Lucy Randolph Mason - The South and The CIO

The South and The CIO

During congressional hearings on the FLSA, Mason met Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) President John L. Lewis, who helped arrange a job for her as the CIO's public relations representative for the South. In July 1937, at age 55, Mason moved into the Textile Workers Organizing Committee offices in Atlanta, and became the CIO's "roving ambassador" for the next 16 years.

For Mason, the CIO was "a training ground for citizenship" for Southern workers, a vehicle "to bring democracy to the South" and the means to alleviate the economic and racial injustices experienced by minorities and the poor. Mason traveled alone to small towns where union organizers and their sympathizers had been shot, beaten, threatened and jailed. She cornered hostile sheriffs, judges, newspaper editors, politicians and ministers, explaining workers' rights to organize and bargain under the new federal statutes and promoting an understanding of the need for unions.

She was known by friend and foe as "Miss Lucy." Her social status as a Southern lady and the daughter of an old, respected Virginia family often gained her access to political and community leaders when others were denied. Miss Lucy's success also rested on her blunt speech, her calm yet steely demeanor and her ability to bring civil liberties violations to the attention of federal officials, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Mason convinced Roosevelt to send a special federal investigator to Memphis in 1940, for example, in the wake of physical attacks on the United Rubber Workers' organizers who were trying to create an interracial union.

After 1944, Mason worked with the CIO Political Action Committee in the South, helping to register union members, black and white, and working for the elimination of the poll tax. She also forged lasting links between labor and religious groups. She helped get the Southern Baptist Convention to adopt a resolution in 1938 recognizing "the right of labor to organize and engage in collective bargaining to the end that labor may have a fair and living wage, such as will provide not only the necessities of life, but for recreation, pleasure, and culture."

In the 1940s, she organized interfaith, multi-union and interracial groups in Atlanta and other Southern cities of workers dedicated to building bridges between organized labor and the churches. Eventually, these local groups formed the National Religion and Labor Foundation.

In 1953, due to ill health, Mason retired from active union work. She completed her autobiography, To Win These Rights, in 1952. That same year, she was honored with the Social Justice Award from the National Religion and Labor Foundation. She died in 1959 in Atlanta.