Despite violent state repression, these organizers laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement, the Winston-Salem Black Panther Party, queer liberation, and beyond.[1]

In March 1956, Viola Brown stood on the witness stand in Charlotte, North Carolina, in hearings of the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The Charlotte Post wrote: “Queer Folks, These Accused Commies.”[2] How “queer” were the witnesses? Fellow witness and coworker William Archibald McGirt, Jr. (later Will Inman), went on to be active in early LGBTQIA+ liberation movements.[3]

Allan Bérubé writes of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union that the queer CIO’s radical history was “rewritten as an un-American activity and (nearly) erased from memory.”[4]

Today, only two of the left-led CIO unions survive as national unions, yet their song reaches across the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, movements for LGBTQIA+ liberation, and beyond.

Winston-Salem, 1960: Students in Greensboro spark a movement. In their wake, students at Winston-Salem Teachers College are the first to eat in a formerly segregated restaurant in the South, at Bobbitt’s Drugstore in the lobby of the Reynolds Building. Do they know Viola?

Charleston, 1969: Tobacco Workers Union members provided crucial support to Charleston hospital workers organizing their union.

Nashville, 1990: FTA organizer Ed McCrea met gay labor activist Gerry Scoppettuolo on a picket line and told Gerry that Moranda was “one of your people.” i.e. queer.[5]

❖

What social movements sing today because of Moranda Smith, Viola Brown, Theodosia Simpson, Velma Hopkins, Ruby Jones, Chick Black, and the union they built?

As we sing today against ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), are our songs rooted in their struggles and songs?

Notes

[1] Claudia Jones, “On the Right to Self Determination for the Negro People in the Black Belt,” January 1946, collected in Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean, eds., Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women's Political Writing (Verso, 2022), 152-164. LGBTQIA+ activists later applied this framework to describe LGBTQIA+ peoples as a nationally oppressed minority. See Bettina Aptheker, Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s–1990s (Routledge, 2022).

[2] “Queer Folks, These Accused Commies,” Charlotte Observer, 14 March 1956, 2.

[3] McGirt was also a pallbearer at Moranda’s funeral and wrote a poem in her memory. See Bill McGirt / Will Inman papers, Duke University Libraries.

[4] Allan Bérubé, "No Race-Baiting! No Queen-Baiting!" on OutHistory. See also Allan Bérubé, No Red-Baiting! No-Race Baiting! No Queen-Baiting! The Marine Cooks and Stewards Union from the Depression to the Cold War, 2016 lecture; Allan Bérubé, My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History (University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Jonathan Kissam and Annabelle Heckler, “'We Took Care of Each Other': A Maritime Union's Hidden History of Gay-Straight and Interracial Solidarity,” Labor Notes, August 2021.

[5] Gerry Scoppettuolo, “Moranda Smith: An African American Revolutionary Trade Union Leader (1915-1950),” Fighting Words, 15 August 2022. See also Gerry Scoppettuolo's conversations with Annabelle, 2022-2024.