In 1950, in the wake of the union-busting, red-baiting Taft-Hartley law, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and RJ Reynolds executives targeted Local 22.

Moranda died of a stroke at age thirty-four, fighting for her union. Celebrated Black radical artist Paul Robeson gave her eulogy. Her funeral, the largest in Winston-Salem history, was racially integrated, nearly unheard of at the time.

The CIO’s diverse and imaginative unions, committed advocates of race and gender equality, were blacklisted, expelled, divided.[1]

Viola went on to support workers organizing across the south, and with other trade unionists cofounded the National Negro Labor Council (NNLC). As Dayo Gore writes, they were anchored by a group “Black women leftists who…defiantly maintained communist affiliations” and whose “shared political work took shape at the crossroads of the fights for Black liberation, women’s equality, workers’ rights, and the U.S. left.” Their expansive radical politics prefigured social movements to come.[2]

Can we sing their songs and carry on their work? In Viola’s words, “We in the South think that organized workers in this country must join with the workers in the South…. We need not continue to be driven backwards in the South. We need not to let the South remain an unorganized base for us and an organized base for reaction and fascism. We in the South believe that a force can be made…if together, North and South, we begin to make it.”[3]

Notes

[1] Steven Rosswurm notes in The CIO’s Left-Led Unions (Rutgers University Press, 1992), 3-4, that the CIO’s expelled unions "reflected the diversity of the American working class to a greater degree than those unions that remained in the CIO." The diversity of working class composition in terms of race, class, gender is better documented. Were the CIO’s expelled unions also queerer? For more about interracial organizing at the time, see Bayard Rustin, “Interracial Primer,” Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1944, used in organizing in Winston-Salem, digitized by Yale University.

[2] Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads, 3-5, 9.

[3] Viola Brown, “Report to the National Negro Labor Council,” Get on Board the Freedom Train: Proceedings of the Founding Convention of the National Negro Labor Council, Cincinnati, 27-28 October 1951, 33-39, Box 111, MS 468, Sam Pollock Papers, Bowling Green State University Libraries.