It’s About Time: Race, Class, Gender, and the 1960’s Ethos that Facilitated Unionization in the Textile Mills of Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina

For more than four decades textile mill workers in Roanoke Rapids struggled, both with themselves and mill management, over the question of unionization. The most popular legacy of those struggles may be the 1979 movie Norma Rae. In the fictionalized account of the 1973 drive against the J.P. Stevens Company, Sally Field portrayed Crystal Lee Sutton, a young mill worker who was fired for her union activism. While a popular and well regarded movie, it missed a number of key elements in the struggle. First, while Sutton did indeed raise her handwritten “UNION” sign over her head before being dragged off to jail, she did not act alone; countless other mill workers and activists joined her in the campaign. Second, although the union “succeeded,” it took more than six years after winning the right to represent the workers before Stevens finally began to negotiate in good faith; and that concession came only after the union organized a nationwide boycott. Finally, and most importantly for our talk tonight, the 1973 campaign was the culmination of decades of previous organizing efforts. Workers and union activists fought for years before they were finally able to breach the walls of the Stevens mills. The obvious question, therefore, is why? Why, after decades of struggle, were textile mill workers in Roanoke Rapids finally able to organize? It is my contention that part of what facilitated this struggle was its timing. This was, after all, the era of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. It was the era of Hippies and anti-war protests. It was the era of Lyndon Johnson and Richard

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Nixon. It was, in other words, the sixties. While Roanoke Rapids may not have been San Francisco, the era’s ethos undoubtedly penetrated the city and, as we shall see, facilitated the unionization effort by altering public perceptions about, and the personal mores around, race, class, and gender. Without the efforts of strong willed and determined individuals the campaign surely would have failed, but in each of the previous, and unsuccessful, unionization efforts strong willed and determined people had tried to unionize the mills. The timing, it seems, was wrong. The effort that gave us the Norma Rae story, however, succeeded in part because of when it happened. It began amidst the social, political, cultural, and economic turmoil of the sixties; a turmoil that empowered African Americans, women, and the working class to organize and fight for their rights. The time, in other words, was finally right. To appreciate the importance of these multiple factors on the unionization efforts, we need to begin our study at the beginning. In 1895 New York industrialist John Armstrong Chanler and former Confederate Army Major Thomas Leyburn Emry worked together to build a power plant and textile mill.1 Attached to both were villages that included homes, individual farm plots, recreation centers, stores, police forces, and power stations, all for the benefit of the workers. In 1897 the villages were incorporated as Roanoke Rapids, and the city as we know it was born. Although the work in the textile mill was hard, workers flooded in and additional mills followed soon thereafter. To many, the pay and familial setting seemed preferable compared to the hard scrabble existence of farm life. As the years went by, however, even the pay and setting could not hide the misery of the mill workers’ existence. Long 1

Emry served in the 6th Regiment of the South Carolina Volunteers and fought at First Manassas, and then served in the 12th North Carolina Regiment. After the war he settled in Weldon and served in the North Carolina State Senate

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hours, low wages, dangerous working conditions, and the vagaries of the textile market meant life was hard. In many cases every member of the family worked, including children as young as ten, simply to make ends meet. Not just in Roanoke Rapids, but nationwide this suffering bread unease, and in 1934 that suffering exploded with the infamous General Textile Strike. 400,000 textile workers up and down the east coast walked out, including 65,000 in North Carolina alone. Workers in Roanoke Rapids joined the strike, stalked the picket lines, and shut down the mills for three months.2 According to one eyewitness and participant, tensions ran high and the 1934 strike “was the closest thing to a revolution I have ever seen.”3 The strike effort failed, however, in part due to its violent and revolutionary nature which scared participants and spectators alike. But it also failed due to the general intransigence of the mill owners and their political allies, the fact that the strike happened during the Depression, as well as the era’s racial and gender divisions that precluded working class unity. In other words, the time was not yet right. The Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) led that 1934 strike and suffered from its collapse. The union managed to survive, however, and returned to Roanoke Rapids in 1948 when organizers sought to unionize the city’s River Textile Mill. Despite continued racial and ethnic divides, as well as a fierce anti-union campaign by mill management, opposition by local officials, and the fact that the newly passed Taft Hartley Act severely limited the rights of unions, workers voted in favor of representation. Although the vote was narrow, the TWUA had a foothold in the Roanoke Rapids textile mills. That foothold was tenuous at best, however, as management refused to negotiate 2

The Cotton Mills Back Home, 57. Janet Irons, Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 200), 3. 3

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and instead spread rumors and fear mongered in an effort to perpetuate the racial and gender divides. White workers were told that they would have to work beside blacks or would be replaced by blacks on the mill floor, while men were told that if demands for female pay equity were met the company would be forced to cut wages. Union organizer Lewis Conn determined to fight these lies, which is what they were, and called for a full fledged assault on the mill and a firm rebuttal of management’s tall tales. National organizers turned a deaf ear on his pleas, however, with the result that by April 1949 workers bought into the propaganda, turned on the organizers, and voted to decertify the union. In the aftermath, without union protection, mill management fired virtually all known union members and supporters.4 Many workers blamed the union for the failed effort, and their firings, and became decidedly anti-union. Indeed, it would be a decade before organizers even considered returning to the city, and fifteen before workers in any real number even considered joining a union. That slow return to union activism began in 1956 when the Simmons Company, which had run the New Mill Textile complex in Roanoke Rapids since 1928, sold out to J.P. Stevens (or Stephenson as the locals would come to call it).5 The change was immediate. Simmons ran the mills, to steal a phrase, “like a family.” Workers continued to live, like their forbearers had, in company owned homes that were supplied with farmland and canning rooms. They also enjoyed company doctors and recreation centers. Again, this is not to diminish the hard work or poverty that most mill workers faced, but the paternalism of the company alleviated some of that suffering. Also, by providing a nearly all encompassing world, the mill village enabled the “lint heads,” as mill workers 4

Mimi Conway, Rise Gonna Rise: Portrait of Southern Textile Workers (New York: Anchor Press, 1979), 186. 5 Ibid., 16.

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often were called, to avoid the public mockery that frequently came with mill work. J.P. Stevens, by contrast, ran the mills as a business. The company sold the homes, subdivided or developed the farm land, closed the canning rooms, shuttered the recreation centers, and halted support for the local hospital and doctors. As historian Mimi Conway writes, the textile workers were suddenly confronted with “the jarring reality of the new, corporate mode.”6 That jarring reality soon led to labor activism, if not union organization. In 1957 loom fixers struck after Stevens forced them to do additional maintenance work without an increase in pay. They won some concessions and returned to the mill. In 1958 doffers (those who replaced empty spools of yarn) walked out because, as one worker said, we are “sick and tired of [the] stretch out, pay cut, personal abuse and demotions.”7 Not only did they walk out, they requested help from the TWUA headquarters in Charlotte. Organizers soon arrived and began yet another attempt to organize Roanoke Rapids. This effort, centered on the Stevens mills, had little hope of success as workers still remembered the 1948 campaign. Indeed, many of those who had lost their jobs in 1948 remained as living reminders of what happened to union supporters. It should be of little surprise, therefore, to learn that when the union held elections, 885 workers voted for union representation while 1,664 voted against.8 Once again the time was just not right. The TWUA was nothing if not persistent, however, and in 1963 it returned. Organizers Virginia Keyser and Jim Pierce worked hard to overcome the historic distrust of unions, to gain the support of union sympathizers, and to use those sympathizers to

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Ibid. Timothy Minchin, Don’t Sleep With Stevens!: The J.P. Stevens Campaign and the Struggle to Organize the South, 1963-1980 (Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida Press, 2005), 18. 8 Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, 192. 7

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spread the union’s message. Workers James Boone, Carolyn Brown, Maurine Hedgepeth, Dorothy Lynch, Robert Mallory, Alice Tanner, Bennett Taylor, and Joseph Williams had supported the union in 1958 and supported it again in 1963. Not only did they support the union, and do so publicly, they won additional workers to the cause and kept track of the company’s efforts to stymie union activism. By 1964, in fact, they had collected so many examples of Stevens’ anti-union tactics that the TWUA sent a formal complaint to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The Board held hearings in Roanoke Rapids in August 1964, and many workers, including Maurine Hedgepeth, testified. Sadly, many more refused to testify for fear of their jobs, and the Board did not find sufficient evidence of wrong doing. Yet, as if to prove the complainant’s point, once the Board left, the company fired most of those who had testified. Maurine Hedgepeth’s husband Julian, or “Doodle,” lost his job, and when Maurine herself tried to return from maternity leave management refused to rehire her.9 Despite such tactics, the TWUA organizers remained and in 1965 held another vote for unionization. That effort also failed, but the NLRB set aside the election declaring that Stevens had tampered with the vote. That was a minor victory. A bigger victory came in 1967 when a U.S. Court of Appeals ordered Stevens to rehire 22 workers, including Maurine Hedgepeth, who had been fired after their 1964 testimony. The court also forced Stevens to pay the workers their back wages.10 With that victory, the union decided it had done enough. Those workers who had lost their jobs as a result of union activism were rehired and compensated; but with the unionization effort clearly going nowhere, in 1968 the

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Ibid., 194 Ibid., 195-96.

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organizers once again abandoned Roanoke Rapids. Apparently the timing still was not right. The union returned one final time in 1973. That year TWUA organizer Eli Zivkovich, among others, arrived and found a willing ally in Crystal Lee Sutton. Sutton, the aforementioned basis for the movie Norma Rae, was fired for her unionization efforts with Zivkovich, but that firing actually laid the foundation for union success. With time on her hands, she took work as a full time union organizer, and with her knowledge of the workers and the mill she was able to do more than even an experienced organizer like Zivkovich could have done. The result was that in 1974, when the workers were once again offered the chance to vote for a union, they did. In a close vote of 1,685 for and 1,448 against, the workers in the J.P. Stevens mills in Roanoke Rapids finally had union representation.11 That, however, was not the end of the story. The company refused to negotiate and ignored several court orders to do so, hoping to draw out the struggle and bankrupt the union rather than accede to its demands. And the demands were not all that great. The union wanted a dues check off and a grievance procedure. The company refused even those modest requests, and a standoff ensued with the company continually threatening to leave the city should it be forced to concede. Even in late 1974 when the federal government discovered that Stevens had failed to pay taxes on $75 million worth of taxable inventory, the company refused to change. Even in 1976, when the NLRB found Stevens guilty of 111 cases of illegal activity, declared it “the most recidivist in the field of labor law” violators, and ordered it to pay $3 million in compensation to

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Joey Ann Frank, “’I Was Doing Something I Didn’t Even Think I Could Do’”: Crystal Lee Sutton and the Campaign to Unionize J.P. Stevens” Master’s Thesis, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2010, 44.

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wrongfully terminated workers, it refused to change.12 Even in 1977 when federal judge Bernard Reis declared that Stevens “approached these negotiations with all the tractability and open mindedness of Sherman at the outskirts of Atlanta,” and found it guilty of “corporately designed lawlessness,” it refused to change.13 Such intransience finally led the union, now called ACTWU (Act Two - the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union), to organize a nationwide boycott of Stevens products beginning in 1977. Called “Don’t Sleep with Stevens” (since the company made blankets and sheets) the object was to hit the company in the pocketbook. The campaign worked, albeit slowly. The boycott created bad publicity for the company, but that did not always result it a change in consumer purchasing. Indeed, the company reported increased profits each year during the boycott, although its stock price fell. One reason it was able to survive so well was that many of its products were not labeled as Stevens products, but rather bore the label of the company selling it. Also, many American companies refused to abide by the boycott, and said it was up to the customer, not the store, to decide what to buy. In the end, the bad publicity and the declining stock price convinced management to concede. In 1980, in return for an end to the boycott, the company recognized the union, began to negotiate in good faith, and granted workers a dues check off, grievance procedures, and a 19% pay increase to $5.10 an hour, which was 11 cents higher than the average textile wage.14 That ends the story, but not our understanding of it. As noted at the outset, the fearlessness, dedication, and hard work of mill workers like Crystal Lee Sutton, Maurine 12

Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, 24; Timothy Minchin, “Organizing a Labor Law Violator: The J.P. Stevens Campaign and the Struggle to Unionize the US South, 1963-1980” International Review of Social History (2005), 50: 27. 13 Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, 11. 14 Fink, “I Was Doing,” 45, 52.; Minchin, “Organizing a Labor Law Violator,” 48.

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Hedgepeth, James Boone, and Joseph Williams was fundamental to the union’s success. My contention, however, is that those very brave souls also benefitted from good timing. Societal mores had changed since 1934 and the first efforts towards labor activism. But even between 1968 and 1973 those mores had changed. That evolution, I believe, is what complemented labor’s diligence and facilitated the union’s success.15 One of the first changes of note was the rise of second wave feminism. Beginning with the likes of Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal study Second Sex and continuing on through Betty Freidan’s Feminine Mystique and Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine, women began asserting their rights to equal pay and job access in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the very year Freidan published her work Virginia Keyser appeared as an organizer in Roanoke Rapids. Just a year after the first Ms. Magazine appeared Crystal Lee Sutton became a union activist. Without putting too fine a point on it, women played a key role in the textile industry, making up some forty percent of the workers in the Stevens mills, and getting them into the union movement, especially into positions of leadership, was fundamental to organizational success. Women had long supported the idea of unionization, but feared what the reality of union activism would mean for their families. Indeed, Maurine Hedgepeth openly admitted in later interviews that she sympathized with the union in 1958 but refused to publicly say so out of fear for losing her job. When Virginia Keyser arrived, however, Hedgepeth found a person who not only empathized but understood her plight as a wife, mother, and worker. That empathy and understanding helped convince her to go public with her support for the union in 1963.16

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JP Stevens sold out to Wet Point Pepperell in 1988. Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, 192.

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Equally important, by the late 1960s women believed they had the right to demand all the benefits that a union could provide. Equating union efforts with the fight for equal rights, the National Organization for Women and the Council of Labor United Women openly supported the “Don’t Sleep With Stevens” boycott. Similarly, Crystal Lee Sutton, clearly no shrinking violet, was forthright in her contention that support for the union and demands for better wages and working conditions were her right to make as a woman. Her life was one long example of a woman’s refusal to submit or subordinate herself to men, and her union activism is prime evidence. Whether or not she consciously absorbed the ethos of the feminist movement, she lived it, and that helps explain why she, and the union, finally achieved success. A second change was the continuing civil rights struggle. African Americans had long worked in southern textiles mills, but for most of that time were relegated to the dirtiest and most dangerous, and yet lowest paying, jobs in the mill. The passage of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act changed that, and forced textile employers, and all employers for that matter, to hire workers for every job regardless of race.17 As a result, the number of African Americans working in the Stevens mills increased from approximately 150 in 1960 to 1000 in 1973.18 Equally important, they began to work what were formerly “white jobs,” and they brought to those jobs a new attitude. In the decades since the Brown v. Board decision the struggle for racial equality had been bruising, but also demonstrated the importance of unity and determination.19 The TWUA itself recognized this change, and in a 1972 report noted, “the new black workers have

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Fink, “I Was Doing,” 9. Minchin, “Organizing a Labor Law Violator,” 31, 38 19 Alan Draper, Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 194541968 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1994), 50. 18

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brought with them an awareness of the need for cohesive group activity to protect their interests.”20 African American workers also recognized this fact. Vonnie Hines, who worked for years in the Stevens mills, noted, “the black workers seemed to understand more that sticking together meant something, that they could accomplish something by doing that.”21 It should thus be no surprise that the NAACP, CORE, and the SCLC, civil rights organizations all, supported the Stevens boycott.22 Nor should it be a surprise that African Americans were among the first to join the union and proved to be some of it most militant members. The rise of the Black Power Movement in the late 1960s also provided African American workers a template and an alternate path. While Martin Luther King’s civil disobedience got desegregation rolling, the efforts of Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Bobby Seale, and the Black Panthers demonstrated what more vigorous efforts could achieve. Black activists were thus willing to do more than protest, often they were willing to fight for their rights. And that fighting spirit was exactly what the union needed after decades of failure and in the face of an intransigent foe. Black union members provided much of that spirit. As with the women, it is largely irrelevant whether or not African American union members fully appreciated where that spirit came from. The fact is, they were a part of the moment. In other words, they appeared at the right time. The success of African American organizing did present a problem, however. Many whites shied away from the union as a result of this black presence. And that too should be no surprise. In 1964 the schools, pools, recreation areas, and public restrooms 20

Minchin, “Organizing a Labor Law Violator,” 37-38. Ibid., 40 22 Ibid., 28. 21

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in Roanoke Rapids still had not desegregated.23 By 1973 desegregation had begun, but many of the racial antipathies remained. While years of interaction with African Americans at work and in the public sector helped break down some of these biases, the racial divide remained. What is noteworthy is that among those who proved most willing to cross that divide and break down ever more of those barriers were women. A shared sense of oppression, it seems, helped these two groups overcome traditional prejudices and unite for the larger good. That shared sense of oppression, and the unity it created, leads us to the third and final component element of the era: class. The working class was re-energized in the 1960s. Whether it was the well paid, and unionized, United Auto Workers Union in Detroit or the poorly organized and low paid textile workers in Roanoke Rapids, labor nationwide was making gains throughout the era. In fact, although J.P. Stevens refused to recognize the TWUA and fired activists throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, it did slowly improve wages and working conditions for those who remained on the floor. Too be fair, there was plenty of room for improvement. In 1969 the national average wage for factory workers was $3.02 per hour; in the Stevens mills the wage was less than $2.00 per hour, with non-production workers earning as little as $1.25.24 What is more important than the numbers is the simple fact that this was an era of labor success, and the workers in Roanoke Rapids were part of, and benefitted from, that success. This also was a great age of blue collar union activism, most prominently seem in the efforts of Caesar Chavez and his famous boycott of California grape growers. The working class, even disorganized groups like migrant workers out west, came to realize

23 24

Fink, “I Was Doing,” 19. Minchin, Don’t Sleep, 21.

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their power, influence, and potential to affect change. That sense of empowerment clearly influenced the workers in Roanoke Rapids, and even union organizers noticed. One leader asserted that the mill workers had “a national U.S. worker self-image,” which made them unwilling to accept “second class pay.” At the same time, he asserted that workers had developed a class-based sensibility similar to that which women and African Americans enjoyed. The result, according to another union leader, was that the textile workers in Roanoke Rapids made demands for “personal recognition and civil liberties in the work place…which would not have occurred to anyone twenty years ago.”25 The larger sense of unionism that pervaded the nation in this era thus clearly inspired the mill workers and facilitated their campaign. There is one final element to this class issue as well, and that is the radicalization of the unions themselves during the 1960s. Most labor historians note that throughout the immediate post-war era labor unions were rather conservative and shied away from mass action. George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, for instance, openly acknowledged his refusal to support strikes or boycotts, in favor of negotiations and management/labor cooperation. As a result of the general unrest and activism of the 1960s, however, labor became more open to pushing the issue and more willing to strike and boycott. The ACTWU [Act Two] efforts clearly demonstrate this changed union worldview. No longer was it willing only to organize and request reforms, simply to then crumble in the face of management intransigence. If the struggle meant fighting back and staging a national boycott, then so be it. It was time to fight, and fight the union did. Taken together, and when combined with the similar changes and sensibilities affecting women and African Americans, as well as the determination and bravery of the individual 25

Ibid., 5.

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workers, the new class climate of the era helped facilitate the union struggle and helps make clear why the union finally found success after decades of failure in the Roanoke Rapids textile mills. The 1960s was the age of protest and dramatic change in the United States. That change may have been most obvious in the music, dress, protests, and the general antiestablishmentarian ethos of the era, but it also comes out in the unionization efforts right here in Roanoke Rapids. With hard work, diligence, bravery, and good timing, mill workers, at least those in the J.P. Stevens mills, achieved something for which their forbearers had fought long and hard. They finally had a union.26

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As a result of continually rising wages, which by 1984 were $7 in the US as compared to $1 in Mexico and 22 cents in China, as well as NAFTA, the mills in the Carolinas began to close down.

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