Mississippi Moments Podcast

When Claude E. Ramsay sat down with us in April of 1981 to discuss his career and tenure as President of the Mississippi AFL – CIO, the three main topics of that series of interviews were: worker’s rights, voting rights, and civil rights. Forty years later, those same three issues are still grabbing headlines across the nation. Whether it is Amazon employees in Alabama trying to unionize, GOP efforts to restrict voting after the 2020 election, the Black Lives Matter movement, or the uptick in violence against Asian, Hispanic, and Jewish communities, the struggle for better working conditions, access to the ballot and freedom from discrimination continues against the same forces using the same tactics and reasoning. 1981 - In 1939, Claude Ramsay went to work for the International Paper Company in Pascagoula. In this episode, he recalls joining the paper-workers union and rising through the ranks to become president. Ramsay was elected President of the Mississippi AFL – CIO in 1959. He discusses working with Me