[Hac-announce] HAC Conversations Oct 06, 2012

[L.M.C. Harvey]

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From: Cynthia Harvey, Coordinator                                                                       October 5, 2012




Hi
Everyone,           This note is a reminder that HAC Conversations will
meet this Saturday to view and discuss the following video which is
about an almost unheard of strike by about 500 thousand textile
workers in 1934.  My mother and her siblings were mill workers until
other opportunities were opened up by the public works  initiatives
of the Roosevelt administration but not a word was ever mentioned
about this strike.  






These
notes are extracted from PBS program notes and quotations.  – 
http://www.pbs.org/pov/uprisingof34/







The
Uprising of '34,  PBS Program POV Premier 6/25/1995.   Producer:
George Stoney,    George Stoney, Judith Helfand and Susanne Rostock's
probing film explores how the strike still impacts labor, power and
economics in the South today.




                                   
  				http://video.pbs.org/video/2264374601
	


    In
1934, Southern textile workers took the lead in a nationwide strike
that saw half a million walk off their jobs in the largest
single-industry strike in the history of the United States. For a
time, these new union members, in response to New Deal legislation,
stood up for their rights and became a force to be reckoned with in
the South. Then management moved in and crushed the strike. Some mill
workers were murdered, thousands more were blacklisted, and many were
so intimidated that "union" became a dirty word in Southern
communities for decades to come. 


  
    For decades, it seemed as if all memory of the General Textile Strike
had been buried with the workers who died in its front lines. Stoney
and Helfand spent nearly six years tracking down and interviewing
surviving strikers and their relatives in Georgia, Alabama,
Tennessee, and North and South Carolina.

…. In these candid
interviews, the workers' courage and pride is still heart-wrenchingly
evident over half a century later — along with the grief,
disillusionment, and lingering fear of retribution. "I took a
man's hat off his head and fanned him 'til he died, 'til the breath
left him," Mrs. Atkins, an elderly mill worker, remembers sadly.
"But I ain't got no more to say into it. I've been trying to
forget about all of that, and this is just bringing it all back up."
Kathy Lamb, a former mill worker's daughter, is flabbergasted that
her father never mentioned the strike. "I can't understand why
my Dad didn't tell me. He could talk about the war and about people
being blown to bits, but he couldn't talk about his neighbors being
killed. It's like somebody trying to hide a dirty secret about their
family, like they're ashamed. They ought to be proud of them. They
stood up when other people wouldn't."




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