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ATTALLA — Dafford Brewster of Attalla went to work at the Dwight textile mill in Alabama City when he was 16.

He promptly joined the union there.

Ask him why, and he'll simply say he "believed in organized labor."

Brewster was hired at the Republic Steel plant in Gadsden in 1948. He would work there 37 and a half years. When he first hired on, he was paid 98 and a half cents an hour.

He spent his days in a world of heat and molten metal — iron ore heated to thousands of degrees. He worked among 200-ton ladles, giant cranes, molds, furnaces, hearths, smokestacks and soaking pits. Melted iron was transformed into steel in the giant plant. Railroad cars slid in and out on tracks, smoke poured from the furnaces, heavy machinery moved across the floors and liquid metal, burning a bright blinding white, was molded into pipes, bolts and other implements to be sent all over the world.

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In its heyday, the Republic Steel Mill in Gadsden produced steel 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"It was something to see," said Brewster, stopping to point out a framed picture on the wall at his home of the plant in action. Glowing white-hot metal is suspended in space over a soaking pit. This is where Brewster worked.

In the industrial clamor of the plant, when the mill is "rolling," said Brewster, "it's a very dangerous place. There's no safe place to work in a steel mill."

Thousands of men poured into the factory each day. For decades, it was the biggest employer in the city.

In the mid-1980s, Republic Steel was sold and renamed Gulf States Steel. Brewster retired on the eve of the new ownership coming in.

By the dawn of the 21st century, Gadsden's steel plant was gone.

Brewster will tell you he's not an educated man. He didn't get much formal education, but sit and chat with him for a bit and it becomes clear that Brewster has a deep knowledge of history and politics and all the intricate details one must keep track of when heading up a union local.

He served as president of United Steelworkers Local 2176 in Gadsden when the Local had 4,400 members. He dealt with contracts, grievances, negotiations and union politics.

With a razor-sharp memory at 82, Brewster can tick off names, dates and numbers easily. He's studied the history of his union and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the labor movement in America and Alabama. He's also lived through some of the important moments in that history.

He knows about the union drives of the 1930s, the union's major strikes, and the benefits the union brought to the working class of northeast Alabama.

He can tell you about how anti-union men were known to bring union organizers to Noccalula Falls and threaten to throw them off the precipice during the steelworkers' organizing drives in Gadsden in the 1930s. Organizers were threatened, beaten, and had their offices broken into, he said. "It was awful hard to organize the plant here."

He'll tell you that history is important and that he wishes workers today had more of an understanding of that history.

"Organizers suffered, were beaten," while trying to unionize the plant, and if the company knew you were involved with the union, they fired you, he said.

The union eventually did come to Gadsden and still has a presence there, even though the giant steel plant is gone. Workers at one of the largest employers in Gadsden, Goodyear Tire, belong to the union.

Brewster said organizing eventually succeeded because workers were "treated like chattel," and they wanted to improve their conditions.

He is glad he "came into the labor movement in its glory years."

"Industrial America was pretty much unionized by the time I joined," he said. Those were the days when some of the giants of the American labor movement were in the thick of it, he says — John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Brewster was a member of the steelworkers union when the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merged into the AFL-CIO in 1955. Previously the AFL concentrated on skilled crafts while the CIO organized the industrial workers.

"When they merged, that made us a lot stronger," he said.

The labor movement didn't always keep its promises, particularly in the realm of race, he'll admit. Black workers were routinely discriminated against and kept out of the best job classes, something he flatly declares "was wrong."

He quotes fiercely the steelworkers' union's policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race — something he admits his union failed to live up to.

Brewster said he integrated the job promotion policies of his department in 1963. "I'm proud of that," he said. "It was the right thing to do."

While he was Local president, he tried to get the rest of the union and management to try similar programs plantwide, he said, and was met with stiff resistance. White leadership split over the issue and the management told him he was crazy to try, he said.

In 1974, a federal court order forced the union and the company to fully integrate.

"All hell broke loose," after the order, said Brewster.

With union leadership split over racial issues and the plant under a court order to completely integrate quickly, the court order helped to break the power of the union at the plant, Brewster said.

Solidarity faltered. "Everyone was representing themselves," he said.

Brewster doesn't make excuses for the Steelworkers racial policies back then. It was a betrayal of the union's constitution, he said, and quite simply not fair.

Fairness and justice matters a great deal to this steelworker. A deep social conscience comes across clearly when he talks. It's something he attributes to his father, a coal miner and farmer who instilled in him a populist sentiment and firm commitment to the Democratic party, and to growing up "knowing what it is to be hungry."

Those formative influences helped lead him to the labor movement, a place where working people had a voice and political power, he said.

In the age of the poll tax, that political strength was precious for working-class people, he said.

Brewster has kept the contracts between Republic Steel and the United Steelworkers dating from the first, 1942, to 1986.

He pulls them out and places each one gently on his kitchen table. The contracts, bound into different colored books, start off skinny and as the decades move by get thicker and thicker. "We were getting stronger," he explains as he fans them out.

What is laid out on his kitchen table is a visual representation of the inching progress the union made to better the lives of workers, he said.

First came health insurance, then pensions, higher wages, supplemental unemployment and the eradication of the North-South wage differential.

There were some strikes — he mentions one in 1949 that led to health insurance and one in 1959 that lasted 115 days.

He tells other steelworkers today, "your job was bought with blood. The company didn't give it to you."

But, he laments, the general public in the 21st century doesn't seem to realize this history. "They don't know, they don't care to find out the history. If they did, there'd be more union people," he said.

"Public perception [of unions] is poor. It's worse now than it's ever been," he said.

The public perception suffers because "people don't know what it is to hold an industrial job — the dangers and the work involved," he said. "Industrial jobs have been outsourced. They've gone to Mexico and China."

"It breaks my heart every time I drive by there," he said of the site of Gadsden's steel factory, which closed in 2000. "It's all tore down and gone now.

"My steel plant is in China.

"It breaks your heart."