Relationship between strikers, strikebreakers, and textile workers
Tensions with strikebreakers may have caused a crowd to gather, which the police eventually fire on. Cloniger remembers also that the textile workers of North Charlotte supported the striking streetcar workers strongly enough to make it dangerous for strikebreakers to run cars up there.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Loy Connelly Cloniger, June 18, 1980. Interview H-0158. 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
- ALLEN TULLOS:
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Why was it, you reckon, that crowd got together? What caused that crowd to form?
- LOY CONNELLY CLONIGER:
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I don't know. Just because the strike was going on, and them strike-breakers was down there or something. Somebody said something about, they said they was going to go back there and get the strike-breakers, but man, they had all kind of guns and everything. [chuckle] And the strike-breakers would take a streetcar out and run it and keep what they took in. They sent them word from north Charlotte that they had a Hindenburg Line over there, to send a streetcar over there. [chuckle] But they wouldn't send one over there. They'd tear it up, see.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
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They had a Hindenburg Line.
- LOY CONNELLY CLONIGER:
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Yes.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
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Why did that happen in north Charlotte?
- LOY CONNELLY CLONIGER:
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They were in favor of the streetcar men.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
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There were lots of the textile workers over there in north Charlotte.
- LOY CONNELLY CLONIGER:
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Yes. They had textile mills over there.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
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And they were supporting the streetcar workers.
- LOY CONNELLY CLONIGER:
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Yes.
