Red Scare, Lavender Song: Moranda Smith, Viola Brown, and Civil Rights Unions, 1943-1969, by Annabelle Heckler

"Close" to Moranda

Years before proud LGBTQIA+ community members began to celebrate pride publicly in Winston-Salem, Moranda, nicknamed “Randy” in her high school yearbook, was “close to” Viola Brown, a fellow worker and union leader.

As their coworker and fellow trade unionist Chick Black remembered, “The first close friendship that I ever detected or observed about Moranda was Viola. And I know that Viola helped Moranda a lot. They were real – as close as two people could get…. I'll give Viola credit for helping to develop Moranda because they would even spend nights together. Mostly Moranda would go over to Viola's and sometimes spend weekends and things like that.”[1]

Did Moranda and Viola meet in the union’s education department? Local 22 members educated one another and built unity and solidarity with other workers across the South, holding regular schools and creating a freedom library in their union hall.

Viola and Moranda in union library and education department.jpg

Annabelle Heckler, sketch of Viola and Moranda in the union library and education department.

As Viola remembered, “You know at that little library the city had for us, you couldn’t find any books on Negro history. They didn’t have books by [Herbert] Aptheker, [W.E.B.] DuBois, or Frederick Douglass. But we had them at our library.”[2]

In 1945, Moranda was elected by her coworkers to head the union’s education department.

Local 22 sponsored a baseball team, the CIO Tigers, in the all-Black city league. Did Viola and Moranda watch games together? Teamwork, discipline, self-respect: The CIO Tigers won the championship in 1946.

FTA Choir 1946 courtesy of Bob Korstad annotated.jpg

Photograph by Parker Condax of Local 22 Tobacco Workers Union Choir in Philadelphia, 1947. Courtesy of Bob Korstad.

Moranda first drew FBI surveillance in 1946 as she organized her coworkers in solidarity with striking tobacco workers in Charleston, South Carolina. The workers won their strike, and their picket line song, “We Shall Overcome,” became a protest anthem sung around the world.

Notes

[1] Interview with Robert “Chick” Black, 13 May 1987, Southern Oral History Program Interviews, E.005. Labor: Civil Rights Unionism. See also Interviews with William McGirt, 13 and 14 June 1995.

[2] Interview with Viola Brown, 7 August 1981, Southern Oral History Program Interviews, E.005. Labor: Civil Rights Unionism.