Dixie Rising by Peter Applebome

Author:Peter Applebome [Applebome, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81987-1
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2012-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

More than forty years later, the story was pretty much the same. After investigating union complaints against Fieldcrest Cannon, Inc., in North Carolina, stemming from a 1991 organizing campaign, the National Labor Relations Board found that the company engaged in unfair labor practices that were “numerous, pervasive and outrageous”–including many of those cited in the 1951 report. To this day, the religion of antiunionism flourishes as it always has throughout the South. The historian James C. Cobb calls it “the South’s most respectable prejudice” and quotes a labor leader as saying of Strom Thurmond: “He’ll accept blacks now, but you still don’t see Strom shaking hands with union people.”

Sixty-one years after the shootings at Honea Path, South Carolina’s public television station refused to show the Uprising of ’34 documentary, and it finally aired on a commercial network at 11:30 P.M. on a Sunday night a half year after the rest of the country got to see it. When Simon Greer, an organizer with the Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment, tried to show the film as part of a noncredit course at nearby Spartanburg Technical College in Roger Milliken’s hometown in the heart of the I-85 manufacturing belt, he was told that the course was being canceled because it was too controversial and the major manufacturers in the area like Milliken and Michelin tires didn’t want it shown.

Many in Honea Path felt the same way. Fred Moore ran the town newspaper, then called the Honea Path Chronicle, from 1945 to 1981 and served for twenty-two years in the state legislature. At seventy-five, he still runs a profitable and sophisticated printing business whose main customers are the textile and apparel mills in the area. We were sitting in the airy vaulted living room of his white brick house, which has four white pillars out front and a trailer full of treasured junk out back, bearing a sign that reads Col. Fred T. Moore, S.C. Lic. Auctioneer 101. Honea Path, S.C. Inside the living room were porcelain dolls and bric-a-brac all around, his wife’s Bible open to Isaiah 29, and mix-and-match upholstered chairs of all shapes and sizes. Jerry Springer was on the TV, interviewing folks who slept with their wife’s sister or their husband’s brother or brother or sister’s mate. An infidelity scorecard flashed on the screen (MARRIED TO TONYA–HAVING AFFAIR WITH HER SISTER JAMIE) for those who couldn’t keep up. It was around noon, and Moore, a big affable man with snow-white hair, was sitting in a wing chair in sky-blue pajamas wearing white slip-on sneakers.

Fred Moore talked about a lot of things, from a long description of Fritz Hollings’s legislative style as governor to an intricate description of how a loom works, using two envelopes and the weave in his pajamas as props. But for the life of him he couldn’t see why anyone would want to dredge up Honea Path’s labor history.

“I didn’t make a single mention of it in all the years I ran the paper, and I don’t see why anyone would mention it now.

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