Bessemer City, North Carolina: The Ballad Singer the Mill Bosses Couldn't Silence

In the fall of 1929, a flatbed truck carrying twenty-two unarmed textile workers rolled down a back road outside Bessemer City, North Carolina. The workers had obeyed an armed roadblock and turned back. Armed men followed them anyway, forced the truck to stop, and opened fire. Ella May Wiggins, a twenty-nine-year-old pregnant mother of five, was shot through the chest. More than fifty people witnessed the killing. No one went to prison.

Ella May Wiggins was a spinner at American Mill No. 2, earning nine dollars for a seventy-two-hour work week. She lived in Stumptown, a predominantly African American neighborhood outside Bessemer City, because company housing was segregated and she could afford nothing else. When four of her nine children died of whooping cough after the mill superintendent refused to move her to the day shift, she stopped being quiet. She joined the National Textile Workers Union, recruited Black workers into the movement in the Jim Crow South, and wrote protest songs set to Appalachian melodies that a journalist named Margaret Larkin called "better than a hundred speeches."

Timeline of Events:

The Loray Mill strike, centered in neighboring Gastonia in Gaston County, was the largest labor uprising in North Carolina textile history. On April 1, 1929, nearly 1,800 workers walked off the job at the Loray Mill, a 600,000-square- foot facility owned by the Manville-Jenckes Company of Providence, Rhode Island. Ella May led a solidarity walkout at American Mill. On June 7, 1929, police raided the union tent colony and Police Chief Orville Aderholt was shot and killed. On September 14, 1929, Ella May was murdered on a public road. Five men were charged with second-degree murder. The jury deliberated less than thirty minutes and acquitted all five.

Historical Significance:

Ella May Wiggins' murder became a turning point in American labor history. Her five surviving children were sent to orphanages and took their mother's maiden name to hide their identity. Her grave in Bessemer City Cemetery went unmarked until 1979, when a group of North Carolina women placed an AFL-CIO memorial stone. Wiley Cash's 2017 Southern Book Prize-winning novel The Last Ballad brought her story to a new generation. Pete Seeger recorded her most famous song, "Mill Mother's Lament. " The Loray Mill itself now houses luxury loft apartments starting at $1,400 a month. Bessemer City included an Ella May Wiggins public art mural in its 2025-2026 strategic plan. The town that watched her die is now working to make sure she is remembered.

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