Textile Trouble

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30937, 18 December 1965, Page 12

Textile Trouble

The Prop!

(Specially written for "The Freer" by DERRICK ROONEY.)

PEOPLE’S Songs, Inc., was founded in 1945 by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays and others with the objects of writing, collecting and .disseminating songs for, and of, the Labour movement It was a short-lived organisation, folding in 1949 with debts of 3000 dollars; but in its short life it amassed an enormous quantity of songs, lore and information about labour unions. Among this was a dozen songs about the National Textile Workers’ Union strike at the Loray mills in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929. Up that old Loray, six stories high. That's where they found us, ready to die. Began one of the songs—although when the. strike itself began there was no indication that it was any different from hundreds of others. Northerners (in this case Communists) organised the oppressed and discouraged mill workers to strike for better pay and conditions; the strike dragged on through the summer, the mill owners turned the workers out of their company-owned houses and the workers set up tents on the outskirts of town. When the strike seemed certain to be lost the workers in desperation formed a picket line and prepared to march to the mill. But they were met by police and deputies who drove them back to the tent town.

Five of the police entered the tent town, blackjacked a union guard and fired at the striker* headquarters. Answering shots killed the Gastonia police chief, O. F. Aderholt. The authorities immediately arrested 15 men and women and, in the absence of eridence that any actually did the Shooting, charged them with conspiracy to commit murder. One of than wm the union leader, Fred Beat, who had mt even been preoeot at the time; the evidence presented areinst Um consisted of excenrtstfem his speeches. Their chances of a fair Jrtal were not helped by the tocai newspapers, one of the Charlotte “News,” wrote: - _ The lenders of the National Texttie Wen’ UnSon are Communists, and are a menace to all we hold most •acred. They believe in violence murder, arson. They

want to destroy our institutions. They are undermining all morality, all religion. But nevertheless they must be given a fair trial, although everyone knows they deserve to be shot at sunrise.” The first trial ended when one of the jurors went suddenly insane, and by then the county was close to anarchy Mobs prowled the area, beating and Intimidating union members; then the songwriter Ella Mae Wiggins was murdered and protests poured in from all over America. At the second trial the prosecution dropped the charges against eight of the accused and reduced the charges against the rest to second-degree murder. But the prosecutor, John G. Carpenter, did not let the lack of evidence cramp him. He rolled on the floor, knelt, denounced the accused as fiends incarnate and devils and tried to introduce as an exhibit a dummy .of the late Chief Aidershot, dressed in his bloody uniform and covered by a shroud. The jury, swayed by his oratory if by nothing else; returned convictions on all indictments; the three Southerners among the accused were gaoled for between five and 15 yean and the four Northern agitators for between 17 and 20.