Notes

KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS

CHAPTER I

1. Quotations from Durham Morning Herald, 4, 5, and 23 Sept. 1934.

2. The phrase comes from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, “The Ladies,” in A Choice of Kipling Verse (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962). The phrase, which I remember from a poem encountered in my school days, refers to the kinship “under their skins” of an Irish washerwoman and the “Colonel’s lady” and argues for the sisterhood of women across class and ethnic lines.

3. Like C. Vann Woodward, who first employed the term in his pioneering study, I agree that a “New South” began to emerge in places like Durham, although surrounded by the legacy of the old. See C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951).

4. Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), 9–10.

5. For discussions of the connections between southern racial and class relationships, see Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975); Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of Georgia’s Upper Piedmont, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 143–78; Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Jonathan M. Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860–1885 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restrictions and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); Jay R. Mandle, The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy after the Civil War (Durham: Duke University Press, 1978); Roger W. Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana: A Social History of White Farmers and Laborers during Slavery and After, 1840–1875 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972); and Harold D. Woodman, “Sequel to Slavery: The New History Views the Postbellum South,” Journal of Southern History 43 (1977): 523–54.

6. Whether females are universally subordinated within the family and the private sphere and universally isolated from public power is an issue that I do not wish to discuss; I do not know enough about other societies and there are problems with the available data and with appropriate measurements of female subordination. Those interested in this issue should consult: Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, eds., Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1983); and Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, eds., Nature, Culture and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

7. For a discussion of the ways in which societies undergoing change fear pollution and strive for purity, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). See also Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Sex as Symbol in Victorian Purity: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Jacksonian America,” in Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family, ed. John Demos and Sarane Spence Boocock (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 212–47. Douglas’s discussion of the pollution rituals in the Hindu caste system offers some possible explanations of similar taboos in the southern racial system; see especially 124—27.

8. See the Appendix for a fuller discussion of the oral history and quantitative evidence used in this history.

9. See, for example, Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Daniel J. Walkowitz, Worker City, Company Town: Iron- and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855–84 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978); Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds., Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community and American Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Peter J. Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865–1890 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); and Melton A. McLaurin, The Knights of Labor in the South (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978). With the welcome but rare exceptions of Fink, Rachleff, and McLaurin, recent explorations of working-class communities rarely have ventured outside the Northeast and Midwest and almost never have integrated gender and race in their analysis of class formation. In this respect, the present study diverges from the usual practice in labor historiography.

10. All too often, southern historians have celebrated the family as a harmonious unit buffeted by the malevolent forces of the market, while ignoring conflicts within the family or in the communities of independent producers. By evading the issue of gender, they have also failed to demonstrate that harmony and interdependence were the prevalent values in the remote countryside. For varying perspectives on rural life before and during the emergence of commercial agriculture and industrialization, see Steven Hahn, “Common Right and Commonwealth: The Stock-Law Struggle and the Roots of Southern Populism,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction, ed. Kousser and McPherson, 51–88; Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism; David Alan Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Ronald Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982); Crandall A. Shifflett, Patronage and Poverty in the Tobacco South: Louisa County, Virginia, 1860–1900 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982); and Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, Promiseland: A Century of Life in a Negro Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). All these studies acknowledge racial and class conflicts in rural areas where blacks and whites lived close to one another, but only the exceptional study like Eller’s and Bethel’s deals with patriarchal domination and women’s unequal position inside the independent, property-holding family economy. Harmony and interdependence may accurately describe interactions within the household unit whose head relied on “family labor,” but the case is not proved unless the issue of gender has been addressed.

11. Although Lawrence Goodwyn, the author of one of the most powerful explorations of the Farmers’ Alliance in the South, repeatedly attacks the “received culture” of racial and class domination for hindering farmers from a full realization of their democratic potential, he gives the Farmers’ Alliance organizers too much credit for creating a “movement culture” free of the old “habits of domination” (my phrase). In fact, class and racial conflict prevented the Farmers’ Alliance from incorporating the entire farm population in their movement. See Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Goodwyn’s condemnation of the “received culture” constrasts oddly with Steven Hahn’s emphasis on the “habits of mutuality,” independence, interdependence, and ownership of productive resources that Hahn described as “linked intimately in this rural culture” (Hahn, “Common Right and Commonwealth,” 55). Although the differences may stem from Goodwyn’s attempt to survey the entire South and Hahn’s examination of a few primarily white upcountry Georgia counties, a synthesis of their approaches could well describe the culture of the nonplantation South as combining “habits of domination” and “habits of mutuality.”

12. For a discussion of the neglect of southern women and recent efforts to redress that omission, see Anne Firor Scott, “Historians Construct the Southern Woman,” in Sex, Race, and the Role of Women in the South, ed. Joanne V. Hawks and Sheila L. Skemp (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983), 95–110; and the forthcoming essay by Anne Firor Scott and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall in the revised edition of Writing Southern History, ed. Arthur Link and Rembert Patrick (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, forthcoming). Anne Firor Scott and Jacquelyn Hall are leaders in the effort to place women in southern historiography.

13. Although no scholar has yet developed a fully integrated analysis of the interplay of race, gender, and class in the lives of women (or men), see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Placing Women’s History in History,” New Left Review 133 (May-June 1982); 5–29; Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1981); Lydia Sargent, ed., Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); and the work now underway by Bonnie Thornton Dill, Elizabeth Higginbotham, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, tentatively titled “A Way Out of No Way: The Impact of Racial Oppression on Women of Color in the United States.” Among the growing list of books dealing with the intersection of gender and class in the lives of working women, I would include Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Barbara Melosh, “The Physician’s Hand”: Work Culture and Conflict in American Nursing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Christine Stansell, “The Origins of the Sweatshop: Women and Early Industrialization in New York City,” and Susan Porter Benson, “’The Customers Ain’t God’: The Work Culture of Department-store Saleswomen, 1890–1940,” in Working-Class America, ed. Frisch and Walkowitz, 78–103, 185–211.

14. Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1980), uses the term “redemptive” or “beloved” community. Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race,” writes about the rituals and slogans of white supremacy. I disagree with Fields’s attempt to distinguish between race and class; she argues that “class is a concept that we can locate both at the level of objective reality and at the level of social appearances,” while “race is a concept that we can locate at the level of appearances only” (151). As the rest of this study will demonstrate, race operated as something more than an ideological cover for class in the southern context.

CHAPTER II

1. Frank Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1924), 144–45.

2. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 284–87. Scholars now working to extend our knowledge of agriculture in the post–Civil War South include Harold D. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968); Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeomen Farmers and the Transformation of Georgia’s Upper Piedmont, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Michael Wayne, The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Charles L. Flynn, Jr., White Land, Black Labor: Caste and Class in Late Nineteenth-Century Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); and various other authors discussed in Harold D. Woodman, “Sequel to Slavery: The New History Views the Postbellum South,” Journal of Southern History 43 (no. 4, 1977): 523–44.

3. Cameron support for the NCRR is discussed in Jean B. Anderson, “Fairintosh Plantation and the Camerons,” North Carolina Division of Archives and History, June 1978, p. 63. The general impact on the local area is discussed in Durward T. Stokes, Company Shops: The Town Built by a Railroad (Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair, 1981), 2–7.

4. For a description of the beginnings of the bright tobacco culture, see Joseph Clarke Robert, The Tobacco Kingdom: Plantation, Market and Factory in Virginia and North Carolina, 1800–1860 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), 20–23; Nannie May Tilley, The Bright Tobacco Industry: 1869–1929 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948); J. D. Cameron, A Sketch of the Tobacco Interests in North Carolina (Oxford, N.C.: W. A. Davis, 1881); and Samuel Thomas Emory, “Bright Tobacco in the Agriculture, Industry, and Foreign Trade of North Carolina” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1939).

5. The creation of the crop lien system was a southwide phenomenon, and its impact on the cotton-growing regions is discussed by Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978); Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); and Harold Woodman, King Cotton. For tobacco conditions in a Virginia county, see Crandall A. Shifflett, Patronage and Poverty in the Tobacco South: Louisa County, Virginia, 1860–1900 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982).

6. As discussed in Robert, Tobacco Kingdom, and in Ronald L. Lewis, Coal, Iron and Slaves: Industrial Slavery in Virginia, 1715–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979).

7. North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, First Annual Report for the Year 1887 (Raleigh, 1887), 91, 97, 128.

8. North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fifth Annual Report for the Year 1891 (Raleigh, 1892), 82.

9. See Table 1.

10. North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fifth Annual Report, 33; First Annual Report, 136; Fifth Annual Report, 104, 134.

11. S. H. V. and M. W., Local Assembly 10, 699, to Editor, Journal of United Labor, 24 Dec. 1887; J. H. M., Journal of United Labor, 9 June 1888.

12. This figure was calculated by W. E. B. DuBois for his study of blacks in Farmville, Virginia, and was used for the same purpose by Shifflet, Patronage and Poverty, 43. George A. White, “Agriculture and Agricultural Labor,” testimony in Hearings before the Industrial Commission 10 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1901), 422.

13. This history originally appeared in the Raleigh News and Observer, 25 Sept. 1921, and later in Rupert Vance, Human Factors in Cotton Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1929), 259–66.

14. The authors are discussed by Harold D. Woodman, “Sequel to Slavery,” whose perspective I generally share. For economic historians with whom I disagree, see Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and Stephen J. DeCanio, Agriculture in the Postbellum South: The Economics of Production and Supply (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

15. Quotations are from North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, First Annual Report, 125; North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing, Twenty-first Annual Report (Raleigh, 1908), 51. The discussion about the tendency of black women to withdraw from agricultural labor includes Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom; Noralee Frankel, “Workers, Wives, and Mothers: Black Women in Mississippi, 1860–1870” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1982); and Bell Hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1982).

16. J. A. J., Statistician, Local Assembly 10, 585, Journal of United Labor, 24 Dec. 1887.

17. Vance, Human Factors in Cotton Culture, 259–66.

18. For descriptions of the difficult lives faced by women in tobacco tenant families, see Shifflett, Patronage and Poverty, and Margaret Jarmon Hagood, Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman (1939; reprint, W. W. Norton, 1977). For the contrasting improvements in the lives of women in landowning families, see Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, Promiseland: A Century of Life in a Negro Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981).

19. For discussion of the Knights of Labor, see Melton A. McLaurin, Knights of Labor in the South (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978); Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 149–77; and Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis, eds., The Black Worker during the Era of the Knights of Labor, vol. 3 in The Black Worker: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978). For discussions of the Farmers’ Alliance and Colored Farmers’ Alliance, see Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Robert C. McMath, Jr., Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977); Bruce Palmer, “Man over Money”: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Theodore Saloutos, Farmer Movements in the South, 1865–1933 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960); John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961); and Gerald H. Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Revolt: Ballots and Bigotry in the “New South” (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1977).

20. Journal of United Labor, 11 July 1889. See also McMath, Populist Vanguard, 74; Goodwyn, Democratic Purpose, 47–51, 58–60, 85–86, 88–94, 107–8, 111–22, 125–45, 307–86; and Fink, Workingman’s Democracy, 225.

21. The first quotation is from Tarboro Farmers’ Advocate, 3 June 1891, in Palmer, “Man over Money,” 9, the most thorough and useful analysis of Populist ideology. The second quotation is from the Declaration of Principles of the Knights of Labor, originally quoted from George McNeill, The Labor Movement: The Problem of Today (Boston, 1887), 485, by Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy, 23. For a fuller discussion of the Knights’ analysis, see Fink, 9–15, and the introduction to Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer, “Dreaming of What Might Have Been”: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For comparisons of the Knights’ and the Populists’ visions, see the introduction to Hahn, Southern Populism, and Robert C. McMath, Jr., “The ‘Movement Culture’ of Populism Reconsidered: Cultural Origins of the Farmers’ Alliance in Texas, 1879–1886,” in Southwestern Agriculture: PreColumbian to Modern, ed. Henry C. Dethloff and Irvin M. May, Jr. (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1982). According to Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy, 16, “The ‘cooperative commonwealth’ was one among many variants of the contemporary labor ideal; ‘commonwealth of toil,’ ‘commonwealth of labor,’ and the ‘association of producers’ were also popular.” See Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, xi–xv, 536–55, for a sympathetic discussion of Populist versions of the “cooperative commonwealth” and the consequences of its defeat.

22. The first quotation comes from Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy, 162. For further discussion of racial equality in the Knights of Labor, see Fink, 169–72, and McLaurin, The Knights of Labor in the South. On the subject of women in the order, see Susan Levine, “Labor’s True Women: Domesticity and Equal Rights in the Knights of Labor,” Journal of American History 70 (1983): 323–39, and Fink, 12. For the racial attitudes of the Farmers’ Alliance and the Populists, see Palmer, “Man over Money,” 50–68. The second quotation is from Palmer, 57, and Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Revolt. For discussions of the activities of women in the Southern Farmers’ Alliance, see Julie Roy Jeffrey, “Women in the Southern Farmers’ Alliance: A Reconsideration of the Role and Status of Women in the Late Nineteenth-Century South,” Feminist Studies 3 (1975): 72–91. The remaining quotations are from Jeffrey. See also Lu Ann Jones, “’The Task That Is Ours’: White North Carolina Farm Women and Agrarian Reform, 1886–1914” (Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, 1983).

23. Journal of United Labor, 11 June, 27 Aug. 1887.

24. Ibid., 7 Nov. 1889.

25. The Durham Tobacco Plant, a Democratic organ in the city, frequently attacked the Knights by reporting on the gains made by blacks since the election of the order’s candidate to Congress in 1886.

26. For example, see “The Farmers and the Knights,” Journal of United Labor, 5 Dec. 1889.

27. Progressive Farmer, 18 Aug. 1887.

28. As argued by McMath, Populist Vanguard.

29. See Robert D. McMath, Jr., “Southern White Farmers and the Organization of Black Farm Workers: A North Carolina Document,” Labor History 18 (Winter 1977): 115–19.

30. Journal of United Labor, 12 Nov. 1887; 2, 30 Aug. 1888.

31. McMath, “Southern White Farmers,” 115–19.

32. Progressive Farmer, 4 Dec. 1888.

33. H. H. Perry to Elias Carr, Elias Carr papers, East Carolina University, quoted in Foner and Lewis, The Black Worker, 294.

34. Foner and Lewis, The Black Worker, 330–64, and Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Revolt, 11. A comment by the editor in the Progressive Farmer concerning black migration out of the state suggested the racial constraint on the alliance between black and white farmers: “The Negro is and will ever remain, so long as he stays, a running, festering sore on our body politics”; the editor offered to “pray God’s blessing to attend him” in his departure from North Carolina; quoted in Frenise A. Logan, The Negro in North Carolina, 1876–1894 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 129.

35. VCF [Vance County Farmer], Gold Leaf, 1 Dec. 1887; McMath, Populist Vanguard, 50–54; Tilley, Bright Tobacco Industry, 406–21; Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers’ Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880–1890 (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 212.

36. Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, 115–17, 152–53, 166–72.

37. The most complete discussion of the growing racial and economic conservatism of the North Carolina Populists is in Palmer, “Man over Money,” 143–54. Quotations from Progressive Farmer, 18 July 1893, in Palmer, 149; North Carolina People’s Party platform quoted in Goldsboro Caucasian, 2 Aug. 1894, in Palmer, 34–35.

38. Jeffrey J. Crow and Robert F. Durden, Maverick Republican in the Old North State: A Political Biography of Daniel Russell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1877), 49, 79–80, 109; quotation from Raleigh News and Observer, 23 Nov. 1898.

39. J. Morgan Kousser argues that the decline was the object of the campaign to reduce the poor white and black vote directed by southern elites. See Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 238–66. For his discussion of the North Carolina campaign of 1900, see 183–95; for discussion of the decline in voting participation, see 240–42, 245–46.

40. Tilley, Bright Tobacco Industry, 354.

41. Southern Tobacconist and Manufacturers Record, 29 Sept. 1903, quoted in Tilley, Bright Tobacco Industry, 423.

42. Tilley, Bright Tobacco Industry, 94–95.

43. Ibid., 354, 356, 386–91.

44. Thomas J. Woofter, Jr., The Plight of Cigarette Tobacco (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1931), 26–40; Pete Daniel, “The Crossroads of Change: Tobacco, Cotton, and Rice Cultures in the Twentieth Century,” paper delivered at the Woodrow Wilson International Center Colloquium, Washington, D.C., 13 July 1982.

45. Rupert B. Vance, The Human Geography of the South: A Study in Regional Resources and Human Adequacy (New York: Russell and Russell, 1934), 177–204.

46. Anthony J. Badger, Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobacco, and North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 11.

47. C. Horace Hamilton, “Recent Changes in the Social and Economic Status of Farm Families in North Carolina,” North Carolina Agricultural Extension Station Bulletin, no. 309 (Raleigh, May 1937).

48. Badger, Prosperity Road, 59, 95, 271, 183–96, 201, 227; see also George Tindall, The Emergence of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 396–407, 414–15; and Charles S. Johnson, Edwin R. Embree, and W. W. Alexander, The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 41–57.

49. Jonathan Daniels, Tar Heels: A Portrait of North Carolina (Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1941), 80–81.

CHAPTER III

1. Alice Schlegel, an anthropologist, discusses these social relations as important components of the hierarchical relationship between men and women cross-culturally. See Alice Schlegel, ed., Sexual Stratification: A Cross-Cultural View (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 3–25.

2. Although the southern racial system resembled the Indian caste system in certain respects, I use the term race because the two systems were not identical. The southern racial system was a considerably cruder and simpler arrangement that divided southerners into two racial communities rather than a series of ascending castes defined by occupation and other characteristics.

3. Richard H. Whitaker, Reminiscences, Incidents and Anecdotes (Raleigh: Edwards and Broughton, 1905), quoted in Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers’ Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880–1890 (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 66.

4. In contrast to some scholars, I use the term “family economy” to specify a type of agricultural household production that involves family labor rather than wage labor, slave labor, or other variants. For discussions of these issues, see Louise Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978); Rayna Rapp, Ellen Ross, and Renate Bridenthal, “Examining Family History,” in Sex and Class in Women’s History, ed. Judith L. Newton, Mary P. Ryan, and Judith Walkowitz (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 232–58; Michael Merrill, “’Cash Is Good to Eat’: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,” Radical History Review, Winter 1977, 42–71; and Harriet Friedman, “Household Production and the National Economy: Concepts for the Analysis of Agrarian Formations,” Journal of Peasant Studies 7 (January 1980): 158–83. In the rural Piedmont the units of household production included independent commodity producers using family labor, plantation production using tenant and sharecropping family households as the units of production, and relatively independent tenant households that rented the land while owning some of the tools of production.

5. This patriarchal ideal apparently existed in the rural Piedmont, according to J. A. Dickey and E. C. Branson, “How Farm Tenants Live in Mid-State Carolina,” North Carolina Year-Book, 1921–1922 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1922), 86. That it still existed as a cultural ideal into the 1930s is clear from the interviews conducted by Margaret Hagood with white tenant farm women, in Margaret Jarman Hagood, Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). For a discussion of the same ideal among black rural families, see Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, Promiseland: A Century of Life in a Negro Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981).

6. Share tenants were legally considered to own the crop and paid a share of the crop in lieu of rent to the landlord; sharecroppers were legally considered to be laborers who earned a share of the crop in exchange for their labor. Although one writer was still describing the tobacco farmer as the “best remaining example of the Jeffersonian ideal of an independent yeomanry” as late as 1981, the realities of tobacco marketing, tenancy, and federal price supports had long since deprived small tobacco producers of economic independence. See William R. Finger, ed., The Tobacco Industry in Transition (New York: D.C. Heath, 1981).

7. As discussed by William H. Fisher, bright tobacco was one of the most-highly labor-intensive crops, with labor accounting for 80 percent of the total costs. See William H. Fisher, Economics of Flue-Cured Tobacco (Richmond, Va.: Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, 1945), 71.

8. Harvesting took 257 hours of labor per acre of tobacco before mechanization in the 1970s cut the demand to 58 hours per acre. See Finger, Tobacco Industry in Transition, 48.

9. Hagood, Mothers of the South, 36, 160–62, 218. Frances Sage Bradley and Margetta A. Williamson, Rural Children in Selected Counties of North Carolina, reprint of U.S. Children’s Bureau Bulletin (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 49–51, 54, discusses male control and greater male mobility in cotton-growing counties where, as in tobacco areas, the family financial transactions took place in town.

10. The use of he and his to refer to farmers was universally applied in the sources. The surveys of farmer opinion published by the North Carolina Bureau of Labor Satisties and its successors were conducted exclusively with men. The residents of Chatham County in the early 1920s distinguished between tenants and croppers by saying that a cropper is a “tenant ‘run by the landlord’ while a renter ‘run himself’” (Dickey and Branson, “Farm Tenants,” 64). T. J. Woofter described tobacco cultivation as “merely a device for the farmer to use his land and sell his labor rather cheaply and occasionally make a small profit” (Thomas J. Woofter, Jr., The Plight of Cigarette Tobacco [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1931], 21).

11. Jonathan Daniels, Tar Heels: A Portrait of North Carolina (Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1941), 90–92. Bethel, Promiseland, 157–58, describes relatively greater economic and social equality between black men and women, but identifies the assumptions that men have “dominance” over women and that women should be loving “helpmates” to their husbands who were the “heads” of the household.

12. *Harriet Suitt Umstead, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding. Here and below, names marked with an asterisk in these notes are pseudonyms chosen to protect the privacy of the person interviewed.

13. *Bertie Loman, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

14. Hagood, Mothers of the South, 89–90. Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, anthropologists, argue that the “social organization of prestige is the domain of social structure that most directly affects cultural notions of gender and sexuality” and that “in every known society men and women compose two differentially valued terms of a value set, men being as men, higher.” They also assert the near universality of male control of the “’public domain’ where ‘universalistic’ interests are expressed and managed”; women are “nearly universally . . . located in or confined to the ‘domestic domain,’” and their concerns are seen as more “particularistic” and encompassed within the male-controlled realm. See Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, eds., Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 16, 7–8. Certainly women appeared to have recognized that “men’s work” in tobacco, the crop that was their link to the public world of the marketplace, carried more prestige and value than the private work of women.

15. Quotations from the Progressive Farmer, in Julie Roy Jeffrey, “Women in the Southern Farmers’ Alliance: A Reconsideration of the Role and Status of Women in the Late Nineteenth Century South,” in Our American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought, ed. Jean E. Friedman and William G. Shade (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1982), 361, 358.

16. This discussion is based on the work of Lu Ann Jones and Julie Roy Jeffrey: see Lu Ann Jones, “’The Task That Is Ours’: White North Carolina Farm Women and Agrarian Reform, 1886–1914” (Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, 1983), and Jeffrey, “Women in the Southern Farmers’ Alliance,” 348–71.

17. Bradley and Williamson, Rural Children, 35–41.

18. Dickey and Branson, “Farm Tenants,” 74–75. Another description of household equipment is given in Arthur F. Raper, “A Case Study of Democratic Procedures in Rural Development—A Personal Account,” paper in possession of Peter Wood, Department of History, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

19. Hagood, Mothers of the South, 93–107, 91. In addition, I gathered information on housekeeping methods and equipment in interviews with *Harriet Suitt Umstead, *Anna Ruffin Whitted, *Rachel Medlin, *Ella Lassiter, and *Vera Rowan, personal holdings.

20. Charles B. Loomis, “The Growth of the Farm Family in Relation to Its Activities,” North Carolina Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin no. 298, June 1934, 25–27. On average, the tenant farm family consumed more of its income in food and clothing and less in investment in either the farm or the household than did the typical landowner.

21. Raper, “Case Study.” Merrill discusses “swap work,” under the rubrics of “cooperative work,” “changing work,” or “neighborliness,” as a characteristic of the “household mode of production.” See Merrill, “Cash Is Good to Eat,” 57–58. Steven Hahn designates such practices as “habits of mutuality,” which, together with slavery, limited “the development of directly exploitative, market relations between whites.” See Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformations of Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 50–85. Yet, rather than representing a distinctive type of economy or mode of production, such patterns may simply have represented the response of those who lacked other resources. For example, the contemporary poor continue to rely on kin and friends for services and access to resources, while the middle class “substitute commodity forms.” See Rapp, Ross, and Bridenthal, “Examining Family History,” 178–80; and Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Survivial Strategies in a Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

22. An ugly incident resulting from this pattern of racial etiquette, which forbade the two races to eat together and insisted on the greatest social distance between white women and black men, was observed by Margaret Hagood while accompanying photographer Marion Post Wolcott in the Durham vicinity. See Hagood, “Corn Shucking,” 16 Nov. 1939, in Subregional Laboratory Records, Howard W. Odum papers, SHC/UNC.

23. This explanation of the sexual division of labor in a patriarchal system comes from Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Toward a More Progressive Union,” in Women and Revolution: A Discussion of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1982), 1–42.

24. Clarence Poe, the editor of the Progressive Farmer, noted that “throwing brickbats at the men” seemed to be a favorite pastime of the women writing letters to his journal (8 Mar. 1906).

25. As revealed in my interviews. Only interviews with *Laura Turrentine Markham and *Helen Ball Riggsbee betrayed any women’s resentment toward husbands or fathers. In both cases, the men were failures as farmers. Schlegel, Sexual Stratification, 335, posits that the economic partnership between men and women within the family economy might mitigate sexual dominance. Thus women might have correctly seen their needs as being better served in a prosperous family economy under an enterprising head than in a poorer and more egalitarian household. Hagood, Mothers of the South, recorded that white tenant farm women identified their interests with those of the family as a whole without questioning the “rightness of male dominance” or the conventional belief in “innate sexual difference in ability.” Yet, as she observed, “Patriarchy prevails in form but not always in practice” (162–65, 168–69). Quotation from Jones, “’The Task That is Ours’: White North Carolina Farm Women and Agrarian Reform, 1886–1914,” paper given at the Organization of American Historians convention, Los Angeles, 7 Apr. 1984, p. 10.

26. For the use of the courts to control poor white and free black women’s sexuality, see Victoria Bynum, “Court Control over Poor White and Free Black Women in North Carolina: The Effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction,” paper given at the Organization of American Historians convention, Los Angeles, 7 Apr. 1984. For the discussion on childbearing, see Hagood, Mothers of the South, 108–27; for child raising, see 128–56. Quotations from Hagood, 143, 147, 200.

27. See John Patrick McDowell, The Social Gospel in the South: The Woman’s Home Mission Movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1886–1939 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983) for a discussion of feminism in a white southern church. The unpublished work of Cheryl Townsend Gilkes on the activities of black women in the Church of God in Christ illustrates the struggles of women for leadership in a black church.

28. Bethel, Promiseland, 33–36, reveals that women in landowning families worked outside the household less often than women in tenant families. Loomis, “Growth of the Farm Family,” 59, reports the same relationship between tenure status and women’s work outside the household. Bradley and Williamson, Rural Children, report that black women worked in the fields more often than did white women. The migration data comes from W. A. Anderson and C. P. Loomis, “Migration among Sons and Daughters of White Farmers in Wake County,” North Carolina Agricultural Extension Station Bulletin, no. 275 (June 1930).

29. C. Horace Hamilton, “Recent Changes in the Social and Economic Status of Farm Families in North Carolina,” North Carolina Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin, no. 309 (May 1937), 129; Loomis, “Growth of the Farm Family,” 48.

30. Hagood, Mothers of the South, 168. Wage data from North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, First Annual Report for the Year 1887, (Raleigh, 1887); North Carolina Department of Labor and Printing, Thirty-Second Annual Report (1919–1920).

31. See B. W. C. Roberts and Richard F. Knapp, John Thomas Dalton and the Development of the Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco (Durham: Solar Plexus Enterprises, 1977), and an unpublished study by Sherlock Bronson, “Tobacco Bag Stringing” (Richmond: Virginia-Carolina Service Corporation, 1939). The company that distributed bags to rural workers sponsored Bronson’s study to prove that the Fair Labor Standards Act, which eliminated home work that didn’t pay a minimum wage, should not be applied to bag stringers. The study argued that such action would “take supplemental income” from poor rural women.

32. Although there is no single source for these ideas about the interconnections between gender and race in southern productive and reproductive systems, see Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “’The Mind That Burns in Each Body’: Women, Rape, and Racial Violence,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 328–48; Randall Collins, “Stratification by Sex and Age,” in his Conflict Sociology: Toward an Explanatory Science (New York: Academic Press, 1975); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 124–27, 162; Frigga Haug, “Morals Also Have Two Genders,” New Left Review 143 (1984): 51–68; Rosalind Coward, Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); Sue Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in China, 1860–1936 (New York: Institute for Research in History, 1982); and Ortner and Whitehead, Sexual Meanings, 1–28.

33. Otto H. Olsen, “North Carolina: An Incongruous Presence,” in Reconstruction and Redemption in the South, ed. Otto H. Olsen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 156–97; Governor Jonathan Worth to William Clark, 16 Feb. 1868, in Olsen, Reconstruction, 167; and Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 196, 197.

34. Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 224, 221.

35. Raleigh Standard, Oct. 1869, quoted in Trelease, White Terror, 196. For discussion of the ending of Reconstruction in North Carolina, see Trelease, 209, 224, 336–37, 347, 408–9; and Olsen, “North Carolina,” 170–97.

36. Frenise A. Logan, The Negro in North Carolina, 1876–1894 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 125–29.

37. George White is quoted in Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872–1901 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 255.

38. North Carolina Department of Labor and Printing, Fifteenth Annual Report (Raleigh, 1902), 59, 70. Both quotations were from farmers in counties bordering on Durham. See Clarence Poe, “Rural Land Segregation between Whites and Negroes: A Reply to Mr. Stephenson,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 13 July 1914, pp. 207, 212.

39. Christian Recorder, 31 July 1888.

40. Raper is quoted in Jay R. Mandle, The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy after the Civil War (Durham: Duke University Press, 1978), 29.

41. *James Lester, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

42. *Anna Ruffin Whitted, interview.

43. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1935), 379, 413–15, 782–85.

44. Bradley and Williamson, Rural Children.

45. *Zina Riddle, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

46. Annie Mack Barbee, interview by Beverley Johnson, SOHP/UNC.

47. *Annie Holman Green and *Anna Ruffin Whitted commented about the sexual exploitation of black women while discussing slavery.

48. *Anna Ruffin Whitted, interview.

49. *Zina Riddle, interview.

50. *Mamie Gray, interview.

51. *Zina Riddle, and *Anna Ruffin Whitted interviews.

52. Bethel, Promiseland. See also John Wesley Hatch, “The Black Rural Church: Its Role and Potential in Community Health Organization and Action” (Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, 1974), and Dale Newman, “Work and Community Life in a Southern Textile Town,” Labor History 19 (1978): 220–21, which suggest that similar patterns existed in the areas around Durham as well.

53. Tenure status also affected longevity. It contributed to higher death rates among black women, who came primarily from tenant and laboring households.

54. Jacqueline Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), presents the most developed discussion of this issue in the chapter, “Strange Fruit.”

55. Rufus B. Spain, At Ease in Zion: A Social History of Southern Baptists, 1865–1900 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967), 101.

56. For Methodist views on racial issues, see Harold Fair, “Southern Methodists on Education and Race, 1900–1920” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1971).

57. Hagood, Mothers of the South, 177, 178–79, 141.

58. Hall, Revolt against Chivalry, describes women who “revolted” against the practice.

59. Arthur F. Raper, The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933), 107–24, 114, 124.

60. *Anna Ruffin Whitted, interview.

61. Annie Mack Barbee, interview.

62. E. Franklin Frazier, “Durham: Capital of the Black Middle Class,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain LeRoy Locke (1925; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968), 333–40.

63. Hatch, “Black Rural Church.”

64. See Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (New York: Viking Press, 1939), 223–85, for a provocative analysis of the black church. Powdermaker argues that there was a reciprocal influence on the church: “The Negro God exhibits more maternal characteristics” than does “the stern patriarchal God of the white Protestants” (247).

65. Based on a comparison of patterns in the interviews that I conducted.

66. See the analysis by Bruce T. Grindal, “The Religious Interpretation of Experience in a Rural Black Community,” in Holding On to the Land and the Kinship, Ritual, Land Tenure and Social Policy in the Rural South, ed. Robert L. Hall and Carol B. Stack (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 92–100. See also Powdermaker, After Freedom, 253–60, for a comparison of religious beliefs and practices among poor whites and poor blacks.

67. This emphasis on consciousness as a negotiated response comes from my reading of Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966); Sarah Eisenstein, Give Us Bread but Give Us Roses: Working Women’s Consciousness in the United States, 1890 to the First World War (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 37–54; and Ortner and Whitehead, Sexual Meanings, 1–27.

68. The “democratic moment” that was Populism is the subject of Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), and of Bruce Palmer, “Man over Money”: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). Quotation from Tarboro Farmers’ Advocate, 23 Sept. 1891, in reference to the cotton pickers’ strike of 1891 supported by the black Farmers’ Alliance, in Palmer, “Man over Money,” 65. See Palmer, 50–68, 144–54, and Goodwyn, 276–306, for contrasting assessments of the Populist response to black farmers.

69. Quotations in Jeffrey, “Women in the Southern Farmers’ Alliance,” 364, 358; Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism, 286.

70. Frederick A. Bode, Protestantism and the New South: North Carolina Baptists and Methodists in Political Crisis, 1894–1903 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), 53, 55–56, 45, 79, 117.

71. Jessie Jeffrey, interview by W. O. F., 10 July 1939, NCFWP/SHC/UNC; Hagood, Mothers of the South, 181; *Zina Riddle, *Anna Ruffin Whitted, and *Laura Turrentine Markham interviews.

72. Hagood, Mothers of the South, 183–92.

73. *Anna Ruffin Whitted, interview.

74. Ortner and Whitehead, Sexual Meanings, 6–13.

75. Loomis, “Growth of the Farm Family,” 38–41, 55–56. Bethel notes, however, that leadership in the black church was “vested within the kinship systems of the original landowners in the community” (Promiseland, 144), and her general discussion of “God and power” suggests that class distinctions were present although less developed than in white society.

76. See Rapp, Ross, and Bridenthal, “Examining Family History,” 236–38, for discussion of this issue.

77. Gerda Lerner, in a forthcoming work tentatively titled “The Sexual Foundations of Western Civilization,” is tracing back this mediated form of women’s class identity to ancient Babylonia and Mesopotamia. She also traces the division of women into the “veiled” and the “unveiled”—the sexually controlled and respectable versus the sexually uncontrolled and disreputable—to ancient Assyrian law. The tendency to describe women by their relationships is discussed by Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes toward a Political Economy of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210, as based in the male exchange of women that gives me “certain rights in their female kin” and denies women “full rights to themselves” and thus defines women in relationship to men (177). See also Ortner and Whitehead, Sexual Meanings, 8.

78. *Harriet Suitt Umstead, interview.

79. There is a similar tendency in Samoa, according to Bradd Shore, “Sexuality and Gender in Samoa: Conceptions and Missed Conceptions,” in Ortner and Whitehead, Sexual Meanings, 192–215. See also Bethel, Promiseland, 157–60, for a discussion of the sexual double standard in a rural black community.

80. *Laura Turrentine Markham, interview. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, 124–27, describes a similar connection between types of occupation and social status in the Indian caste system, which designated some occupations as polluting and others as fit for the pure and higher castes.

81. Ortner and Whitehead, Sexual Meanings, 5; more fully developed by Jane F. Collier and Michelle Z. Rosaldo, “Politics and Gender in Simple Societies,” in Ortner and Whitehead, 275–329. Collier and Rosaldo extend their analysis of the political importance of sexuality to rape as an expression of “three culturally salient themes” in simple societies (i.e., nonclass societies)—“sexual intercourse, male violence, and male solidarity”—intended to punish “women who wander beyond male control—through promiscuity, assertions of undue independence, and/or refusals to marry” (297). Compare this analysis with Jacqueline Hall’s examination of rape, “The Mind That Burns the Body,” in the more complex and racially divided society of the South. Here lynching for the crime of rape expressed white male solidarity and control over the bodies of white women and black men, while black women were offered no such “protection.”

82. Rapp, Ross, and Bridenthal, “Examining Family History,” characterize the split “between public and private, workplace and household, economy and family,” as a false dichotomy that disguises the fact that “household activities are continuously part of the ‘larger’ processes of production, reproduction, and consumption” (233–34).

83. Household Account Book, Cameron Family papers, SHC/UNC.

84. Margaret Hagood, “Corn Shucking.”

85. *Laura Turrentine Markham, interview. Hagood reported that tobacco-farm women like Markham considered cotton-growing to be “back-breaking work, fit only for ‘niggers,’” and too low-paying compared with tobacco” (Mothers of the South, 80).

86. *Anna Ruffin Whitted, interview.

87. *James Lester, interview.

88. For a complex discussion of black attitudes toward “white people,” see Powdermaker, After Freedom, 325–53.

89. Mary E. Mebane, Mary (New York: Fawcett Junior, 1981), 220–24. See also E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States, 2d ed. rev. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 89–101, 190–208; and Charles S. Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1941), for comparisons of sexual mores between lower-class and middle-or upper-class rural blacks. Bethel discusses how the churches dominated by black landowners dealt with unwed mothers; they were “turned” out of the church as soon as the pregnancy became obvious, isolated within their homes during a period of social disgrace, and then reintroduced into the church and society after acknowledging guilt and giving birth to the baby (Promiseland, 157–59). See also Powdermaker, After Freedom, 143–74, for another comparison of sexual attitudes and marriage patterns among blacks of different classes.

90. Hagood, Mothers of the South, 37, 130, 152, 177–78, 180–82.

CHAPTER IV

1. Based on Hugh Penn Brinton, “The Negro in Durham: A Study of Adjustment to Town Life” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1930); Charles S. Johnson, “The Tobacco Worker: A Study of Tobacco Factory Workers and Their Families,” 2 vols. (1935), Division of Review, Industrial Studies Section, NRA/NA; Orie Latham Hatcher, Rural Girls in the City for Work: A Study Made for the Southern Women’s Educational Alliance (Richmond: Garrett and Massie, 1930); C. Horace Hamilton, “Rural-Urban Migration in North Carolina, 1920–1930,” North Carolina Agricultural Extension Station Bulletin, no. 295 (Raleigh, February 1934); and Irwin Dunsky, “The Excess Female Population in Durham, N.C.: A Study of Migration and Urbanization” (Master’s thesis, Duke University, 1939).

2. See the discussion of the “great migration” in Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, Promiseland: A Century of Life in a Negro Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 171–94. Sex ratios are based on comparison of population figures for Durham, Person, and Granville Counties with Durham, 1900–1930.

3. This is due, in part, to the practices of the Bureau of the Census, which recorded no location more specific than the state of birth for the period in question.

4. Durham Negro Observer, 4 Aug. 1906, quoted in Walter B. Weare, Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 27.

5. Hatcher, Rural Girls, 211.

6. *Calvin Couch and *Louise Couch Jenkins, interviews by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding. Calvin and Louise were the children of *Wilma Mayfield Couch. Here and elsewhere in these notes, names marked with an asterisk are pseudonyms chosen to protect the privacy of the person interviewed.

7. Esther Jenks, interview by Dolores Janiewski, SOHP/UNC.

8. Hatcher, Rural Girls, 10, 14, 25.

9. Hamilton, “Rural-Urban Migration.”

10. Dunsky, “Excess Female Population in Durham.”

11. Johnson, “The Tobacco Worker,” 2:387.

12. *Rowan Mangum, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

13. Harriet Herring, Passing of the Mill Village: Revolution in a Southern Institution (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977). Herring reports that the mill village began to pass away during the wartime boom when mill managers allowed some workers to live outside the mill village. Later, the construction of paved roads in the 1920s allowed others to commute from homes in the “stringtowns” that began to line North Carolina highways. Herring reports that this trend was most pronounced in North Carolina; two of its leading industries—tobacco and furniture—never established company housing, and a third—hosiery—had never housed all its employees. Durham Hosiery Mills began eliminating company housing for its employees and Erwin Mills began the deliberate sale of its houses in the 1940s.

14. Mary E. Mebane, Mary (New York: Fawcett Junior, 1981), 96. According to interviews conducted for the Johnson survey, white workers resented the ability of black tobacco workers to buy automobiles (Johnson, “The Tobacco Worker,” 2:428).

15. Mrs. John Gates, interview by W. O. F., NCFWP/SHC/UNC.

16. New York Times, 23 Sept. 1879.

17. North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, Annual Report for 1887 (Raleigh, 1887), 86.

18. North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, Annual Report for 1887, 136.

19. North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, Second Annual Report (Raleigh, 1888), 302.

20. North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing, Fifteenth Annual Report (Raleigh, 1901), 301–2.

21. North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing, Twenty-first Annual Report (Raleigh, 1907), 52; North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing, Seventeenth Annual Report (Raleigh, 1903), 53.

22. North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing, Seventeenth Annual Report, 45–46.

23. North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing, Fifteenth Annual Report, 81–82.

24. North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing, Seventeenth Annual Report, 241.

25. *Pearl Barbee, interview by Linda Guthrie, personal holding.

26. *Hetty Love, interview by Linda Guthrie, personal holding.

27. William Merriman Upchurch and M. B. Fowler, Durham County: Economic and Social, April 1918 (Chapel Hill: Department of Rural Economics and Sociology, University of North Carolina), 13.

28. Bessie Taylor Buchanan, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/UNC.

29. Esther Jenks, interview by Dolores Janiewski, SOHP/UNC.

30. Luther Riley, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/UNC.

31. *Rose Weeks, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

32. Annie Mack Barbee and Charlie Decoda Mack, interviews by Beverly Jones, SOHP/UNC.

33. Esther Jenks, interview.

34. Levi Branson, Directory of the Business and Citizens of Durham City for 1887 (Raleigh: Levi Branson, 1887), 13.

35. Kemp P. Lewis to the Commissioners of Harnett County, 2 Mar. 1909, KPL/SHC/UNC.

36. Julian S. Carr, Jr., “Building a Business on the Family Plan,” System 35 (July 1919): 301–5.

37. Kemp P. Lewis to J. O. Bailey, 19 Dec. 1931, KPL/SHC/UNC.

38. Weare, Black Business, 50–59, 29, 34, 36–49.

39. Weare, Black Business, 44–45, 101–2, 114–16.

40. Edward Franklin Frazier, “Durham: Capital of the Black Middle Class,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968), 339.

41. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 284, 287.

CHAPTER V

1. Edward Franklin Frazier, “Durham: Capital of the Black Middle Class,” in The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968), 338–39.

2. This chapter draws on the work of C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South: 1877–1913, vol. 9 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), principally 107–41, 291–320, 369–428. For additional information about Blackwell and Carr, see U.S. Tobacco Journal, 17 Nov. 1883; Nannie May Tilley, The Bright-Tobacco Industry: 1869–1929 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948); Hiram V. Paul, History of the Town of Durham, N.C. (Raleigh: Edwards, Broughton, 1884); William K. Boyd, The Story of Durham: City of the New South (Durham: Duke University Press, 1927); and Peter Burke Hobbs, “Plantation to Factory: Tradition and Industrialization in Durham, N.C, 1880–1890” (Master’s thesis, Duke University, 1971). Quotation from U.S. Tobacco Journal, 17 Nov. 1883, quoted in Paul, Durham, 134.

3. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 10th Census, (manuscript) Census for Manufacturing, 1880, Orange County, North Carolina/NA.

4. Paul, Durham, 105.

5. Ibid., 27, 104.

6. The firm’s history is described in Robert F. Durden, The Dukes of Durham (Durham: Duke University Press, 1975); Dwight B. Billings, Jr., Planters and the Making of a “New South”: Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Jonathan Daniels, Tar Heels: A Portrait of North Carolina (Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1941); and Richard B. Tennant, The American Cigarette Industry: A Study in Economic Analysis and Public Policy (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1971).

7. Durden, Dukes of Durham, 18–19.

8. U.S. Bureau of the Census, (manuscript) Census for Manufacturing, Orange County, 1880.

9. U.S. Tobacco Journal, 17 Nov. 1883.

10. Joseph C. Robert, The Story of Tobacco in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 141.

11. Tennant, American Cigarette Industry, 17–21.

12. In New York City, James B. Duke canvassed the retail trade selling goods and conducting a vigorous advertising campaign. See Tennant, American Cigarette Industry, 23, and Manufacturers’ Record, 28 Aug. 1886.

13. James B. Duke to D. B. Strouse, 16 Mar. 1888, JBD/PL/DU.

14. James B. Duke to D. B. Strouse, 2 Apr. 1886 and 19 July 1887; and D. B. Strouse to Duke, Ginter, and Allen, 8 Feb. 1888, JBD/PL/DU.

15. Don Maby Lacy, “The Beginnings of Industrialism in North Carolina” (Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, 1935).

16. James B. Duke to D. B. Strouse, 19 July 1887, JBD/PL/DU.

17. James B. Duke To D. B. Strouse, 27 Mar. 1889, JBD/PL/DU.

18. Tennant, American Cigarette Industry, 24–5; Durden, Dukes of Durham, 48–55; Meyer Jacobstein, “The Tobacco Industry in the United States,” Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Law, vol. 26, no. 3 (1907), 102–5.

19. Durham Weekly Globe, 8 June 1892. See also A. W. Hayward to Benjamin N. Duke, 10 May 1892, BND/PL/DU.

20. Benjamin N. Duke to Stonarch, 12 May 1892, BND/PL/DU, and Durham Weekly Globe, 8 June 1892.

21. Benjamin N. Duke to Julian S. Carr, 11 Nov. 1899, BND/PL/DU. By this time, Carr apparently was in financial difficulties because Benjamin Duke asked him to repay a loan a week later. See Benjamin N. Duke to Julian S. Carr, 20 Nov. 1899, BND/PL/DU.

22. Jacobstein, “Tobacco Industry,” 97.

23. James B. Duke, testimony, 7 May 1902, U.S. Industrial Commission, Trusts and Combinations (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1903), 317–37.

24. William H. Nicholls, Price Policies in the Cigarette Industry: A Study of Concerted Action and Its Social Control, 1911–1950 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1951), 31–32.

25. Tobacco manufacturing rested on a foundation of cheap labor, according to Robert C. Weaver, “The Tobacco Industry in North Carolina,” n.d., an unpublished study in the Tobacco Code Section, NRA/NA/DC. Weaver reports that labor’s share in the proceeds of the industry declined steadily after 1899, which means that the decline coincided with the growing monopolization of the industry and its move to the South.

26. Industry profits are recorded in Nicholls, Price Policies, 42–43; wages are found in Paul H. Douglass, Real Wages in the United States, 1890–1926 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 610–13.

27. I. M. Osbreen, President, Cigar Makers International Union of America, Memorandum to National Recovery Administration, Code of Fair Competition for the Cigarette Industry, Tobacco Code Section, NRA/NA.

28. Durham workers, however, fared better than workers in northern plants whose factories were closed as the industry moved south to take advantage of lower wage rates. The American Tobacco Company, for example, closed its Brooklyn plant in 1930 and moved its operations to Durham. See Survey Materials for Bulletin No. 100, Women’s Bureau record Group, WB/NA. The subject is also discussed in Charles S. Johnson’s 1935 study, “The Tobacco Worker: A Study of Tobacco Factory Workers and Their Families,” 2 vols., Division of Review, Industrial Studies Section, NRA/NA.

29. Tennant, American Cigarette Industry, 4–5.

30. This is described by radical economists as “labor market segmentation” and by Marxist-influenced scholarship as “colonized labor,” in which racial-ethnic workers are confined to the most labor-intensive and least remunerative parts of the economy. See the articles in Labor Market Segmentation, ed. Richard C. Edwards, Michael Reich, and David M. Gordon (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1975), especially those by Harold M. Baron and Alice Kessler-Harris, for examples of the first approach. See Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), for an example of the second.

31. A tobacco employer quoted in Emma L. Shields, “A Half-Century of the Tobacco Industry,” The Southern Workman, 22 Sept. 1922, p. 420.

32. This also happened in textile mills.

33. These basic divisions of labor in the tobacco industry are described in Johnson, “The Tobacco Worker.”

34. In Richmond, white women had been hired by Allen and Ginter in the late 1870s and early 1880s to roll cigarettes by hand, but by the late 1880s they had almost no employment in Durham except for bag making. After mechanization, they usually ran the packing rather than the making machines.

35. A few women became foreladies, but Johnson’s survey of the industry in the mid-1930s found that no women, black or white, occupied the foreman’s level in the industry: Johnson, “The Tobacco Workers,” 1:26.

36. Harriet A. Byrne, “The Effects on Women of Changing Conditions in the Cigar and Cigarette Industries,” U.S. Women’s Bureau Bulletin, No. 100 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1932), discussed the effects of the move south. Herbert R. Northrup, The Negro in the Tobacco Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), discusses the employment trends in the industry.

37. Durham Recorder, 19 Jan. 1899.

38. Daniels, Tar Heels, 113. The Durham example contradicts the version of southern industrialization presented in works such as Broadus Mitchell, The Rise of Cotton Mills in the South (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith Publishing, 1906), in trade journals such as the Manufacturers’ Record and the Southern Textile Bulletin, or in the local histories by Hiram Paul, William K. Boyd, and Robert Durden. These sources place undue emphasis on the philanthropic and public-spirited motives that fostered the growth of industry in communities like Durham. The Durham example also contradicts the thesis presented by Dwight B. Billings, who tried to make a clearcut distinction between the social origins and managerial behavior of textile and tobacco manufacturers in Dwight Billings, Jr., Planters and the Making of a “New South.” Claiming that textile manufacturers sprang from the planter class and tobacco manufacturers from the yeoman class, Billings ascribed structural differences in the industries to the origins of the entrepreneurs who built them. In the Durham case, however, the men he called planters and the men he called yeomen cooperated in building both textile and tobacco enterprises.

39. Hobbs, “Plantation to Factory,” 17. Using the machine invented by William H. Kerr, Carr was able to increase bag output almost six times.

40. See BND/PL/DU, 1892–1902, for extensive discussions of the Duke involvement in the textile industry. See also Durden, Dukes of Durham, 124–33.

41. W. A. Erwin to B. N. Duke, 3 Jan. 1901, BND/PL/DU; Durden, Dukes of Durham, 139.

42. J. S. Carr, Jr., “What Made Our Business Grow,” System 35 (2 Feb. 1919), 201–5.

43. J. S. Carr, Jr., “Building a Business on the Family Plan,” System 35 (7 July 1919), 47–50.

44. J. S. Carr to B. N. Duke, 4 Jan. 1898, BND/PL/DU, and J. S. Carr, Jr., “What Made Our Business Grow.”

45. North Carolina Department of Labor and Printing, Annual Report for 1917 (Raleigh, 1917).

46. See Allen Heath Stokes, Jr., “Black and White Labor and the Development of the Southern Textile Industry, 1800–1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1977); John Curtis Barstenstein, “The Exclusion of Black Workers from N.C. Textile Industry, 1880–1910” (B.A. thesis, Harvard University, 1976); Holland Thompson, From the Cotton Field to the Cotton Mill: A Study of Industrial Transition in North Carolina (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 248–65; and Daniel A. Tompkins, Cotton Mill, Commercial Features (Charlotte: the author, 1899), for discussions of the reasons for the exclusion of black workers from the mills. By the late 1840s the exclusive use of slaves in southern textile mills began to decline. The ready availability of white labor on the land undoubtedly contributed to the policy. By the late 1880s and 1890s, white workers defeated attempts to introduce black labor into the mills. Meanwhile, industrial ideologues like Daniel A. Tompkins were arguing that the exclusion of black labor would “reestablish respectability for white labor,” which had been demoralized by the unsuccessful competition waged by poor whites with slave labor and then black labor. Had there been a serious labor shortage, manufacturers would have copied the Carr experiment despite threats from white workers, but the agricultural crisis eliminated the need of taking that risk.

47. See Jennings J. Rhyne, Some Cotton Mill Workers and Their Villages (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1930); Marjorie Potwin, Cotton Mill People of the Piedmont: A Study in Social Change (New York: Columbia University, 1927); Thompson, From the Cotton Field to the Cotton Mill; Lois MacDonald, Southern Mill Hills: A Study of Social and Economic Forces in Certain Mill Villages (New York: Alex L. Hillman, 1928); Paul Blanshard, Labor in Southern Cotton Mills (New York: New Republic, 1927); Tom Tippett, When Southern Labor Stirs (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1931); and Jeannette P. Nichols, “Does the Mill Village Foster Any Social Types?” Social Forces 2 (1923): 350–57, for descriptions of mill villages.

48. North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, First Annual Report for the Year 1887 (Raleigh, 1887), 149–50, 142. Census reports in North Carolina and a U.S. Senate study reported the following percentages of female textile workers under the age of 21: 1900, 68.2%; 1907, 68.2%; 1920, 36.4%; 1930, 33.7%. As the age of the women workers rose, the same sources also recorded a rise in the numbers of married women employed in the industry: 1900, 16.7%; 1907, 6.9%; 1920, 32.2%; 1930, 48.9%. All the figures come from the U.S. Census of Manufacturing except for the 1907 figures, which come from the Senate report. See U.S. Senate, “The Cotton Textile Industry,” vol. 1, in Report on the Conditions of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, 61st Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1910).

49. Carr, “Building a Business”; Walter B. Weare, Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 45, 82–83.

50. R. W. Henniger, “What the South Offers Industry,” Factory and Industrial Management 77 (4 Apr. 1929); the author was listed as Professor of Industry, North Carolina State College, Raleigh.

51. Spencer T. Miller, Jr., and Joseph E. Fletcher, The Church and Industry (New York: Longmans, Green, 1930), 201. Although blacks did not work in the mills, they cleaned the village privies and worked in the yards.

52. Bessie Taylor Buchanan, interview by Lanier Rand, July 1977, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

53. Luther Riley, interview by Lanier Rand, July 1977, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

54. H. R. Fitzgerald to the Southern Textile Association, Southern Textile Bulletin, 30 Oct. 1919.

55. Carr, “Building a Business.”

56. Durham Morning Herald, 18 July 1919.

57. “A Doctor of Industrial Relations,” Southern Textile Bulletin, 22 Jan. 1920. See also 10 July, 24 July, 14 Aug., 2 Oct., and 30 Oct. 1919.

58. J. F. Sturdivant, “Employee Representative Plan of Durham Hosiery Mills,” Journal of Social Forces 4 (3 Mar. 1926): 625–28.

59. Obituary for Julian S. Carr, Jr., in the Greensboro Daily News, 18 Mar. 1922.

60. Kemp P. Lewis to Hayden Clement, 10 Aug. 1920, KPL/SHC/UNC.

61. Harry Preston, Railway Audit and Inspection Company, to K. P. Lewis, 11 and 18 Aug. 1919, KPL/SHC/UNC; “Report of Operative No. 230,” 22–23 Jan. 1920, ECMC/FD/PL/DU.

62. Kemp P. Lewis, “Need of Cooperation for Our Company’s Good,” speech given in 1925, KPL/SHC/UNC.

63. A. L. Agner, report on his course, “Modern Production Methods,” taught by the Business Training Corporation, 8 Feb. 1921; there are similar reports in 1922 and 1923 (KPL/SHC/UNC); K. P. Lewis to W. A. Erwin, 27 Feb. 1931, refers to the “extended labor system.” “The Petition of the Weavers and Fixers of the No. 1, Weave Room,” 8 Apr. 1929, refers to the “stretch-out” (KPL/SHC/UNC).

64. Luther Riley, interview, uses this formulation. So did one of the West Durham merchants interviewed by Richard Franck concerning the 1934 textile strike at Erwin Mills (personal holding).

65. Based on a comparison of the listings for Durham mills in Davison’s Textile “Blue Book” for 1920–21, 1925–26, and 1935 (New York: Davison Publishing, 1921, 1926, 1935).

66. See Durham Morning Herald, 26 Sept. 1929, and Durham Sun, 26 Apr. 1939, for descriptions of how the Carr firm survived.

67. Erwin Cotton Mills Company reports, Aug. 1925 and Jan. 1926, KPL/SHC/UNC.

68. Numerous letters in the Lewis correspondence for 1928 deal with the efforts led by the Cotton Textile Institute (KPL/SHC/UNC).

69. Correspondence concerning the merger began in January 1928 and continued intermittently until 1 Jan. 1929 when the Erwin Company officially rejected the proposal. See correspondence in 1928–1929, KPL/SHC/UNC.

70. Kemp P. Lewis to the Stockholders and Directors of the Erwin Cotton Manufacturing Company, 29 July 1931, KPL/SHC/UNC.

71. K. P. Lewis to G. A. Allen, 26 June 1931, KPL/SHC/UNC.

72. Durham Hosiery Mills report to the Stockholders, 26 Nov. 1935, KPL/SHC/UNC.

73. Report of the liquidation proceedings for the Durham Cotton Manufacturing Company, 1 May 1940, KPL/SHC/UNC.

74. Kemp P. Lewis memorandum, 1940, KPL/SHC/UNC.

75. Frazier, “Durham,” 338–39; Booker T. Washington, “Durham, North Carolina: A City of Negro Enterprise,” Independent 70 (30 Mar. 1911): 642–50; and W. E. B. DuBois, “The Upbuilding of Black Durham,” World’s Work 33 (Jan. 1912): 334–38.

76. Paul, Durham, 49. Frazier, for example, describes white business as showing “respect” for black businessmen’s achievements (“Durham”).

77. Frazier, “Durham,” 338–39.

78. Walter Weare, “Charles Clinton Spaulding: Middle-Class Leadership in the Age of Segregation,” in Black Leaders of the 20th Century, ed. John Hope Franklin and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 171.

79. See also William J. Kennedy, Jr., The N.C. Mutual Story: A Symbol of Progress, 1898–1970 (Durham: North Carolina Mutual Publications, 1970), and Weare, Black Business.

80. Allen Edward Burgess, “Tar Heel Blacks and the New South Dream: The Coleman Manufacturing Company, 1896–1904” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1977).

81. DuBois, “Upbuilding of Black Durham,” 335–36. Weare, Black Business in the New South, 41, depicts a more supportive attitude on the part of the Carrs toward the black-owned mill, but the DuBois article seems the more credible assessment since its author was generally pleased with the way in which white Durham was treating black Durham.

82. T. A. Allen, North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing, Fifteenth Annual Report (Raleigh, 1902), 415–16.

83. Paul, Durham, iv, 99.

84. Tobacco Plant, 14 Sept. 1888, quoted in Durham, Dukes of Durham, 125.

85. Durham Recorder, quoted in Durden, Dukes of Durham, 126.

86. Durham Recorder, 19 Jan. 1899.

87. John Merrick, “A Speech to Durham Negroes in 1898,” quoted in Robert McCants Andrews, John Merrick: A Biographical Sketch (Durham: Seeman Printery, 1920), 158–61.

88. Paul, Durham, 207.

89. John Swinton’s Paper, 8, 22 Nov., 13 Dec. 1885; Hiram V. Paul to editor, Journal, 15 July 1887; Journal of United Labor, 6 Aug. 1887.

90. Benjamin N. Duke to Charles F. Lovering, 4 Feb. 1893, BND letterbook, PL/DU, quoted in Durden, Dukes of Durham, 128.

91. R. H. Wright to A. C. Watts in London, 11 Aug. 1891, Wright letterbook, PL/DU, quoted in Durden, Dukes of Durham, 128.

92. Duke to Lovering, Durden, Dukes of Durham, 131.

93. Kemp P. Lewis to Kemp D. Battle, 4 Feb. 1930; K. P. Lewis to William J. Battle, 30 July 1929; and K. P. Lewis to J. Spencer Love, 18 Oct. 1932, KPL/SHC/UNC.

94. Harry Mortimer Douty, “The North Carolina Industrial Worker, 1880–1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1936).

95. Richard Eldridge, memorandum to Labor Advisory Board, n.d., Tobacco Code, NRA/NA/DC.

96. Junius Strickland, “Wake Up! Cigarettemakers,” Appeal of Master Workman Strickland, Office of Master Workman, Progressive Assembly No. 4105, Knights of Labor, Durham, N.C, 9 Mar. 1886, published in John Swinton’s Paper, 14 Mar. 1886.

97. North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fifth Annual Report for 1891, p. 300.

98. *John Lincoln, interview by Travis Jordan, 9 Jan. 1939, NCFWP/SHC/UNC. Here and elsewhere in these notes, an asterisk before a name indicates a pseudonym.

99. *Dena Coley, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

100. Ozzie Richmond, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

101. Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 2:419.

102. K. P. Lewis to Mrs. Brooks, president of Durham YWCA, 6 May 1921, KPL/SHC/UNC. See also Marion W. Roydhouse, “The ‘Universal Sisterhood of Women’: Women and Labor Reform in North Carolina, 1900–1932” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1980), which covers this episode and others in extensive detail. For a thorough discussion of reformers and the “Mill Problem,” see David L. Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880–1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 129–214.

103. The Corporation Industrial Auxiliary Company sent K. P. Lewis frequent reports on reform meetings in the late 1920s; these are available in his papers. The Southern Textile Bulletin also covered the meetings, which included Broadus Mitchell, Mary O. Cowper, Frank P. Graham, and Nell Battle Lewis. See “Our Greatest Menace,” Southern Textile Bulletin, 5 Jan., 2 Feb. 1928; and “The Drive against Southern Cotton Mills,” Manufacturers’ Record, 28 Oct. 1909. The statement from which the quotations were taken was circulated by Graham in 1930 before he became president of the University of North Carolina. Its signators included Kemp. D. Battle, K. P. Lewis’s cousin. See correspondence for January-February 1930, KPL/SHC/UNC.

104. Compare W. E. B. DuBois, “Upbuilding of Black Durham,” with his The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (London: Archibald and Constable, 1903), 50, and see the discussion of DuBois’s views in Weare, Black Business, 16–18.

105. Weare, Black Business, 32–37.

106. Harry J. Walker, “Changes in Race Accommodation in a Southern Community” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1945), 83, quoted in Weare, Black Business, 33–34.

107. According to Weare, Black Business, 116, the typical official at North Carolina Mutual was a “light-brown man . . . who almost without exception possessed a college degree,” the son of “upper-class professionals or middle-class craftsmen, and almost always property-owners.” Portraying the black-owned institutions in Durham as the “black middle-class Zion,” Weare described the complex links of kinship between its officials (138–39). The pictures illustrating his book also demonstrate the generally light complexions of the Mutual’s staff and officers. Mary Mebane, daughter of a Durham tobacco worker, entered North Carolina College in 1951; the quotations in the text are her characterization of attitudes prevalent at the college “since the beginning”–in 1910. See Mary E. Mebane, Mary (New York: Fawcett, Junior, 1981), 218–24, 229–32. According to Mebane, “For people who wonder why segregation lasted so long without effective protest against it, one answer might lie in the notion of a ‘privileged’ class among oppressed people,” a class she identified with the Durham elite and their children (230). Weare, Black Business, 227–32, describes the founding and growth of the college as resulting from collaboration among its president, James E. Shepard, C. C. Spaulding, and influential whites like the Dukes.

108. Quotations from Walker, “Changes in Race Accommodation,” 219–20, from a discussion at a Durham Committee on Negro Affairs meeting that probably occurred in 1938, quoted in Weare, Black Business, 241. Weare’s discussion of the assault on Spaulding (153, 236) was based on a folder of correspondence and clippings in the Charles Clinton Spaulding Papers, North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company archives, Durham, N.C. The incident occurred on 3 August 1931.

109. Manufacturers’ Record, 28 Oct. 1909.

110. National Negro Business League, Proceedings, Sixteenth Annual Meeting, Boston, 1915, p. 118, quoted in Weare, Black Business, 99. C. C. Spaulding was the person quoted.

111. The phrase was taken from William P. Few, “The Constructive Philanthropy of a Southern Cotton Mill,” South Atlantic Quarterly, Jan. 1909.

112. Paul’s charges were contained in letters published in Knights of Labor, Record of the Proceedings of the Ninth Regular Session of the General Assembly, held at Hamilton, Ontario, 5–13 Oct. 1885, p. 30–35.

113. Durham Recorder, J. F. Crowell scrapbooks, PL/DU (as reported in Hobbs, “Plantation to Factory,” 64).

114. Raleigh News and Observer, 18 and 26 Aug. 1900. Arthur Vance Cole was the organizer. See Arthur Vance Cole papers [AVC], 1917–1920, PL/DU.

115. This is apparent in the correspondence among W. D. Carmichael, K. P. Lewis, and W. H. Carr, 1926–1928, KPL/SHC/UNC.

116. K. P. Lewis to J. T. Thorne, 23 Feb. 1926, KPL/SHC/UNC.

117. Mary Belle McMahon to Mary O. Cowper, n.d., MOC/PL/DU.

118. K. P. Lewis to Burton Craige, 20 Jan. 1936, KPL/SHC/UNC. The precipitating issue was Graham’s decision to eliminate football scholarships, as Lewis reported to David Clark on 23 May 1936, but the underlying conflict lay in the profound disagreement between industrialists and Graham about the purpose of the university. K. P. Lewis also protested campus events such as Langston Hughes’s visit, a lecture by Bertrand Russell, Graham’s offer of bond for a student arrested in a bombing episode at a Burlington mill, and a UNC professor’s lunch with James Ford, a Communist Party black activist. See 1929–1936, KPL/SHC/UNC.

119. Levi Branson, Directory of the Business and Citizens of Durham City (Raleigh: Levi Branson, 1887), 13.

120. Raleigh News and Observer, 6 Apr. 1896. See Costen Harrell, The Methodist Church in Durham (Durham: Durham City Board of Extension, 1915), and Frederick Bode, Protestantism and the New South: N.C. Baptists and Methodists in Political Crisis, 1894–1905 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), for opposing views about the relationship between the Dukes and the Methodist Church in Durham. North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fifth Annual Report, 300; Julian S. Carr, speech to Methodist banquet, Apr. 1911, JSC/SHC/UNC.

121. Durham Recorder, 5 Mar. 1896.

122. St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, The Life and Service of St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church: Fifty Years in the West Durham Community, 1908–1958 (Durham, 1958). Miller and Fletcher, Church and Industry, 207.

123. See Southern Textile Bulletin, 16 Feb. 1928, for the standard industrial and conservative religious rebuttal to Cannon’s letter. Cannon had objected to the institution of the mill village, advocated the right of workers to organize, and called for a living wage in the textile industry. See also Manufacturers Record, 21, 28 Apr., 12 May 1927, for similar opinions.

124. C. C. Spaulding, speech at Howard University, 4 Apr. 1943, quoted in Weare, Black Business, 185.

125. Undated clipping, Natural Baptist Voice, quoted in Weare, Black Business, 189.

126. According to Weare, Black Business, 193, Rev. M. M. Fisher even wrote speeches for Spaulding that included this new emphasis on the rights of labor. Second quotation from C. C. Spaulding to Miles Mark Fisher, 24 Apr. 1939, in Weare, 194.

127. John Donald Rice, “The Negro Tobacco Worker and His Union in Durham, N.C.” (Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, 1941), 62. Fisher’s role is also revealed in Miles Mark Fisher, Friends: A Pictoral History of the Ten Years Pastorate: 1933–1943 (Durham: White Rock Baptist Church, 1943), and *Horace Mize, interview by Stuart Kaufman, in possession of Stuart Kaufman, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.

128. C. C. Spaulding, quoted in Weare, Black Business, 142, referring to the residence he established, the North Carolina Mutual Clerks Home, for single women employees.

129. Raleigh News and Observer, 6 Apr. 1896.

130. North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, Annual Report for 1887, 149–50.

131. *Henry Laws, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

132. Contract between “the Erwin Cotton Mills Company and the Undersigned Employee,” 13 Sept. 1909, KPL/SHC/UNC.

133. Miller and Fletcher, Church and Industry, 208.

134. Quoted from Erwin’s obituary, Durham Morning Herald, 27 Feb. 1932.

135. Weare, Black Business, 139–40.

136. Biographical information from Paul, Durham.

137. Durham Morning Herald, W. A. Erwin obituary, 29 Feb. 1932.

138. Cotton, May 1939, clipping contained in KPL/SHC/UNC, as was other information concerned with the relations between Erwin, his son, K. P. Lewis, and his relatives.

139. Durham Recorder, 16 Apr. 1900.

140. The official Carr version of the relationship is contained in Julian S. Carr, Jr., “Building a Business on the Family Plan.” The title itself may contain inadvertent support for local gossip among black (and some white) Durhamites that Carr had sired black sons who helped his “legitimate” white sons carry the coffin at his funeral in 1924. Walter Weare mentioned this gossip to me in a telephone conversation about Carr, the personification of the “divided mind” of the South, according to Weare. See also Weare, Black Business, 39–42. Ernest Seeman’s American Gold, a roman à clef about Durham, contains a Carr-like figure, General Eugene Pericles Owsley, who dons a Confederate uniform, as Carr did, and was known for his “way with colored ladies” (Seeman, 235–36).

141. Weare, Black Business, 144–52.

142. In May 1900, leading North Carolina textile manufacturers met in Greensboro to formulate a common labor strategy. They decided not to hire union members or workers from struck mills. The agreement, dated 10 May 1900, was signed by men from Erwin Mills, Pearl Mill, and the Durham Cotton Manufacturing Company. A copy of the agreement is contained in the North Caroliniana Collection, UNC.

143. As revealed in KPL/SHC/UNC.

144. Durham Recorder, 19 Jan. 1899.

145. Durham Recorder, 16 Apr. 1900.

146. See Durden, Dukes of Durham, 100–104, 154–55, for discussions of the Dukes’ devotion to the Republican Party and Daniel L. Russell, Republican-Fusion governor from 1896 to 1900. The use of the press to counter Populist criticisms by members of the Durham elite is also discussed in Bode, Protestantism, and Josephus Daniels, Editor in Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941).

147. Phrases such as these frequently appeared in Carr’s speeches, which have been preserved from 1890 to his death in the mid-1920s, JSC/SHC/UNC. The sharpest attack on the Dukes appeared in the Durham Weekly Globe, 8 June 1892. Carr’s bombast made it easier for historian Nannie May Tilley to dismiss Populist arguments as self-serving, as she declared in a letter to Leonard Rapport, in possession of Leonard Rapport, Archivist, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Where Georgia Populism gave way to the rantings of Tom Watson and South Carolina’s Populism produced Cole L. Blease, the death of Leonidias L. Polk led to the eventual rise of Julian S. Carr, Populist, leader of the Confederate Veteran’s Association and tobacco and hosiery entrepreneur.

148. Durham Daily Sun, 21 July 1900, and Oliver H. Orr, Jr., Charles Brantley Aycock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 123–28, 132, 174.

149. North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing, Seventeenth Annual Report (Raleigh, 1903), 141, contains this discussion by E. K. Powe, brother-in-law of W. A. Erwin; K. P. Lewis quoted in ECMCO report, Child Labor file, U.S. Children’s Bureau, CB/NA/DC.

150. K. P. Lewis, ECMCO report, Child Labor file, CB/NA/DC.

151. See the Kemp P. Lewis correspondence for Apr.–Aug. 1924, SHC/UNC.

152. This is revealed by letters in the Lewis papers. See for example K. P. Lewis to Victor S. Bryant, 22 Mar. 1935, in which he opposed constitutional changes that would give more power to the city council; it would be “unfortunate to throw away what we have gained by adopting the managership plan of operation” (KPL/SHC/UNC).

153. The incident is described in the K. P. Lewis papers for 1926 and from the labor point of view in Miller and Fletcher, Church and Industry, 210–11.

154. This was the case in the 1940 strike at Erwin Mills. Lewis sent a letter to Governor Clyde R. Hooey thanking him for his “stand that people who want to work should be allowed to work” (K. P. Lewis to Clyde R. Hooey, 28 Mar. 1940, KPL/SHC/UNC). An earlier letter from Presiding Judge Samuel E. Shull, Court of Common Pleas, Stroudsburg, Pa., suggests that Lewis’s influential connections extended beyond North Carolina. Apparently Shull and Lewis had been classmates at the University of North Carolina and Lewis had commented on Shull’s conviction of Alfred Hoffman, the textile and hosiery organizer, on a “charge of conspiracy” arising from a strike in Pennsylvania. According to Shull, “his conviction met with universal satisfaction . . . and at least for the next two years, neither North Carolina nor Pennsylvania will be annoyed by his activities.” “Mike” Shull to Kemp P. Lewis, 30 Nov. 1931, KPL/SHC/UNC.

155. For examples of the attacks on W. G. Pearson, see Tobacco Plant, 20 Oct. 1886 and 5 Oct. 1888. For the Parrish episode, see the same paper, 14–21 Nov. 1888. In addition to Pearson, four of the seven founders of the North Carolina Mutual had been active in Republican Party politics, but eventually they heeded the warnings of men like Julian S. Carr that “if the negro is to continue to make politics his chief aim . . . there can be but one ending” (Weare, Black Business, 23, 40).

156. Quoted in Durham Recorder, 16 Apr. 1900.

157. Weare, Black Business, 232–33.

158. Durham Morning Herald, 20 June 1919.

159. Albion L. Holsey, “Pearson: The Brown Duke of Durham,” Opportunity, Apr. 1928, pp. 116–17.

160. K. P. Lewis to R. H. Lewis, 18 Jan. 1921, KPL/SHC/UNC.

161. James E. Shepard in Robert Cannon, “The Organization and Growth of Black Political Participation in Durham, N.C.: 1933–1958” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1975); C. C. Spaulding quoted in Walker, “Changes in Race Accommodation,” 306. According to Weare, Black Business, 225–27, Spaulding and Austin “functioned well as a team, one rocking the boat, the other stabilizing it, their reciprocal actions maintaining movement without upheaval” (225), but Cannon’s interpretation, based on reading NAACP records, emphasizes conflict between the two men and portrays Spaulding as always striving to keep the lid on protests from the black community. For information on the Durham Committee on Negro Affairs, see Weare, 240–64; Cannon, “The Organization and Growth of Black Political Participation”; Walker, “Changes in Race Accommodation”; and William R. Keech, The Impact of Negro Voting (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1968). Durham city manager quoted in Weare, 244.

162. Weare, Black Business, 252, 259, 263, 261, 45.

163. Naomi Brooks, “A Southerner’s Point of View about Bryn Mawr,” Bryn Mawr Day, 1922, Hilda Worthington Smith papers, Box 3, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.

164. Daniels, Tar Heels, 107, 116.

165. Ibid., 134.

CHAPTER VI

1. Bessie Taylor Buchanan, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

2. *Hetty Love, interview by Linda Guthrie, personal holding. Here and elsewhere in these notes, an asterisk before a name indicates a pseudonym.

3. Martha Gena Harris, interview by Dolores Janiewski, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

4. Esther Jenks, interview by Dolores Janiewski, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

5. Mary Burdette, interview by Mary O. Cowper, MOC/PL/DU.

6. Even when industrial slavery was the major form of labor control in antebellum factories, planters found that slaves could be rendered unfit for agriculture after exposure to the greater freedom of factory slavery and town life. See Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

7. This is another instance of my disagreement with Dwight Billings’ comparison of the textile industry with the plantation. Placing whites instead of blacks under direct supervision was an innovation rather than a continuation of antebellum traditions. Furthermore, the textile mill village was not a uniquely southern invention but closely resembled the company towns erected in New England and the Middle Atlantic states. See Dwight Billings, Jr., Planters and the Making of a “New South”: Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865–1900 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), and Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978) for comparisons between northern and southern examples of the mill village system.

8. Theoretically, one might refer to this transition as a shift from a private or familial to a public patriarchy in which increasing numbers of white men were becoming subject to the public patriarch embodied in a mill village system. See Carol Brown, “Mothers, Fathers, and Children: From Private to Public Patriarchy,” in Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 239–68, for a discussion of these issues in feminist theory. See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Placing Women’s History in History,” New Left Review, no. 133, May–June 1982, pp. 19–25, for efforts to link changes in gender relationships to changes in the political economy. As expressed by Fox-Genovese, “[gender] difference became an ideological justification for collective male and class dominance in a society that claimed to draw its identity from the freedom of individuals . . . In this respect, the representations of gender difference came to dominate the most fundamental representations of the social order.” Racial differences, although Fox-Genovese does not include them in her discussion, serve a similar ideological purpose by masking the differences in power between classes of white men. The experience in the mill village, however, calls for a modification of Fox-Genovese’s assertion that industrial capitalism strengthened private patriarchal power; clearly, the patriarchal authority of men who entered the textile mill was eroded by their permanent subordination to the authority of mill management. In effect, they became perpetual adolescent “sons” to a patriarch who would never relinquish his authority.

9. Holland Thompson, From the Cotton Field to the Cotton Mill: A Study of Industrial Transition in North Carolina (New York: Macmillan Company, 1906), 207.

10. The cigarette makers made these complaints in the pages of Progress, the journal of the Cigar Makers Progressive Union (CMPU), in which they were the only southern local. The reports of Local 27 began appearing on 26 Sept. 1884, shortly after the local was founded on 14 July “as a benevolent and protective association with fourteen members” (Progress, 26 Sept. 1884). “Tyrannous shope rules” were denounced in Progress, 13 Jan. 1885. In the 24 Apr. 1885 issue, Junius Strickland, the corresponding secretary for Local 27, proposed that the CMPU constitution read: “Workingmen of all countries unite and prepare yourselves for the coming battle, you have nothing to lose but everything to gain.” He warned members against spending money to support electoral candidates, and advised them to “use the money they contemplated spending on election humbugs in buying weapons and preparing for the coming revolution.” When the CMPU altered its constitution to replace the work tobacco (describing the trade of its members) with cigars, Local 27 disappeared from the organization; it continued to exist, however, as a local assembly in the Knights of Labor.

11. Hiram Voss Paul, a local printer recruited into the Knights of Labor, directed these charges against the Dukes in the Journal of United Labor, 6 Aug. 1887. According to Paul, a few local workers, including two women, were also discharged by the Dukes because two knights “happened to speak of some of the hardships and unchristian acts” in the Duke factory.

12. Thompson, From Cotton Field to Cotton Mill, 249. Thompson, however, made this explanation for the exclusion of blacks from the textile mills. Like most commentators, he never explained the discrepancy in policy between the textile and tobacco industries, which calls into question his statement that a “fixed belief” underlay the exclusion of blacks from the mills. Charles S. Johnson, who did not avoid this issue, suggested that the labor-intensive textile industry needed a more cohesive labor force, while greater mechanization in tobacco made this less important. Both industries evolved a particular tradition, possibly without a thought-out reason for so doing. Charles S. Johnson, “The Tobacco Worker: A Study of Tobacco Factory Workers and Their Families,” 2 vols. (1935), Industrial Studies Section, Division of Review, NRA/NA.

13. Washington Duke, quoted in Raleigh News and Observer, 6 Apr. 1896. By 1886, the Tobacco Plant reported that the Duke firm employed 120 “young ladies” as packers (22 Dec. 1886).

14. Harriet L. Herring, Welfare Work in Mill Villages: The Story of Extra-Mill Activities in North Carolina (1929; reprint, Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1986), 270–71. Herring’s book, based on interviews with representative mills, including Erwin and Durham Hosiery Mills, explains that mill housing was “essential to get rid of undesireable families.” By threatening to evict families that violated their moral code, mill owners could make sure that they retained a virtuous, chaste, and temperate work force. This policy also involved a strict monitoring of girls’ sexual behavior and reputation but did not require that management be “equally strict with the boys and men.” Interviews with Bessie Taylor Buchanan, Esther Jenks, Luther Riley (interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/SHC/UNC), and *Henry Laws (interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding) discussed the moral controls in the Erwin mill village. Interviews with *Rose Medlin, *Lona Oakey, *Maude Foushee (interviews by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding) discussed the moral code for the L and M factory, the successor to W. Duke and Sons.

15. *Lona Oakey interview. Oakey prided herself on meeting this requirement, which signified that she belonged to a “higher class of people” than her counterparts at the morally indifferent American Tobacco Company.

16. Ernest Seeman, American Gold (New York: Dial Press, 1978), 256, 69. The historical record offers some evidence to support Seeman’s fictionalized portraits of the two men: Brodie Duke was married four times and was known to have a problem with alcohol; Julian S. Carr was rumored to have had black mistresses and “several Negro sons” as Seeman also alleges (166).

17. *Lona Oakey, interview.

18. Annie Mack Barbee, interview by Beverly Jones, SOHP/SHC/UNC, describes the foremen who tried to “fumble your behind.” *Clara Jeffries, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding, described the “love birds” who offered sexual favors to the visiting officials sent by American Tobacco from New York. They received benefits, such as being able to rest while others were working.

19. Julian S. Carr, Jr., “Building a Business on the Family Plan,” System 35 (7 July 1919): 301–5.

20. E. K. Rowe and K. P. Lewis (then executive assistant to the treasurer), ECMCO, interview by Emma Duke, 11 Apr. 1918; Child Labor Law File, CB/NA/DC.

21. *Jessie Ervin interview, Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

22. Reports of these operatives or letters concerning their activities are contained in KPL/SHC/UNC.

23. This quotation, taken from the memoirs of a white woman who went south to teach in a black school in Wilmington, epitomizes the creation among blacks of a separate morality for dealings with whites. See Lura Beam, He Called Them by the Lightning: A Teacher’s Odyssey in the Negro South, 1908–1919 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 11.

24. W. Izard and A. D. Turrentine, interview by Emma Duke, 11 Apr. 1918, CB/NA/DC.

25. W. C. Cole and Son, interview by Emma Duke, 6 Apr. 1918, CB/NA/DC.

26. C. Tinsley Willis, “Negro Labor in the Tobacco Industry in North Carolina” (Master’s thesis, New York University, 1931). As suggested by the example of the Carr mill, which employed black workers during the wartime labor scarcity, “public sentiment” could be altered to suit managerial necessity.

27. The Kemp P. Lewis papers are the basic source for this data on Lewis’s career, KPL/SHC/UNC.

28. Charles S. Johnson, “The Tobacco Worker”; Willis, “Negro Labor”; and Meyer Jacobstein, The Tobacco Industry in the United States, in the Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Law, 24:3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1907), are among the sources for this description.

29. This date for the entrance of black women in significant numbers into the tobacco industry comes from Joseph Clarke Robert, The Tobacco Kingdom: Plantation, Market, and Factory in Virginia and North Carolina, 1800–1860 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965). Robert states that the percentage of women employed rose from 10 percent in 1850 to 17 percent by 1860 but varied in tobacco centers from 1 percent in Richmond to 33 percent in Petersburg (197). The same decade saw the first introduction of white women into a few Virginia factories because the cost of male slaves had risen too high for manufacturers making plug tobacco (208).

30. U. S. Senate, “Women and Children in Selected Industries,” vol. 13 in Report on the Condition of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, 19 vols., 61st Cong. 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1910), 13:314. Earlier the study describes a factory in which the workers were “very old, others crippled,” seated on low benches “without backs or rests of any kind; the floors are very dirty, the light is poor, and the women have to lean over their work” (13:79).

31. Emma L. Shields, “A Half-Century in the Tobacco Industry,” Southern Workman 52 (1922): 419–25.

32. I am drawing on the theoretical work of labor historians like Alice Kessler-Harris as well as labor economists. For the latter, see Michael Reich, David Gordon, and Richard Edwards, eds., Labor Market Segmentation (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1975). I also drew on many scholars who study “dual labor markets” and “segmented labor processes.” See, for example, Eva Gamarnikow, “Sexual Division of Labour: The Case of Nursing,” in Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production, ed. Annette Kuhn and Ann Marie Wolpe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 96–121. My own work suggests a segmentation by gender, class, and race that would render the term dual labor market inadequate. The notion of hierarchy must also be incorporated into the center of the theory to make it correspond with some precision to the actual case of women in Durham.

33. The photograph illustrated the article by W. E. B. DuBois (written after a visit to Durham), “The Upbuilding of Black Durham,” World’s Work, Jan. 1912, pp. 334–35. The clothing may have been specifically worn for the photograph, but such posturing would only strengthen the message that the image was meant to convey.

34. Hugh P. Brinton, “The Negro in Durham: A Study in Adjustment to Town Life” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1930), 134–35, describes the labor process in a hosiery mill employing an all-black labor force. The description is also based on an interview with *Ada Scott by Peggy Rabb, personal holding.

35. Mary O. Cowper, “Cotton-Cloth: A Type Study of the Community Process,” unpublished paper (1925), p. 82, MOC/PL/DU.

36. *Mollie Seagrove, interview by Linda Daniel, personal holding.

37. Thompson, From Cotton Field to Cotton Mill, 118–33, describes the labor process in a typical North Carolina mill.

38. T. A. Allen, quoted in North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing, Fifteenth Annual Report, 301–2.

39. David Moberg, “A Familiar Story of Changing Times,” In These Times, 3:15 (14–20 Feb.), 1979. See Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); and Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), for a more thorough analysis of these issues.

40. Seeman, American Gold, 174, 273, 251.

41. Kemp P. Lewis, “Need of Cooperation for Our Company’s Good,” 1924; A. L. Agner, report on his course, “Modern Production Methods,” taught by the Business Training Corporation, 8 Feb. 1921, KPL/SHC/UNC. Other reports are contained in the same papers for 1922 and 1923. K. P. Lewis continued to turn to outside experts for advice on managing the labor force at Erwin Mills. For example, in 1938 the Charles E. Bedaux Company, a firm of industrial engineers who specialized in “human power measurement,” advised the company not only on the introduction of new machinery but on the scientific way to manage “laying off and rehiring of employees.” Citing a series of factors to be considered, including seniority, skill, productivity, health, and family, the Bedaux company insisted that “in all cases their rating should be amenable to mathematical, precise, evaluation rather than personal judgment,” an obvious contrast to paternalist managerial practices. See Albert Rauoud to Carl R. Harris, 16 Aug. 1938, EMC/FD/PL/DU. Rauoud was chairman of the Charles E. Bedaux Company, according to its letterhead.

42. KPL/SHC/UNC, 1925–1929, contain correspondence dealing with these issues, including an unsigned petition to K. P. Lewis from the Weavers and Fixers of the No. 1 Weave Room, dated 8 Apr. 1929. Alfred Hoffman’s activities were covered in the Raleigh Union Herald, 1927–1929, and in reports from the Corporation Auxiliary Company, KPL/SHC/UNC. After leaving Durham, Hoffman became embroiled in the famous Marion textile strike of 1929. The Corporation Auxiliary Company sent secret observers to the meetings of the Piedmont Organizing Council and also to meetings of its supporters, who included Frank Graham, Nell Battle Lewis, Mary O. Cowper, and women associated with the workers’ education movement.

43. According to the survey materials used by Caroline Manning and Harriet A. Byrne, “The Effects on Women of Changing Conditions in the Cigar and Cigarette Industries,” U. S. Women’s Bureau Bulletin No. 100 (Washington, D.C.: G. P. O., 1932). The closing of the Brooklyn plant brought the Turkish and special brand production to Durham in Jan. 1930. This led to the employment of 500 new workers, bringing the total work force at the Lucky Strike plant to 1,431, including 757 white women and 54 black women, WB/NA/DC.

44. Manning and Byrne, “Effects on Women,” and Caroline Manning, “Hours and Earnings in Tobacco Stemmeries,” U. S. Women’s Bureau Bulletin No. 127 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1934), and survey materials for both reports, WB/NA/DC. W. B. Mitchell, American Tobacco Company, quoted in NRA “Hearings on Code of Fair Competition in the Cigarette, Smoking Tobacco, Snuff, and Chewing Tobacco Industries,” Aug. 1934, NRA/NA/DC.

45. Kemp P. Lewis, “To the Stockholders and Directors of the Erwin Cotton Mills Company,” 26 Jan. 1935, KPL/SHC/UNC. The K. P. Lewis papers for 1935–1941 cover this long series of conflicts between Erwin workers and management over work rules and workloads.

46. W. B. Mitchell, NRA, “Hearings on Code of Fair Competition,” NRA/NA/DC.

47. Thompson, From Cotton Field to Cotton Mill, 207.

48. Ibid., 206. Paul Wheeler, a Durham manager, presented the second stereotype: “There are lots of lazy men in this country that move to town and put their wives and children in the factory to work for them so they can sit around on the street corners and dry goods boxes and tell yarns and cry hard times” (North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing, Seventeenth Annual Report [Raleigh, 1903], 240–41).

49. *Pearl Barbee, interview by Linda Guthrie, personal holding; Annie Mack Barbee interview; Dora Scott Jones, interview by Beverly Jones, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

50. Mary E. Mebane, Mary (New York: Fawcett Junior, 1981), 98–99, 125.

51. Theotis Williamson, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

52. U.S. Bureau of the Census, The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965), 71.

53. Harry Mortimer Douty, “The North Carolina Industrial Worker, 1880–1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1936).

54. The North Carolina Commissioner of Labor established $560 as a modest standard of living. It included $34 for fuel, $94 for clothing, and $247 for food. A textile worker’s lower housing costs (figured at the average rent of 25 cents per room per week or about $3 per month) reduced the total budget by $20 from the average presented in the North Carolina Bureau of Labor and Printing, Eighteenth Annual Report (Raleigh, 1904), Table 3, “Cost of Living and Retail Price of Food, 1903,” p. 335. Jerome Dowd, a professor of economics and sociology at Trinity College in Durham, collected statistics on the cost of living in Durham in 1899 and published them in “Cheap Labor in the South,” Gunton’s Magazine, Feb. 1900, pp. 113–21.

55. As discussed by Frank H. White, “The Economic and Social Development of Negroes in North Carolina since 1900” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1960). To some extent the Durham example differs from comparisons in Boston presented by Elizabeth Pleck, “A Mother’s Wages: Income Earning among Married Italian and Black Women, 1896–1911,” in A Heritage of Our Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 367–92.

56. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1930, Fifteenth Census, Families: Reports by States (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1933).

57. Based on wage data contained in ECMCO/FD/FL for Erwin workers, and Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 2: 434–38, for Durham tobacco workers.

58. Evidence gathered by the Industrial Studies Section of the NRA contained this wage and occupation data which were included in the records included with the NRA, “Hearings on a Code of Fair Competition,” NRA/NA/DC.

59. Mebane, Mary, 166.

60. Some children “helped” their older relatives by working in the stemmery or hosiery mill, according to interviews with *Dena Coley and *Robert Thompson, D. Janiewski personal holding.

61. Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 2: 401–3.

62. This refers to the arguments made by Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), and Sarah Eisenstein, Give Us Bread but Give Us Roses: Working Women’s Consciousness in the United States, 1890 to the First World War (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), that the impermenence of working women’s presence in the labor force made wage labor “secondary to, and indeed structured by, the expectation of marriage and motherhood” (Eisenstein, 48). By the 1930s, Durham women had moved beyond this short-term commitment to paid employment.

63. Brinton, “The Negro in Durham,” 244, noted that 42 percent of the black laboring class in Durham in the late 1920s depended on the earnings of an employed couple, compared with 26.9 percent supported by an adult male. The increasing numbers of married women in the paid labor force suggested that the same trend applied to white households.

64. There is, of course, a debate among Marxist and socialist feminists whether it is employers alone who benefit from women’s domestic labor or whether working-class male relatives share the benefits. See Natalie J. Sokoloff, Between Money and Love: The Dialectics of Women’s Home and Market Work (New York: Praeger, 1980), 112–80.

65. By non-Marxist, I refer to the definition of “economic exploitation” presented by Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 3, which defines the phrase as the “expropriation of the product of labor without compensation.” These authors also cite Joan Robinson’s definition of exploitation as a worker’s being “paid less than the value of his marginal production” (Joan Robinson, The Economics of Imperfect Competition (London: Macmillan, 1969), 281–83. See Ransom and Sutch, 317. While Ransom and Sutch are willing to assume that the market assigns a fair return to labor and capital, which would mean that only unpaid labor is exploited, Marxists assume that the returns are dictated by unequal power between the two classes based on their different relationship to the means of production. Thus Marxists might more readily describe women as “exploited” in their wage-earning work, while Ransom and Sutch would more readily see exploitation in women’s unpaid domestic labor. However, I feel that both areas of work involve women’s exploitation.

66. *John Lincoln, interview by Travis Jordan, NCFWP/SHC/UNC.

67. Howard Newby, Colin Bell, David Rose, and Peter Saunders, Property, Paternalism, and Power: Class and Control in Rural England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 28.

68. David Metza and David Welham, “The Ordeal of Consciousness,” Theory and Society 9 (1980): 7.

69. E. P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” Journal of Social History 7 (1973–74): 393. See the discussion by Hans Medick, “Plebeian Culture in the Transition to Capitalism,” in Culture, Ideology and Politics, ed. Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 84–112.

70. E. P. Thompson, “The Long Revolution, I,” New Left Review, no. 10 (1961), 33.

71. This emphasis on inequality as “natural” is the other side of the American emphasis on “natural rights” and was emphasized in the South in part to justify slavery.

72. Newby et al., Property, Paternalism, and Power, 29.

73. In the words of Karen Brodkin Sacks, “Labor: White Coats and Pink Collars,” Women’s Review of Books (July 1984): 6–8, “class consciousness has plural foundations” because a gender-specific and racially-specific identity is the take-off point for consciousness (7).

74. Eisenstein, Give Us Bread, 39.

75. See Appendix for a fuller discussion of this issue.

76. “Durhamite,” Letter to the Editor, Journal of United Labor, 23 Aug. 1888.

77. North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, Second Annual Report (Raleigh, 1888), 81–83.

78. Chester Daniels, interview by Glenn Hinson, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

79. Child Labor File, Durham Extracts, CB/NA/DC.

80. Mebane, Mary, 98–99, 108; Theotis Williamson interview.

81. Annie Mack Barbee, interview.

82. Metza and Wellham, “Ordeal of Consciousness,” 6; Annie Mack Barbee interview.

83. *Jessie Ervin, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding; *Pearl Barbee interview.

84. Charlie Decoda Mack, interview by Beverly Jones, SOHP/SHC/UNC; Jessie Ervin, 2d interview; Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 2: 415.

85. *Clairborne Peavey, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

86. Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 2: 420.

87. Mebane, Mary, 173–74.

88. *Louise Couch Jenkins, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

89. Bessie Taylor Buchanan, interview.

90. *Lona Oakey, interview.

91. Charlie Decoda Mack, interview.

92. *Clara Jeffries, interview.

93. Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 2: 427–28.

94. *John Lincoln, NCFWP/SHC/UNC, tried to use education and a promotion to a clerk’s position as a way out of the mill; Mary Mebane also chose education. Pauli Murray left Durham. *Ada Scott left but returned at her daughter’s request, to her ultimate regret, and *Louise Couch Jenkins secured a white collar job on the basis of her college training.

95. Newby et al., Property, Paternalism, and Power, 26–27.

96. Herring, Welfare Work in Mill Villages, 275.

97. Luther Riley, Theotis Williamson, Bessie Taylor Buchanan, interviews.

98. Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 1: 126.

99. Ibid., 2: 420.

100. K. B. Wheeler, NRA, “Hearings on a Code of Fair Competition,” NRA/NA/DC.

101. Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 2: 421.

102. Petition of the Weavers and Fixers of No. 1 Weave Room, KPL/SHC/UNC; Petition of Shop Committee of Bull City Textile Local Union No. 2155, 24 Sept. 1935, KPL/SHC/UNC.

103. H. C. Hall to President Roosevelt, 9 Aug. 1933, Correspondence in support of the Code of Fair Competition for the Cigarette, Snuff, Chewing, and Smoking Tobacco Industry, NRA/NA/DC.

104. Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 2: 421.

105. *Jessie Ervin, interview.

106. *Clara Jeffries and Tillman Jeffries, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

107. Mary Bailey, interview by Glenn Hinson, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

108. Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 2: 428; Annie Mack Barbee interview.

109. Annie Mack Barbee, interview.

110. *Lona Oakey, interview.

111. Mebane, Mary, 177, 178.

112. Seeman, American Gold, 174, 173, 251, 274, 273, 279.

113. Bessie Taylor Buchanan, interview.

114. Phrase from George Gunton, “Factory Labor in the South,” Gunton’s Magazine, Apr. 1898, pp. 227–28.

115. Mebane, Mary, 177.

CHAPTER VII

1. Ernest Seeman, American Gold (New York: Dial Press, 1978), 259.

2. Ibid., 274, 283, 7.

3. See the provocative study of reproduction by Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).

4. This clarification of the complicated levels of meaning for the term reproduction is based on the discussion by Lourdes Beneriá, “Reproduction, Production, and the Sexual Division of Labour,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 3 (1979): 205–6.

5. Seeman, American Gold, 173. For a useful comparison to the Durham ritual, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 97–123, esp. 105–9.

6. The word “economy” is used in these two formulations in its twofold meaning as a system of producing, distributing, and consuming wealth and as the management of that system. “Sexual economy” refers to the distribution or exchange and utilization of women’s reproductive capacities, one of the most important forms of wealth and wealth-gaining assets in most societies. Natalie Z. Davis uses this term in her introduction to Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France (New York: Pantheon, 1983), ix. She discusses the connection between changes in marriage and kinship relations and changes in property and political relationships. In the first, gender is constructed; in the second, class and race.

7. “Bird’s Eye View of the City of Durham” (Madison, Wis.: Ruger and Stoner, 1891), Map Collection, North Carolina Department of History and Archives, Raleigh.

8. Coy T. Phillips, “City Pattern of Durham, North Carolina,” Economic Georgraphy 23 (Oct. 1947): 233–47.

9. Seeman, American Gold, 7.

10. Ida L. Moore, “Description of a Mill Village,” West Durham, 17 Sept. 1938, NCFWP/SHC/UNC.

11. Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (New York: Harper, 1978), 26–27.

12. According to Charles S. Johnson, “The Tobacco Worker: A Study of Tobacco Factory Workers and Their Families,” 2 vols. (1935), Division of Review, Industrial Studies Section, NRA/NA, 25.8 percent of the white tobacco workers interviewed and 8.8 percent of the black workers owned automobiles in 1935 (2:445). At that time, second- and third-hand autos could be purchased for $25–$75.

13. Hugh P. Brinson, “The Negro in Durham: A Study of Adjustment to Town Life” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1930), 222.

14. U.S. Works Project Administration, “Real Property Survey,” W.P.A. Project 3833 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O. 1939).

15. Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 2: 440–42. According to the Johnson survey, the median weekly earnings of white families in Durham were $20.83; black families received $14.11. Using the rule that families should pay about 25 percent of their monthly income for housing, it is clear that far more white than black workers could afford the higher-priced housing.

16. North Carolina Bureau of Vital Statistics, Annual Report for 1934 (Raleigh, 1934), and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1933).

17. Theotis Williamson, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

18. Bessie Taylor Buchanan, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/SHC/UNC; Leonard Rapport, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

19. U.S. Senate, “The Cotton Textile Industry,” Report on the Conditions of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, vol. 1, 81st Cong. 2d Sess. (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1910); U.S. Women’s Bureau, Bulletin No. 52, “Lost Time and Labor Turnover in Cotton Mills” (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1926); U.S. Women’s Bureau, Bulletin No. 70, “Negro Women in Industry in Fifteen States,” (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1929).

20. Brinton, “Negro in Durham,” 118; C. Tinsely Willis, “Negro Labor in the Tobacco Industry in North Carolina” (Master’s thesis, New York University, 1931).

21. Quotation from a series of interviews conducted by Peggy Rabb and Chris Potter with the residents of Henderson and Oldham Towers, two senior citizens centers in Durham in fall 1977 and spring 1978. The residents, aided by Rabb and Potter, put together a slide show of their remembrances, which included this quotation.

22. Travis Jordan, “Life in Erwin Village,” Durham, N.C., 21 Nov. 1938, NCFWP/SHC/UNC.

23. Bessie Taylor Buchanan, interview.

24. *Allie Ennis, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding. Here and elsewhere in the notes, an asterisk indicates a pseudonym.

25. *Calvin Couch, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

26. *Dena Coley, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

27. Quotation from a series of interviews conducted by Dolores Janiewski with people at the Lyons Park Senior Citizens Center in Durham, personal holding.

28. Brinton, “Negro in Durham,” 119. Brinton continues: “An attitude of physical tenseness and helplessness is bred which is disorganizing to family stability and sustained efforts at adjustment, social or economic.”

29. Mary E. Mebane, Mary (New York: Fawcett Junior, 1981), 96–98, 107.

30. Valerie Quinney, “Childhood in a Southern Mill Village before World War I,” unpublished paper, 16–17, later revised as “Farm to Mill: The First Generation,” in Working Lives: The Southern Exposure History of Labor in the South (New York: Pantheon, 1980).

31. A blues musician, interview by Glenn Hinson, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

32. Lyons Park Senior Citizens Center interviews. The Klan march was also discussed by Leonard Rapport.

33. Mebane, Mary, 128, 144–50, 173–74, 177–201, discusses how her views of “bad” or “fast” women altered; Brinton, “Negro in Durham,” 206, discusses “the loafing places, affording an opportunity for demoralizing contacts with baser elements,” in the business district of Hayti. The white male haunts are described by the special operatives hired to spy on Durham workers. For example, see the report for 13–17 Sept. 1919 in W. A. Erwin papers, PL/DU, and also the reports of Special Operative No. 1357 for 27, 28, 31 Mar. 1934; R. L. Roscoe to K. P. Lewis, 21 Mar. 1934: and Frank L. Dobbs to K. P. Lewis, 25 Sept. 1934, KPL/SHC/UNC.

34. Glenn Hinson, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

35. Helen L. Phillips, “Shouting for the Lord: A Black Rite of Modernization” (Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, 1969).

36. Brinton, “Negro in Durham,” 305.

37. According to Jessie Ervin (interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding), women complained to their supervisors when men violated their marital vows. The official Erwin employment contract, as exemplified by one dated 13 Sept. 1909 and signed by C. D. Carter, declared that “no intemperance, profanity, or obscene language or fighting will be tolerated on the premises, nor will gross misconduct or drunkenness be tolerated off the premises . . . Any hand failing to comply with these rules subjects him or herself to discharge without notice,” KPL/SHC/UNC.

38. The Dunnes, interview by Ida L. Moore, West Durham, 12 July 1938, NCFWP/SHC/UNC, discusses one family who ended in Monkey Bottoms because they took coal from the village coal pile and because the husband occasionally drank too much. Bessie Taylor Buchanan, interview, and Luther Riley, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/SHC/UNC, discuss the Erwin policy of dismissing families with unwed mothers.

39. *Martha Hinton, interview by Travis Jordan, 9 Dec. 1938, East Durham, NCFWP/SHC/UNC.

40. Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 2: 415.

41. *Nellie Carter, interview by students in History 101, holding of Professor Sydney Nathans, Department of History, Duke University.

42. *Martha Hinton, interview.

43. *Jessie Ervin, interview.

44. *Clarence Byrd, interview by Ida L. Moore, East Durham Mill Village, 29 July 1939, NCFWP/SHC/UNC.

45. Walter B. Weare, Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), describes the beating and the shooting of the black soldier as two separate events. In the version circulated in Mebane’s community, the events were combined. See Mebane, Mary, 32, 158, 159–65.

46. Bessie Taylor Buchanan, interview.

47. Brinton, “Negro in Durham,” 298, 303–5.

48. For other assessments of the role of religion in stimulating southern women’s social activism and organizing skills, see Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1980), 33–37; Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 134–63; Jacqueline Jones, “To Get Out of This Land of Suffering”: Black Migrant Women, Work, and the Family in Northern Cities, 1900–1930 (Wellesley, Mass.: Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, 1982); and Mary E. Frederickson, “Shaping a New Society,” in Women in New Worlds: Historical Perspectives on the Wesleyan Tradition (Nashville: Abington Press, 1981), 345–61.

49. Murray, Proud Shoes, 270; Pauli Murray, “The Fourth Generation of Proud Shoes,” Southern Exposure 4 (Winter 1977): 4–9.

50. Report of the Durham School Board, 1928–1929, KPL/SHC/UNC.

51. Mebane, Mary, 77, 202–3, was puzzled by her community’s ambiguous attitude toward sexuality: “Though the church teaches Biblical chastity and preaches that it is better to marry than to burn, still underlying it is a strong current that says: Better some physical intimacy than none” (202). Mebane resisted the social pressure, but *Pearl Barbee and *Bernice Jefferson (interviews by Dolores Janiewski, personal holdings) did not, to their eventual regret.

52. *Pearl Barbee, interview.

53. Ozzie Richmond, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

54. *Allie Ennis, interview.

55. Rabb and Potter, interviews at Lyons Center.

56. Glenn Hinson, interview.

57. From the papers of Mary O. Cowper. A Durham daycare center was ultimately named after her to honor her efforts in the 1930s and 1940s; MOC/PL/DU.

58. “C. P. Ellis,” interview by Studs Terkel, in his American Dreams: Lost and Found (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), 219–33.

59. Annie Mack Barbee, interview.

60. Leonard Rapport, interview.

61. Theotis Williamson, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

62. Ozzie Richmond, interview.

63. *Louise Couch Jenkins, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

64. Ida L. Moore, “East Durham Mill Village,” 12 Sept. 1938, East Durham, NCFWP/SHC/UNC.

65. Mebane, Mary, 250–53.

66. Pauli Murray, of course, also escaped by going north to finish her education.

67. U.S. Children’s Bureau, “Extracts from Durham Schedules,” Child Labor Law series, CB/NA/DC. These were based on interviews by Emma Duke, a Children’s Bureau investigator sent to Durham in 1918.

68. Mebane, Mary, 203. The entire sentence reads, “And it was my secret guilt that I had longings to do better than that” in reference to a destiny in “field or factory.”

69. *Dena Coley, Theotis Williamson, *Allie Ennis, *Louise Couch Jenkins, *Calvin Couch, interviews; *Rose Weeks, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

70. Annie Mack Barbee, interview.

71. Esther Jenks, interview by Dolores Janiewski, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

72. *Hetty Love, interview by Linda Wright, personal holding.

73. *Edward T. Williams, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding. One person told Leo Davis that black ministers and businessmen, the church’s major financial supporters, feared that unions would compete with them for influence in the black community: Leo Davis, “The History of the Labor Movement among Negro Tobacco Workers in Durham, North Carolina, with Specific References to A.F.L. Locals 194, 204, 208” (Master’s thesis, North Carolina Central College, 1949). John Donald Rice, “The Negro Tobacco Worker and His Union in Durham, N.C.” (Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, 1941), concurs with this assessment. The chief officer of the Tobacco Workers International Union detected a strictly mercenary motive behind black ministerial opposition to the TWIU campaign in Durham: “They were only looking for the smile you can feel with your hand,” he wrote to the TWIU organization about local black ministers. See E. Lewis Evans to Duby S. Upchurch, 28 July 1934, TWIU/ML/UM.

74. The last quotation is from Spencer T. Miller, Jr., and Joseph E. Fletcher, The Church and Industry (New York: Longmans, Green, 1930), 214. Bernard M. Cannon, “Social Deterrents to the Unionization of Southern Cotton Mill Workers” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1952), found a high correlation between Pentecostalism and anti-union sentiment. Franz Daniel of the Textile Workers Union of America complained about “revivalists paid by the manufacturer who told the workers that we were the agents of the devil and that the mark of the beast was on our forehead” (Textile Workers Union of America, “Building a Union of Textile Workers: Report of Two Years of Progress,” Philadelphia, Pa., 15–19 May 1939). Later religious journals such as the Trumpet and Militant Truth propagandized in the same vein and received contributions from manufacturers. Anti-union lawyer Frank A. Constangy, however, argued that the real reason that the “fundamentalist preacher” opposed unions was “probably and likely competition from Union organizers” for “his position of being the spokesman and leader of his group”: Frank A. Constangy to Dr. Frank T. DeVyver, Director of Industrial Relations, Erwin Mills, 24 Oct. 1950, FD/ECMC/PL/DU. John A. Peel, president of the Durham Central Labor Union, and D. C. Parker of the Carpenters pointed to monetary inducements as one of the major reasons for the silence of local churches. According to Peel, “Most of the Churches around here get all their money from the rich mill owners, and would not dare to be open and above board in their support of the unions” (Miller and Fletcher, Church and Industry, 212).

75. Rice, “Negro Tobacco Worker”; Weare, Black Business; *Horace Mize, interview by Stuart Kaufman, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park; and Miles Mark Fisher, Friends: A Pictoral History of Ten Years’ Pastorate, 1933–43 (Durham, N.C.: White Rock Baptist Church, 1943)—all concur on the exceptional support given by Fisher to the tobacco workers.

76. *Jessie Ervin, interview; Miller and Fletcher, Church and Industry, 212, 210.

77. Bessie Taylor Buchanan and Esther Jenks, interviews.

78. K. P. Lewis to W. D. Carmichael, 1 Mar. 1926; KPL/SHC/UNC. The same incident is also reported in Miller and Fletcher, Church and Industry, concerning the film, “Labor’s Reward.” The mayor gave permission to use the city auditorium but the city council refused, leading to a protest meeting and the film’s eventual showing at the Orpheum Theater. Four years later, Lewis advised Will Carr, a member of the city council, to let the “labor people” use the auditorium for an address by the president of the AFL because “we could not afford to add fuel to the flame”: K. P. Lewis to W. A. Erwin, 17 Feb. 1930, KPL/SHC/UNC.

79. Miller and Fletcher, Church and Industry, 198–99, 193–94.

80. Katherine Norman, interview in MOC/PL/DU; Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 1: 96.

81. Chester and Roxanne Clarke, interview by Glenn Hinson, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

82. Constangy to DeVyver, FD/ECMC/PL/DU.

83. Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 1: 105–6, 2: 591–93, 413–14, 417, 427–29.

84. Mebane, Mary, 141–44, 151–53, 179–82, 194–97, 237–39, describes incidents of violence and abuse.

85. Constangy to DeVyver, FD/ECMC/PL/DU. The other trade secrets involved a manager becoming a “part of the community . . . gaining the support of his employees” and “the support of the so-called respectable element of the community” by conforming to the “local mores.” Last quotations from David Matza and David Wellman, “The Ordeal of Consciousness,” Theory and Society 9 (January 1980): 6–7, 26.

86. John Paul Lucas, Duke Power Company, to K. P. Lewis, 5 Jan. 1928; circular by W. Bradford, District Agent, National Merchants and Manufacturers Protective Association, 14 Oct. 1929. These, of course, were letters from manufacturers and industrial espionage agencies attempting to prevent unionization. K. P. Lewis was also in communication with the Railway Audit and Inspection Company, from whom he usually hired operatives for use in Erwin Mills, KPL/SHC/UNC. The use of such professional services apparently began with an agreement among the leading mills of North Carolina, signed on 10 May 1900, during the first concerted campaign to organize the textile industry. The mills agreed to hire an agent, not to work “Union Labor,” not to “employ any of the hands” that were involved in a strike or lockout at any mill, and to appoint a “Central Committee of five to watch the labor unions.” A copy of the agreement, signed at Charlotte, is located in the North Caroliniana collection, UNC.

87. The culture of the southern mill worker will be most thoroughly discussed in Christopher Daly, Jacquelyn Hall, Lu Ann Jones, Robert Korstad, James Leloudis, and Mary Murphy, “Like a Family”: An Oral History of the Textile South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming.)

88. K. P. Lewis to John Paul Lucas, Duke Power, 8 Feb. 1928, KPL/SHC/UNC. The men to whom Lewis referred included several professors at the University of North Carolina, Broadus Mitchell from Johns Hopkins University, and Alfred Hoffman of the Hosiery Workers.

89. Weare, Black Business, 193. The quotation is from a speech by C. C. Spaulding written by Rev. M. M. Fisher.

90. Ibid., 225–64.

91. W. H. Gray, Railway Audit and Inspection Co., to “Att. of 700,” stamped “received April 16, 1935, Exhibit 169,” in U.S. Senate, Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor, 74th Cong., 2d sess., Hearings, Part 1: Labor Espionage and Strikebreaking: Railway Audit & Inspection Co., Inc., National Corporation Service Inc., 21 Aug., 22, 23 Sept. 1936 (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1936), 323; Carl Goerch, publisher of The State, to K. P. Lewis, 24 May 1934, KPL/SHC/UNC. Goerch was reporting his conversation with Albert Beck, organizer for the United Textile Workers, and offering his sympathy to Lewis.

92. K. P. Lewis to J. C. Thorne, 23 Feb. 1926; K. P. Lewis to Fred R. Marvin, 24 Feb. 1926; K. P. Lewis to W. D. Carmichael, 26 Feb. 1926; and Margaret C. Robinson to K. P. Lewis, 12 Mar. 1926, KPL/SHC/UNC.

93. *Nellie Carter, interview.

94. MOC/PL/DU.

CHAPTER VIII

1. Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (Harmonds-worth, Eng.: Penguin, 1974), 33–35.

2. From the title of a book by Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (London: Merlin, 1979).

3. For examples of women’s activism elsewhere in the textile industry, see Melton A. McLaurin, Paternalism and Protest: Southern Mill Workers and Organized Labor, 1875–1905 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1971).

4. Journal of United Labor, 6 Aug. 1887.

5. For a discussion of the policy of the Knights of Labor toward working women, see Susan Levine, Labor’s True Woman: Carpet Weavers, Industrialization, and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984).

6. Raleigh News and Observer, 18 Aug. 1900.

7. Raleigh News and Observer, 26 Aug. 1900.

8. See Ernest Seeman, American Gold (New York: Dial Press, 1978), 173–74, for a fictional account of the strike and its aftermath. See the Durham Daily Sun, 30 Aug. 1900, for a report of the actual condition of the strikers and Erwin’s charitable decision to open the company store to them (but not to rehire them).

9. Arthur Vance Cole papers, 1917–1920, PL/DU, are the source for this discussion. Cole was the organizer of the TWIU local. For the local’s statement of principles, see AVC, 30 Aug. 1919; for the invitation to the ladies, see 26 Aug. 1919.

10. E. Lewis Evans to Arthur V. Cole, 13 Oct. 1919; Henry McAndrews to Arthur Cole, 13 Sept., 26 Dec. 1919. McAndrews, then president of the TWIU, offered Cole a job organizing in Petersburg, Va. Hugh P. Brinton, “The Negro in Durham: A Study in Adjustment to Town Life” (PH.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1930), covers the same episode.

11. Durham Herald, 20 Aug. 1919.

12. Report of Operative No. 230, 23 Jan. 1920, FD/ECMC/PL/DU.

13. Spencer T. Miller, Jr., and Joseph E. Fletcher, The Church and Industry (New York: Longmans, Green, 1930), 194–95; Henry Eatough, UTW organizer in Charlotte, report in Textile Worker, Aug. 1925, p. 284; Ervin Holt, Local 31, in the Proceedings, Fifteenth Annual Convention of American Federation of Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers, 7 Sept. 1926 (Philadelphia, 1926), 33.

14. Miller and Fletcher, Church and Industry, 194; phrase from Report, Builder’s Exchange of Durham, Oct. 1926, KPL/SHC/UNC. K. P. Lewis and his allies believed that the employment of a unionized firm to build Duke University’s new campus threatened just such an invasion. They also corresponded with John Paul Lucas of Duke Power. See Kemp P. Lewis to J. C. Thorne, 23 Feb. 1926; Kemp P. Lewis to Carmichael, 23 Feb. 1926; John Paul Lucas to Kemp P. Lewis, 5 Jan. 1928; Kemp P. Lewis to John Paul Lucas, 8 Feb. 1928; Kemp P. Lewis to W. D. Carmichael, 19, 22, Feb. 1929, KPL/SHC/UNC.

15. Durham Central Labor Union to President Steele, American Federation of Full-Fashioned Hosiery Workers; Alfred Hoffman, Proceedings, Sixteenth Annual Convention of the AFFHW, 6–9 Sept. 1927 (Philadelphia, 1927), 18, 376; Alfred Hoffman, Seventeenth Annual Convention of AFFHW, 4–8 Sept. 1928 (Philadelphia, 1928), 376. A brief biography of Alfred Hoffman is contained in his letter to A. J. Muste, 17 July 1928, in which he affirmed his support of Brookwood Labor College and declared that “no attempt was made to empregnate me with Communistic ideas or philosophies, or hair splittings” during “my year’s attendance at Brookwood.” Brookwood was then under attack in the AFL for leftist tendencies. Hoffman’s letter is contained in the Local 189 file, American Federation of Teachers papers, the Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit, Mich.

16. The surveys are contained in MOC/PL/DU. She collected them for use in an unpublished paper, Mary O. Cowper, “Cotton Cloth: A Type Study of the Community Process,” written under the direction of Howard W. Odum, while Cowper was enrolled at the University of North Carolina, 1924–1925, MOC/PL/DU.

17. *Nellie Carter, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding. Cowper’s sources include two other women who attended the Bryn Mawr Summer School under the auspices of the Durham YWCA.

18. Mary Frederickson, “The Southern Summer School for Women Workers in Industry: A Female Strategy for Collective Action in the South,” paper read at the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, Mount Holyoke College, Mass., 28 Aug. 1978. Mary Frederickson has a book on the same subject forthcoming from Indiana University Press.

19. *Nellie Carter, interview.

20. Corporation Auxiliary Company report on the convention in 1930 of the N. C. Federation of Labor, KPL/SHC/UNC. Ironically for Lewis, the spy discovered that his sister was one of his opponents.

21. See the Raleigh Union Herald, 3, 26 June 1920. The campaign for the constitutional amendment granting women the vote and the new recruitment drive for the revived Ku Klux Klan coincided. North Carolina did not ratify the 19th amendment until 1970.

22. Brinton, “Negro in Durham,” 141.

23. Ibid., 146–48. According to Robert L. Allen, Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1975), racism was prevalent throughout the labor movement, not merely in the South.

24. Durham black leaders are quoted in the Durham Morning Herald, 2 Oct. 1919; Charles S. Johnson, “The Tobacco Worker: A Study of Tobacco Workers and Their Families,” 2 vols., Division of Review, Industrial Studies Section, NRA/NA/DC, 2: 412. See also “Open Letter to William Green, President of the AFL,” in Opportunity, Feb. 1930, 56–57, for black criticisms of AFL policies; Horace R. Cayton and George S. Mitchell, Black Workers and the New Unions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939). For tobacco unions in particular, see Herbert R. Northrup, The Negro in the Tobacco Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970).

25. *Jessie Ervin, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding. (Here and elsewhere in these notes, an asterisk indicates a pseudomyn.) The arrest of the organizer, Marvin Ritch, was reported in the Durham Herald, 19 Sept. 1919. See also the issues of Southern Textile Bulletin for 1919–1921.

26. Hoffman’s report on the Henderson strike is contained in Proceedings, Sixteenth Annual Convention of the AFFHW, 376. Persuaded by Hoffman’s report, the president of the Hosiery Workers pledged to “work more or less in secret gradually educating the Southern workers to a realization of the present day industrial situation.” In his remarks Hoffman also noted that many Henderson workers were relatives of Durham workers.

27. For descriptions of the strikes and the Piedmont Organizing Council, see George Sinclair Mitchell, Textile Unionism in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1931); see also the Raleigh Union Herald and the Textile Worker for 1927–1929. Details of the Cone incident are contained in the James Evans interview by Ida L. Moore, NCFWP/SHC/UNC; the R. J. Reynolds incident is reported in Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 2: 587–89. Simultaneously with the campaign in Winston-Salem, Kemp P. Lewis and W. D. Carmichael were involved in a covert scheme with a man inside the local TWIU to prevent a similar attempt in Durham. Lewis even advised Carmichael to pay the informant several thousand dollars to call off a planned boycott of L and M: Lewis to Carmichael, 19 Feb. 1929, KPL/SHC/UNC. Whether Carmichael followed this advice isn’t clear, but the TWIU had ceased activities in Durham by 1930, according to TWIU records, TWIU/ML/UM.

28. *Clara Layton, interview by Ida L. Moore, NCFWP/SHC/UNC.

29. *Henry Laws, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding; David Matza and David Wellman, “The Ordeal of Consciousness,” Theory and Society 9 (Jan. 1980): 7.

30. James Evans, interview.

31. Southern Summer School for Women Workers in Industry, untitled pamphlet, Summer Session, 1931, Arden, N.C., North Caroliniana Collection, UNC. The last phrase is taken from T. W. Bradford, District Agent, National Merchants and Manufacturers Protective Association, to Kemp P. Lewis, 14 Oct. 1929, KPL/SHC/UNC. Bradford was soliciting Lewis to “allow us to place with you as workers our trained confidential agents . . . We can furnish agents male or female, union or non-union as may best suit the locality or particular situation.” Apparently such agencies were aware that employers perceived a widening “gap between employer and employee” that could only be bridged by an agent disguised as a worker, “just ‘one of many.’” Although Lewis did not hire this firm, he did use the Railway Audit and Inspection Company’s services and amateur industrial spies in 1929 and 1934. He seems to have begun to fear that workers had drawn firmer boundaries between “them and us,” had begun to see their interests in opposition to his, and might be organizing against him. These three steps are crucial to the process of forming a class-conscious workers’ movement, according to Matza and Wellman, “Ordeal of Consciousness,” 7.

32. James Evans, interview.

33. *Maggie Daws, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

34. Matza and Wellman, “Ordeal of Consciousness,” 9. The authors identify this process of the “transformation of national minorities from isolated periphery to integral core of the working class” as a product of “particular times” involving “a rapid coming together of discrete tendencies which were previously unrelated.” If southern workers, black and white, can be ascribed “minority status,” as I believe, then such a period occurred in the 1930s and 1940s before southern workers were once again pushed to the semi-periphery of the organized working class.

35. This section from the NIRA was quoted in a flyer distributed in Durham; a copy exists in KPL/SHC/UNC.

36. Quotation from E. L. Crouch to E. Lewis Evans, 2 Aug. 1933, E. L. Crouch file, Series 2, TWIU/ML/UM.

37. E. L. Crouch to Evans, 28 July 1933, TWIU/ML/UM.

38. W. B. Culbreth to E. Lewis Evans, 29 July 1933, Local 176 file, Series 3, TWIU/ML/UM.

39. E. Lewis Evans to W. B. Culbreth, 17 Aug. 1933, Local 176 file, TWIU/ML/UM.

40. E. Lewis Evans to Duby S. Upchurch, 22 Jan., 19 Mar. 1934; Duby S. Upchurch to E. Lewis Evans, 19, 24, 31 Mar. 1934, Duby S. Upchurch file, Series 2, TWIU/ML/UM.

41. Duby S. Upchurch to E. Lewis Evans, 5, 11, 23 May 1934, Series 2, TWIU/ML/UM.

42. E. Lewis Evans to Duby S. Upchurch, 28 July 1934, Series 2, TWIU/ML/UM.

43. Reports of Operative No. 3157, Railway Audit and Inspection Service, 25 Mar.–l Apr. 1934, KPL/SHC/UNC.

44. Carl Goerch to K. P. Lewis, 25 May 1934, KPL/SHC/UNC.

45. John W. Kennedy, “The General Strike in the Textile Industry” (Master’s thesis, Duke University, 1947); Durham Morning Herald, 24 Aug. 1934.

46. Hoffman, Sixteenth Annual Convention of AFFHW.

47. Duby S. Upchurch to E. Lewis Evans, 6 Apr. 1934, Series 2, TWIU/ML/UM.

48. Duby S. Upchurch to E. Lewis Evans, 4 Aug. 1934, Series 2, TWIU/ML/UM; John P. Davis, chairman of the Joint Committee on National Recovery, after a visit to Durham to check on the effects of the NRA code on black tobacco workers, NRA/NA/DC.

49. Duby S. Upchurch to E. Lewis Evans, 2 July 1934, Series 2, TWIU/ML/UM.

50. Charles S. Lakey to E. Lewis Evans, 15 June 1934, Series 1, TWIU/ML/UM.

51. Durham Morning Herald, 4 Sept. 1934.

52. A reporter circulated through the crowd to interview participants (including the woman quoted in Chap. 1), Durham Morning Herald, 4 Sept. 1934.

53. Kemp P. Lewis, “To the Stockholders and Directors of the Erwin Cotton Mills Company,” 26 Jan. 1935, KPL/SHC/UNC.

54. Durham Morning Herald, 6 Sept. 1934. Also, see description in Chap. 1.

55. Durham Morning Herald, 23 Sept. 1934.

56. James Cavanaugh, Textile Workers Union of America oral history project, to Dolores Janiewski, 21 Nov. 1978, personal holding. Robert Murray, a Durham striker and local leader, was interviewed by John Kennedy for his master’s thesis; he reported that pickets in Durham performed their duties without knowledge of the UTW’s overall strategy. C. W. Bolick, a UTW organizer, quit the union after the strike. See C. W. Bolick, “Why I Quit the U.T.W.,” Textile Bulletin, 11 Apr. 1935, pp. 10, 24. The UTW never recovered although it continued to exist.

57. See also John Wesly Kennedy, “A History of the Textile Workers Union of America, C.I.O.” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1950).

58. Textile Worker, Dec. 1934; Railway Audit and Inspection Company, Report of Operative No. 3574, 30 Sept. 1934, KPL/SHC/UNC.

59. Durham Hosiery Mills vs. American Federation of Hosiery Workers, 31 Oct. 1934, Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, NA/DC.

60. Durham Cotton Manufacturing Company vs. Local 2155, Textile Labor Relations Board, 4 Oct. 1934, NRA/NA/DC.

61. Durham Hosiery Mills vs. American Federation of Hosiery Workers’ local, Textile Labor Relations Board, 2 Nov. 1934, NRA/NA/DC.

62. Kemp P. Lewis, “Report to the Stockholders,” 26 Jan. 1935, KPL/SHC/UNC.

63. Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 2: 414.

64. Ibid., 2:413.

65. Ibid., 2: 414.

66. Ibid., 2:413.

67. “The Tobacco Workers International Union,” 16 May 1935, Tobacco Studies Section, NRA/NA/DC.

68. Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 2: 415.

69. *Ella Faucette, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

70. *Rose Weeks, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

71. *Maggie Daws, interview.

72. L and M vs. TWIU Local 176, 11 Mar.–30 Oct. 1935, Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, NA/DC; Local 176 files, 1935, Series 3, TWIU/ML/UM.

73. Local 183 files, 1935–1936, Series 3, TWIU/ML/UM; *Rose Weeks, interview; *Henry Laws, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

74. Daisy R. Jones to E. Lewis Evans, 10 Oct. 1938, Local 194 file, Series 3, TWIU/ML/UM. See also Leo Davis, “The History of the Labor Movement among Negro Tobacco Workers in Durham, N.C., with Specific Reference to A.F.L. Locals 194, 204, 208” (Master’s thesis, North Carolina Central College, 1949); John Donald Rice, “The Negro Tobacco Worker and His Union in Durham, North Carolina” (Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina, 1941).

75. E. Lewis Evans to T. J. Atwater, 23 Oct. 1939, Local 194 file, Series 3, TWIU/ML/UM.

76. Local 204 to E. Lewis Evans, 10 Dec. 1938, Local 204 file, Series 3, TWIU/ML/UM.

77. Durham Morning Herald, 25 July 1935.

78. Ibid.; Durham Hosiery Mills vs. A.F.H.W. Local, 23 July, 18 Aug. 1935, Textile Labor Relations Board, NRA/NA/DC.

79. Durham Hosiery Mills report to stockholders, 26 Nov. 1935, KPL/SHC/UNC.

80. Kemp P. Lewis to Mrs. Hargrove Bellamy [Sara Erwin Bellamy], 5 Sept. 1935, KPL/SHC/UNC.

81. Luther Riley, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

82. Although Lewis was aware in May 1937 that the “union forces are working at Durham very hard,” he received his “first visit from the C.I.O. Committee” in mid-November. Kemp P. Lewis to J. C. Thorne, 10 May, 19 Nov. 1937, KPL/SHC/UNC. For information on the TWUA, see Kennedy, “Textile Workers Union.”

83. Election results in ECMC/FD/PL/DU.

84. Kemp P. Lewis to W. R. Perkins, 2 Apr., 18 July 1938, KPL/SHC/UNC; N. A. Gregory [Erwin supervisor], “Diary,” 19 June 1939, ECMC/FD/PL/DU.

85. Luther Riley, interview.

86. Esther Jenks and *Jessie Ervin, interviews.

87. E. Lewis Evans to P. M. Taylor, 13 Oct. 1937, E. Lewis Evans file, Series 1; Lewis G. Hines to E. Lewis Evans, 20 Oct. 1937, E. Lewis Evans to Lewis G. Hines, 28 Oct. 1937, AFL file, Series 1, TWIU/ML/UM.

88. Stuart B. Kaufman, “The Tobacco Workers International Union,” unpublished manuscript, Stuart B. Kaufman holding, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park, 127–29.

89. H. A. McCrimmon to E. Lewis Evans, 22 May 1937, H. A. McCrimmon file, Series 2, TWIU/ML/UM.

90. E. Lewis Evans to S. E. Blane, 24 June 1937; S. E. Blane to E. Lewis Evans, 26 June 1937; E. Lewis Evans to S. E. Blane, 29 June 1937, T. L. Copley file, TWIU/ML/UM.

91. Much of Evans’s correspondence from 1934 to 1940 with H. A. McCrimmon and T. L. Copley, his closest allies in Durham, concerned his efforts to discover the dissidents among local tobacco workers. See the H. A. McCrimmon files and the T. L. Copley files, Series 2, 1934–1940, TWIU/ML/UM.

92. S. E. Blane to E. Lewis Evans, 26 June 1937, T. L. Copley file, TWIU/ML/UM. The investigators for the Johnson survey elicited this comment from an ardent union man in Durham: “I think we’re going to get a closed shop . . . The Niggers will have a closed shop, too. They will never get as much as us though. The company couldn’t afford that” (Johnson, “Tobacco Worker,” 104).

93. Beginning in 1937, the CIO moved into the tobacco industry but its activities were concentrated in centers other than Durham. Most local blacks chose the alliance with white activists, but Oliver Harvey refused to be “Jim Crowed.” See Ed McConville, “Oliver Harvey: ‘Got to Take Some Risks,’” Southern Exposure, 7:2 (1978), p. 24. Harvey refused to join the segregated TWIU local when he arrived in Durham in the 1930s and later went to Duke University where he became involved in forming an independent black local which joined an integrated international union. Robert Korstad, Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is currently completing a dissertation on Local 22 of the United Cannery, Agricultural, and Processing Workers of America, later renamed Food, Tobacco, and Allied Workers, the CIO affliate that organized tobacco workers. See also my article, “Subversive Sisterhood: Black Women and Unions in the Southern Tobacco Industry,” in Southern Women: The Intersection of Race, Class and Gender, a working paper series published by the Center for Research on Women, Memphis State University, July 1984.

94. Durham Morning Herald, 18 Apr. 1939; Ernest Latta, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/SHC/UNC. According to Latta, “We emphasized the fact that if they let us have the strike, there’d be no violence . . . It was our intention to have an honorable, peaceful strike.”

95. Contracts for L and M Locals 176, 177, 210, 208, 202, 9 June 1939, ECMC/FD/DU.

96. Lewis, of course, was not pleased to see L and M capitulate, as was revealed by the company’s careful monitoring of contracts between the TWIU and L and M. His earlier alliance with W. D. Carmichael in the 1920s had been intended to avert just such a calamity. ECMC/FD/PL/DU.

97. *Horace Mize, interview by Stuart Kaufman, Stuart Kaufman holding, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park; Chester and Roxanne Clarke, interview by Glenn Hinson, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

98. Annie Mack Barbee, interview by Beverly Jones, SOHP/SHC/UNC; Chester and Roxanne Clarke, interview.

99. Daisy R. Jones to E. Lewis Evans, 17 Mar. 1940, Local 194 file, Series 3, TWIU/ML/UM.

100. Contract between L and M and TWIU Local 194, 3 Oct. 1939, ECMC/PL/DU.

101. As explained by *Oscar Scoggins, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding. See also Jean M. Cary, “The Forced Merger of Local 208 and Local 176 of the T.W.I.U. at L & M in Durham, North Carolina” (Master’s thesis, Duke University, 1971), for a continuation of the story.

102. As described by Stuart Kaufman, “Tobacco Workers International Union.”

103. As revealed in TWUA Local 246 vs. Erwin Cotton Mills Company before the National Labor Relations Board, ECMC/FD/PL/DU.

104. Erwin Shop Committee reports, ECMC/FD/PL/DU.

105. William H. Ruffin to Kemp P. Lewis, “Memorandum to Mr. K. P. Lewis,” 2 Aug. 1939, KPL/SHC/UNC.

106. William H. Ruffin to Kemp P. Lewis, 27 Feb. 1940, KPL/SHC/UNC. Ruffin would later succeed Lewis as president of the company

107. Based on my analysis of the strike records prepared by Erwin Mills for the NLRB in the strike’s aftermath, ECMC/FD/PL/DU.

108. Esther Jenks, interview.

109. Kemp P. Lewis to Clairborne Carr, 18 Mar. 1940, KPL/SHC/DU.

110. Kemp P. Lewis to Clyde R. Hooey, 28 Mar. 1940, KPL/SHC/DU. Hooey, a prominent attorney associated with the textile industry before his entry into public office, had prosecuted the Gastonia strikers.

111. Kemp P. Lewis to Magruder Dent, 26 Mar. 1940, KPL/SHC/UNC.

112. Esther Jenks, interview.

113. Luther Riley, interview.

114. *Charlie Riddick, interview by Dolores Janiewski, personal holding.

115. Bessie Taylor Buchanan, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

116. Kemp P. Lewis to J. C. Thorne, 17 July 1940, KPL/SHC/UNC.

117. L. P. McLendon to W. R. Perkins, “re: N.L.R.B. vs. Erwin Mills,” 19 Apr. 1940, KPL/SHC/UNC.

118. Kemp. P. Lewis to J. C. Thorne, 17 July 1940, KPL/SHC/UNC.

119. Kemp P. Lewis to W. R. Perkins, 10 Sept. 1940, KPL/SHC/UNC.

120. Henry Nathan Mims, “Impact of Union-Management Relations on Management’s Industrial Relations Policy: A Study of the Erwin Cotton Mills Company and the T.W.U. of A.” (Master’s thesis, Cornell University, 1949).

121. Esther Jenks, interview.

122. Mims, “Union-Management Relations.” Frank DeVyver was hired to deal with labor relations after the onset of collective bargaining.

123. *Joe Daniels, *Rachel Medlin, *Ada Scoggins, interviews by Dolores Janiewski, personal holdings.

124. Wilbur Hobby, interview by Bill Finger, SOHP/SNC/UNC; Robert Cannon, “The Organization and Growth of Black Political Participation in Durham, N.C., 1933–1958” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1975); Margaret Elaine Burgess, Negro Leadership in a Southern City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960); Durham Labor News, 1945–1955; and Esther Jenks, *Henry Laws, *Charles Riddick, interviews.

125. Based on the interviews and my own observations of Durham during the years that I spent in that city (1974–1979).

126. *Ella Faucette, interview.

127. *Pearl Barbee and *Oscar Scoggins, interviews.

128. Annie Mack Barbee, interview.

129. Bessie Taylor Buchanan, interview.

130. Wilbur Hobby, interview; Local 208 files, Series 3, TWIU/ML/UM. In the Local 183 files for the 1970s are some newspaper clippings alleging that some members of that local also belonged to the KKK, Local 183 file, Series 3, TWIU/ML/UM.

131. Floyd McKissick in “Tobacco Workers International Union and Local Union No. 208 Hearing,” Durham Labor Temple, 26–27 Aug. 1964, Local 208 file, Series 3, TWIU/ML/UM. See Cary, “Forced Merger of Local 208 and 176,” for more information on the battle by Local 208 to retain its autonomy and its ultimate defeat.

132. *Charlie Riddick and *Jessie Ervin, interviews.

133. Luther Riley, Ethel and Fannie Jenks, and *Everett Hancock were among the union stalwarts who left the textile industry as a result of the Second World War. West Durham mill village also began to be sold in the same period.

134. *Horace Mize, interview.

135. Sheila Rowbotham warned against this tendency of a “particular oppressed group” to substitute its own narrow definition of oppression rather than to deal with all of the sources of division and exploitation: Woman’s Consciousness, 27–28.

136. Based on my discussions with Robert Korstad, who is currently completing work on the CIO’s tobacco worker unions.

137. Ozzie Richmond, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

138. *Rose Weeks, interview.

139. Martha Gena Harris, interview by Dolores Janiewski, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

140. Ernest Latta, interview by Lanier Rand, SOHP/SHC/UNC.

141. As revealed by the files for Roy Trice and George Benjamin, Series 2, TWIU/ML/UM; and *Horace Mize, interview.

142. Bessie Taylor Buchanan, interview.