Moranda was elected to national union leadership in January 1947, in the face of rising big business backlash and the gathering Red Scare.[1]

Moranda confronted the union busting, red baiting Taft-Hartley bill (and U.S. Senator Robert Taft): “As a worker and a union member, I want to tell you something about what unions have meant to us in Winston-Salem. I want you to understand why our organization is priceless to us. Every human being longs for a life that is made happy with freedom and security. Through our union, my fellow workers and I have made the first steps toward that kind of life that we have ever known. It has opened our eyes and put gladness in our hearts. It has given us strength and hope. We love our union. There are bills before this committee designed to weaken our organization, to make it helpless, to keep it from continuing to build and carry us onward. The Constitution of the United States holds out a hope of democracy and progress for all people. But it is only through our union that we have been able to begin the realization of those hopes. Every bill against our union is a blow to our hopes as human beings and our rights as citizens.

You know what the four freedoms mean to people of the whole world. Freedom of speech, freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of religion. For the workers of Winston-Salem, and for millions of others, their union organizations are making these freedoms something more than just words.”[2]

In the wake of Taft-Hartley, Moranda, Viola and their coworkers went on strike May 1, 1947, fighting to save their union.[3] Ed McCrea remembered, “Every picket captain pretty near was a song leader.” The sound of peaceful, psalm-singing pickets engulfed Winston-Salem. Moranda and her coworkers faced repression from their employer, the FBI, white supremacist vigilantes, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and the mayor of Winston-Salem, who called them “Stalin’s little songbirds.”[4]

Moranda, a mesmerizing public speaker, a forceful negotiator, and a dedicated trade unionist, stressed the need for unity and organization for all workers. She pushed for “not words, but action” in defense of democracy, for “people to walk the picket lines free and unafraid and know that they are working for their freedom and their liberty.”[5]

Moranda became her union’s regional director, fighting raids in Charleston and the Klan in Apopka, Florida. In Birmingham, Alabama, years before Bull Connor turned police dogs and fire hoses on children on national television, Moranda and fellow Black trade unionist Asbury Howard led delegates of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) in singing “We Shall Not Be Moved” to fend off Connor’s Birmingham police.[6]

In 1949, Claudia Jones wrote that the “the militant participation of Negro women in all aspects of the struggle for peace, civil rights, and economic security” was essential to the emerging Black liberation movement and “the emerging anti-fascist, anti-imperialist coalition." Black women were “among the most militant trade unionists,” she wrote, as “shown in …the tobacco workers' strike – in which such leaders as Moranda Smith and Velma Hopkins emerged as outstanding trade unionists.”[7]

Moranda, Viola, Velma, Theodosia, Chick and their coworkers won wage increases, improved housing in Winston-Salem, resisted police and sexual violence in North Carolina and across the South, and elected the first Black alderman in the South since Reconstruction.[8]

Ruby Jones: “We didn't get no recognition or be treated as human beings till that union came in there.… Even in the newspaper, nobody never had a ‘Mrs.’ on their name till that union came… It's helped everywhere … Some stores you couldn't go in. You couldn't eat at places. You couldn't vote. You had to take what the other people give you. … It was just like being reconstructed. That union was the best thing that ever happened.”[9]

Notes

[1] Charisse Burden-Stelley, Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2023), describes how deeply anti-Black racial oppression has infused the U.S. government’s anti-communist repression.

[2] Moranda Smith, Testimony before the Senate Labor Committee, Government Printing Office, 25 March 1947. Senator Taft did not allow Smith to deliver her full prepared remarks; see page 2354 and her testimony, page 1565. Also printed as “My Name is Moranda Smith,” Daily Worker, 20 April 1947, 2.

[3] “In the wake” is an homage to Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016). 

[4] Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, 318, 410.

[5] Moranda Smith, Speech Before Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Convention, Boston, MA, 15 October 1947, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1947-moranda-smith-addresses-congress-industrial-organizations-annual-convention-boston/.

[6] Betty Feldman, “Heroine of Southern Unionism,” Daily Worker, 12 April 1953, 12. Describes the 1948 event and also names Viola as Moranda’s “close associate.”

[7] Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Political Affairs, June 1949, 51-67. Claudia Jones was the Black Trinidadian Communist founder of London carnival, an early theorist of what we today call intersectionality, and much more. See Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press, 2008).

[8] For more on these victories, including the election of Kenneth Williams, the first Black alderman in the South elected after Reconstruction, see Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism. For more on Moranda, Viola, Velma Hopkins’s efforts, and the campaign to free Rosa Lee Ingram, see Dayo Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York University Press, 2011). 

[9] Interview with Ruby Jones, 28 December 1976, Southern Oral History Program Interviews, E.005. Labor: Civil Rights Unionism.