Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960-1980

By Timothy J. Minchin

In the 1960s and 1970s, the textile industry's workforce underwent a dramatic transformation, as African Americans entered the South's largest industry in growing numbers. Only 3.3 percent of textile workers were black in 1960; by 1978, this number had risen to 25 percent. Using previously untapped legal records and oral history interviews, Timothy Minchin crafts a compelling account of the integration of the mills.
Minchin argues that the role of a labor shortage in spurring black hiring has been overemphasized, pointing instead to the federal government's influence in pressing the textile industry to integrate. He also highlights the critical part played by African American activists. Encouraged by passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, black workers filed antidiscrimination lawsuits against nearly all of the major textile companies. Still, Minchin notes, even after the integration of the mills, African American workers encountered considerable resistance: black women faced continued hiring discrimination, while black men found themselves shunted into low-paying jobs with little hope of promotion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780807882931

Timothy J. Minchin

TIMOTHY J. MINCHIN is professor of history at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of numerous books, including Labor under Fire: A History of the AFL-CIO since 1970, Empty Mills: The Fight against Imports and the Decline of the U.S. Textile Industry, and, with Robert H. Zieger and Gilbert J. Gall, American Workers, American Unions. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Contemporary History, Labor History, and the Australasian Journal of American Studies, among others.

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Hiring the Black Worker

Hiring the Black Worker

The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960–1980

Timothy J. Minchin

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 1999 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by April Leidig-Higgins

Set in Minion by Running Feet Books

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Minchin, Timothy J. Hiring the black worker: the

racial integration of the Southern textile industry,

1960–1980 / by Timothy J. Minchin.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2470-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8078-4771-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Discrimination in employments—Southern States

—History—20th century. 2. Textile workers—Southern

States—History—20th century. 3. Race discrimination

—Southern States—History—20th century. 4. Trade-

unions—Afro-American membership—Southern States

—History—20th century. I. Title.

HD4903.3.T42U66 1999 331.6′396073—dc21

98-30146 CIP

Portions of chapters 4 and 8 previously appeared in

Timothy J. Minchin, "‘Color Means Something’: Black

Pioneers, White Resistance, and Interracial Unionism

in the Southern Textile Industry, 1957–1980," Labor

History 39, no. 2 (May 1998): 109–33. Used by

permission.

03 02 01 00 99 5 4 3 2 1

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY PRINTED.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

one

There Were No Blacks Running the Machines: Black Employment in the Southern Textile Industry before 1964

two

The Government Brought About the Real Change: Causes of the Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1964–1980

three

For Quite Obvious Reasons, We Do Not Want to Fill These Mills Up with Negroes: The Attitudes of Textile Executives to Black Employment

four

I Felt Myself as a Pioneer: The Experiences of the First Black Production Workers

five

The Only Ones That Got a Promotion Was a White Man: The Discriminatory Treatment of Black Men in the Textile Industry, 1964–1980

six

Getting Out of the White Man’s Kitchen: African American Women and the Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry

seven

Community Activism and Litigation: The Role of Civil Rights Organizations in the Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry

eight

A Mixed Blessing: The Role of Labor Unions in the Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Black worker feeding cotton 17

Quiller technician, 1968 34

Production worker in the carpet and rug industry 35

Black man in card room 40

Black woman in sewing operation 176

Black woman spinner, 1968 177

Laura Ann Pope, 1973200

Tables

1. Number of Shift Foremen, Total and Black, at Dan River Mills, 1965–1973 41

2. Comparison of Black and White Hiring Rates at J. P. Stevens, 1969–1980 136

3. Racial Disparities in Pay Rates among All Male Employees at J. P. Stevens, 1967–1972 142

4. Average Pay Rates of Hourly Male Employees at Dan River Mills, Danville Division, April 1969 143

5. Average Pay Rates of Hourly Males Employees at Dan River Mills, Danville Division, April 1973 143

6. Proportion of Male Employees at the Bottom and Top of the Pay Scale at Dan River Mills, April 1969 144

7. Proportion of Male Employees at the Bottom and Top of the Pay Scale at Dan River Mills, April 1973 144

8. Average Pay Rates of Male Employees in Racially Identifiable Jobs at Dan River Mills, January 31, 1972 144

9. Average Pay Rates of Hourly Male Employees by Race and Year of Hire at Dan River Mills, January 31, 1972 145

10. Comparison of Pay Rates of Hourly and Incentive Male Employees by Race and Education Level at J. P. Stevens Plants in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., December 28, 1980 146

11. Comparison of Pay Rates of Black and White Male Hourly Employees at J. P. Stevens, 1966–1974 147

12. Racial Composition of Job Classifications in Cone Mills Power Plant, December 15, 1971 150

13. Racial Hiring Rates at J. P. Stevens, Mid-May 1969-June 30, 1972 163

14. Black Female Textile Workers Compared to White Female Textile Workers in South Carolina Piedmont Counties, 1967 164

15. Comparison of the Percentage of White Applicants and Black Applicants Who Were Hired at J. P. Stevens, 1969–1975 167

16. Assignment of New Hires to the Weaver Job by Race and Sex at Dan River Mills, January 1, 1969-March 31, 1971 175

17. Comparison of Turnover by Race and Sex at Dan River Mills, Danville Division, 1969 183

18. Racial Composition of South Carolina Piedmont Counties Covered by TEAM, 1960 209

19. Textile Employment Compared to Total Manufacturing Employment in South Carolina Piedmont Counties, 1967 209

20. Black Textile Workers Compared to Total Textile Workers in South Carolina Piedmont Counties, 1967 210

Acknowledgments

This book was researched and written while I was Mellon Research Fellow at Cambridge University. I wish to acknowledge the financial assistance of the Mellon Fund that allowed me to undertake several extended research trips to the United States. I also wish to acknowledge the support provided by Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, where I was a fellow between 1995 and 1998. The college provided a wonderful research environment that helped a great deal in the writing of this book. I would also like to thank St. Andrews University for allowing me time to add the finishing touches to this book before I started my teaching duties with them.

I owe a great debt to my friend and colleague, Jim Leloudis. Jim helped arrange for me to be a visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina in 1996, and he was supportive and helpful throughout. I am also grateful to other members of the Leloudis family, of a wide variety of ages, who looked after and entertained me while I was in the United States. Especially I thank Dianne, James, and Virginia for their hospitality and friendship. Other friends in the United States helped me in many ways. I especially wish to express my thanks to my friends Rick and Hatsy Nittoli, George Waldrep, and Richard and Claire Zieger, who all helped me a great deal while I was living in North Carolina. Many people were kind enough to put me up while I was on my travels, and in this regard I especially wish to thank Norris and Alice Tibbetts, Laura Ann Pope, and Bob and Gay Zieger.

Various members of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE!) helped me in setting up and carrying out interviews. On many occasions, UNITE! members allowed me to use their union halls for interviews, and I thank them for this. I owe a special thanks to UNITE! joint board managers who helped me locate many of the people I needed to see, especially Reese Boulware in Columbus, Georgia; Sammy Glover in Andalusia, Alabama; James Johnson in Andrews, South Carolina; Clyde Bush in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, and Sydney Young in Rock Hill, South Carolina. UNITE! organizer Nick Atkins assisted me in carrying out interviews in the Columbus, Georgia, area. Former organizer Bob Freeman was a great help with interviews in Kannapolis, North Carolina. UNITE!’s southern regional director, Bruce Raynor, also helped me a great deal when I was carrying out my interviews across the South. In Andrews, South Carolina, Laura Ann Pope was of enormous assistance. I wish to thank all those whom I interviewed for providing me with such an enjoyable and memorable experience, and especially for being so hospitable and helpful.

I also wish to thank several archivists who were particularly helpful. I am especially grateful to Bob Dinwiddie at the Southern Labor Archives for allowing me to use several important record collections before they had been fully processed. I also wish to thank the staff at the Federal Records Center in East Point, Georgia, who looked after me very well during my prolonged visits to their archives. The editors at the University of North Carolina Press deserve thanks for all their support and help in seeing this project to publication, especially Lewis Bateman, Mary Laur, and Ron Maner. The manuscript also benefited from the skillful copyediting of Mary Reid.

My debts to academic colleagues and friends are also considerable. I want to give particular thanks to Tony Badger, who has consistently encouraged and supported my research ever since I began my Ph.D. under his supervision. I have benefited greatly from the way that Tony has advanced the profile of American History in Britain and Europe. I also wish to thank those who provided useful comments on drafts of this book, especially Tom Terrill and John Thompson. Gavin Wright provided valuable advice and guidance in the early stages of the project. Others whose advice I have benefited from include How-ell Harris, Rick Halpern, Annette Cox-Wright, John Salmond, and Bob Zieger.

Finally, I wish to give thanks to my family, especially to my parents and to my wife, Olga, for all their support and love that helped make this book possible.

Hiring the Black Worker

Introduction

There is little value in a Negro’s obtaining the right to be admitted to hotels and restaurants, if he has no cash in his pocket and no job.

—President John F. Kennedy

Although a vast amount of historical literature on the civil rights movement has been written in the last twenty years, very little attention has been focused on economic aspects of the civil rights upsurge, especially the impact that the movement had upon southern workers. This neglect has occurred partly because scholars have concentrated overwhelmingly on protest efforts, especially examinations of protest organizations and leaders during the heroic period of activism from 1954 to 1968. Only very recently have historians begun to explore some of the issues surrounding the impact of the civil rights era upon southern workers and the southern labor movement.¹

Investigation of the relationship between the civil rights movement and southern labor is important because the struggle for economic equality was recognized by the federal government as well as by black leaders as central to achieving black equality. In the 1950s and 1960s, both politicians and civil rights leaders repeatedly emphasized the centrality of economic equality to the wider struggle for black rights. As President Lyndon Johnson wrote in 1966, Surely there is no more difficult, nor more important question in the field of civil rights than that of opening up new job opportunities for Negro Americans, helping them to prepare for those opportunities, and assuring them fair treatment at promotion time. Negroes feel, and I think rightly, that full participation in the American promise can never be theirs, until the job question is settled and settled rightly. Vice President Hubert Humphrey echoed Johnson when he told a White House Conference in 1965 that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which prohibited racial discrimination in employment—was the heart of the Act. Humphrey explained that nothing is more important to the Negro in his struggle to free himself from the circle of frustration than the ability to have and to hold a good job.²

The central importance of the employment issue was developed by civil rights leaders, who argued that the ability to enter a good job was the key to true black equality. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. repeatedly spoke of the importance of economic equality to the civil rights struggle, especially in the later years of his life, and was an active supporter of organized labor. As King declared in 1964, Of what advantage is it to the Negro to establish that he can be served in integrated restaurants or accommodated in integrated hotels, if he is bound to the kind of financial servitude which will not allow him to take a vacation or even take his wife out to dinner?³

While black leaders such as King recognized the centrality of economic equality to the struggle for civil rights, they also realized that ending discrimination in employment was far more complicated and problematic than achieving legal or political equality. King himself recognized that whites would be more sympathetic to granting individual rights documented in the Constitution than to promoting group solutions to poverty. Thus, from the mid-1950s on, the civil rights movement had tried to tackle the problem of black poverty by attacking legal and political barriers to equality, hoping that voting rights would ameliorate economic problems. As political and legal equality were achieved, however, the importance of the problematic issue of economic equality was thrown into sharp relief. King himself wrote in 1966 that the issue of better jobs was the most important of the future but added, The future is more complex. . . . Jobs are harder to create than voting rolls. Ironically, the struggle for economic equality was both the most important and, as President Johnson admitted, the most difficult to achieve.⁴

The reluctance of the civil rights movement to address the issue of economic equality—and the failure of King’s belated effort in the mid-1960s to wage a War on Poverty in the North—has meant that scholars have often assumed that few economic gains were made by the civil rights movement. The movement indeed seemed to leave black poverty untouched. In 1969 nearly two out of every three blacks in the rural South lived below the poverty line. The discovery of black economic problems disillusioned civil rights workers. The civil rights movement has thus become defined by the classic period of protest from 1954 to 1968 and the struggle to end legal segregation and political exclusion.⁵

One area that has been particularly neglected is the breakthrough that African Americans made into employment in the southern textile industry in the 1960s and 1970s.⁶ The textile breakthrough was especially significant because blacks made rapid gains in an industry that had traditionally excluded them. The textile industry was the South’s largest industry and had previously been overwhelmingly white. In 1964, for example, less than 5 percent of mill workers in South Carolina were black; by 1976, nearly one in three textile workers in the state were black. African Americans made employment gains in the southern textile industry at a much greater pace than in most other American industries. Between 1960 and 1969, black employment in textiles increased four times faster than the national average for all manufacturing. In 1960, only 3.3 percent of textile workers were black, compared to 7.6 percent of manufacturing employees. By June 1978, African Americans had progressed slightly to hold 12 percent of all manufacturing jobs, but textile firms, by hiring African Americans at twice the rate for all employees, had increased minority participation to over 18 percent. In 1978, blacks held a quarter of all production jobs in the southern textile industry.⁷

Data from individual firms further illustrates the major strides in black employment that were made in the 1960s and 1970s. Cannon Mills, one of the largest textile companies, was located in the Kannapolis area of North Carolina, where the black population was around 18 percent. Although the company hired almost no blacks until 1964, by 1975, black employment in the mills exceeded the community level, and in the early 1980s around a quarter of the company’s 22,000 workers were African American.⁸ Between 1967 and August 1977, the number of African Americans working for the large J. P. Stevens Company increased by over 200 percent. At Stevens, as elsewhere, major gains in black employment were made in the 1970s. At the company’s main facility in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, the number of blacks in the workforce grew from 19.4 percent in 1970 to 37.1 percent in 1975, a figure that roughly matched the percentage of blacks in the community.⁹

Thus, the southern textile industry, which had always been known for its lily-white character, had thoroughly integrated its workforce within fifteen years.¹⁰ Historians have noted the scale and significance of the change. Richard Rowan, who studied the industry’s moves toward black employment in the late 1960s, concluded in his 1970 study that a change of the magnitude noted in the racial employment structure of textiles has probably never occurred before in southern industry.¹¹ Gavin Wright has called the entry of blacks into the southern textile industry a genuine revolution, very deserving of a prominent place in the history of the civil rights movement.¹² Similar conclusions have also been made by Mary Frederickson.¹³

Study of the racial integration of the southern textile industry has been limited, however. Studies outlining the importance of black entry into textiles have not gone beyond this, failing to explore in detail the issue of how much discrimination remained in the mills. The attitudes of companies to integration have also not been examined at length.¹⁴ The most detailed treatment of the subject, Richard Rowan’s The Negro in the Textile Industry (1970) is dated and only covers the early years of the integration. Because major employment gains were made by African Americans throughout the 1970s, a complete picture of the racial integration of the industry must cover the 1970s as well as the 1960s. Rowan’s study also fails to provide any information on what black workers themselves felt about integration. The voices of the subjects, the black workers who were hired into the industry in the 1960s, are completely missing.

This study will examine the racial integration of the southern textile industry in detail, a task that is made possible by the availability of a wide variety of original sources, including excellent written records that have not been used in previous studies. My main source is legal records, especially the detailed documentation provided by class action racial discrimination lawsuits filed under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the 1960s and 1970s, virtually every large southern textile company was involved in major litigation alleging racial discrimination. The companies sued included Cannon Mills, Fieldcrest Mills, Cone Mills, Burlington Industries, J. P. Stevens, Dan River Mills, and many others. As Ed Rankin, public relations director of Cannon Mills, admitted in 1982, as Cannon settled a class action suit, This type of suit has been initiated against every major textile company. . . so it’s not the first of its kind.¹⁵

The records of these lawsuits, housed in federal records centers, are voluminous. Because many cases were class action suits that went on for several years, the records provide details of many aspects of the racial integration of the industry that have not been covered at length in the existing literature. The depositions of aggrieved African American textile workers describe in compelling detail the discrimination in the mills. Statistics based on company records and covering thousands of black textile workers provide a detailed quantitative picture of the amount of racial discrimination remaining in the industry after integration. The trial testimony of company officials reveals the arguments that companies used to resist racial change and to defend their industry against charges of discrimination and provides valuable insights into the attitudes of textile executives to black employment.

These written records are supplemented by a large body of interviews that I carried out with African American textile workers across the South. Many of those interviewed had been plaintiffs in the lawsuits, and their memories highlight the motives and bravery of the black workers who initiated and participated in litigation. These interviews are intended to supplement the written record by showing what integration meant for its participants. Many interviews were conducted with pioneers, the men and women who were the part of the first wave of African American workers hired in the industry in the mid-to-late 1960s. The experience of the pioneers is an important, untold part of the story of integration, illustrating the techniques that companies used to start the integration of their plants, and revealing the relationship between black and white workers in the workplace.

After an opening chapter that outlines the history of black employment in the southern textile industry before 1964, the reasons that companies hired increasing numbers of blacks in the 1960s and 1970s will be discussed in Chapter 2. While earlier studies have suggested that racial integration of the textile industry was caused by a labor shortage, this account will argue that federal regulations were also a major cause.¹⁶Chapter 3 will analyze the way that textile executives reacted to the racial integration of the industry. Many textile executives held deep-seated fears about the integration of the industry and resented federal efforts to push the pace of black hiring. They wanted to maintain control of the hiring process and resisted federal efforts to implement affirmative action programs in the textile industry. Although textile companies hired African Americans in increasing numbers, many executives were reluctant to accept black employment in nontraditional jobs.

Chapters 4–6 examine the experiences of the first black workers hired into production positions. These chapters draw upon remarkable letters that black workers wrote to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in which they described in detail the discrimination they faced. Such letters were often written by groups of black workers and were responsible for initiating the lawsuits.

One of the most striking aspects of the racial integration of the textile industry was that the experiences of African American women differed greatly from those of men, especially in the type of discrimination faced. Black women came into the industry from a different background than black men, and they faced different problems. Unlike black men, who had a history of participation in the industry in nonproduction jobs, black women had rarely been hired. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the major problem for black women was getting hired, while for black men, it was being promoted. Thus, the experience of integration varied greatly according to gender. This is reflected in the lawsuits, in which black male plaintiffs sought promotions but black female plaintiffs protested against hiring discrimination. Chapter 5 explores the discrimination faced by black men, while Chapter 6 examines the unique experiences of African American women, using the excellent records provided by the lawsuits.

Two final chapters examine the role that civil rights organizations and labor unions played in the integration of the industry. Historiographical emphasis on the major civil rights protests has meant that little is known about the impact of the civil rights movement outside the Deep South. Most textile mills were located in small towns in the industrial Piedmont, communities that have generally not achieved a reputation for civil rights activity. Through the lawsuits and the records of civil rights organizations, however, it is possible to uncover civil rights activism in textile communities. National civil rights organizations targeted the textile industry for particular attention. In 1967–68, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a variety of other organizations funded Textiles: Employment and Advancement for Minorities (TEAM), a major project aimed at increasing black employment in the textile industry of South Carolina. The records of TEAM illustrate the extensive efforts made by civil rights groups to improve employment opportunities for African Americans in the textile industry.

Although most textile mills were not covered by union contracts, labor unions played a significant role in the racial integration of the industry. The entry of blacks into the workforce brought with it optimistic predictions that increased unionization would follow. This did not occur, however, and it is important to find out why. In recent years, historians have also debated the extent to which black and white workers were able to cooperate within unions, and studying the influx of blacks into the textile industry provides an opportunity to further examine this question.¹⁷

The extensive records of the lawsuits are supplemented by a variety of other written sources, particularly records of civil rights organizations. TEAM was an important civil rights initiative that has not been studied before, and the records of the project are extensive and rich. The records of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) also provide a wealth of information on the integration of the industry. Between 1952 and 1965, the AFSC carried out a merit employment program aimed at persuading southern companies to hire African Americans into nontraditional positions. The AFSC made hundreds of plant visits to southern industrialists, including many textile mill owners. The records of these visits offer a fascinating look at the racial attitudes and fears of textile executives. Union records are another important source, providing valuable information on the role that unions played in the integration of the industry.

One

There Were No Blacks Running the Machines

Black Employment in the Southern Textile Industry before 1964

On March 18, 1953, twenty-six-year-old Johnnie Franklin Archie started working as a laborer at Rock Hill Printing and Finishing Company in Rock Hill, South Carolina. A small, bearded black man, Archie was to work at the mill for the rest of his working life. Interviewed in 1996, Archie recalled that all the blacks who were hired at the plant in the 1950s and early 1960s worked in non-production positions that were heavy, dirty, and frequently hazardous: The only black women there cleaned the white women’s restrooms, none on production. And the blacks that were there were on the lowest paid and most hazardous, worst-condition jobs of any human being—this was the black man’s job. Archie went on to describe some of the jobs that African Americans carried out: The trash truck for one, hauling garbage for one; and a place called the napping department, you’d walk in there and you had to wear a mask over your face. Lint was pulled off the cloth and put in a small bin to make bales out of it—a black man seen to that. Another hazardous job was out on the yard, in the rain and cold. Archie felt that black men wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t that we were doing the work that the white man didn’t want to do. That’s the only reason we were there.¹

The experiences of black workers at Rock Hill Printing and Finishing Company were typical of those of black workers in the textile industry generally before 1964. Very few blacks were employed in the industry, and those who were hired worked in nonproduction positions, often outside of the mill. Because of the heavy nature of many of these jobs, the majority of black textile workers before 1964 were men; the few black women in the industry tended to work, as at Rock Hill, purely in cleaning positions. The type of jobs described by Archie were typical of those performed by black textile workers. In 1964, for example, the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) confirmed this picture in a report it compiled on black employment in the industry. This report concluded that Negro employment in the southern textile industry has traditionally been restricted to work in yard and labor gangs. There have been a few plants in which Negroes have been engaged in production work but these are relatively rare.²

The entry of African Americans into production jobs in the textile industry is especially significant when it is compared to the opportunities available to black workers in the industry before 1964. Indeed, prior to the 1960s, the textile industry employed African Americans only in a very limited number of jobs. In 1940, only 2.1 percent of textile workers were black, a figure that rose slightly to 3.6 percent in 1950. A study of black employment in the industry carried out by Donald Dewey in 1950, for example, found that blacks were employed either as laborers outside the plant or as janitors inside the plant. In contrast, most white workers were employed in office or production positions inside the plant.³

Thus, employment opportunities for African Americans in the textile industry were extremely restricted before 1964. This employment pattern clearly had major implications for African Americans who lived in a region dominated by that industry.

The American Textile Industry

In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of factors made it important for blacks to secure more jobs in the textile industry. Overall, the industry was in a unique position to reduce black economic inequality and bring substantial economic gains to the African American community. Most significant was the fact that its cultural and political influence as the South’s largest industry meant that any integration that occurred in the textile industry would be repeated in smaller industries. In addition, most of the jobs in the industry were unskilled or semiskilled and could easily be learned by inexperienced black workers.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the textile industry was a major American industry, employing between 800,000 and 1 million workers. These employment levels ranked the textile industry as a primary employer on a par with other major American industries such as automobiles, steel, and paper. Although the industry was affected by industrial decline and plant closings in the 1980s and 1990s, most of the period between 1960 and 1980 was one of sustained growth and prosperity. Between 1965 and 1974, in particular, the textile industry experienced unprecedented levels of prosperity and employment. In December 1973, for example, the trade journal Textile Hi-Lights reported that year-end 1973 finds the textile industry with record sales, increased profits, rising employment, and a leveling off of imports. Between June 1965 and December 1973, the number of people employed in the industry rose steadily from 922,000 to 1,028,000.⁴ In the main textile state of North Carolina, employment in textile mills reached an all-time high of 293,600 in 1973.⁵

The growth that the industry experienced for most of the 1960s and 1970s is well illustrated in trade sources. In 1964, America’s Textile Reporter, a conservative trade publication not given to overuse of rose-colored glasses, reported optimistically that textile earnings are on the rise and there is nothing on the horizon that would suggest a reversal of the trend in the months ahead.⁶ In 1965, the large Fieldcrest Mills reported that sales and earnings in 1964 reached new highs for the third consecutive year.⁷ Many other textile companies also reported record sales in the mid-1960s.⁸ In 1967, Textile Hi-Lights reported that 1967 was the fourth successive year of intensified operations in the U.S. textile industry. Increased volume since 1963 is indicated by a 22 percent increase in shipments, 72,000 added employees and a 12 percent increase in operating spindle looms.⁹

By the 1960s, the vast majority of the American textile industry was located in the South. In 1961, for example, southern textile plants were responsible for about 89 percent of the nation’s total textile production. By 1965, the southern states had over 18 million spindles, compared to only 756,000 in New England, the industry’s birthplace. The South had achieved a position of dominance in the industry largely through lower costs in the form of labor, transportation, and taxes.¹⁰

To a large extent, textiles dominated the South. In 1973, it was by far the South’s biggest industry, employing 697,500 workers in eight southern states.¹¹ A further 421,900 people worked in the related apparel industry. The South’s third largest industry, food processing, only employed around 275,000 workers. In 1973, New York Times writer Henry P. Leiferman called mill workers the bedrock of the Deep South’s economy, religion, politics, industry. The industry’s cultural and economic influence upon the South was considerable. As Leiferman pointed out, The industry, from floor sweeper to chairman of the board, reaches everywhere in the South. Senators such as Strom Thurmond, Sam Ervin, Herman Talmadge, governors such as John West, Terry Sanford and Jimmy Carter started their campaigns with the mill vote. Evangelist Billy Graham started his career reaching out to the souls of the mill hands. Mill owners such as Roger Milliken, who was Richard Nixon’s finance chairman in 1968 and later became a strong supporter of Pat Buchanan, were themselves often powerful political figures in the region. Milliken, indeed, had long been the source of money and support for Strom Thurmond and other Republican politicians, and he is an important figure in understanding the revival of the Republican Party in the South.¹²

The textile industry’s dominance of the southern economy was most pronounced in North and South Carolina, both states with large black populations.¹³ In December 1966, the EEOC found that around 45 percent of all manufacturing jobs in the Carolinas were in textiles. More than 48 percent of all U.S. textile plants that employed over 500 persons were in these two states. As an EEOC report concluded, The Carolinas, therefore, are the hub of the U.S. textile industry.¹⁴

The industry went through a small recession in late 1974 and 1975, and employment levels fell below the peak of 1973. This was the start of a long-term decline for the southern textile industry that was largely related to the flood of textile imports that came onto the American market after 1975. Indeed, textile imports nearly tripled in the decade between 1974 and 1984, leading to widespread plant closings in the late 1970s and 1980s. Between 1975 and 1985 more than 800 American mills closed down, and in North Carolina textile employment fell 28 percent between 1973 and 1986.¹⁵

Although the textile industry began to decline in the late 1970s, it remained a major industry that still offered significant employment opportunities to many southerners. As of June 1978, for example, the textile industry’s employment had just dipped under a million workers, at 990,800.¹⁶ Even after the recession of 1974–75, the industry continued to dominate the economy of the Carolinas. In October 1978, textile payrolls provided a living for more North Carolinians than any other industry. Textile plants were located in eighty-one of the state’s one hundred counties, with a payroll of nearly $3 billion a year. In the early 1990s, the textile industry remained North Carolina’s largest industrial employer, and there were more textile workers in the state than in any other.¹⁷

Throughout the postwar period, the textile industry experienced a process of consolidation, whereby the average size of companies grew through mergers. The industry had traditionally been characterized by small, individually owned companies, and mergers were an attempt to improve profits and achieve better control of product lines. Although the industry was increasingly dominated by a small number of large companies, it was still competitive in character. Thus, the fifteen largest companies in 1968 employed less than half of all workers in the industry in the same year. The largest, Burlington Industries, employed less than 10 percent of the industry’s workers in that year.¹⁸

The records of the class action lawsuits offer a detailed look at the process of integration at these large textile companies. Indeed, the companies that feature heavily in this story were among the biggest in the industry. J. P. Stevens, involved in several large class actions in this period, was the nation’s second largest textile company, employing 49,300 workers in 1968. Cannon Mills, another company involved in a great deal of litigation, was the eighth largest, employing 18,000 workers in its plants around Kannapolis, North Carolina. Dan River Mills, Cone Mills, and Fieldcrest Mills, all at the center of this study, were also top-fifteen companies. The largest company, Burlington Industries, employed 83,000 workers in 1968. Burlington also features in this study through several lawsuits which were filed against it.¹⁹

Entry into the textile industry was particularly important for African Americans because most of the jobs were unskilled or could be easily learned with no specialist training. In 1968, Richard Rowan’s study found that 87 percent of all textile jobs were classified as blue-collar, with most of these being operative positions. Rowan concluded that there is probably no other basic industry in the United States with more employees classified as operatives. Even in the 1960s, the industry retained a labor-intensive character, meaning that it was in a unique position to employ large numbers of relatively unskilled workers.²⁰

The vast majority of production work in the textile industry was unskilled or semiskilled, with machine operators holding over one-half of all jobs. Most mills, moreover, used standard equipment in the production process, making it easy for workers to transfer their skills from mill to mill. Although most jobs were not skilled, jobs within the industry were graded according to how heavy or dirty the work was. African Americans had traditionally been hired at the start and finish of the production process, where work was arduous and less desirable, rather than in the central processes of spinning and weaving, which were considered cleaner, more prestigious jobs.

The first stage of the production process was the opening room, where bales of raw cotton were opened and fed into a machine that cleaned the fiber. This job was unskilled and heavy, requiring regular lifting of raw cotton bales. For this reason, black men had traditionally been hired in the opening room.

After opening, the cotton was transferred by machine to pickers for additional cleaning. The pickers formed the cotton into large rolls called laps, which weighed up to ninety pounds. These laps had to be manually lifted to the next machine, making the picking room an undesirable job where large numbers of African Americans were employed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Following picking, carding machines straightened and cleaned the fiber into long strands called card slivers that were mechanically coiled into cans for transfer to the next stage of the process. After carding, drawing reduced several loose slivers into a single, compact, uniform strand, while roving twisted the strands and wound them onto bobbins ready for spinning.

Spinning made up around 20 percent of a textile mill’s employment and was usually carried out by women. Spinning was the final operation of yarn manufacture and was responsible for drawing strands out further and then twisting them to form yarn. Spinning was traditionally restricted to white women, and black women had to fight hard to get spinning jobs in this period.

In the 1960s and 1970s, most mills also wove their own cloth, and in these mills weaving made up around half of all jobs. Weaving involved mixing crosswise (filling) threads with lengthwise (warp) threads on a loom to form cloth. This work was more skilled than most textile work and was the most highly paid. Consequently, it was dominated by whites, especially men. The position of loom fixer, responsible for maintaining a weaver’s looms and keeping them running, was particularly prestigious and difficult for blacks to break into. Loom fixer was the highest paid and most prestigious job in the textile industry without entering management.

After weaving, the cloth was finished through processes such as dyeing, bleaching, and preshrinking. This work involved extensive exposure to chemicals and heat and was often considered undesirable. Again, this was an area of the industry where black men had traditionally been employed, and companies such as Cone Mills and Dan River Mills used large numbers of black men in their bleachery and dyeing operations well before the 1960s.²¹

Black Employment before 1964

A mixture of state law and social custom ensured that no blacks worked on production jobs in the southern textile industry before the 1960s. In South Carolina, the Segregation Act of 1915 made it illegal for anyone engaged in the business of cotton textile manufacturing. . . to allow. . . operatives. . . of different races to labor and work together within the same room. The law, which stayed on the books until 1960, had a separate clause that excluded many non-production jobs, establishing a tradition of black employment in these jobs. Other states followed similar patterns due to social custom.²²

This exclusion of African Americans from production positions was a central feature of labor relations in the southern textile industry before the 1960s. As one recent study of the industry in the early twentieth century has concluded, The most striking feature of the labor system in southern mills was the exclusion of blacks from ‘production jobs.’²³ The industry’s exclusion of blacks even stood out when compared to other southern industries, and for many observers the textile industry was a symbol of the racist South. Dr. Vivian W. Henderson, president of Clark College in Atlanta and an economist, told the EEOC textile forum in 1967: The textile industry in the South has an extremely poor record on Negro employment. The industry has a vicious history of outright exclusion and sheer discrimination regarding Negroes from the workforce in the various plants. The only manufacturing industry, in my judgement, that parallels the textile industry—and this can be supported by data—in terms of Negro exclusion from employment in the South is apparel, an allied industry. Henderson used EEOC data to show that in 1960 textiles had the poorest record of Negro employment as a proportion of total employment of all manufacturing industries.²⁴

The only opportunities for African Americans before the 1960s were thus in nonproduction positions. The industry employed some black men in service or janitorial positions; these workers were usually hired to sweep or clean areas of the mill where the white workers operated the machinery. The jobs were frequently dirty and menial. Theodore Suggs, a retired black mill worker from Tarboro, North Carolina, remembered clearly the demeaning nature of the job that he was first hired to perform in 1952: I was taking care of the floors, buffing and sanding and sweeping. A lot of times they would spit on the floor and we had to go and scrub up that spit. It would get real bad, especially in the weave room; we’d have to scrape up all the cotton and stuff that was stuck to the floor.²⁵ At the Rosemary Mill in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, Sammy Alston was hired in the 1950s to clean the bathrooms and empty the spit trays that white workers used while they were on the job. Alston remembered that he was the only black person in the entire department where he worked: I used to work up there at that mill. What I was doing was putting in spit trays, putting sawdust in it, and I was cleaning bathrooms. . . . They had some little spit trays, what they used to spit in. You put sawdust in it. . . keeps them from spitting on the floor. . . . I would always get them up, put new ones down, and I had bathrooms I had to clean up. Weren’t black people working there and I was the only one to come through there, and it would be nothing in that card room but white people.²⁶

This isolation from other black workers determined the way that the few black workers had to behave. Many black men who secured jobs inside the plants before the 1960s remembered that they had to perform their work quietly and unobtrusively, taking care to avoid any contact with whites, especially white women, who worked on the machines. Calvin Quarles was hired at the Eagle and Phenix Mill in Columbus, Georgia, in 1952. His job was to sweep the weave department where white men and women tended the machines. A soft-spoken, affable man, Quarles remembered that I started sweeping in the weaving department, and back then it was where you wasn’t even supposed to go down an alley where a white person was. You had to get out that alley when they come in, and then when they got out of the way, then go and sweep the alley. Quarles felt that he had only been successful in holding down his job because he worked hard and did not talk back.²⁷ Jacob Little, who started working at the Columbus Towel Mill in Columbus, Georgia, in the early 1960s, recalled similar experiences: In the early ‘60s some of the problems facing you was if you walked down—you know, you have a row of looms with machinery—if you walked down the row with the machinery and a white woman started walking down it, you’d better get out of the alley, you know, let her pass, you’d better not pass in the alley. So that was some of the things, you know, down South. We went from being called boy, nigger, black, to our names.²⁸

Besides working in cleaning jobs within white departments, black men also found employment in heavy jobs either outside of the mill or in segregated departments within the mill. Before the 1960s, many large southern textile companies hired blacks in their dyeing departments, where workers were exposed to heat, dust, and chemicals. Other companies that were not involved in the finishing of cloth employed blacks in yard or warehouse labor. Theodore Suggs remembered that the choice for blacks before the 1960s was either cleaning work or heavy yard work: The only thing you could get was a cleaning job, clean the machinery and stuff like that, the floors, the bathroom, and then doing a lot of heavy work like out on the yard, cleaning the yards and handling the cotton by the bale, that’s what blacks were doing.²⁹

At Rock Hill Printing and Finishing Company, black men were hired in a variety of heavy nonproduction jobs long before the 1960s. A number of jobs at the plant, in fact, became identified as black jobs. General Manager Durwood Costner admitted in 1972 that the laundry, the yard and the shipping department were all-black jobs. Many black men were hired into the shipping department, where they performed a variety of heavy, laborious tasks. As Jake Boger, hired into the shipping department in 1953, remembered, Yeah, mostly it was heavy. Either heavy or dirty. . . . We loaded all those trucks by hand. . . . Bales or boxes, whatnot, anything that came in there we had to load it by hand or unload it by hand. The formal complaint in Ellison v. Rock Hill Printing and Finishing Company described blacks’ jobs as the lowest and least desirable jobs. . . being generally the jobs demanding the most strenuous and continuous physical exertion, often in an environment of extreme heat or extreme cold, dirt, dust, noise and duties hazardous to health or physical safety.³⁰

African Americans who worked in the industry before the 1960s believed that textile companies hired black men for these jobs out of necessity. They felt that the jobs were heavy and undesirable and that whites would not be willing to carry them out. Joan Carter, whose father worked in the dyehouse at Fieldcrest Mills in Eden, North Carolina, in the 1940s and 1950s, remembered that some of my family always worked in the mills, but it was the men, not the women. Black men were hired for these jobs because, as Carter explained, "Who else is going to go into the spinning room and do those dirty jobs? They worked in the finishing plant, they worked in the distribution centers and places like that. My father worked in the dyehouse. They would come and get him out of bed if he was late for his work; they would beg him to go in. . . . A friend of ours that lived in the community, they would send him if my