The shirt-sleeved audience sweltering in the frowzy, faded yellow hall on Atlanta's Ivy Street included labor leaders from Texas oil fields, Alabama steel furnaces, North Carolina textile mills. They had gathered to be knighted for a new crusade. Up rose portly, grizzled Van Bittner, 61-year-old veteran organizer and director of the C.I.O.'s drive to unionize the South, to make the dedication:
"Every well-thinking man and woman will join in this holy crusade. . . . C.I.O. is not going to invade the South. The South is coming to us. . . . The day has gone by when the working men...
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