Years before Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks sat down on the bus, Black women in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, sat down at RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company, the largest factory in the South. Together they sparked a movement: 10,000 workers turned their backs to the machines in June 1943.

Black and white workers united, won their strike, and built a union, Local 22, United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA), later Food Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers, Congress of Industrial Organizations (FTA-CIO). Together, they dreamed beyond workplace demands, inspired workers across the South, and won early civil rights victories in the face of a rising Red Scare.[1]  

Reluctant at first, striker Moranda Smith, daughter of sharecroppers, went on to become the one of the first Black women elected to U.S. national union leadership in 1947: “everyone stood taller” because of her.[2]

Notes

[1] Local 22 organized as part of the largest upsurge in union organizing in U.S. history, spearheaded by left-led unions in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), as part of the Popular Front. See Annabelle Heckler, "Tobacco Workers Strike," Celebrate People’s History Poster (Just Seeds, 2023).

[2] Jonathan Kissam and Annabelle Heckler, “Not Words, But Action: Moranda Smith, Food and Tobacco Workers Local 22, and the Fight to Expand Democracy,” Labor Notes, June 2023; Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Interview with Bernard Friedland, Junius Scales, and Karl Korstad, 14 April 1986, Southern Oral History Program Interviews, E.005. Labor: Civil Rights Unionism. Interviews conducted by Robert Rodgers Korstad, Lisa Hazirjian, Karl Korstad, and Lane Windham between 1976 and 1998, Southern Oral History Program Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.