Strike at White Oaks Cone plant in early 1920s
Wright describes a strike that occurred at White Oak years before the workers were officially organized. Sometime in the 1920s, a group of workers, including Wright, decided to walk out on the job when the company bosses implemented technology and wage changes. He describes how they came to the decision, the actions they took, and he stresses the unorganized nature of the strike.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Lacy Wright, March 10, 1975. Interview E-0017. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
But what
happened: they were changing the style of yarn that they were going to
make. They were making coarse yarn and fine yarn. Your fine yarn was
really filling And the warp was for the war. They were going to make it
all on the speeder the same size. Now they had for years, when they were
filling speeders, a two cent difference in the amount you got per hank,
because it was fine work. And on the warp you made two cents more per
hank. Well, when you run fine work on a speeder in an eight-hour period
the speeder wouldn't run as many hanks on fine work as it
would coarse work. Well, they made the change, and
they was going to make the hank price uniform. Now the filler men
wasn't going to be hurt too bad; but the warp men, that was
on the warp speeders, we were going to be cut. We was getting about
fourteen cents a hank, I believe it was. And it was running ten hours a
day in those days, and we run 24, 26, 28 hanks in a day. Well, when they
made the change and put it on fine, they were going to drop us to about
twenty hanks a day, and cut the price of our hanks two cents too.
- WILLIAM FINGER:
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To twelve? To twelve cents?
- LACY WRIGHT:
-
So everybody got all worked up about it. And it was a funny thing: I went
on vacation—back in them days they didn't give you
no vacation pay, they just shut down. On vacation. It was all worked up
before vacation. So I come back the morning after vacation; I was
already a week behind in my grocery bill, you might say. They said (they
were all out on the supply floor, all of them together): "What
are we going to do?" And it was right funny, I
didn't have too much to say into it. I was always young man
then, you know. They said: "We're going to shut it
down. We're going to get old man Tom Gardner (he was
superintendent then), we're going to get him down here and
talk to us, and if he don't raise the price of the hank, we
ain't running no speeders." And I just thought to
myself: "What am I going to do? I don't feel like I
should go against them fellows, and I don't feel like I can
afford to be out of work." So he come on down there and talked
to us. He said: "No, absolutely not. We're not going
to do one thing." Now he said that right to start with, to show
you how you can irritate a bunch of men that's already mad.
That was the first thing he said when we told him what we wanted:
"No, that's all we're going to do. Now
you can take it, or you can leave it." And some of the fellows
pretty badly cursed, and they said: "Well by God,
we're going to leave it in the speeders
too." And they walked out, every one of them but one. There
were twenty-six speeder hands, and part of somewhere else too.
- WILLIAM FINGER:
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You walked out with them?
- LACY WRIGHT:
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I walked out with them.
- WILLIAM FINGER:
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Had people talked about this during vacation?
- LACY WRIGHT:
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Oh, a long time before vacation, and during vacation too, you see.
- WILLIAM FINGER:
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And had they planned it out? Had they planned to walk out together?
- LACY WRIGHT:
-
Well, I can't actually say that… In other words,
there absolutely wasn't no organization in what we know of
organization.
- WILLIAM FINGER:
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It wasn't formal.
- LACY WRIGHT:
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It was each man making up his mind what he was going to do,
don't you see.
- WILLIAM FINGER:
-
There was no union.
- LACY WRIGHT:
-
No. Neither was there anybody that even attempted to lead the group or do
anything like that. So we walked out, and they wouldn't let
us go out the gate that we had come in at. They made us go out up at the
office.
- WILLIAM FINGER:
-
Oh.
- CHIP HUGHES:
-
Oh.
- LACY WRIGHT:
-
All went out at the office
[laugther].
Had the office way on back over there at where they closed the
Holiday Inn on Fifteenth Street—Sixteenth Street, 1100
Sixteenth Street, that's over by the Post Office. And right
near that Holiday Inn over there. So I walked on out and we (all of us)
stood around and talked a little bit. All of them said: "Well
by God, let them fire us. We'll just go somewhere else and
get us a job." So I went on home. Before I got home they done
sent the constable over and had my wife all tore up, and told her I had
to get out of the house. She was crying; she didn't know no
better, she was a'crying. I said: "Now wait a
minute.
[laughter]
They ain't going to run me out
of this house until I get a place to go somewhere else." She
said: "Well, I know." She said: "Do you know
what they done at Revolution, don't you?" I said:
"Yes, I know what they done at Revolution." I said:
"But I'll find a place to stay." So we
hadn't been out more than two hours and they shut down. Shut
the whole plant down.