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