F1: That's a private joke. That's a private joke. (laughter)
LUCILLE THORNBURGH: I wish it was.
JUDITH HELFAND: (inaudible) does the union. (laughter)
F1: (inaudible)
GEORGE STONEY: OK, we want to talk about the --
F1: Yes, are we going --
GEORGE STONEY: No, I'm going to -- just makes sure. Let's see if I can find
my letter because I want you to read the letter and then (inaudible) fit much better in the back.JAMIE STONEY: I want to say something about all the letters we've read, OK?
While you're looking through it, we're sitting here --GEORGE STONEY: Just a moment.
HELFAND: (inaudible)
F1: Should be the (inaudible) to last one. No it's not. (overlapping
dialogue; inaudible)M1: These letters we're reading are so heart-felt and emotional. I mean, you
know, we're sitting here -- I'm sitting here and listening to them and 00:01:00they're basically tearing me up. I mean, emotionally listening to them and if these letters have this much pain and feeling coming off of them -- this is what, 50, 60 years ago, I mean, and we're feeling them now. Imagine how these people felt writing these letters. I mean, it's just -- to me it is amazing that they're so emotional and still have such an emotional impact this -- this many years.GEORGE STONEY: I just hope that some of these letters are reproduced in high
school textbooks in Southern history. For example, this is a Xerox of the actual original letter that you're going to be reading. You want to read the letter?F1: Yes. January 5, 1934 from Greensboro, Georgia. This is to the Honorable
Hugh S. Johnson. "Dear sir, on Tuesday, January 2nd, Seven men were fired from the Mary [Leah?] cotton mill in this city. On Friday morning, January 5th, 00:02:00seven more were fired making a total of 14. These men had been working at the factory from two to 14 years and were fired without any reason. The factory recently put in new machinery, which of course reduced the number of men. For this number 14 colored were working inside; twelve operated machines and two cleaned. We feel that this was unfair as whites were taken from other jobs and put on colored jobs. We will appreciate it if you would send in (inaudible) authorities to investigate. Respectably, 14 colored men." The first point I'd like to make about this letter is -- it's dated 1934 and the 14 men who were fired had been working in the plant from two to 14 years, which would mean if a person had been there 14 years it would have had to have been 1920 and I mention that because most of what I've learned from, um, blacks being involved 00:03:00in the textile trades was that it was primarily after World War II that, um, that, um, we know blacks came into the plant as well as women, and, um, the other point is, um, 12 operated machines and two cleaned and so far I've mostly heard that blacks really did the menial jobs, not to say that operating machines was not menial, but at least it wasn't, you know, sanitation, it wasn't sweeping or scrubbing floors or -- or anything like that. And I think it's important in like an original question that was asked about African American youth and the relevance of to them of -- of -- not seeing any black faces in the news during the 1934 strike, and I think that this is the only letter that I know of that exists that really dates black men working in the 00:04:00plant in 1920, and I think that's very important. And just like, you know, African American history that did not start in middle passages, it did not start in slavery, it predates all of that. Working class history did not start or working people's history did not start after the Regan-Bush era. I mean, the position that working class people are in now because of Reaganomics and because of the whole, you know, Republican or administration, it goes back to 1934 and I think that's very important, um, um, to point out that it just didn't start because of Reaganomics. I mean, sure, we're in dire straits because, you know, of all of the policies in the last, you know, Republican -- last two Republican administrations. But, you know, our history goes further beyond that and it's important to uplift that and to highlight that. 00:05:00GEORGE STONEY: I'd like to suggest that there's a place for at least a
pamphlet about just the blacks participation in the mills. For these reasons the number six -- Cannon Number Six Mill -- was originally a mill that was started by a black man --F1: [Krogman?], yeah.
GEORGE STONEY: -- in the 1890s. I went into your library. The book about it
isn't there. I finally got it -- I finally got it from a rare book dealer in [Charlotte?] --F1: Judy showed me that book last night and I was truly fascinated to see the
pictures of in Concord, I mean, Cabarrus County, Kannapolis and Concord is in the same county where I worked and just to -- I mean, I never knew that book existed and you're right, it's not in the library, it's not in the visitor center for the Cannon Museum -- why?GEORGE STONEY: And did you know that in Greensboro there was a mill that was run
00:06:00almost entirely by blacks and -- no, I'm sorry, in Durham, North Carolina there was -- almost entirely run by blacks and there was also one at -- in Alabama in Kilby prison where the prisoners were making their own uniforms and they were operating, so what does that say about the blacks being assigned jobs only jobs that they had the skill to do.JOE JACOBS: (inaudible) were the exceptions to the rule.
GEORGE STONEY: Of course there were exceptions to the rule, but this shows a possibility.
F1: But there were exceptions in this.
F2: And its really fascinating to me that the 14 African American men wrote the
letter, having the courage to write that letter -- all of the oppression that they were going through already and then they had the letter to write this letter, you know, and to, you know, let our young African American people see that they weren't that -- even if they were in the union or not, they were a part of it and they did it. 00:07:00GEORGE STONEY: What do you think the unions should be doing, and textile workers
generally, to reclaim their history? Now we have a marvelous tape which Tom made with his grandmother, her telling her experiences of the mill is a fascinating tape. Tom, tell me what that meant to you and her.THOM MALCOM: It meant a lot to both of them and really it was like an education
for me because, you know, we sit down and we just -- you didn't have to -- you know, she just started on her own, you know, she's amazing. And she talked about like how young she was when the truant officer would come by, you know, to make sure there were no children working. They put her in a feather [can?] to cover her up, you know, and when they left they'd take her back out and she'd have to stand on steps to run her spinning frames, you know.M1: How old was she at that time?
MALCOM: About like 14.
M1: Fourteen?
JAMIE STONEY: She admitted to being there as early as nine.
00:08:00GEORGE STONEY: But it's this business of reclaiming that. Do you think that
once this tape is out, once this program is out, that there's going to be any kind of interest among your members in reclaiming their own history?F1: I can assure you that it will be. It will be a very helpful [tool?] -- very
helpful tool -- for me, especially in my organizing because like you said, we can reclaim a part of history that's hidden in Kannapolis.F3: My opinion is that there was no defeat in the general textile strike of
1934. It was a great victory and the defeat in that is that we have -- we lost that history for 60 years.GEORGE STONEY: That's true.
F3: The -- I had this great mother who worked in the mill for 25 years and she
was courageous and fought in trying to get support with her fellow workers to do 00:09:00something about the issues in the mill, but for all my life I've been thinking why are mill workers a subjugated class of people? Why are we different from everybody else? And we are not different from everybody else. There were hundreds of thousands of women and men like you who did what, you know, we had to fight, we had to struggle, we're as strong as other people are, but nobody -- we lost that history.M2: Nobody acknowledges that.
F3: Being able to feel that again, I feel like a whole person for the first
time. (inaudible) and proud of a heritage that just has been lost and I didn't know it existed.F4: Yeah, on the educational panel, I believe, they had a -- they were showing a
school up north or somewhere that the teachers were teaching the black children the black heritage and this is along the same line actually. If we can't find some way to interject our experiences into the history books, which is what 00:10:00we'll have to do, we'll have to become an integral part of what a child is taught in school and it is -- I don't know if there's legislation, you'll have to tell us that, is there anything? You know, what do we have to do? People are doing it all the time as far as a teacher is teaching a person, a child their beliefs because they are in fact a human being. You know, is there something under in the school -- I know the school system has to approve all the books that are there -- all the textbooks, but of the variety have we ever as a union said, look, here's the books available -- not just on the union-ism but on people-ism.JACOBS: Let me talk about two things. I've kept quiet for a long time.
F1: Five minutes. (laughter)
JACOBS: That's about the length of time I can keep quiet. (laughter) You
know why I kept quiet? I was listening to your reactions and I wanted to see 00:11:00how much further we would go about how we handled the '34 strike when it came to a end? Let me tell you how we handled it. I don't know how many meetings we had with local unions all over the South where it was like a wake. We had been promised that we'd get our jobs back. We'd been promised that there would be no discrimination and that we would have the right to bargain. The 00:12:00[later?] of it, you heard of this person who said, Francis Gorman, where are you at? We're here by ourselves. We got them from everywhere. All those hundreds of locals that we had. Some of us went to them -- most of them -- not all of them. And we tried to say this, the strike's not lost. For 20-some days we stood tall almost in these words. We didn't bow down to the boss. We 00:13:00didn't lose, we believed in Roosevelt. He was double-crossed, we didn't say tricked, double crossed. Those people who owned the mills didn't keep their word. We kept ours. We stood taller than they did. And if anything we showed, and again these are almost the words, that we were men and women. And I can remember and, I don't know, Alabama or just outside of Atlanta was one of the two where when we got through talking this man said, "You know, it's hard to 00:14:00stand tall when your belly's empty." As we went down the line and there was the pressure to get the National Labor Relations Act, we used that. We said at least we're going to accomplish that. We're going to make it into the law where the boss when he makes a promise has got to keep the promise. Where the boss has to live by the law. That's why we were so disappointed with the National Labor Relations Act. When it first got started it was good. Now it isn't worth anything. It deprives people there rights. Place after place, though. When we tried to cover them and we were there getting these affidavits and we were getting the paper signed and everything else, we knew we had been 00:15:00licked. We knew. Deep down most of us had the hope that it would result in the next try, in the next time they would win. Took a long time, took a long time. That's the way we treated it then. That's the way we handled it then and you can't kid yourself about it. You can't kid yourself about it. Like I said, it was like a wake and it used to tear us all up. Now, what do we do? People won't read books. We've got places where we have put books in libraries and said this is about the labor people. We've got places where we have tried to have as part of history say something about the labor movement or 00:16:00things of that kind. We're not strong enough to enforce that. People will not let us do it. People in education -- well, to begin with so many of the teachers have felt that they were a profession. It's only within recent time that they have started belonging to the American Federation of Teachers or within recent times that they've belonged to the American Association of University Women and Men and Professors and that sort of thing. The only way you can do it is, again, by being missionaries. Word of mouth is as good as anything I know. A lot of the songs that they sing in the country songs -- how'd they get 'em? Word of mouth. Union songs -- how did they do it? They didn't write 'em out. Somebody sang them. Joe Hill sang them or the Wobblies sang 'em or somebody sang 'em. They found somebody to play a guitar as I say and he's the one that did it and they passed it on. That's 00:17:00the way you do it. But again, you have to take what the change of the time will do. The change of the time is that you cannot do anything -- I don't care how much you put in books, I don't care how many times you show a film, and films are good. I think the visual arts are fantastic. They do lots more [special than now?] where we're so dependent on the television. But it's increasingly important that it be repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated. When you do that you can change it. You can change the world. And the way the world was changed, it was changed by revolutions and I have said that '34 was a revolution. It was a revolution. It was not a revolution that was won but it was a revolution that inspired the national labor relations back, 00:18:00it inspired the organization of the industrial workers in the '40s. It inspired the creation of the CIO. It inspired the creation of an atmosphere where people were no longer afraid of education. It inspired the creation in my mind, in some extent the Civil Rights movement because in AF of L and the AFL/CIO both we never took a position that was contrary to it. We never took a position except that all people were born equal and they had the right of equal opportunity. And despite that we had people who belonged in our ranks who didn't feel that way about it. But it's incessant work. Part of what we're doing here now is part of that job that has to be done. You were talking about techniques. You still have to knock on doors to get people to sign cards. If they don't sign cards they won't join unions. If they 00:19:00won't unions we can't bring about what it is to make this a better world to live in. Now I will quit. (laughter)THORNBURGH: Now, George, we were talking about the history of the labor movement
and how it needs to be [original?]. I think it needs to go way, way back from 1934 though really to have the whole history. I have a friend in Knoxville. Oh, I guess he's 50 or 60 years old or something like that.JACOBS: Young fellow.
THORNBURGH: Yeah, young fellow. But his grandmother worked in the union -- I
mean, I'm sorry, worked in the mills before we had child labor laws and she told him some stories that would just almost be unbelievable. She told him that they had these children working in the mills, and of course working those long hours they would get tired and they would shoot them in the legs with a little pellet guns to keep them awake.JACOBS: BB.
00:20:00THORNBURGH: A BB -- BB -- shoot them in the legs to keep them awake. Now, his
grandmother told him those stories and also I've heard that again. And, you know, the AF of L took a lot of credit for it. I don't know whether it was the AF of L or the old Knights of Labor, but they were very instrumental if not responsible for the child labor laws we have. And he told me some terrible stories about that -- about the children and in some magazine I saw a picture of a little girl about nine -- nine years old working in a spinning frame.M1: Nine years old on a spinning frame.
JACOBS: Yeah, they started that in England, of course, where the children were
the ones that they used in the cotton mills and then brought it of course over here. But we had the same thing here. We had kids that were only 12 years old that worked in the mine. First time I went down in one I was 12 years old. We didn't -- they didn't have us digging coal, but they had us carrying water 00:21:00to the men that were there. They had us carrying carbide to the men to put in their lamps that they ran out of it. They had us doing a lot of the odds and ends and the crummy work and that got us used to going down into the mines. And we -- they didn't think anything of it. You got that age and you were supposed to go to work. And textile mill's the same thing. They expected you, when you grew old enough, whether you finished high school or whether you didn't finish school, to go to work in the mills sooner or later.THORNBURGH: And there is that [in the mills?], too. I have heard that and I'm
sure all of you have, too, that the conditions that you have in the mills now, like your holiday, sick leave, air conditioning, and things like that that we didn't have, I have heard people say, "Oh, well, changing times have brought that on anyway." It would not have, like it did not bring on doing away with that child labor until there was furor raised over it. So it would not have 00:22:00happened. It didn't just happen.GEORGE STONEY: Now, we have interviewed a lot of people who have described what
it was like to be 10,11, up to 14 years old working in the mills and surprisingly to me many of those were very proud of what they did because they were people of importance and they were contributing to the support of their families. And it says something to me now about the need for people to feel important. I certainly don't want to condone child labor and I have to think about all of the things that these people were denied. That is they were denied an education, they were denied what we know as childhood. At the same time, 00:23:00they had something that was positive that even sticks with them today. I wonder if there's something -- something we can wrestle with there in terms of people feeling that they have -- the children feeling they have something to contribute. I found almost universally that those people are very proud of that legacy.M1: Having started in the mill at a young age.
JACOBS: Well, they had to support a family the same way as the wives going to
work now. They're proud of the fact that they go to work. They don't stop and think that it takes two now to make a living where before it used to take one and then in those days, why the whole family worked in the mill because it took the little one and the bigger one and the bigger one and the bigger one and the wife and the husband and all of them to work in order to make a -- not a decent living but a half way decent living. They were proud. That meant that they had growed up. That was it -- they growed up. They already went to work 00:24:00in the mill. The fact that they'd be dying in the mill didn't mean anything to them because it meant the rest of their lives they'd be spending in the mill. They didn't have a chance to get an education. They didn't have a chance to grow or to do what they were capable of doing.GEORGE STONEY: Tom?
MALCOM: I was pretty much going to say what he said, that it was hard times and
they really -- they needed to work but a lot of it had to do -- could have been tradition because every generation -- it's what they thought they were supposed to do. They thought that's the way it was supposed to be. They felt proud to follow in their parents' footsteps.THORNBURGH: Something, too, that I think we should give consideration to are
those blacklisted, but that's going back to the 1934 textile strike. You just hear people say, "Oh, she's a blacklisted textile worker," or something. That was really pathetic. When you were blacklisted like I was, and like 116 or 00:25:00117 others were, where were we going to work? There wasn't a mill, a store, there was no place in Knoxville that would hire me if there hadn't been a TVA there, which of course was a federal project and I finally got a job there as a file clerk. But I think about all those other people. It decimated our neighborhood. They had to go other places. It broke up families. They had to go where they could. I know some of them even changed their name, you know, because that blacklist, like somebody said here that they would check on them in other mills? That they'd have to change their name.JACOBS: They didn't [file?] social security numbers as well.
THORNBURGH: No, they didn't. No, they didn't. We didn't have social
security until 1936 and they -- it was really pathetic [something?] where the man would have to leave, his wife and children would have to move in with somebody, and so being blacklisted was not a fun thing.M3: At this point in the [legacy?], too, I think that we have not -- I have not
00:26:00appreciated until now -- because I mean, in looking at these kind of figures -- I mean, some people are saying 10,000 people may have been forced out that way and that's a lot of activists to be exiled from a community and if your most active leaders are forced out, what does that mean for the next generation or the next organizing drive?THORNBURGH: It disrupts your community. It certainly does.
JACOBS: And a lot of them went to Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, to all the big
industrial areas --THORNBURGH: That's where they went.
JACOBS: -- where they could get lost and where they could go to work where the
atmosphere was different than what it had been. They didn't go to the northeast as much. That's where they went -- to Middle America. They went to those places where they knew industries were coming along and growing and things were better and a lot of them forgot some of the things down here and then some of them afterwards came on back again.THORNBURGH: Detroit was a favorite place. (overlapping dialogue; inaudible)
00:27:00JACOBS: It was a real haven and that's why I used to say that they had Ku Klux Klan
real opportunity in Detroit because half of the Klan [migrated?] up there. (laughter)M3: I prefer to think that Southern workers were [may have been?] very involved
in UAW organizing jobs.JACOBS: A few, a few. But we have to organize them back down here where we had
the plants down here.M4: And you know a lot of people like myself went around and just in my family I
found out about it [I mean?] the '34 strike, but a lot of people think today the laws are protecting workers today like the National Labor Relations Board or workmen's compensation or unemployment that this was just given to them back then by [good?] government. You know, everything was just handed to them because it was handed to me because I didn't have to fight for any of it. Everything was all set up there. Just like are union, sometimes we don't appreciate our union because we file a grievance and we can't get this one grievance took care of because even though it might not be right, we might have been done wrong, but we don't appreciate because, you know, we got an 00:28:00organization where we can fight. If something comes up, we've got our organization there and we can go and we can fight with our organization.JACOBS: Someone to talk to.
M4: That's right. I mean, even though they don't answer every one of our
concerns, but nothing in this world that I know of answers every concern that we've got. And I wish we could pay just dues and get all our job related problems settled but you can't. But a lot of people think that workmen's compensation, unemployment, everything, social security, was all just handed to them on a silver platter. It was just the government did it. Working people had nothing to do with it whatsoever and they could get it. If you get something given to you, you don't appreciate it as much until you lose it. I mean, if you really work for it like y'all had to do and then when you see it coming you appreciate it more.GEORGE STONEY: It's interesting that we have talked with so many workers from
the '30s. Almost of them are living on their social security. They would have almost nothing than -- didn't get a pension from the mill, almost nothing else except that social security. You ask them about it, they said, "Oh, 00:29:00Roosevelt gave it to me." And they don't seem to realize that it was the unions in the teens and '20s were fighting for that, getting the country ready so that finally when Roosevelt got it and the political climate was right, it could go into effect. But it took hundreds of thousands of people building up to that. And this is a kind of reinterpretation of history which has fascinated me ever since I've started on this project and that's why I'm so anxious to get people from the unions to kind of reclaim their own history because it will affect this idea that only a few important people give us -- we create our history. That isn't the way it happens, but that's what we think. 00:30:00JACOBS: Not only that, but when you start talking about that and you say
pensions --