgia State University Library online catalog (GIL). Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons, or places should search the catalog using these headings.
See Southern Labor Archives Non-Print Collection finding aids for descriptions of photographic material (available in the reading room).
Series 1 spans the time period from Claude E. Ramsay's first Mississippi AFL-CIO presidential election in 1959 to his retirement and death in 1986. The series is arranged in chronological order and contains correspondence, newsclippings, memoranda, telegrams, and printed matter. The bulk of the material relates to Ramsay's involvement with the local, state, regional, and national AFL-CIO organizations, other labor unions, and local and national politicians.
Among Ramsay's correspondents were such labor officials as George Meany, Andrew J. Biemiller, Stanton Smith, Daniel Powell, and Carl McPeak of the AFL-CIO, and E.T. Kehrer and Nick Bonanno of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). Among the many prominent public figures who corresponded with Ramsay were Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie, William F. Winter, Charles Evers, Roy Wilkins, and Coretta Scott King.
Series 1 also includes Ramsay's acceptance letters to speak to many groups or institutions in Mississippi including the Mississippi Heart Association, Mississippi Library Association, the University of Mississippi, Tougaloo College, and Meridian Junior College.
The series concludes with a miscellaneous section of miscellany containing some of Ramsay's speeches, public statements, interviews, legal and medical papers, and biographical news articles.
Series 2 contains correspondence, memoranda, newsclippings, printed matter, grievances, and legal documents concerning unions affiliated with the Mississippi AFL-CIO. The folders are arranged alphabetically by the name of the union, using the "key word" of the union name, e.g. Professional Air Traffic Controllers, uses "Air" as the key word. The material inside the folders is arranged chronologically.
There are seven folders of material about organizing efforts and other activities of the Jackson Police Officers Association (JPOA) in 1973 and 1974, including numerous newsclippings relating to grievances over firings and wages, as well as material describing the relations between the police and city officials and the newly formed JPOA.
Ramsay's involvement with the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) organizing battle for the right to represent city employees in Jackson and a strike of about 750 Jackson city workers in 1970 is documented by a substantial amount of newsclippings, correspondence, and legal documents. Similarly, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is represented by ten folders of material from 1963 to 1983. Altogether, Series 2 contains varying degrees of information on some fourteen or more unions such as the Communications Workers of America, United Brotherhood of Carpenter, and the International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers.
The miscellaneous portion of this series is large and covers the years 1957 to 1978. The bulk of the miscellany consists of memoranda and newsletters from the Mississippi AFL-CIO to the many local unions that were affiliated with it.
Series 3 contains records pertaining to the CIO; the AFL-CIO and its various departments, committees, and trade and industrial councils; the Mississippi State AFL-CIO; and a few other state labor councils. The series begins with the CIO files, 1952-1955, which include correspondence from President Walter Reuther, Vice-Presidents Allan Haywood and John V. Riffe, and Secretary-Treasurer James B. Carey.
The post-merger AFL-CIO material follows, arranged hierarchically beginning with the correspondence of President George Meany and Secretary-Treasurer William Schnitzler, followed by departments such as Civil Rights, Community Services, Education, and Legislation. This sub-series includes the voluminous files of the Committee on Political Education (COPE), which contain a twenty year (1960-1980) run of Mississippi COPE Activity Reports submitted by Mississippi AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Thomas Knight.
The third sub-series begins with records pertaining to local and state trade and industrial councils, such as the Pascagoula Metal Trades Council and the Mississippi Building Trades Council. The Mississippi State AFL-CIO records consist of correspondence of the Executive Board and various committees, financial statements, legislative reports, memoranda, and assorted material related to state AFL-CIO conventions, 1957-1968.
Series 3 continues with a sub-series of files pertaining to the various city and county central labor councils in Mississippi. Series 3 concludes with files pertaining to the state labor councils of Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee.
Series 4 holds correspondence, telegrams, memoranda, newsclippings, news releases, legal documents, and printed items pertaining to Ramsay's interest in and involvement with many local, state, and national governmental agencies, and chronicle his participation in many advisory committees and commissions of these agencies. The series is arranged alphabetically by the name of the agency.
Several advisory committees that Ramsay served on were the U.S. Department of Labor's Southeastern Regional Manpower Advisory Committee, 1973; the Governor's Quality Education Committee, appointed by Gov. Bill Waller, 1974; the Advisory Committee for the Governor's Conference on Libraries, 1978; the State Advisory Committee for the Appalachian Adult Basic Education Project, 1968; the Lay Advisory Committee to the State Superintendent of Education, 1977; the Advisory Committee for the Statewide Planning for Vocational Rehabilitation, 1967; the State Advisory Committee for the Mississippi Employment Security Commission, 1963; and the Private Industry Council in the Jackson Consortium-Comprehensive Employment and Training Act Administration (CETA), 1979. Ramsay also had extensive dealings with the National Labor Relations Board and the Office of Economic Opportunity. This series also includes Ramsay's testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1965. Also included in this series is substantial documentation of Ramsay's efforts in the early 1970's to pass legislation that would establish a state Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
This series of files arranged alphabetically by subject is the largest series in the manuscript collection; it contains correspondence, newsclippings, printed material, news releases, legal documents, and memoranda covering a variety of national, state, and local political and other public figures, events, and organizations. Additionally, a discrete portion of Series 5 dedicated to a collection of newsclippings from many of the towns and cities in Mississippi covering the years 1957 to 1986.
As President of th Mississippi AFL-CIO, Claude Ramsay had extensive contact with political leaders. Examples of such figures in this series are U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy; U.S. Congressmen William Colmer, Charles Griffin, Hubert H. Humphrey, Frank E. Smith, and John Bell Williams; and Mississippi Governors or Lieutenant-Governors Carroll Gartin, Paul Johnson, William Waller, William Winter, and Fielding Wright.
Series 5 contains a substantial number of folders on the National and Mississippi State Democratic Parties, 1956 - 1983, and has some material on the Loyal Democrats of Mississippi, 1963 - 1969, who sought to challenge the seating of the Regular Mississippi Delegation to the Party's National Convention in Chicago in 1968 because they believed that there was inadequate representation of blacks in the State Delegation; and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, 1964 - 1968, a primarily black organization formed in 1964 to work for adequate representation of blacks in the national and Mississippi Democratic Parties; as well as one folder on the Mississippi Republican Party, 1973.
In addition to strictly political interests, Ramsay also created files on events as diverse as bombings in Laurel, Jackson, and Natchez in 1967 - 1968; the Cambodian Crisis, 1979 - 1980; a Mississippi Delta Farm Workers Strike in 1965; the Energy Crisis, 1973 - 1978; and shootings at Jackson State College in 1970.
There is a considerable amount of material on the Mississippi Legislature, 1958 - 1980, documenting regular, special, and extraordinary sessions. Material also exists on the Mississippi Democratic Conference, with Ramsay as co-chairman, which was formed in 1965 to support President Lyndon Johnson because most state Democrats failed to back the national ticket. Claude Ramsay similarly served as secretary in Mississippians Associated for Tax Equity (MATE), 1972 - 1982, a coalition of business, organized labor, and educators formed to make the State Tax Commission comply with the Constitution in equalizing tax assessments throughout the state.
Other organizations represented in Series 5 having Ramsay's membership were the L. Q. C. Lamar Society, 1970 - 1978, the Mississippi Council on Early Childhood Development, 1968 - 1971, and the Mississippi Council on Economic Education, 1967 - 1978. Since Ramsay served on the Board of Directors for Systematic Training and Redevelopment (STAR), 1965 - 1971, a great deal of material exists on this non-profit corporation sponsored by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Natchez-Jackson and funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Office of Manpower, Automation and Training of the Department of Labor.
The sub-series of newsclippings is divided into two sections. The first consists of newsclippings gathered by the Mississippi State AFL-CIO from 1957 to 1986 from local Mississippi newspapers and a few major U.S. cities. The second section is a larger collection of articles created by the Magnolia Clipping Service covering the years 1982 - 1985, clipped from about forty newspapers in Mississippi. Most of the articles deal with civil rights, unemployment, and union activity in the state. Both sections are arranged chronologically.
The following newsclippings were clipped in the offices of the Mississippi State AFL-CIO, and are arranged chronologically.
The following newsclippings are from the Magnolia Clipping
Service, Jackson, Mississippi. These newsclippings include articles on
Note: List compiled at time of processing. Material must be requested separately; consult reference archivist.
Filed under the following headings:
Oversize periodicals: