Previous
Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT)
The United Auto Workers is a large, politically powerful labor union that historically enabled American factory workers to earn solid middle-class wages, but it failed to unionize southern car factories from the 1970s onward.
United Auto Workers (UAW) Quotes in The Sum of Us
The The Sum of Us quotes below are all either spoken by United Auto Workers (UAW) or refer to United Auto Workers (UAW). For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 5
Quotes
At the worker center, I asked Melvin about how unions are perceived where he lives. “The people that we see, as soon as they see UAW, and even if you bring up union, they just think color. They just see color. They think that unions, period—not just UAW—they just think unions, period, are for lazy Black people….And a lot of ’em, even though they want the union, their racism, that hatred is keeping them from joining.”
Johnny agreed with Melvin’s assessment of his fellow white workers. “They get their southern mentality….‘I ain’t votin’ [yes] because the Blacks are votin’ for it. If the Blacks are for it, I’m against it.’ ”
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Sum of Us LitChart as a printable PDF.
United Auto Workers (UAW) Term Timeline in The Sum of Us
The timeline below shows where the term United Auto Workers (UAW) appears in The Sum of Us. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 5: No One Fights Alone
In 2017, a Nissan factory in Mississippi narrowly voted against joining the United Auto Workers union. News articles about the events mentioned racial conflict among workers, so McGhee decided to...
(full context)
...is primarily because white Americans turned sharply against unions in the 1960s, largely because the United Auto Workers openly supported the civil rights movement. Later, white men began shifting from unionized manufacturing jobs...
(full context)
