On May 19, 2007, at the annual conference of the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) conference held at Duke University, a meeting took place to create a new regional organization, the Southern Labor Studies Association (SLSA).
For many years, scholars at different universities have volunteered to host a biannual meeting of folks interested in Southern labor called the “Southern Labor Studies Conference.” This small but successful conference actually dates back to 1966 and to a group of Southern Historical Association (SHA) members who were getting together yearly at the SHA Conference and decided to form their own organization called the Association of Southern Labor Historians (ASLH). Although the ASLH had largely disbanded by 1972, Merl E. Reed and Gary M. Fink initiated a biennial conference to continue its past efforts. Building on the previous success of the Southern Labor Archives and the Organized Labor Awards, Reed along with Atlanta area labor leaders energized that biennial meeting. The Southern Labor History Conference (Later named Southern Labor Studies Conference) first met in Atlanta in the Spring of 1976 and sponsored sessions from historians, activists and labor leaders alike. It was a place where workers and academics met to exchange scholarship and experiences. Over the years several volumes of edited collections were published from these conferences. The last meeting of this group was in 2004 in Birmingham, Alabama were the program committee discussed a more permanent structure.
By creating the new SLSA the Southern Labor Studies Conference now has needed support as well as a consistent base of operations and an institutional memory. Like the longstanding conference that it brought it into being, the SLSA intends to promote dialogue between academics, activists, students, teachers, trade unionists and any others in the South, the nation, and around the world who share an interest in southern labor history beyond the conference venue.
The Southern Labor Studies Association is pleased to announce that it has affiliations with the following organizations:
The Labor and Working Class History Association
The Southern Historical Association
The Southern Industrialization Project
We at the SLSA encourage you to visit those websites and join those organizations as well!
