[September 5th is the 75th anniversary of the day when "Civil
Rights Unionism" was won by tobacco workers in North Carolina. ]
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75 YEARS AGO, NC TOBACCO WORKERS CHALLENGED JIM CROW WITH “CIVIL
RIGHTS UNIONISM”  
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Jonathan Kissam
September 3, 2021
UE News
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_ September 5th is the 75th anniversary of the day when "Civil Rights
Unionism" was won by tobacco workers in North Carolina. _

FTA-CIO leaflet issued shortly before China American vote,

 

September 5 marks the 75th anniversary of a National Labor Relations
Board election that took place at the China American Tobacco Company
in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. It was the first NLRB victory in
eastern North Carolina for the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural & Allied
Workers of America (FTA-CIO), part of a campaign that would bring
nearly 10,000 tobacco “leaf house” workers, most of them
African-American women, into unions.

The FTA, like UE, practiced a brand of “them and us” unionism that
stressed aggressive struggle, rank and file control, political
independence and uniting all workers. Retired UE Local 150 leader JIM
WRENN writes in his introduction to _“It Wasn’t Just Wages We
Wanted, But Freedom,”_ a history of the campaign compiled by the
Phoenix Historical Society, that:

These workers not only secured union contracts in over 30 some leaf
houses which improved wages and working conditions, but these workers
also engaged in mass voter registration and political action that
challenged both the very profitable tobacco corporations of North
Carolina as well as Jim Crow segregation and black disfranchisement.

Thanks to the work of the Phoenix Historical Society, this victory was
commemorated in 2010 with a state historical marker
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the city of Rocky Mount passed a resolution recognizing the importance
of the China American election.

JIMMIE THORNE, the current president of CAAMWU, the UE Local 150
chapter that represents workers at the Cummins Rocky Mount Engine
Plant, has a personal connection to the history of the FTA: his
grandmother Annie Mae Bynum worked at China American at time of the
vote and his grandfather Wardell Bynum was the last president of FTA
Local 10, the amalgamated FTA local that covered the eastern part of
the state.

“Civil Rights Unionism” Comes to Eastern NC

The China American vote initiated a string of wins for Local 10 over
the next two months of 1946 which brought FTA representation to two
dozen more leaf houses throughout the region.

As was the case with FTA Local 22
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which had successfully organized the huge R.J. Reynolds tobacco plant
in Winston-Salem during World War II, Local 10’s organizing
successes drew on the traditions and institutions of the black
community. Mass meetings and rallies were held in black churches, and
the _Carolina Times_, a Durham-based paper that was one of the leading
voices of the state’s black freedom movement, endorsed the campaign.

A key tactic employed by Local 10 during negotiations for first
contracts was short work stoppages. FTA organizer Ed McCrea remembered
“A couple of times we’d just have a ten of fifteen minute
stoppage, but that cost them a lot of money because that tobacco was
burning up in drying kilns, and that’s where they couldn’t afford
to have a stoppage.”

Thanks to this kind of aggressive struggle, workers got a ten-cent
raise (approximately a 20-25 percent increase), and the companies
agreed to stop using a loophole in the Fair Labor Standards Act which
allowed them to avoid paying overtime during the fourteen-week season.
Athenia Moses, who worked at the J.P. Taylor company in Goldboro,
recalled in a 2007 interview that “We got a longer lunch break, a
dining room, a first-aid room [and] a 15-minute break. Why, when the
union came in, we only [worked] eight hours a day. We even had some
holidays.” Cornelius Simmons, who worked at Imperial Leaf in
Greenville, remembered “Instead of sitting on a stack of tobacco to
eat, we got a dining room. We got coolers rather than a nail keg with
water in it.”

The establishment of the FTA in eastern North Carolina also challenged
the dominant white power structure in the political arena. Local 10
set up a political action committee which registered members to vote
and mobilized them to participate in elections. Simmons recalled that
“After we got the union in there we started educating people. We got
rid of a judge there who was real nasty. We changed a lot of the
aldermen and got a different chief of police.” FTA’s Washington
representative, Elizabeth Sasuly, was instrumental in getting
severance pay, amounting to thousands of dollars, to black veterans in
the region who had been unable to collect it due to obstruction from
local white officials.

A Different South Was Possible

The FTA campaign in the eastern North Carolina leaf houses was part of
“Operation Dixie,” a postwar effort by the CIO to organize the
South. (UE did our part, starting with an election victory at a
subsidiary of Stewart Warner in Winston-Salem the week prior to the
China American vote.) Operation Dixie promised not only to raise low
wages in the South, which threatened the gains CIO members had made in
the North, but also to break the power of the anti-labor
“Dixiecrats,” who ruled as a single party through much of the
South and blocked pro-worker legislation in Congress.

Unfortunately, during this period the CIO largely abandoned its
commitment to “them and us” unionism, and particularly its
commitment to uniting all workers. Historian Robert Rodgers Korstad,
who gave a talk about the FTA to the 2002 UE convention in North
Carolina, explains in his 2003 book _Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco
Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century
South_
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that:

CIO officials saw white textile workers as the key to organizing the
South ... Assuming as they did that white textile workers were
irredeemably racist and that they would respond only to the most
cautious and narrowly defined appeals, Operation Dixie’s leaders
took pains to play down the CIO’s strength in the black community,
hired few black organizers, and avoided any linkage between
unionization and civil rights.

The retreat from uniting all workers crippled Operation Dixie. The
“them and us” unions that insisted on organizing black and white
workers on the basis of equality, most prominently the FTA, were far
more successful than the more conservative CIO unions. Another
militant “them and us” union, the Farm Equipment Workers (FE),
successfully organized the International Harvester plant in
Louisville, Kentucky in 1946, building a strong biracial local that
also challenged Jim Crow and the political establishment. Despite
their successes in organizing the South, however, FE and FTA were
sidelined by the CIO in “Operation Dixie” and eventually expelled,
along with UE, in 1949 and 1950 respectively.

Korstad reports that “By any measure, FTA’s eastern North Carolina
drive was among the most successful of Operation Dixie’s
endeavors,” and it suggests how the history of the South in the
second half of the 20th century could have been different had more CIO
unions embraced the FTA’s commitment to uniting all workers and
independent political action. Wrenn points out that the leaf house
campaign is part of “what Robert Hinton has called the tradition of
liberation politics in eastern North Carolina,” a tradition that
“connects the history of Reconstruction in North Carolina with the
current organizations that carry on that organizing tradition
today,” including UE Local 150.

_All quotes from FTA members and organizers used in this article are
taken from Korstad, _Civil Rights Unionism
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