Sick for Justice

Three years ago, when I first met Talbert Faircloth and his wife, Dora, I found it very hard to believe the story that they told me. Talbert was sick at the time, and jobless and angry. Two years earlier he had been carried breathless out of the cotton mill on a stretcher, never to return to work again. I found it hard to believe that thousands of workers in the South's largest and oldest industry could have been afflicted by a crippling disease for years and not have known that they had it or even what caused it. In time, I learned that Talbert's story — like that of 35,000 other Southern textile workers — was so wrought with truth and so difficult for the region's most powerful industry to accept, that it had been suppressed and ignored for decades.

A year ago, during a conference at Highlander Center in Tennessee, I first heard Les Falk recount his experiences as medical administrator for the United Mine Workers Health and Retirement Fund. The conference brought together doctors, nurses, organizers and health workers from across the South to discuss topics and articles for this health issue of Southern Exposure and to share common experiences in the health field. Les Falk's recollections of the UMWA Fund's battles with entrenched coal company doctors during the early 1950s gave our gathering of Southern health activists a sense of rootedness in our region's tradition of struggle and innovation in organizing health care.