0:03 [SPEAKER_00]: September 14th, 1929. 0:06 [SPEAKER_00]: A flat bed truck kicks up red Carolina dust on a back road outside Bessomir City. 0:15 [SPEAKER_00]: The boards rattle beneath 22 pairs of feet. 0:19 [SPEAKER_00]: No one in the truck bed carries a weapon. 0:23 [SPEAKER_00]: They are textile workers heading home from a roadblock that turned them around. 0:29 [SPEAKER_00]: They did what they were told. 0:31 [SPEAKER_00]: They turned back, and the cars behind them kept coming. 0:37 [SPEAKER_00]: In that truck bed, gripping the wooden side rails. 0:42 [SPEAKER_00]: A 29-year-old woman feels the September heat, press against her skin. 0:48 [SPEAKER_00]: She has buried four children, she earns $9 a week, she is pregnant, she writes songs about the lives of people like her, and she sings them, at rallies where exhausted Millhands weep, in a few minutes, armed men will force this truck to stop, they will open fire on unarmed workers, a bullet will pass through her chest 1:17 [SPEAKER_00]: More than 50 people will watch it happen. 1:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody will go to prison. 1:24 [SPEAKER_00]: Her name is Elame Wiggins. 1:29 [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back friend to Home Town History, the podcast that takes a stroll down the main streets and back alleys of the past, to uncover how local stories shaped the world. 1:41 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters. 1:42 [SPEAKER_00]: And today works blowering how a mill worker, who earned $9 a week in Bessamir City, North Carolina, became the voice that textile barrens had to silence, and the mother, America, tried to forget 2:00 [SPEAKER_00]: By the late 1920s, Gaston County, North Carolina held more cotton mills inside its borders than anywhere else in the American South. 2:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Over a hundred of them packed with an attend mile circle. 2:17 [SPEAKER_00]: Bessamir city set at the western edge of that circle. 2:23 [SPEAKER_00]: The American Mill, the Osage Mill, smoke stacks and spindles, and 12-hour shifts that turned cotton into cloth, and people into something disposable. 2:39 [SPEAKER_00]: At the center stood the Lorraine Mill in Gistonia. 2:44 [SPEAKER_00]: the largest single textile mill in North Carolina, 600,000 square feet of brick and noise owned not by anyone in the county, but by the Manville Janks Company of Providence, Rhode Island. 3:02 [SPEAKER_00]: In to this world came Ella Maywiggins, born around 1900, in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. 3:11 [SPEAKER_00]: She grew up in a family that lived and died by the timber trade. 3:17 [SPEAKER_00]: Her father, James May, was a logger. 3:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Her mother was Elizabeth Mayples May. 3:25 [SPEAKER_00]: When Ella May was still a girl, her father was killed in a logging accident. 3:30 [SPEAKER_00]: The family drifted between camps, near Andrews and Cherokee County, North Carolina, and the mountains around Savareville, Tennessee. 3:41 [SPEAKER_00]: She learned to read, write, and sing in those camps. 3:48 [SPEAKER_00]: At 16, she married John Wiggins. 3:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Their first daughter, Murdoch, came shortly after. 3:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Over the next decade, Ella May gave birth to nine children. 4:01 [SPEAKER_00]: John was injured in a logging accident, and eventually left the family for good. 4:08 [SPEAKER_00]: She was alone with all of them. 4:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Ella may move to Bessamir City and took work as a spinner at American Mill number two. 4:17 [SPEAKER_00]: Night shift, love hours a day, six days a week, nine dollars. 4:27 [SPEAKER_00]: She lived in Stumptown, a neighborhood outside Bessamir City that was predominantly African-American, 4:35 [SPEAKER_00]: company housing was segregated and she could not afford anything else. 4:42 [SPEAKER_00]: A white woman and her children living where the mail system said she did not belong. 4:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Then four of her children died of wooping cough all at once. 4:55 [SPEAKER_00]: She begged the mail superintendent to move her to the day shift so she could care for the ones still sick. 5:05 [SPEAKER_00]: her own words as documented at that time. 5:09 [SPEAKER_01]: I'm the mother of nine. 5:11 [SPEAKER_01]: Four died with the hooping cough all at once. 5:14 [SPEAKER_01]: I asked the super to put me on days, so as I could tend them when they had their bad spells. 5:19 [SPEAKER_01]: But he wouldn't. 5:21 [SPEAKER_00]: That refusal changed everything. 5:25 [SPEAKER_00]: By 1927, the Lorraine Mel had introduced a stretchout system, slashing its workforce from 3500 to 2200, while demanding the same output. 5:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Fewer workers, more machines, less pay, no breaks for nursing mothers. 5:50 [SPEAKER_00]: The system was designed to squeeze every scent from everybody. 5:56 [SPEAKER_00]: Ella Maywiggins had already paid the price. 6:00 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, she was done being quiet about it. 6:05 [SPEAKER_00]: On March 25, 1929, five workers at the Lorraine Mel were fired for attending a union meeting. 6:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Five days later, the remaining workers voted to strike. 6:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Their demands were plain. 6:22 [SPEAKER_00]: A $20 minimum weekly wage, a 40-hour week, equal pay for women. 6:29 [SPEAKER_00]: and end to the stretch out, recognition of their union, the national textile workers union, led by an organizer from the north named Fred Beale, 6:44 [SPEAKER_00]: On April 1, 1929, nearly 1,800 Lorraine Millworkers walked off the job, Ella Maywiggins, and the Workers at American Mill staged a spontaneous walkout in solidarity. 7:00 [SPEAKER_00]: She was the first to sign up when the strike was called in Bessamir City, 7:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Within days, a national guard arrived, strikers faced bayonets at their own workplace gates. 7:16 [SPEAKER_00]: The mill owners responded with evictions, families thrown from company housing, with nowhere to go. 7:23 [SPEAKER_00]: A tent colony rose along Franklin Avenue in Guestonia. 7:30 [SPEAKER_00]: and Elamay Wiggins found her weapon, not a picket sign, her voice. 7:38 [SPEAKER_00]: She could not read music, and did not need to. 7:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Elamay set her own lyrics to melodies, every mountain-born worker already knew, hymns, murder ballots, fiddle twos, her mother sang. 7:54 [SPEAKER_00]: She called them song ballots. 7:58 [SPEAKER_00]: She would stand in front of a crowd of spent mill hands and sing about their own lives back to them. 8:06 [SPEAKER_00]: A journalist and folklorist named Margaret Larkin heard her once and wrote that LMA's songs were better than a hundred speeches. 8:16 [SPEAKER_00]: Her most famous, mill mother's lament was set to the melody of Little Mary Fagan, 8:24 [SPEAKER_00]: a ballot every worker in those mountains knew by heart, and here is where it gets interesting. 8:33 [SPEAKER_00]: Elamay did something, no one else in Gaston County had the nerve to do. 8:39 [SPEAKER_00]: She opened the union to black workers. 8:43 [SPEAKER_00]: In stump town where she lived, she recruited African-American Millhands from the American Mill, where nearly half the workforce was black, 8:55 [SPEAKER_00]: In the Jim Crow South, in 1929, she stood on a platform and said the fight belonged to everyone. 9:05 [SPEAKER_00]: She traveled to Washington, D.C., to confront Senator Lee Ovarman about labor conditions in the South. 9:13 [SPEAKER_00]: She was not some figurehead. 9:15 [SPEAKER_00]: She was the beating heart of the movement and best of your city. 9:20 [SPEAKER_00]: The mill owners noticed. 9:22 [SPEAKER_00]: On June 7, 1929, police and deputies raided the Gastonia tick colony without a warrant. 9:31 [SPEAKER_00]: A gunfight broke out. 9:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Police Chief or Ville F. Atterhold was shot. 9:38 [SPEAKER_00]: He died the following day. 9:41 [SPEAKER_00]: 16 Union members were arrested and charged, including Fred Biel, despite no clear evidence of who fired first. 9:52 [SPEAKER_00]: What the records show is this, the violence only grew worse after that. 9:58 [SPEAKER_00]: A vigilante group calling itself the committee of 100 formed, financed by the male owners, stocked with newly deputized citizens, 10:08 [SPEAKER_00]: They beat Union supporters. 10:12 [SPEAKER_00]: They kidnapped organizers. 10:15 [SPEAKER_00]: They flawed workers in the dark. 10:18 [SPEAKER_00]: In early September, three Union members were seized and warm was whipped, bloody. 10:25 [SPEAKER_00]: On September 9th, the Adderholt murder trial ended in mistrial, when a juror suffered a mental breakdown in the courtroom. 10:34 [SPEAKER_00]: The next day, mobs destroyed the N-T-W-U headquarters, in both Gastonia and Bessomir City. 10:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Governor O. Max Gardner himself, a millowner, did nothing. 10:50 [SPEAKER_00]: The NTWU announced one final rally for September 14th in South Gastonia, a last stand. 11:00 [SPEAKER_00]: The Manvilt Jinx Company mobilized hundreds of armed men and set roadblocks in every direction. 11:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Ella Maywiggins and 22 unarmed workers climbed into a flat bed truck in Bessomir City. 11:16 [SPEAKER_00]: They never reached the rally. 11:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Armed men at a roadblock ordered them to turn back on pain of death. 11:25 [SPEAKER_00]: They turned back. 11:28 [SPEAKER_00]: They did what they were told. 11:29 [SPEAKER_00]: 22 workers in a flat bed truck heading back toward Bessomir City. 11:37 [SPEAKER_00]: They had obeyed, and the cars behind them kept coming. 11:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Five miles down the road, a second car overtook the truck, and forced it to stop. 11:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Armed men climbed out. 11:53 [SPEAKER_00]: They opened fire on a truckload of unarmed people. 11:58 [SPEAKER_00]: Ella Maywiggins was shot through the chest. 12:02 [SPEAKER_00]: She collapsed into the arms of a fellow worker, 12:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Those near her, hurt her, say, Lord, they done shot and killed me. 12:16 [SPEAKER_00]: She was 29 years old. 12:18 [SPEAKER_00]: She was pregnant. 12:20 [SPEAKER_00]: She had five surviving children. 12:23 [SPEAKER_00]: The oldest murder was 11. 12:26 [SPEAKER_00]: The youngest was 13 months old. 12:30 [SPEAKER_00]: More than 50 people saw it happen. 12:33 [SPEAKER_00]: Every one of them, 12:37 [SPEAKER_00]: word spread fast. 12:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Hundreds of mills across the Piedmont announced solidarity strikes. 12:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Her funeral true workers from counties away. 12:50 [SPEAKER_00]: Six fellow Millhands lowered her plain pine coffin into an unmarked grave at Bessamir City Cemetery, 12:59 [SPEAKER_00]: Reaths from the NTWU, the International Labor Defense, and the Workers Defense League, covered the lid. 13:10 [SPEAKER_00]: No headstone, no marker, just bare ground, where a mother's body lay, and five children who would never see her again. 13:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Governor O. Max Gardner faced national pressure. 13:27 [SPEAKER_00]: He reopened the investigation into LMA Wiggins' killing. 13:32 [SPEAKER_00]: But Gardner was a mancott between two loyalties, and both of them, belonged to the mills. 13:40 [SPEAKER_00]: He himself was a mill owner. 13:41 [SPEAKER_00]: 5 Lorraine Mel employees were charged with second-degree murder. 13:53 [SPEAKER_00]: The trial was moved to Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, because no jury in Gaston County could be trusted to be impartial. 14:04 [SPEAKER_00]: More than fifty eyewitnesses took the stand. 14:08 [SPEAKER_00]: They described the cars, the guns, the men who fired. 14:14 [SPEAKER_00]: The jury deliberated for under 30 minutes. 14:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Not guilty. 14:20 [SPEAKER_00]: All five. 14:22 [SPEAKER_00]: The men who killed Ella Maywiggins went home, free. 14:28 [SPEAKER_00]: The union organizers who had been at the Tint colony, the night police chief Adderhold was shot, went to prison. 14:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Fred Beale was convicted and sentenced to 17 to 20 years. 14:42 [SPEAKER_00]: The workers who tried to organize lost everything. 14:48 [SPEAKER_00]: The men who murdered a pregnant mother in broad daylight lost nothing. 14:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Ella May's five children paid next. 14:59 [SPEAKER_00]: Murdole 11 Clyde 8, Millie 6, Albert 3, Charlotte 13 months. 15:08 [SPEAKER_00]: All five were sent to orphanages. 15:12 [SPEAKER_00]: They took their mothers made in name May, to hide who they were, because being the children of Elame Wiggins meant being the children of the target. 15:26 [SPEAKER_00]: Three of them were eventually buried beside her in Bessamir City Cemetery. 15:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Frank P. Graham, then a professor at the University of North Carolina, stood quite alone among public figures when he recognized LMA as a voice of genuine Americanism, most of the state preferred silence. 15:50 [SPEAKER_00]: The NTWU abandoned its Gastonia organizing by late September, 1929. 15:57 [SPEAKER_00]: The strike collapsed. 16:01 [SPEAKER_00]: The Lorraine Mill was sold to Firestone in 1935, and ran as a non-union shop until it closed in 1993, and the town tried to forget. 16:15 [SPEAKER_00]: In 1986, North Carolina proposed a historical marker near the Lorraine Mill, Gastonia officials fought to remove all mention of deaths and demanded a language about citizens defeating communist efforts. 16:33 [SPEAKER_00]: a marker was finally erected in 2013. 16:37 [SPEAKER_00]: It read, a strike in 1929 at the Lorraine Mill, 200 yards south, left two dead, and spurred opposition to labor unions statewide. 16:50 [SPEAKER_00]: No names, no context, no justice. 16:55 [SPEAKER_00]: 27 years of fighting over a metal sign, and the dead still went 17:04 [SPEAKER_00]: But Bessomir City today is a town of roughly 5,600 people, still in Gaston County. 17:12 [SPEAKER_00]: The American Mill is gone, stumped town is gone, but the cemetery is still there. 17:21 [SPEAKER_00]: On September 14, 1979, the 50th anniversary of her death, a group of North Carolina women placed a permanent AFL CIO marker on LMA Wiggins' grave. 17:36 [SPEAKER_00]: The inscription reads, she died carrying the torch of social justice. 17:49 [SPEAKER_00]: even in remembrance, they got her wrong. 17:54 [SPEAKER_00]: But Lorraine Mill and Gastonia stands today. 17:56 [SPEAKER_00]: It has been renovated into 189 luxury loft apartments. 18:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Rent starts at $1,500 a month. 18:08 [SPEAKER_00]: An on-site history gallery preserved textile artifacts behind glass. 18:15 [SPEAKER_00]: The workers who once could not afford to eat inside that building could not afford to live there now. 18:23 [SPEAKER_00]: In 2013, after 27 years of resistance, a revised historical marker was approved. 18:31 [SPEAKER_00]: The LMA Wiggins Memorial Committee, a registered non-profit, continues to push for more. 18:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Bessamir City approved a budget for a public art mural, honoring LMA. 18:51 [SPEAKER_00]: The town that watched her die is now working to make sure she is remembered. 18:58 [SPEAKER_00]: Wiley Cash, in his 2017 Southern Book Prize winning novel, The Last Ballad, brought Ella May's story to a generation that had never heard it. 19:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Pete Seeger recorded Mill Mother's Lament. 19:14 [SPEAKER_00]: Folk collectors carried her song's north, where they became touchstones for a generation of protest singers. 19:23 [SPEAKER_00]: Historians believe her songs did more to organize southern workers than any speech or pamphlet of the era. 19:32 [SPEAKER_00]: The melody outlived every mill boss who tried to silence it. 19:39 [SPEAKER_00]: That's the story of Elame Wiggins, the Balotsinger, they couldn't silence, even with a bullet. 19:49 [SPEAKER_00]: If you found this story a story as I did, share it with someone who believes one voice can still change things. 19:58 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters. 20:00 [SPEAKER_00]: Every hometown has a story. 20:02 [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight, it's a $9 a week mother who sang the truth until they killed her for it. 20:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Good night, friend.
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