Organizing the Breathless: Cotton Dust, Southern Politics, and the Brown Lung Association

In the 1970s, textile workers joined forces with a small band of grassroots activists and organizers and challenged the most powerful industrial interest in the heart of Dixie-the cotton textile manufacturers. They located disabled workers and organized them, employing the full range of interest- group tactics, and they creatively engaged in legislative, administrative, and judicial lobbying as well as protest actions-with remarkable success. Robert E. Botsch recounts the history of the Brown L