The Cigar Factory

An 1882 illustration of the cotton mill

During the late 1800s, influential business leaders and boosters in Charleston, South Carolina, sought to encourage increased industrial development in the city.^[1] At the time, Charleston was the economic center of the state, but was not developing as rapidly as some other major cities in the Southern United States, and much of the state's textile industry was based in Upstate South Carolina.^[2] In 1882, as part of this push for industry in South Carolina, the Charleston Manufacturing Company began operations at a newly built cotton mill in the city's Hampstead neighborhood,^[2] which would eventually become known as the Charleston Cotton Mills.^[3] This five-story building,^[3] which was constructed in the Victorian style,^[4] occupied an entire city block at the intersection of East Bay Street and Columbus Street, several blocks away from Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and overlooking the Cooper River.^[2] When it first opened, the plant only hired African Americans in custodial positions, while textile jobs were performed by local white Americans under the supervision of experienced workers from cotton mills in the Northern United States. However, in 1897, due to poor business, the plant began to accept African American workers to certain positions that had previously been off-limits. The plant closed shortly thereafter, and an effort to revive the plant two years later with a workforce that included black women from the nearby Sea Islands also failed.^[2]

The plant remained dormant for several years until the property was leased to the American Tobacco Company (ATC), which converted the plant from a cotton mill to a cigar factory.^[5][4] By 1912, the company purchased the plant outright,^[4] and it would eventually become known locally simply as the Cigar Factory.^[3] Like the cotton mill before it, this plant hired both black and white people, with black workers performing separate tasks from the white workers,^[3] such as creating cigar boxes or processing tobacco leaves.^[5] By the 1930s, the plant employed about 1,400 people, of whom 60 percent were women, and had an annual payroll of approximately $1 million.^[4][5] At its peak of production, the plant was creating 1.5 million cigars per day.^[3] The plant attracted many African American workers as it offered some of the highest wages available to them in the city, though they had to contend with both the physically demanding nature of the work and constant racial discrimination from management.^[6]

FTA-CIO Local 15

In the 1940s, during World War II, workers at the plant organized under a local union of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), a labor union affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).^[4] The UCAPAWA changed its name shortly after the Charleston workers organized with it, becoming the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers (FTA), with the local union at the Cigar Factory becoming FTA-CIO Local 15.^[4] On September 1, 1944, they voted to approve their first union contract, and leaders of Local 15 began to negotiate with ATC management.^[4] The union agreed to abide by a guideline set by the National War Labor Board (NWLB) that barred the union from engaging in any strike action,^[6] and while the company did not institute immediate pay raises, they did agree to raise workers' pay after the war was over.^[4] Under the terms of the agreement, black workers would receive a pay raise from 25 cents per hour to 40 cents per hour, while white workers who were machinists and supervisors would be paid 65 cents per hour.^{[4][note 1]}

During the war, despite an excess profits tax, the ATC experienced significant growth and record profits, with their workforce at the Cigar Factory expanding to almost 2,000 employees.^[4] Additionally, following the war's conclusion in 1945, the company received roughly $1.3 million in refunds from the excess profits tax.^[4] With World War II over, the Cigar Factory employed about 1,400 workers, of whom about 900 were black women,^[3] and roughly 1,000 were Local 15 members.^[6] On September 24, 1945, Local 15 members voted to approve a new contract that called for increased wages and backpay that had been guaranteed during the war.^[4] The following month, the NWLB also ordered ATC to pay their workers some wages that had been withheld by the company from December 1944 to October 1945.^[4] However, company executives ignored the order and Harold F. McGinnis, the manager of the Cigar Factory, also refused to honor the local union's contract.^[4] On October 1, McGinnis fired a black male employee after his white female supervisor accused him of "taking familiarities" with some of the female employees in the plant, a move that many Local 15 members saw as racially charged.^[4] With the firing and the failure to honor their contract, tensions increased dramatically between the company and the union, and on October 3, Local 15 president Reuel Stanfield organized a sitdown strike.^[4] Over the next two days, about one hundred workers participated, remaining idle by their workstations to protest the company, and on October 4, about 900 African American employees performed a walkout after the fired employee was not given his job back.^[4] In light of these events, on October 5, McGinnis met with Stanfield to discuss the workers' grievances.^[4] However, during the meeting, McGinnis offered no firm plans on how to handle their grievances, and following the meeting, the company's process for issuing backpay was slow.^[4] This was not an issue that was unique to the Cigar Factory, as workers at other ATC plants in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Trenton, New Jersey, also voiced their displeasure at backpay issues and discrimination.^[4] As a result of this, the FTA decided to initiate a solidarity strike at all three of these ATC plants, and on October 15, workers at the Philadelphia plant became the first to go on strike.^[4] Workers at the Charleston plant would go on strike as well one week later, on October 22.^[4][6][8]

Historical significance

The Cigar Factory in 2010

Some historians note that the strike was significant in bringing together black and white individuals towards a common goal, a rarity in the Southern United States at the time.^[9][11] In an article on the strike, the Preservation Society of Charleston stated that, "In the 1940s south, the Cigar Factory strike was revolutionary in its illustration of the power of a unified voice".^[9] A 2016 book by historians Herb Frazier, Bernard Edward Powers Jr., and Marjory Wentworth echoes these same sentiments, stating that the strike was "far ahead of its time" for uniting black and white economic interests.^[11] Many of the individuals who were involved in the strike would later be active in the civil rights movement that would begin several years after the strike ended,^[8] and in Charleston during this time there was a surge in political activity among African Americans, such as with the formation of the Progressive Democratic Party.^[4] Other sources view the strike as part of a long history of organized labor activity among African Americans in Charleston, including activities among organized longshoremen and the 1969 Charleston hospital strike,^[12][13] the latter of which drawing inspiration from the Cigar Factory strike.^[9][14] However, the strike would prove to be one of the last major biracial movements in the city.^[4] According to Frazier, Powers, and Wentworth, "The divisions between working-class Southerners of both races increased under the pressures of anticommunist and anti-integration rhetoric that was soon to come".^[11]

Fate of the Cigar Factory

The passage of the Taft–Hartley Act in 1947 severely hurt the FTA, which had several ties to communist organizations and individuals, and as a result, Local 15 became associated instead with the Distributive, Processing, and Office Workers of America (DPO) of the CIO.^[4] Around this same time, many white workers at the factory abandoned DPO Local 15 and joined the white-only Tobacco Workers International Union (TWIU) Local 257, which competed with Local 15 for influence at the plant.^[4] By the mid-1950s, Local 257, which was considered a company union, had become a serious threat to Local 15's influence.^[4] Additionally, by the 1960s, the factory was experiencing the negative effects of changes in the tobacco industry related to increased competition from foreign companies and a requirement from the federal government to add tobacco packaging warning messages to their products.^[4] As a result, in 1966, the Cigar Factory laid off 900 workers,^[4] and in 1973, the factory closed permanently, having operated continuously for about 70 years.^[3][9] In 1980, Johnson & Wales University began using the facility as for classroom space,^[4] and that same year, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places.^[3] In 2013, a historical marker was added outside the building that gave information on the strike, and the following year, the property was purchased by a private company that converted it into a mixed-use development.^[3] In 2016, the cigar factory and the strike were the subject of a historical fiction novel written by Michele Moore and published by Story River Books.^[15]

"We Shall Overcome"

The gospel song "We Shall Overcome" traces its origins back to the 1800s, when it was used as a work song sung by slaves in the United States, and in 1901 a version was published by the Methodist minister Charles Albert Tindley titled "I'll Overcome Someday".^[7] During the Cigar Factory strike, Lucille Simmons, a striker and longtime employee of the factory, would sing a modified version of this gospel song, which became known as "We Will Overcome", to signify the end of picketing for the day.^[4][10] According to a 2016 article in The Atlantic, Simmons's performances would be "[t]he first widely acknowledged performance of the modern song".^[16] In 1947, two members of Local 15, Anna Lee Bonneau and Evelyn Risher,^[4] traveled to the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, to attend a workshop.^[7] There, they introduced the song to civil rights activist Zilphia Horton, who sang it for activist and folk singer Pete Seeger later that year.^[7] Seeger is generally regarded as popularizing the song, with the name "We Shall Overcome", which became a major anthem in the civil rights movement.^[4] The 2013 historical marker at the Cigar Factory gives information regarding the singing of the song during the strike.^[3]