On this Labor Day — 80 years ago — the Textile Strike of 1934 began. It would be was the largest strike in the labor history of the United States, involving 400,000 textile workers from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the U.S. Southern states. The strike swept through Southern cotton mills, outpacing the union organizers and employing flying squadrons which traveled by truck and on foot from mill to mill, calling the workers out. Textile workers in the North went out on strike in great numbers as well, although they were spread more evenly across different industries and had more diverse grievances than the Southern cotton mill workers. Within a week, hundreds of thousands of textile workers nationwide had left their jobs and the industry was shut down. The mill owners were initially taken by surprise by the scope of the strike. They immediately took the position that these flying squadrons were, in fact, coercing their employees to go out on strike. Gov. Blackwood of South Carolina took up this theme, announcing that he would deputize the states mayors, sheriffs, peace officers and every good citizen to maintain order, then called out the National Guard with orders to shoot to kill any picketers who tried to enter the mills. Mill owners persuaded local authorities throughout the Piedmont to augment their forces by swearing in special deputies, often their own employees or local residents opposed to the strike; in other cases they simply hired private guards to police the areas around the plant. Violence between guards and picketers broke out almost immediately. In Honea Path, South Carolina, my hometown, seven picketers were shot to death and more than twenty-seven other were wounded on September 6th. Most were shot in the back as they were fleeing the picket line. There was no National Guard on duty — only anti-union workers deputized my grandfather, who ran Chiquola Mill, in 1934 The bloody riot at the towns cotton mill on that warm Thursday morning shaped the lives of two generations to follow — not because of the shock of what was known, but by what was unknown. Fear, threats and intimidation were used to silence the story of the greatest tragedy in the towns history. This month is the 80th anniversary of the murders in Honea Path. The town itself will not commemorate the anniversary. It would rather forget the tragedy. The story has been erased, not only from the history books, but from the public consciousness of those people most affected by it. An instrument of fear was so powerful that parents were afraid to tell the story to their own children. It formed a lifelong social contract for entire communitys survival. My grandfather, who was also the mayor and town judge, organized the posse of gunmen who fired on their fellow workers in 1934. The 80th anniversary of the killing is on Sept. 6 and we’ll have more on the story then. I have written the full story of the Chiquola Mill killings in the multimedia e-book, Mill Town Murder ($9.99) (ISBN-9781629218465). It is available at Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s Kindle book store and Barnes & Noble’s Nook store. It can also be bought directly from the store at Vook at store.vook/ and read online there on Macintosh and PC platforms. In order that the murders in Honea Path not be forgotten, I have also produced a 48-minute audio documentary. You can listen or download it for free. I hope you will listen. It will be posted during the month of September.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 03:39:28 +0000
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