Ninety-five years ago, the American textile industry was shaken to its core as workers at Loray Mill, the largest textile mill in the entire world, went on strike. On April 1st, 1929, close to two thousand workers, led by the National Textile Workers Union (NTWU), a Communist-led union part of the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), walked out of the mill. Many “leftists” today place a ceiling on what’s possible for the working class at the workplace and argue that it is impossible for workers to organize themselves outside of the class collaborationist state union-led labor movement and against the capitalist state. The Loray Mills strike is proof not only of the immense potential for independent class-conscious or red unions to organize previously unorganized workers, but also very dramatically demonstrates the link between the daily economic demands of the workers and the historic task of the proletariat to violently struggle for political power against the capitalist state.

In the early 1900s, textile companies were leaving the Northeast and moving to the South, looking to exploit the labor pool of doubly-oppressed Black workers, unregulated child laborers, and lower-wage White workers, that existed in the South at the time. Mill owners, who were primarily from New England, also perceived Southern workers as individualistic and unlikely to organize. As a result, conditions at the new textile mills in the South were abysmal. Mill workers toiled on nearly twelve-hour shifts for just a few cents an hour. The Manville-Jenckes Company, which owned Loray Mill and many other mills in the South, had been throughout the late 1920s establishing the “efficiency system.” The mill would lay off older, more well-paid workers and double the amount of work on the remaining workers. A mill worker who ran two machines before was now running four, without seeing any of the benefits of this extra labor.

Conscious of the miserable working conditions at Southern textile mills in January 1929, the Communist Party USA sent Fred Beal to Charlotte, North Carolina to establish locals of the National Textile Workers Union (NTWU) in the region. The NTWU was a red union formed in response to the Comintern’s correct condemnation of the CPUSA’s previous boring-from-within policy in the AFL-led labor movement. Beal had been a textile worker his entire life and was an experienced organizer, having just before helped organize a strike of 25,000 textile workers in New Bedford, Massachusetts where the NTWU was founded. Despite this, Beal was initially met by hesitancy and a lack of trust from Gastonia mill workers. Led by the Manville-Jenckes Company, the Loray Mill was a center of anti-unionist propaganda in the South, and many textile workers in the region had been sold out by and abandoned by an AFL-affiliated union less than a decade prior. In 1920-21 the United Textile Workers (UTW), an AFL union, organized a strike wave across the textile mills in Gastonia. Despite the strike starting with momentum, mobilizing thousands of workers, it soon went awry. The strikers were met with immense state repression, with many of the leaders being arrested. The UTW collected a small fortune in initiation fees and dues, promising strikers that they’d support them in the event of arrests. When the inevitable repression came, instead of backing up the mill workers on strike, the UTW abandoned them, leaving the strike and the arrested strikers up to their fate.

Beal was able to overcome the initial hesitations of textile workers and forged ties with them, establishing a small local of the union in Charlotte, then establishing another in Gastonia shortly after, with Will Truett, a local worker, as its secretary-treasurer. With the situation rapidly developing, Beal traveled back North to secure additional funding and organizers from the NTWU. When he returned to Charlotte, he discovered that Will Truett was fired, and other union members were facing harassment from both company management and police. In the house of one of the union members, a meeting was held to discuss the possibility of a strike where the atmosphere was resoundingly optimistic. The decision was made to hold a rally on March 30th outside Loray Mill; at the rally, additional NTWU organizers, including Vice President Ellen Dawson, arrived.

On April 1st, five mill workers were fired for attending the rally on March 30th. Beal organized another rally outside the mill later in the afternoon; at this rally, he called a strike vote, and all mill workers present unanimously supported going on strike. Beal declared a strike, and those present marched to the gate of Loray Mill, persuading those still working to join them on strike. The next day, strikers presented their demands to management. They demanded a weekly wage of $20, a 40-hour workweek, union recognition, and equal pay for women and child laborers. News of the strike at Loray Mill spread rapidly amongst mill workers in the area, and soon, workers at several other mills went on strike. At American Mill No. 2 in Bessemer City, North Carolina, black and white workers, typically segregated, walked out in unison. On April 3rd, North Carolina Governor Oliver Max Gardner, who was himself a textile mill owner, sent in 5 companies of the National Guard to attempt to crush the strike. The strike at Loray Mill had developed in just three days from a struggle for economic demands to a struggle directly between the workers and the Government.

With the National Guard failing to break the strike, the bourgeois press worked to incite violence against strikers. Local bourgeois newspapers like the Gaston Gazette stated, “Let every man and woman in Gaston County ask the question: Am I willing to allow the mob to control Gaston County?… The time is at hand for every American to do his duty.” The calls for violence manifested in the formation of the “Committee of 100” a vigilante group made up of mill supervisors, “bosses pets,” paid informants, and backward segments of the masses. Along with anti-communist propaganda, the bourgeois press and the Manville-Jenckes Company attempted to utilize white supremacist messaging to convince white workers to return to work, claiming if the strike were successful they’d lose their privileged position over black workers at the local mills.

As the strike progressed, it continued to become more organized and supported. The Workers International Relief distributed food and set up temporary housing for evicted strikers. The International Labor Defense provided legal defense and support for strikers who had been arrested. Responding to the increased organization of the strike, after the police had arrested the strikers at the NTWU headquarters in Gastonia, under the watch of the national guard, a masked band believed to have been hired by Manville-Jenckes Company destroyed the union headquarters and temporary housing for strikers which had been set up. This did not deter the workers’ spirits, however, and by hand over the next month, they built a new union headquarters. Repression would continue; picketing was banned by the city council, so then the strikers organized marches. Then marches were banned, but they kept marching despite this, and many were arrested. When Manville-Jenckes Company realized the state’s measures weren’t slowing down the strike, they began a new campaign of evictions from company towns, but still, the strikers wouldn’t back down.

In June, the struggle in Gaston had reached a higher stage, that of armed struggle. Rumors began to surface that the newly constructed union headquarters would be attacked again. In addition, the Committee of 100, the primary vigilante group attacking strikers, had recently been given guns and ammunition by Mill supervisors, in response the strikers armed themselves. On the night of June 7th, the police and vigilantes attacked and the workers defended themselves, opening fire. During the ensuing gun battle, three officers were wounded along with one union organizer, while the chief of police of Gastonia, Orville Aderholt, lay dead. The strikers had successfully repulsed the attack. According to William F. Dunne in his text, Gastonia, Citadel of the Class Struggle in the New South, an immense wave of repression hit the strikers. Despite there being no evidence, eight strikers and eight NTWU leaders were charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder over the death of Aderholt.

The strike continued over the Summer. In the face of continued repression and the arrests of its leaders, much of the optimism had been diminished. Still, the workers would rally, march, and sing songs in the town. It was during this period that strike leader Ella May would sing her infamous song “Mill Mothers Lament,” which opens with the lines: “We leave our home in the morning, we kiss our children goodbye, while we slave for the bosses, our children scream and cry.”

The trial of those charged with the murder of the police chief was moved from Gastonia to Charlotte, and the International Labor Defense was organized in support of those charged. As the trial went on, things had been looking favorable for the defendants. However, on September 9th, the prosecution wheeled in an effigy of the police chief wearing the same clothes he was shot in. One of the jurors suffered a mental health breakdown, and the judge used this as an excuse to declare a mistrial.

Following the mistrial, when the strikers and remaining union leaders organized a rally, a vigilante mob was sent to disrupt the strikers surrounded strike leader Ella May, and shot her down in cold blood. Five men, all employed by Loray Mill, were charged with May’s murder and were let out on $1,000 bonds, paid for by Manville Jenckes Company which owned Loray Mill. All five men were acquitted, despite there being fifty eyewitnesses who testified against them. May’s murder was in many ways a death blow and the Loray Mill strike is considered to have ended on the same day of May’s death.

At the end of the month, a second trial began on the Loray Mill strikers. Despite there being nothing in the way of evidence, Charlotte courts would sentence the defendants to years of hard labor for their supposed involvement in the killing in self-defense of the Gastonia chief of police. Following the guilty verdict, William F. Dunne would smuggle several of the organizers out of the country to the Soviet Union to avoid their sentences. Many continued to attempt to organize textile workers and were met with continued repression.

While the Loray Mills strike was eventually defeated following multiple waves of extreme repression, at a time when many “communists” seem to spend most of their time placing limits on the working-class and its potential activity, the strike serves as a reminder of what is possible and exhibits the potential power wielded by the working class when organized. Thousands of mill workers across an area considered at that time to be the most inaccessible, backward region of the United States for labor organizers, a place where “no Communist organizer had ever ventured before,” were organized into an independent red union and went on strike for five months while facing immense repression. In a feat that is almost unthinkable today, the union never once sold-out or betrayed the workers despite the most adverse conditions possible, and in the end could be defeated by sheer brute force alone.

The strike also stood out for its involvement of women and black workers. Many of the leading union organizers, such as NTWU Vice-Chair Ellen Dawson, NTWU Deputy Vera Buch, and labor militants Ella May, Cora Harris, and Ivy Fulbright, were women. While the percentage of black workers involved in the strike was lower compared to that of white workers, the NTWU and activists like Otto Hall went to great lengths to break down the barriers between white and black workers. Loray Mill, 95 years later, continues to remind us of the ability of workers to unify against our enemy, the capitalist class, and wage an all-out struggle against it for political power. At a time where Maoism has now more fully theorized and provided the proletariat answers in relation to the military question, it is our task to learn from these invaluable historical events and combine them with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and our own preliminary practical and theoretical contributions in order to shine a revolutionary light forward for all exploited and oppressed workers in our society.