[During the Great Depression, St Louis’s Funsten Nut Factory was
racially divided. Black workers, mostly women, worked harder and made
less than their white counterparts. So they went on strike — and got
their white coworkers to join them on the picket line.]
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“GIRLS, WE CAN’T LOSE!”: IN 1930S ST LOUIS, BLACK WOMEN WORKERS
WENT ON STRIKE AND WON  
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Devin Thomas O’shea
April 18, 2023
Jacobin
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_ During the Great Depression, St Louis’s Funsten Nut Factory was
racially divided. Black workers, mostly women, worked harder and made
less than their white counterparts. So they went on strike — and got
their white coworkers to join them on the picket line. _

Funsten Nut Company nut display in a Woolworth company store, 1941,
Missouri Historical Society

 

Ninety years ago this May, eighteen-year-old food worker Carrie Smith
marched onto the shop floor of a nut processing factory in St Louis
and initiated one of the most successful labor actions of the Great
Depression. “The heavy stuff is here,” Smith said, observing the
urgency and decisiveness of the moment upon them. “Get your hats and
let’s go.”

Over the course of eight days, the Funsten Nut Strike put two thousand
predominantly black female industrial workers on picket lines across
five factories. The strike was led and organized by radical black
working-class women — including Smith, who confronted a foreman to
make sure her coworkers would exit safely.

On that first morning, Carrie Smith argued with the boss for two hours
before taking to the picket line with a Bible in one hand and a brick
in the other. “Girls,” she announced, “we can’t lose!”

The Funsten Nut Strike is little-known, but it deserves to go down in
the history of Midwestern labor militancy alongside the 1877 general
strike
[[link removed]].
As Keona Ervin notes in her book
[[link removed]], _Gateway
to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St.
Louis_:

Newspapers in and outside of the Gateway City [St. Louis] covered the
episode, prominent local leaders weighed in or became involved, and
the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) used the strike as a moment to mark
the urban Midwest as a new hotbed for radical labor politics
spearheaded by black working women.

The July Riot

During the Great Depression, St Louis’s unemployment shot through
the roof. Overall joblessness jumped from 9 to 30 percent. Black
workers took the first and most severe cuts, with 70 percent of the
black workforce becoming either unemployed or severely underemployed.

But 1930s St Louis was also rich with radicalism. Both
the_ Communist _and the_ Anarchist_ were nationally circulating
newspapers published in St Louis. So was Frank O’Hare’s _National
Rip-Saw_ (later _Social Revolution_), which served as an
intellectual clearinghouse for Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party.
Globetrotter Publishing House turned out radical pamphlets with titles
like “Women Under Capitalism,” “Socialism for the Farmer,” and
“Socialism and Faith in Practice.”

“I found Bohemia on the Banks of the Mississippi,” socialist
writer Jack Conroy said of the city’s radical culture, informed in
large part by the values of Germans who’d immigrated there in the
wake of the 1848 revolutions
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St Louis in the 1930s was also home to several organizations that
served as progenitors to the civil rights movement, as documented in
historian Walter Johnson’s book
[[link removed]] _The
Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the
United States_. For example, the League of Struggle for Negro Rights,
briefly led by socialist poet
[[link removed]] Langston
Hughes, brought together “women and men, Black and white, communists
who sought to join the struggle for racial and economic justice in the
United States to the global struggle against capitalism and
colonialism.” The League became the first in a series
of organizations
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toward St Louis’s Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Action
Committee to Improve Opportunities for Negroes (ACTION).

“In St. Louis,” Johnson writes, “the legal struggle against Jim
Crow tapped into a deeper and more radical history of grassroots
organizing and direct action led by Black workers, especially Black
women, and by communists.”

Economic immiseration intensified St Louis’s radicalism. A year
before the Funsten Nut Strike, on the morning of July 8, 1932, those
dispossessed during the Depression marched on city hall, demanding to
be fed. Singing “Solidarity Forever” to the tune of “John
Brown’s Body,” more than a thousand gathered with signs that read,
“No Evictions of Unemployed” and “We Will Work But We Won’t
Starve.” Children carried signs demanding “Free Milk for the
Children of the Unemployed.”

Days later, during what came to be known as the July Riot, a dozen
demonstrators occupied the mayor’s office while a crowd of thousands
gathered outside. The _Post-Dispatch_ reported a black protester’s
speech: “There is only one way left for the working class —
that’s the militant way. I am speaking for the Negro workers who
know how to fight and will fight. We will not continue to starve
peacefully.”

‘There is only one way left for the working class — that’s the
militant way. I am speaking for the Negro workers who know how to
fight and will fight.’

When the crowd was told that the mayor would not meet with Communist
Party organizers, fifty black women led the charge up the stairs. The
police responded with tear-gas bombs, and a canister was picked up and
thrown back — a scene immortalized in Jack Conroy’s novel _The
Disinherited_, and echoed in the 2014 Michael Brown protests in St
Louis, when Edward Crawford
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clad in an American flag shirt, launched a smoking canister back at
riot police.

The July Riot was one in a series of 1930s “hunger marches” in the
city. On this occasion, police briefly retreated before drawing guns,
swinging billy clubs, and shooting into the crowd. Children were
trampled, and four protesters were shot.

While the police commissioner said he was sympathetic to the
unemployed, in the following days uniformed and armed policemen
arrested suspected members of the St Louis Communist Party for their
role in the protests. But despite the crackdown, the July Riot yielded
results. St Louis’s Board of Aldermen passed an emergency motion to
appropriate $25,000 in food distribution centers throughout the city.

The next summer, in 1933, the struggle spilled into the workplace. Nut
pickers at several processing facilities began holding secret
meetings. The rendezvous were led by black women, several of whom were
veterans of the July Riot.

Ten and Four

“The scene outside the plants during the nine days of the strike was
by turns (and depending on one’s perspective) inspiring, chaotic,
and violent,” Johnson writes in _Broken Heart_. The Funsten walkout
was an action long in the making, organized across various locations,
in clandestine get-togethers of six, then twenty, then fifty. The
organizers were aided by the St Louis Communist Party, in particular a
labor activist named William Sentner.

On the first day, one white worker, Nora Diamond, was quoted in the
labor press explaining that the wages and working conditions of the
black workers “don’t affect me.” Diamond was staying on the job
because the strike was “led by the wrong kind of people, Russians,
foreigners.”

As Myrna Fichtenbaum notes in her book
[[link removed]] _The
Funsten Nut Strike_, “Women represented around 30% of the
workforce” in 1930s Missouri. The occupations open to black women
were hairdresser, waitress, cafeteria help, seamstress, houseworker,
laundry worker, tobacco factory worker, and nut factory worker. Almost
all of these workplaces maintained Jim Crow policies physically
separating workers in different facilities.

At the time, St Louis had zero black officials in locally elected
office. The city was the “last stop on the railroad before entering
the South,” Fichtenbaum writes. “It was here that the cars were
changed to designations of ‘Colored’ and ‘White.’”

Nut pickers at several processing facilities began holding secret
meetings. The rendezvous were led by black women, several of whom were
veterans of the July Riot.

Black women’s prestrike wages at Funsten Nut amounted to about $6 a
week. “Compared to their fellow workers,” Keona Ervin told the 
[[link removed]]_Post-Dispatch_
[[link removed]],

primarily women of Polish descent, black women earned 3 to 4 cents per
pound of shelled nuts, not the 4 to 6 cents the immigrant workers
earned. Black women did work that caused physical strain, picking
nutmeats from their shells, while the Polish women had the preferred
assignment of sorting and weighing the pieces.

This was a time when St Louis was the center of the pecan industry, up
current from the Mississippi River Valley that had proved ideal for
growing large groves of natural pecan trees. In the Gateway City,
sixteen factories, seven owned by the R. E. Funsten Company, employed
about three thousand women in grueling food processing jobs.

At Funsten, black women worked nine hours a day, five and a half days
a week, starting at 6:45 a.m. and stopping at 4:45 p.m. with
forty-five minutes for lunch. White women worked shorter days,
starting at 7 a.m., stopping at 4:30 p.m., and receiving a whole hour
for lunch.

From The Funsten Nut Strike by Myrna Fichtenbaum

Indignities small and large abounded at Funsten Nut. Nutmeat produced
permanent stains, and the cost for aprons was deducted out of
workers’ weekly pay. The bathrooms were unsanitary despite the
workers handling food. Additionally, writes Fichtenbaum, “working
with the nuts emitted a dust which precipitated coughing.” She
writes:

Seated at a table, after obtaining a 25 lb. bag of nuts, the women
separated the meats from the shells with a knife. Halves were placed
in one pile, broken pieces in another. The shells were also kept, so
that upon completion all of it could be weighed once more, making sure
that it all added up to the original 25 lbs.

White women worked on the first floor, while black women worked in the
basement of some buildings and on the second floor of others. “It
wasn’t clean,” a worker named Josie Moore told Fichtenbaum.
“They didn’t have no windows. They had big doors that just come
open.” When it was cold,

they fastened the doors and they’d have a little heat in there, very
little. They kept the lights on all the time. Oh, it was terrible. I
remember a couple of women taking sick and they told the man, the
boss, that they would have to go home. He said, “Well if you start
that going home, you just stay there.”

Two years prior to the strike, the _St. Louis Post-Dispatch_ noted
that the Funsten women had suffered five wage cuts. Then there was the
most common complaint: being cheated at the final weighing.

Picking demanded speed, dexterity, and endless patience. Sorting did
as well. Black women pickers were paid three cents per pound of
halves, and two cents for pieces — in other words, three and two.
Coined by Carrie Smith, “We demand ten and four!” became the
strike motto. Ten cents for halves, four for pieces.

Dickmann Versus the Nut Shellers

“Animals in the Zoo Are Fed While We Starve” read one picket sign
outside of a Funsten plant. Strikers carried Bibles and interrupted
the line now and then to pray. Husbands and children joined the march
from plant to plant, calling for the women who remained inside to come
out.

On the first day of the strike, only black women stood on the picket
lines. By the second, the lines were multiracial. One woman
interviewed recalled, “They came they hollered for us to ‘Come
out, the strike is on!’ and most of the women dropped their work and
went out and joined in.”

On the first day of the strike, only black women stood on the picket
lines. By the second, the lines were multiracial.

Each shop elected its own strike committee and captains, and planned
to meet with the mayor. “Imagine the vulnerability these women
faced,” historian Walter Johnson told _Jacobin_. “They had to
reassure that number of people who are really one step away from being
out of work. They are really at the bottom of the class order.”

Work at Funsten Nut was an exercise in racial discrimination, but the
multiracial picket lines were representative of the realities of
working-class life in St Louis, where working-class neighborhoods were
often populated by black and immigrant communities. In those
intermingled bohemian neighborhoods, working-class solidarity could be
built organically, neighbor to neighbor.

“We believe we are entitled to live as well as other folks live,”
Carrie Smith told newly elected Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann at a
meeting. “And should be entitled to a wage that will provide us with
ample food and clothing.” Ervin writes that a worker named Caroline
Lewis spoke at the same meeting and “shared that her three-dollar
average weekly wage kept her household, comprising her mother and her
four children, mired in poverty.” In negotiations, Lewis told Mayor
Dickmann that working women’s low wages, not paid labor itself, made
mothering difficult.

Over the course of eight days, city police escorted strikebreakers
through angry crowds, and at least ninety strikers were arrested for
disturbing the peace. Many women made their court appearances bruised
and bandaged from what Johnson calls the “curbside justice to which
the arresting officers had subjected them.”

On the ninth day, May 24, the Funsten owners and Mayor Dickmann
folded. Eighteen-year-old Carrie Smith emerged from city hall with an
offer from the company to double their wages — close to the demanded
“ten and four” quota. Smith and the mayor drove to the Communist
Party headquarters where seven hundred strikers had assembled and
presented them with the company’s proposal. It was unanimously
approved.

A Watershed Moment

The Funsten Nut strikers had shown the labor movement and the civil
rights movement the way forward. “They fiercely resisted
red-baiting,” Ervin writes, “persuasively criticized liberal
reformism, creatively bridge local struggles for economic justice and
black freedom, and broke new ground for working-class women’s
leadership.”

“You must follow these steps of these nutpickers,” the Trade Union
Unity League (TUUL) urged in a subsequent pamphlet. “You must
organize yourselves and strike!” According to the journal _Working
Women_, the nutpickers had “aroused the masses of St. Louis like no
other strike in years,” gaining the “full sympathy and solidarity
of the St. Louis working class. . . . One would think that the Negro
woman had been for years trained in the working-class movement.”

The Funsten Nut Strike “set the stage for a wave of struggle over
the following two decades,” Ervin writes. “Women merged feminist,
labor, black freedom, and antipoverty agendas to construct broad
visions of community empowerment and democratically controlled urban
landscapes.”

Many women made their court appearances bruised and bandaged from what
Johnson calls the ‘curbside justice to which the arresting officers
had subjected them.’

The strike had a major impact on the political landscape in St Louis.
For example, notes Johnson, “The St Louis Urban League had been
founded in 1918 to assist southern migrants in their transition to
life in the city.” For some League members, it was difficult to make
common cause with black women of the working poor who couldn’t abide
by health requirements and had “open sores on their arms and their
hands,” which was the reason given for the League’s formal refusal
to get involved with the strike. After the strike, a different story
took hold. “The Urban League’s Women’s Division became
particularly attuned to the needs of black women,” Ervin
told _Jacobin_. “They wanted to find out where they were working,
and what they needed.”

Black workers in St Louis continued to strike through the years of the
Depression and World War II. Notable civil rights figures cut their
teeth in that period of militancy, including Marian Oldham, Frankie
Freeman, DeVerne Lee Calloway, and Ora Lee Malone. As Johnson notes:

Because Blacks had long voted in St. Louis, the city’s freedom
movement, from the beginning to the end, emphasized economic equality
in addition to issues of access to public accommodations, parks, and
pools. The critique of economic injustice that historians identify as
having come to characterize the mainstream of the Civil Rights
Movement only in 1968, with Martin Luther King Jr.’s support of the
sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, had a much longer history in
St. Louis.

After the strike, C. L. R. James and Claudia Jones visited Missouri to
find out what working-class black people in the Midwest were doing and
learn from them. We can do the same today. “I think it’s so
critical to draw this genealogy of black women’s working-class
radicalism,” Ervin told _Jacobin_, “and to demonstrate this
larger history that is a living one. The Ferguson liberation movement,
the Fight for 15, the radical tenant organizing in Kansas City —
this is all deeply connected.”

DEVIN THOMAS O’SHEA’S writing has appeared in
the Nation, Protean, Current Affairs, Boulevard, and elsewhere.

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* unions
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* Black Women
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* Strikes
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* Great Depression
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* St. Louis
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* Communists
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* jim crow
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