In the fall of 1938, federal minimum-wage law and mechanization combined to erase hundreds of stemming jobs from Wilson tobacco factories.
Wilson Daily Times, 24 October 1938.
“Each year here in Wilson hundreds of negroes leave private employment in the fall to take more lucrative jobs in the factories while hundreds of other negroes who are out of work at the time get work at that time.”
[This photo says “1940s” or maybe even ’50s to me, not 1926, but 1926 is how it is labeled.]
Tobacco Production, 1926, Wilson County, Black and White Photographic Print 0019, in the Commercial Museum (Philadelphia, Pa.) Collection of North Carolina Photographs (P0072), North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In 1949, Charlotte, North Carolina,’s Hollywood Film Company produced a 32-minute promotional film touting Wilson’s businesses, churches, schools, and neighborhoods. Predictably, not a single African-American person or place was mentioned, much less featured, though the town’s population was about 40% Black. This is the kind of erasure that will have you thinking your people never contributed, never built institutions, never thrived. Black people, however, can be glimpsed throughout the film, hard at work. Below, a few stills, starting with a scarfed African-American woman crossing Nash Street at Goldsboro Street, the courthouse and Confederate monument visible behind her. The other images depict tobacco warehouse and factory laborers, a laundry worker, and a bakery worker. The film also showed men working in a lumber yard and a concrete pipe manufacturer. Do you recognize anyone?
My thanks to the late Steve Brown for a DVD copy of this film.
The Daily News, 20 September 1900.
Wilson was never a big cigarette-producing town, but around the turn of the twentieth century Wells-Whitehead Tobacco Company’s Carolina Brights brand and, for a briefer, later moment, Edwin-Nadal Tobacco Company’s Contentnea brand were made here. While tobacco processing plants were major seasonal employers of African-American workers, especially women, higher-paying cigarette jobs were whites only.
Wilson Daily Times, 21 August 1942.
African-American workers at conveyor belts at an unidentified tobacco factory in Wilson.
Clipping courtesy of J. Robert Boykin III.
On the back of a truck in Wilson’s 1939 Tobacco Festival parade, African-American employees of Southern Tobacco Company No. 2 simulate processing tobacco. At the time the photo was shot, the float was passing in front of the county courthouse in the 100 block of East Nash Street.
Photo courtesy of J. Robert Boykin III.
Tobacco factory work was seasonal, and late fall meant the end of work for hundreds across Wilson County. The color line extended even to applying for unemployment benefits, and “colored claimants” who had worked at Imperial Tobacco were directed to report to Darden Funeral Home to continue their claims.
Wilson Daily Times, 20 November 1940.
For much of the twentieth century, tobacco factories and stemmeries employed more African-American workers than any other industry in Wilson. The work was low-paid, mostly seasonal, and often performed by women.
In September 1939, shortly after the season began, Imperial Tobacco abruptly released hundreds of newly hired workers, sparking mass layoffs by other factories. The state employment office opened a temporary processing location at Reid Street Community Center, but officials warned that most workers had already maxed out their yearly unemployment eligibility.
Wilson Daily Times, 13 September 1939.
Clipping courtesy of J. Robert Boykin III.
When tobacco processing plants could not convince or coerce or otherwise attract sufficient workers, Wilson’s office of the U.S. Employment Service of the War Manpower Commission turned to the Negro Ministerial Alliance. With a hiring center set up at Saint John A.M.E.Z. — the article says First Baptist, but that photo is Saint John — African-American ministers fanned out across Wilson with a basic message: “the harvest is ready and the workers are few.” (Delivered occasionally with a little of the Good Word.) In a week, they spoke with about 1500 people and signed up 700. [For perspective — Wilson’s total population in 1944 was about 20,000, of whom about 40%, or 8000, were Black.]
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Wilson Daily Times, 8 September 1944.
Wilson Daily Times, 12 June 1896.
The welcome mat laid out for Little Richmond was quickly rolled up. Within months, the neighborhood developed a reputation for violent crime, and complaints replaced the cheers.