
          Claude Ramsay-A Life for Mississippi workers
          By Riley, SteveSteve Riley
          Vol. 8, No. 2, 1986, pp. 19, 21
          
          When Claude Ramsay retired late last year, the longtime Mississippi
labor chief started shopping for a shotgun. After twenty-six turbulent
years of fighting racism and anti-union sentiment in a state steeped
in conservative traditions, Ramsay said he was ready for the serenity
of the piney woods and the open water.
          "I'm getting ready to do some fishing and hunting," Ramsay told an
interviewer in September.
          Ramsay's hunting season was short-lived, however. He died in his
sleep at his home in west Jackson January 18, barely a month after
stepping down as director of Mississippi's AFL-CIO. While Ramsay, who
was sixty-nine, had talked a good game about relaxing in retirement,
few who knew him believe he would have strayed far from his primary
passion: assisting the less fortunate, particularly through
politics.
          "He was always pulling for the underdog," said Wayne Dowdy of
McComb, Mississippi's Fourth District congressman, whose shocking 1981
election was made possible by Ramsay's endorsement. "He was going to
stay right in the middle of politics. He gave me every assurance he
would be active. That was Claude's way. He wasn't one to sit on the
sidelines."
          Sitting on the sidelines would have been safer during the turbulent
1960s. While Mississippi boiled with racial turmoil, Ramsay took
perhaps the two most risky positions for a white Mississippian still
living in his home state: he tried to build a base of organized labor
and supported-no, campaigned for-equal rights for blacks.
          "He was really in double jeopardy," said Norman Hill, a former
civil-rights worker and now president of the A. Phillip Randolph
Institute. "He showed tremendous courage."
          Herb Mabry, head of the Georgia AFL-CIO, summed up Ramsay's
positions succinctly. "He had guts when it took guts to have guts,"
Mabry said. Ramsay also had something to back up his guts - a double
barreled shotgun he carried on the front seat of his car during his
travels across Mississippi. That gun was stolen after the civil-rights
battles died down, and Ramsay never had it replaced. But he never
regretted arming himself. "In November 1975, I went to a victory party
for (former Governor) Cliff Finch," Ramsay said in September. "A
little sawed-off bastard came up to me and said, 'Claude Ramsay,
you're about the ugliest SOB I've ever seen.' He said he was a former
member of the Ku Klux Klan and that he had an assignment to bump me
off one time. I said, 'I'm glad you never got around to it. It may
have been that you were scared you might get your ass blown off.'
          "I didn't come back from World War II to run from some SOB with a
sheet over his head."
          As Ramsay told that story, he chuckled with a degree of
self-satisfaction. His always raspy voice had grown gruffer, his
prominent nose looked larger and redder than in years past. A bout
with throat cancer had forever extinguished what had been an
ever-present cigar. But as he approached retirement, Ramsay appeared
content--not that he had accomplished everything he had wanted, but
that he had given it his best arm-twisting effort.
          It was never easy for labor and Claude Ramsay. In 1959, when he was
elected to his first term as president of the state organization,
Mississippi labor unions counted 35,000 members. Ramsay's work boosted
membership to 50,000 in 1960; it peaked in 1980 at slightly above
100,000. Membership since then slipped to about 80,000 which Ramsay, a
hard-line Democrat, attributed to anti-labor actions by the Republican
administration of Ronald Reagan.
          Even as the labor ranks swelled during the 1970s, Ramsay's
influence on state government was never overpowering. Though he
influenced a sizeable chunk of votes, his bouts in the Legislature
often ended in disappointment. Mississippi's workers' compensation
laws remain among the nation's weakest, and Ramsay's ultimate goal, a
state Department of Labor, remains a dream.
          But Ramsay is given credit for effective voter-registration drives
in the 60s, which syndicated columnist and veteran political observer
Bill Minor said "helped blacks more than they will ever know." And his
coalition of labor and blacks also was a positive factor in 

the landmark
education reform legislation in 1982.
          Ramsay backed his share of political losers, going it alone in 1972
for George McGovern, a most unpopular politician in the Deep South. He
also campaigned hard in 1964 for Lyndon Johnson, a national winner who
was swamped by Barry Goldwater in Mississippi.
          Ramsay often said his political "high-water mark" came with Dowdy's
election in 1981. In a special election to replace the resigning Jon
Hinson, Dowdy stunned Republican Liles Williams in the GOP-dominated
Fourth District. Dowdy had emerged from a crowded Democratic field
after he endorsed extension of the Voting Rights and Ramsay rallied
the labor troops.
          That victory was heady stuff for the Ocean Springs, Mississippi,
native, who got his first involvement in union organizing in 1939 when
he went to work for International Paper Company in Moss Point,
Mississippi. That job had come about after Ramsay's fiery personality
had helped ease him out of higher education. He briefly attended Gulf
Coast Junior College, where he had a job milking cows.
          "I got into a cuss fight with the guy who was in charge," Ramsay
recalled.
          He then left school and went to work at the paper company, where he
helped organize one of the state's first industrial unions. He served
in Europe in World War II and later returned to his Moss Point job as
a shop steward. In 1950, he was elected president of his union local
and in 1959 he was asked to direct the AFL-CIO.
          It was in the Army that Ramsay met a soldier who would strengthen
his already growing resistance to racial hatred. He said a black
French Moroccan joined his unit and "became a favorite of everybody in
the company. And all of them were Southern boys. I was never taught to
hate black people. But it set me to thinking."
          Those thoughts started to crystallize in the early 1960s, when
Ramsay faced some tough choices. Ramsay said he worked and spoke out
for civil rights because racial tensions were chasing away industry
and because he thought segregation was wrong.
          A speech in 1962 to the Metal Trades Council in his native Jackson
County thrust him into the civil-rights spotlight. In the speech,
Ramsay spoke out against racism, saying violence could prompt the
federal government to take contracts away from Ingalls Shipbuilding, a
major defense contractor. And he came to the defense of a Pascagoula
newspaper editor Ira B. Harkey, Jr., who had written that a group of
local citizens were "goons" after they traveled to Oxford to support
segregation at the University of Mississippi.
          Harkey won a Pulitzer Prize for his civil rights editorials and
later wrote a book, The Smell of Burning Crosses. He
credited Ramsay with turning the tide in Jackson County. "It was a
helluva gutsy thing to do," Harkey said. "Without him, God knows what
would have happened."
          At the time of his retirement, Ramsay took the title president
emeritus and turned over his authority to Thomas Knight, who had
served under Ramsay as secretary-treasurer since 1960, and Neal
Fowler, took Knight's old job. Fowler said Ramsay wanted to stay
involved.
          "Just the other day he and I were sitting and talking about plans,"
Fowler said. "I think it really struck him that day. He realized he
was going to retire. I can remember seeing tears in his eyes. It's a
shame that he didn't get to enjoy his retirement."
          Others said Ramsay just wasn't the type to sit around. "The kind of
life he lived made up for not getting a long retirement," said Robert
Walker of Vicksburg, a Warren County supervisor and former field
secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. "He didn't work for that."
          
            Steve Riley is a staff writer for the Jackson (Miss.)
Clarion-Ledger.
          
        