The Labor Movement in the U.S. South: Voices of Workers
Archival Resources
Southern Oral History Program Collection
Founded in 1973, the Southern Oral History Program collects interviews with southerners who have made significant contributions to various fields of human endeavor. In addition, the Program undertakes special projects with the purpose of rendering historically visible those whose experience is not reflected in traditional written sources. Interviews are conducted by Program staff, graduate students, faculty members, and consultants.
Millie Wiggins Wandell and Charlotte Wiggins Oral History on Ella May Wiggins
The Millie Wiggins Wandell and Charlotte Wiggins Oral History on Ella May Wiggins, 1984, records the sisters' memories and what they learned afterward of the death of their mother, Ella May Wiggins, a white balladeer, textile worker, and union organizer who was killed during the textile strike in Gastonia, N.C., in 1929.
Raymond Caballero Interviews on the Griggs v. Duke Power Case
Contains audio and video recordings of interviews with plaintiffs and attorneys who were involved in the 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power Supreme Court case, a landmark employment discrimination case. These oral histories were conducted by Latino American attorney and historian Raymond Caballero in 1991, at the time of the 20th anniversary of the ruling. The case was brought against Duke Power Company by thirteen Black men who were employed as janitors at Duke Power's Dan River hydroelectric power plant in Draper, N.C., to challenge discriminatory hiring and promotion practices. Caballero interviewed several of the plaintiffs, Julius Chambers (lead attorney, working on behalf of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), Kelly Alexander, Jr. (the son of the state president of the NAACP at the time of the case), and attorneys who represented Duke Power.
Cooleemee (N.C.) Mill Town Collection
The collection, a community archive developed and organized between 1989 and 2016 by the Cooleemee Historical Association (CHA) in Davie County, N.C., documents work life in the Erwin Cotton Mills No. 3 and social life in the company town of Cooleemee, N.C. between 1898 and 1969 when the mill closed. Materials collected by CHA board members Jim Rumley and Lynn Rumley include blueprints of the plant and other structures in town, financial ledgers, employment records, telephone directories, research files, subject files, scrapbooks, yearbooks, trade union publications, and family and personal papers donated by Cooleemee residents.
Federal Writers’ Project Papers
W. T. Couch (1901), a white publisher and editor, was also a part-time official of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration, as assistant and associate director for North Carolina, 1936-1937, and as director for the southern region, 1938-1939. These papers include his correspondence relating to the project and narratives (called "life histories") of about 1,200 individuals, written by about 60 members of the project after one or more oral history interviews with the subjects. Persons interviewed, many of them African Americans, described life in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.
Jane Abernethy Plyler Papers
Eighteen cassette tapes of oral history interviews with public health nurses who practiced during the 1920s and 1930s in North Carolina. Also included is a copy of Plyer's thesis, "Public Health Nursing in North Carolina: Oral Histories of Earlier Years," which includes edited excerpts from the interviews.
Published Resources
Like a Family by ISBN: 9780807882948Publication Date: 2012-12-30Since its original publication in 1987, Like a Family has become a classic in the study of American labor history. Basing their research on a series of extraordinary interviews, letters, and articles from the trade press, the authors uncover the voices and experiences of workers in the Southern cotton mill industry during the 1920s and 1930s.
Mama Learned Us to Work by ISBN: 0807827169Publication Date: 2002-09-16Farm women of the twentieth-century South have been portrayed as oppressed, worn out, and isolated. Lu Ann Jones tells quite a different story in Mama Learned Us to Work. Building upon evocative oral histories, she encourages us to understand these women as consumers, producers, and agents of economic and cultural change.
We Just Keep Running the Line by ISBN: 9780807157688Publication Date: 2014-11-05We Just Keep Running the Line is the story of the rise of the poultry processing industry in El Dorado, Arkansas, and the labor force -- composed primarily of black women -- upon which it came to rely. Using collected oral histories to allow marginalized women of color to tell their own stories and to contest and reshape narratives commonly used against them, the book explores the physical and psychological toll this work took on black women, analyzing their survival strategies and their fight to retain their humanity in an exploitative industry.
