Moisture of the Earth

This title presents a voice from the margins that refuses to be silenced. ""Moisture of the Earth"" recounts the life story of African American activist Mary Robinson. The daughter of Alabama sharecroppers, she worked in the cotton fields as a child, coming of age at the peak of the civil rights movement. When textile manufacturing giant J.P. Stevens was forced to admit African American workers, Robinson began working at their Montgomery plant. In the 1970s, she joined the organizing struggle by the ACTWU (Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union) and became an outspoken activist.Later, when the Stevens plant closed, she became a school bus driver and then a paid organizer for AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees union. Based on twenty-three years of interviews between Mary Robinson and oral historian Fran Leeper Buss, this book reveals the intertwined effects of race, class, and gender on the lives of lower-income women during segregation and after; it sheds light on African American resistance movements in the twentieth century and the roles of religious traditions and storytelling to struggles for social justice; and, it highlights women's important roles in community activism and the labor movement.