THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL SOUTHERN ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM. Interview. with ROBERT "CHICK" BLACK. Greensboro, North Carolina

Transcription

1 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL SOUTHERN ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Interview with ROBERT "CHICK" BLACK Greensboro, North Carolina March 4, 1985 By Robert Korstad Transcribed by Jovita Flynn

2 Original transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection Louis Round Wilson Library

3 CENTERPAGE.5 page Robert Black Interview by Robert Korstad March 4, 1985 Greensboro, North Carolina START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A ROBERT BLACK:... in Winston, that would have allowed him to be. They wouldn't announce the place where the meeting would be held until right up, almost 'til the hour. BOB KORSTAD: Before hand? RB: Yes, to keep from being intimidated. This lady said to me, "Your mother was active in that thing." They got food and stuff through this small organization that the city just wouldn't have ever given--something like this, their government program. But brother, they said that the reactions were so strong in there until they, well, they didn't want to get arrested and things like that because that would have scared the people away from the organization. But said they did a lot of good. BK: You told me, I guess, that your mother was involved in that. I didn't realize Bink was, that sounds about right though. He was probably still around here or had been around here then. Did I ever show you these? I found all these copies of the Worker's Voice down at Chapel Hill. It's not a complete set but it's almost every issue that was put out. This was a good little newspaper. RB: Yes, it was. It was real relevant, the articles. BK: And I've gotten a lot of good information out of here. There's a lot of good stuff on grievances and on different disputes and things that were going on, plus they list all the meetings that took place, every meeting that was going to take place for the next month. So that every month you'd have a list like this. So there's a lot of really good information on this. Who put this out, do you do? RB: No, I was going to ask you that. I don't know who put

4 that out. BK: I guess Eleanor did. RB: I imagine so, probably she did. BK: It was probably some international rep there who worked, because this took a lot of work just to put this little thing out every month. RB: Some work and some talent. [Laughter] BK: There's a lot of good stories, and they had a lot of different people writing, you know, would write little articles about their shop. [Interruption - personal discussion] BK: I'll just kind of work through some of these questions. We'll see what we can do. One thing that I was wondering about was these radio programs, the Saturday morning programs on WAIR. Do you remember anything about how you went about doing that? RB: No, I really don't have any details on that because, let me see now, one of the white workers, I believe, that had had some newspaper experience. I don't know whether she was in the plant at that time or not. Seems like to me she was outside of Reynolds production and worked with Eleanor and Velma, and I'm sure Theodosa had some relationship with her too. But she used to come to the office there, in the educational department, and they would work out press releases, things like that. I don't even remember her name, and I'm not sure as to what part she played. BK: Did people listen to these? I guess on every Saturday there was a show at 1:00 and then at noon. Do you think people listened to them and got information about the union? RB: I think they did. I think they had some kind of a survey or something, polling different workers about whether they did listen, because the union wanted to know if it was wise to continue those programs because they were costing the union money. But I'm at almost a complete loss when it comes to the effectiveness and who operated it and how it was done. And it's kind of bad though that I did, but you take mostly on Saturday mornings, Slim Shepherd and myself, we were co-chairmen there in the local. And we would be in the union office to try to answer questions and try to coordinate departments. A lot of the white workers that had questions, they would come to the union hall on Saturday. BK: So that would be a full day for you. You'd be doing union business all day on Saturday? RB: Well, yeah, and then executive board meetings and things like that, and sometimes shop steward council on Saturday, but shop steward councils seldom met on Saturdays unless it was

5 something like contract negotiations coming up or something like that. But we were never able to get a working group of people, between the whites and the blacks, on this thing about publicity, because the whites just didn't want to commit themselves, most of them, you know. You take the Sheltons and Shepherds and Vivian and all them, but it was hard for us to really move out and branch out into the rank and file or whites. Because, well, they would brand them as "nigger lovers," you know, and all this kind of stuff in order to keep down the growth of the organization. It was rough. BK: Another question, they're a lot of references to leadership classes and stuff. I wondered how you went about, what kind of problems were involved in trying to develop new leaders in the plants and how you went about training leaders. Was it just a process of people being really natural leaders or being leaders out of their church or communities? RB: Well, we tried, particularly among the heavily unorganized groups of the workers, we tried to get people to volunteer. Then some of them wanted to be put on the payroll as union representatives. They said all big unions paid their stewards and all. Well, in most cases they did, where there were established unions and check-offs and things like that, but we didn't have any of that. Well, we had check-offs too, but so many of the white workers that were professed union members wouldn't go on the check-off. So that kept the company from ever realizing that we did have new added strength in some of the white departments. But they demanded, course all these demands was made on Henderson and those, they demanded that the white workers have separate leadership meetings and separate membership meetings. That was a part of, of course, they weren't coming in the union, not on a mass base anyway, but that was the feeling of some of the white workers. Well, we could very easily see why that wouldn't work, because there was the Brown and Williamson union, and the white workers would meet and they would hammer out the contract demands and all of this. And they would call in one or two blacks to submit conditions from their respective departments. But the contract was agreed upon by the white workers, and it was just a question of rubber stamp. But the bulk of the membership and the strength of the union was among the blacks, just like it was in Winston, I mean in Reynolds. Then Don, you know Don wasn't going to go for that. Well, none of the other international officers didn't go for it, because they said this, that you'll end up with the blacks building a union and then being forced to turn it over to the whites who would never, if they weren't willing to come in on an integrated base now, and then they build up added strength among the white members, you

6 know they wouldn't come in later. Because if you couldn't draw in a handful of whites on the basis of one union, and the strength of the whites and the blacks would be there in that one unit, it just wouldn't work out by saying that, "Well, we'll bring the white members in under all white leadership and then further on down the road, we'll... " They wouldn't go for that. The workers, well, in fact, the Negro workers, wouldn't have gone for that. BK: So it would be trying to develop leadership, bring some white workers and blacks into the union like that. Take somebody like Moranda, who went from being not particularly active in the union for the first year or so. This kind of process of getting people involved in the day to day function of the union, who actually emerge as leaders--do you remember much about the kind of process she went through of becoming a...? In '43 she's really not active at all. RB: That's right. Well, the best thing that I can say about that would be that there was Moranda Smith and, let me see, who else rose to the top that was a late comer, but we'll use Moranda for an example. Now Moranda, I don't what her reasons were, but she see came out of this Number 8 stemmery. There was a lot of militant people in the early stages of the union that came out of her same department. Now some of the things that were told about Moranda later, and Velma played up on that because Velma felt that the leadership training and the leadership authority and the leadership promotion that was given to Moranda, she felt that it should have been given to her. Well, you know, you come out of every situation with frictions, but the thing about it was that the reason that Moranda Smith and Bob Lathan rose as high as they did in the union, we needed to give executive leadership to the leaf houses. And that was done through Bob. All right, I had an opportunity to have gone to a leadership school right along with them, but the feeling of the international and the local union was that, early in the union, it would be better if they kept some of the people who the workers looked heavily towards, to remain there in the local. Well all right now, that pinned Velma Hopkins down, and there were a few other people that were mentioned in that. But now more of this school education was given to various people out of the leaf house division which the membership that learned of this added training felt should have been given to more of the Reynolds workers. Because the way Reynolds went, was the way the leaf houses was going. So now when Moranda did adjust herself and really begin to pour her talent and all into the building of the union, then she began to rise in the shop steward meetings and things like that, and she had ability too. Moranda, I don't how much education she had but she

7 certainly had more education when it came down to dealing in the leadership capacity then Velma had. BK: Was she a good speaker? RB: She was not only a better speaker but she could do book work and go in and aid and assist local unions, improving their work. Moranda began too, after she moved up into the ranks, she was sent into Charleston and into Florida and into Virginia and all around to help assist these local unions in improving their methods of work. So this caused Velma to resent very strongly Moranda's up-and-coming. Then they tried to get a fight out of Bob Lathan and myself when they mentioned to us that they wanted the Local 22 to nominate Bob Lathan to be the vice president. Well, everybody said, "Well, we'd like to see Brother Black be the vice president. He knows more about unions and all this." And I just told them point blank, I said, "I don't think that my educational ability would warrant me to fight to get myself elected as a vice president representing the international union." Because when you go international, you're moving out of the local category and you're moving up into a higher bracket. I said, "My ability to go in and train bookkeepers and all this kind of stuff," I said, "I've never had that experience." and, of course, Bob hadn't either. But there was a good labor school over there in Tennessee or Kentucky or wherever it was, and they taught them a lot over there. But there were some pretty deep feelings there because I had some of them to come to me and ask me my opinion about the ability of Moranda Smith and whether the workers would actually trust her, remembering the stand that she took in the early stages of the union and all of this. 'Course now, Moranda was, as far as I knew, the only person that ever defied the workers' demand, you know, to stop operating in order to gain respect, that ever rose high into the steward council or into the leadership of the union. She was the only one that I ever heard--we had people to complain about, I've got six people in my department, the only ones that aren't members of the union, like for you all to take their names and go out and talk with them and things like that. Well now, most of them that we went out and talked with said, "I've got nothing against the union, and I need the protection of the union, but one thing, I don't like the person who is the steward in my department." I said, "Well now, when you begin to pick out sore spots in the union, if you don't like the person that is representing you on the steward council, what you need to do is to become more active and probably run for the steward yourself. That is, if your outlook is for the best interests of the union." But now, nobody's going to fight to get an individual promoted to a shop steward when he's maneuvering around to build a union around hisself or around

8 a few friends, because the union is for all the workers and it should serve all the workers. Even though we had to handle grievances, as you know probably, for workers who weren't even members of our union. And the law demanded that we do that. We sat in on a case once, course I don't know whether it was a trick on the part of the company or what. The company fired a guy because of absenteeism, and the guy had been working for Reynolds God knows how long, twelve or fifteen years. And the guy admitted that he never had joined the union, but he wanted to join at the time he asked Clark Shepherd to work out where he could file a grievance through the union. So we met with him, John Henry Minor and myself and Ed McCrea, I believe Ed was there then, and Velma and Moranda Smith and a bunch of others, Viola Brown. So we decided that it was of the interest of the union to air his grievance and we aired it and the company put him back to work. But now after the guy went back to work, he sit back on his ass, he never lifted a finger, as far as we knew, to try to encourage anybody else to [laughter] come in. So you see, you've got to try and protect your union against all these kind of gimmicks. But now had not we carried his grievance through the proper procedure, the guy could have sued us because we had pledged to bargain and represent all of the employees of that particular bargaining unit. BK: Was this a white worker? RB: Yeah, he was a white worker. BK: Out of one of the cigarette plants? RB: Yeah, I think he came out of #12, I believe. Yeah, he came out of #12, and this was the plant where Vander Rogers was the chief steward of, and he talked Vander about the grievance. And Vander said to him, "I'll go with you up to the union office and let you talk with some of the others." So Vander made an appointment with John Henry Minor and Slim Shepherd and they had one or two other whites. So we all sat down as a group and discussed his grievance and sent the request into Reynolds that we wanted to have a third stage grievance meeting. They tried to beat the guy down though. The foreman jumped on him, and he wanted to know why did you go to the union. You didn't have to go to the union office. Then the superintendent called him in for a couple of hours session and none of them could get him to change his mind, not to air the grievance. And we publicized this grievance, non-union worker's grievance in our little... BK: I think I have a copy of the, I think I saw it somewhere. RB: So the company settled it. They didn't want to make a big fanfare out of it. They went ahead and settled the grievance. BK: They might have been putting him up to it.

9 RB: Well yeah, as you said, you never know, but at least they settled. And the superintendent admitted, and the foreman, that they tried to get him to drop the grievance because they didn't see where it was going to help him any. But the company had flatly refused to allow him to come back to work. BK: One kind of complaint that I saw in the Worker's Voice here was that the meetings were getting, this was by the end of October, 1945, that the meetings were getting too long and dull. So they were trying to figure out new ways to run the meetings. These were departmental meetings, general membership meetings and stuff. RB: Yeah. BK: In these years when there wasn't either a strike, how did you keep enthusiasm of workers up for the union? Was that a hard thing to do? RB: No, it really wasn't. The union was something similar to a church. We had large numbers of people in the most of our stemmery divisions that just loved to attend the union meetings. And they would air their opinions and things like that. So in order to expedite all of this, what looked like a waste of time, we would try to get the workers, under the guidance of the stewards, that had similar grievances to sit down and pool their grievances and pick out a spokesman to present this grievance. But we found that it was one of the healthiest ways of keeping the interest of the union at a high level, was to appeal to the workers to air their problems, to give strength to some of the others. You see, what was actually happening during those days in the departments like where Moranda Smith, Willie Greer, and Reverend Frank O'Neal, myself, and Vander Rogers, and Velma, and Theodosia, seldom they ever had a grievance. But when they would come up with a grievance, the company would never allow the grievance to get out of the department. They'd never allow those kind of grievances under those militant, what the company considered well trained stewards, they would never let them get up to top management, because they would expose too much corruption down inside of those departments. And I'll tell you right now, it's real funny, when we would have departmental divisional meetings, the stemmeries would meet on one day and the cigarette workers would meet, and the prefabricated workers, like the division that I was in where they ran this tobacco, processed the raw tobacco into cigarettes, and all this, they were all lumped into one group of meetings. But now if any special unit or division felt they needed to have a membership meeting to air out, they were free to ask for that meeting and plan the meeting and someone would always be there to give them guidance and to work with them. But now, to go back to

10 the membership meetings, the membership meetings among the prefabrications and the stemmeries, which was listed under there, they would always have the largest meetings and they would always have the strongest type union. But now the workers didn't stray away from the union during the periods when there wasn't any fights going on, because we let them know point blank that, "This is your union. It's your ideas and opinions that's going to help to make it a good union or a bad union. And for you to know what is going on inside of those plants and things, will give you more knowledge on what should be done and how it should be done." And let's see, what day was it that the stemmeries met. The stemmeries met, I believe, on Wednesday, and brother, you could just assure yourself that you were going to have just about a packed union hall the days that they met on. BK: Did they come in after work? RB: Yeah, in the afternoons. We found that that was better. Not only was it better for the people, the workers, but you would get people at those kinds of meetings that you wouldn't get once they went home and relaxed. There were just a lot of them that wouldn't come back. BK: People could feel like they could say anything they wanted to from the floor, I mean, did they feel free to criticize the way some steward had handled a problem? RB: Well, sure, they were critical and there were replacements. Some departments there would come in, maybe on a special meeting just for their department. "We don't think we're getting the full results of our steward. We would like to have the right to add on some more stewards or to do some replacing." But it was pretty hard to replace a steward that had years of steward training. END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A, START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B BOB KORSTAD: Would people actually raise problems, like in one of these stemmery meetings, would people get up on the floor and say my foreman is doing this or the work, it's too hot in here? Would they raise very particular issues? ROBERT BLACK: There were a few problems raised in that category. For the simple reason, we told our membership in every meeting, you have stewards in that department. You don't have to go to this foreman feeling that you're going to be intimidated. Go to your steward and air your grievance. If you want the steward or the steward feels that the grievance has merits, then you and the steward go to the foreman. That was your first step. Now if the foreman doesn't solve this grievance, then your next stage, after you wait two days or three days, is for the steward

11 to submit this grievance in writing to the superintendent. And by following that procedure, which was outlined in the grievance procedure of the contract, it eliminated a lot of serious personal grievances from coming up in the meetings. But we would always ask the steward in the membership meetings to raise--if I had a grievance in my department. Whether the grievance got settled or not before the next membership meeting, it was always healthy to let the workers know that this grievance was in the grievance procedure and that the outcome of the settlement, whether it was going to arbitration or what not, would be reported meeting after meeting. But we left the membership free to feel that if there was any kind of problem in his or her respective division or department, if they had discussed with the steward or if they hadn't discussed it with the steward. A lot of people would ask for this kind of information, "Do I have a grievance? This is what I have. I wanted to be sure I had a grievance before I went to my steward." Then we tell them in a case like that, that they should go to the steward and let the steward weigh the merits of the grievance, and if the steward isn't sure, instead of forcing the member to come to the union hall, let the steward bring in the merits of the grievance and then it would be decided whether the worker had a grievance. But we never tried to close the mouth of a worker around a grievance. Because then the attitude of the members would be, "Well, you've got to take it up there and let Chick Black and Slim Shepherd and Velma Hopkins decide whether you're got a grievance." We say if you feel you've got a grievance, you are covered under the contract. You take in my department, for an example, there were several things there I carried to the foreman. A worker would bring it to me, I said, "Okay, let's go out here." "Well, can't we wait until lunch time." I said, "We shouldn't wait. Let's go out here and take it up with the foreman right now." So we'd take it up with him and he'd say, "Well all right, Robert what do you think should be done?" I said, "Ask the worker and the steward what they think should be done." Just because I'm on the top grievance committee, don't ask me to come up with the solution. Ask them what would it take to satisfy them or what is the correct thing to do to get rid of the grievance. And we kept a strong feeling among the people. Some of them said, "I want to get transferred over in Velma Hopkins' department because Velma don't ever have any grievances." I said, "Well, you can do the same thing in your department. You build up the strength of the union so that the workers feel confident in coming to the steward, and you'll solve your problems too." So there was never a feeling, that I knew of, where a worker doubted the ability of the union to process

12 and to solve their grievance. And they never felt that they were denied the right to discuss their grievance. BK: I see in here too that they would from time to time run special steward schools, particularly after every contract. You'd actually train people in the new language of the contract. The publicity department did skits for the membership meetings on how to handle... RB: Grievances, yes. BK: Were those helpful? RB: Yeah, they were, they were very helpful. We would first hold those after new contract negotiations and during the life of a contract, we would have, as you said, through the educational department, and Eleanor contributed a lot to that. They'd have mock grievance procedures, things like that, you know, to bring the stewards and train them in new techniques about how to process and how to handle grievances. Of course, you'd just select or either ask for volunteer stewards to participate in the mock procedures, which gave them new ideas or new strength and knowledge about how to handle grievance. Of course, in some of our departments we had stewards that would sit back on their fannies and wouldn't move too fast. But now when they would come to those big stemmery meetings and things like that and hear the militant stewards report on what happened in their departments and how the grievance was followed through and what the outcome of the grievance was and things like that, and it gave new strength and ideas to a lot of the other departments too. BK: It must have been such a different thing to have had people who had been working for all those years, who never had the chance to speak back or kind of deal with a foreman on some kind of basis of equality. Did some people take to it right away, learned this whole new relationship or was it hard? RB: You mean the stewards? BK: Yeah. RB: Well, no, it really wasn't too hard. I'll tell you, as I said to you, the departments that had what we considered stewards on the move, the stewards that were up on what was going on in their departments, when they began to realize that by the failure of the members of certain departments to select militant stewards, that they were losing something. I mean, then the workers began to say this, a lot of the stewards wouldn't half attend the steward council meetings, and it was impossible for them to really know what the duties of a militant steward were without steward training. And then we would allow--all right, a steward maybe from 256 would come up and say, "The people in my department wants a called meeting. We want to discuss adding on

13 some more stewards or what have you." And we'd say, "Yeah, well, you go back there in the educational department and get them to give you a date, and you select with them a date when you would like to call this meeting." Now when this meeting was called, other people would be coming in and out of the union hall and they'd know there was a meeting going on upstairs. Some of them would go up there and sit through the meeting or sit in on it a while. But each department had that right. But we never tried to plan that kind of a meeting during the same day as the regular membership, because some people can get the wrong idea. "The people down yonder, they ain't getting nothing out of their union on account of their stewards ain't no good." And then we would say to the people, they'd say, "We want the steward's attendance record read in this meeting," and they would name their particular department. So the educational department would get the steward list, and sometime you'd find where maybe out of a month, I think the stewards met every two weeks, I believe it was, or once a month, whatever the meeting date was, and if that steward had missed two meetings in a row, they, in most cases, when the steward would come up for re-elections and sometime in the middle of their terms, they would replace them. There wasn't a whole lot of replacement done but there was always add on an assistant steward, because their feelings were to bring a rank and file worker out of membership and just assign him or her to be a steward, that that wasn't good enough. But now we found that where such meetings had brought in new stewards, the assistant stewards turned out more militant, in most cases, than the regular steward. So that gave them new hope and new strength too. BK: That must have been quite a job, an organizational, administrative job, running that union with all these meetings and all these different things. RB: It was. And then too, they didn't call on the black leaders too much to go out and meet with, trying to organize these white workers. Occasionally, they would ask me to go along, Reverend O'Neal or somebody like that, who the white workers knew all. But it wasn't often because the white workers main demand was let us bring the white workers into the union under our theories and the way we think we can do it. Well now, no one ever told them that they couldn't go to the white worker and ask them to come to a lily white... They wouldn't come to the departmental meetings, but they felt that they could get them, not in the union hall, but in some nearby house or some nearby public building or something where they could thrash out the possibilities that the white workers would have if they would come into the union. But under no circumstances were they ever

14 told that you go out and bring in the white workers at any cost, because then the white workers was going to determine who the leaders of the local union were. And they were going to be some of their hand picked and may have been some of those that were high up in the company union or some of the anti-union people. They were coming in under one theory that this is our union, and nothing is going to be done here that's going to be in violation of the international constitution. And that means that all members of the union come in one door and serve in the capacity of the leadership of the union, not by holding little groups of white workers over here and a little group over yonder. Because even the white membership, had they been able to win the white workers to the union, wasn't going to be in agreement. They were going to be groups from certain departments that was going to be making certain demands, and they would eventually just destroy the union. Because the Negro worker was not going to turn over that union, all the picketing and everything else that we had been through, to no group of people, because they stayed out of the union on the basis of their prejudice. BK: One other question, is the top committeemen, this would the third stage of grievances when the things would come to you, to the top committee? RB: Yeah. BK: Would you explain what happened there and would company people be involved there too? RB: Yeah. You see, under the contract we named six people, three representing the company and three representing the union, with the right, if we felt it would add anything to the case, this is a stage short of arbitration, that the worker could be asked to appear. But we would take the written documents of the first and the second stage of the grievance procedure and we would air that with the three company representatives and the three union representatives. Now, if we couldn't agree on a settlement that was satisfactory to the union and to the person who filed the grievance, then the case would be submitted to arbitration. Well, all right, the company named the personnel manager, Bumgardner, and one of the vice presidents of the company, and then one of the superintendents of the company. We appointed our two co-chairmen, Slim Shepherd and myself, and Velma Hopkins because Velma really handled the bulk of the grievance procedures short of this top meetings, because she would meet with the members and the stewards and things and help them write out the grievances and things like that. So Mr. Whitaker felt that in order to give all that he thought should be given to each respective grievance, he put himself as the chief arbitrator to represent the company. Now you can say what you

15 will to me, I've said many times and I'll say it again, old man Whitaker was an honest guy, even though he was heading a hell of a business. But when you boiled right down to the human nature of a grievance, you'd get more deeper consideration from him. Now, Bumgardner's answer was, to every grievance, "No, no, we're not going to settle the grievance." And think that the union would walk off with its tail between its legs and accept that. And we'd just tell him, "Mr. Bumgardner, we'll meet you in arbitration." [Laughter] BK: When you settled some at that stage, would new facts come up or would somebody just back down on something, or did you ever settle any at that point? RB: Oh yeah, we settled most of them. We had a very few grievances to ever go to arbitration, because our position to the company was that the man that you have here heading your grievance procedure, Ed Bumgardner, doesn't care whether the grievance has merits or not. And we say that every grievance has merits. That the answer is no. So how do you expect us to ever, we'd just as well say to the membership, "Well, our grievance procedure is no good, and we aren't going to try to get any benefits through the grievance procedure." Well, hell, what do you need with the union. So we would always point out to the chief of grievance procedure, representing the company, that we're here because we were forced to come here because no one, the superintendent refused to settle it when it was in his power. And he brings it Mr. Bumgardner, and Mr. Bumgardner is more determined not to settle a grievance because he thinks that strengthens the union. So Whitaker said this grievance really had no business coming to the third stage of the grievance procedure. It should have been settled either in the foreman's department or either in the superintendent's, under his jurisdiction. So he just, shit, he just browbeat old Bumgardner down on most of these grievances. I want to tell you the most kind of grievances that ever went to arbitration, and we knew we were going to lose them. We had one worker, rank-and-filer, at 60 extension. He wouldn't work on Monday. He laid out thirteen Mondays in a row. He'd booze himself off on the weekend. He just wouldn't work. Well, the steward kept bringing him over to the union office, not for us to browbeat him, but to sit down and discuss with him. The steward kept a record of it, and he said, "Now, you have eleven Mondays here, and the year isn't hardly half over yet, where you wouldn't call in." And the worker had all kinds of protections under the procedure. He could call the foreman, didn't even have to go face him. He could call him and render an excuse. But now, his excuse was he buried four grandmothers, out of those thirteen weeks

16 [laughter], and the foreman knew what it was. The foreman even refused to discuss the grievance, and we went to the superintendent. Well, the foreman had done had it out with the superintendent. Superintendent said, "I'm not going to even discuss it." Then we go to the third stage, and Whitaker brings out this man's record in writing and said, "How can you honestly go before a board of arbitration and try to defend a person with a record like this." Well, we said to him that this person is a member of our union, and he has all the rights that any other member of our union has, regardless as to his absentee record or anything involving that. So we are going to arbitrate this case with a strong feeling that the arbitrator's decision just might be that this man is entitled to be reinstated. Of course, among ourselves, we never admitted it, but, you know, we knew he was going to lose. So the arbitrator's decision was that the company had investigated and found out that out of all these grandmothers that this guy had claimed that he attended the funerals for, that only one of his real grandmothers was dead. And they had all this in the record. They never let us see it, but they had it in their reasons for the board of arbitration to deny this man the right to come back to work. And you know that guy went back among the people over there in that plant and lambasted the union. And the members got together and they called a meeting. They said, "We appeal to the officers of this union not to even carry this case to the third stage of the grievance procedure, because we worked up there and we know what the reasons were that the company had to..." Now, the guy was a good union member. He paid his dues and he'd come to meetings and get up and blab, blab, blab, but he just wouldn't work. So the workers said to him, "With enough members like you, you would wreck the union because you are causing suspicions to be thrown on a lot of other people who have legitimate grievances." But it didn't bother us. He'd come up to the union office sometimes half drunk and stand downstairs there and cuss me [laughter] and Slim Shepherd and Velma out. "Damn union ain't no good. Taking people's money and then won't do nothing for them," and all this. But it's just one of those things. Out of a large number of people like that, that had never been in a union before, you would expect to find a few people among the large membership. We had a membership there, I'm telling you. RB: Now you take, over there in Winston-Salem, at the early stages of our union, some of the supposed to be militant black people over there came to us and suggested that we hire an outside person to represent our union locally, some lawyer or somebody like that. I said, "Uh-uh, we don't need that." Not because I'm in the top leadership of the local union, because I'd

17 support anybody that was elected to serve in the top leadership as long as he was leading the union in the right direction. But I said, "Now, we would be real silly to overlook all the people that have worked and slaved in Reynolds down through the years and go out and bring in some person that knew nothing about the problems and the conditions and pay him a big, fancy salary." "Ah, he could open doors for you," you know, and all this. I said, "You ought to remember John L. Lewis. Didn't nobody open no doors for John L. Lewis," and you couldn't be an elected officer in that union unless you had dug coal out of the ground. He said, "Any person that sits in the leadership of this union is going to have to know what it's like to bend your back going into the coal pit because it's only those that have served that knows the real hardship of the mine." And he stuck to it too. END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B, START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A ROBERT BLACK: She's a fighter. But now she came forward in her department and opened herself up for the top steward in her plant, and she made a darn good one too. Brother, she'd go out hunting for people, I'm telling you. "Are y'all satisfied with so and so and so? If you're not satisfied now, we've got a grievance procedure. We've got a union." BOB KORSTAD: The question that that brought up, what you were just talking about, what were the feelings that people had about--i know the first year, at least, or so, whoever the international rep was, until the local was actually formed, you had a chairman who was maybe Frank Green or Frank Hargrove, what was the attitude towards the international people by both the local leadership and the local rank and file? RB: Well, it was always a good attitude. Course, you know, some doubts arose out of two of those guys, Frank Hargrove. He really turned out to be an ass. And then Green, it was told to me by, supposed to have been a responsible person, that Green was actually working for the FBI. Now, I couldn't prove it. I wouldn't know which a way to start to prove it, but they said that in some incidences that Green would have a tendency to try to water down certain statements or certain programs that the union was discussing concerning the Reynolds Tobacco Company. He was an expert on wages. He would say, "Do we agree that we ought to ask for this steep of an increase in this division?" I said, "Brother Green, maybe you don't understand fully what we're trying to do here as a union. We are tired of these wage brackets. We are fighting to bring about a more unified wage system. Because a man is working in the cigarette industry, spending eight hours a day on that job, doesn't mean that that

18 man should be making a $1.00 or $1.50 an hour more than some guy that's down there in the prefabrication department. We're trying to bring up the wage brackets. But we're trying to narrow the gap between the bottom wage brackets and the top ones." And that's why we had such a hell of a fight with Reynolds in that first contract. We had people who were actually working in Reynolds, some of them, for 38 and 40 and 43 cent an hour. And here's some guy up in Slim Shepherd's department or in that unit that is making three times more money than those people were. Just like, Whitaker said to me when we first went in on negotiations about union recognition, he said, "I look on this committee and I see two of the highest paid colored workers in our company sitting on this committee, demanding more money." I said, "Well, that's why we're sitting here. I know you're pointing me out," because Mr. Bumgardner wouldn't let me sleep until he showed me that I was among one of the two or three black workers in terms of hourly pay. Reverend O'Neal was the highest because he was a piece rate worker. What I would do was I'd just go to the foreman about every four or six weeks, I'd say, "Mr. Harper, I feel like I'm entitled to a wage increase." "Robert, don't talk so loud. How much do you want?" I said, "I'd like to have about a 12 cent an hour wage increase." "Ah, the company's not going to hear that now. But let me put you in for a wage increase but don't say nothing to nobody about it." So I'd go in and maybe a few days later or a week later he'd come by and tell me, "Well, Robert, I got the last wage increase due for you." I said, "How much is it, 10 cents?" "No, company gave you 4 cents." I said, "My God All Mighty, what kind of..?" "Well, we hope you'll appreciate that now. Don't make no fuss about it." I'd go up and down the line and tell the other guys. Some of them was working in there making 48, 52, when I went on that job. And when I went over there, they was paying me 43 cent an hour. And I just kept needling the foreman, needling, until I got up to 56, and then when I asked him for this last one what carried me up to 60 cent. Well, my argument about Reverend O'Neal to the company was this, that O'Neal exhausts for physical energy than any other employee that you have in order to make that money, and it's not going to allow him to live always because it's taking too much out of his body. Now, we'd like to see under the wage structure O'Neal continuing in that wage bracket and going up on the basis of merits and other wage increases, and the amount of production that he is doing now be lowered. That a man shouldn't have to sweat himself to death in order to earn the kind of money that he's earnings, which the money should justify the lowest productive person in that bracket and O'Neal should be way on up

19 there higher if you're going to base it on what he's putting out. And we did. We got them on a piece rate base which meant that if you were able to produce a certain amount of production in a period of eight hours, then you would fall in this bracket. But now, that almost backfired on our negotiations because the company didn't tell us then but they implied that for those who wanted to be in that bracket, had to be able to actually earn a certain amount of money to stay there. Other than that, they would be dropped back into a less paying bracket which was going to cause a ruckus in the union. But now, we went before the arbitration to arbitrate some of those jobs, and most of them we won. There was one other person, he was a male person too, that worked in O'Neal's department, that could turn out almost the same amount of products that O'Neal was turning out. But it also was doing the same thing to him that it was doing to Reverend O'Neal. Those people would go down to the bathroom and the floor sweeper would have to follow them with a mop, perspiration was running out of their shoes. BK: Sweating so hard, yeah. RB: And you know that wasn't good for a man. But I'm going to tell you, that's one thing that old Reynolds, brother, they really shivered about. Reynolds, way years ago, in those stemmeries, when they'd weigh those stems, they'd take them out in a big place in between the factories and just dump them out there on the ground. And the farmers would come by and fork up those stems and carry them out and condition the land with them. Then Reynolds got smart--well, I won't say they got smart but somebody got smart--and found that they could process those stems, liquid and sweetening and all that kind of stuff, and put a certain amount of them into every cigarette. But now, by me working in that department, Whitaker and those really thought that I was going to get up on the speaker's platform, you know, we weren't trying to destroy Reynolds, and for us to get up and begin to expose some of their techniques in manufacturing that would drive people away from the company's product wasn't going to help our membership any at all. And I never mentioned it. I spoke to Don and some of them about it. He said, "Well, Black, we'll always hold that as a stick over their heads." [Laughter] He said, "But I don't think it would be good sense because here the other cigarette manufacturers would play on it." But during the peak of the war, they began to add more and more of those stems to the cigarette, and some of those stems would have little hard places on them where they wouldn't get ground and cut as well as the company wanted them to. You could mash a cigarette that had too much of that hard stuff in it, and it would just punch a hole in the cigarette. So they had to drop back on the

20 amount of that stuff they were using. But I know that they shoveled a lot in their shoes during the time that we were out on strike, you know, and things like that. But I never used it because I didn't really see where it would be to that much advantage. If the company just flatly refused to negotiate and you're going to try to bust them, then go ahead and use whatever you've got. BK: One question I had had to do with these layoffs when they started installing this new machinery in the stemmeries. One little article here was that "three hundred have been taken off their regular jobs in #60" and this was right after Christmas, I guess, in the 1940s. That would have been Christmas of '45, so '46. The union went to ask that the company, if they were going to do this mechanization, if they would do something like some kind of "share the work" program. They'd cut back people's hours to 6 hours a day, maybe institute three shifts rather than two shifts. Evidently, there were a lot of people working Saturday overtime then, right after the war. Do you remember any negotiations on that, or whether you ever made any progress with the company on those kinds of issues? RB: We didn't make any progress, but we submitted certain proposals. The membership said that they would rather reduce their hours, demand a greater wage increase and reduce their hours to share the work, but the company wouldn't agree to it. They claimed that the addition of this new shift would work a complete hardship on the machinery, and that they had to have some time to mechanic and take care of those machines, and that with three shifts around the clock, allowed them no time at all. That was one of their arguments to try to beat down the request. Then they claimed that their feeling was that after this thing went into effect--we tried to play this dismissal, layoff, on the basis of temporary. That these people would probably be off maybe three months or six months and would be called back, but the company's position was that this was a permanent layoff, and that they brought in improved machines to take the added work that these additional people were doing. So we never got to first--well, one thing that kept us from getting to first base was the weakness among our overall membership. If we had had a 90 or 95% membership in Reynolds, and then the white workers wouldn't lend any support in the layoff at all. BK: So you just didn't have the strength at that time to do anything about it? RB: We didn't have the strength, no, to make them do it. But the membership voted to submit this as a proposal to, you know, do away with the layoff. But see, Reynolds went after the stemmery divisions because that's where the strength of our union

21 was. That's were the union actually sprung from, was from the stemmery. And they figured if they could intimidate the workers in those divisions enough and cut down on the numbers, that they could probably frighten the union, you know, the members out of supporting the union. But that was one demand that we couldn't get, but if we had had the strength. And we went to some of the white workers. They had some little night group meetings here, but they didn't materialize because they just weren't within the framework of the union. BK: I see even after these people were laid off, they formed their own committee of laid-off workers to function and continue in the union, and they appointed representatives to various committees and stuff. I mean, that's pretty amazing after they got laid off that they were still very active members in the union. RB: That's true. And then too, we did win some concessions from the company. BK: Some of them got other jobs, I guess? RB: Yeah, we negotiated the right of any of those workers, as far as job preferences were concerned, that they had the right to go in and be interviewed in any of the places were the company had offerings for additional workers. We don't know how close the company lived to it. We know they cheated on that just like they did anything else. And too that comes back to the fact that it would have been impossible for Reynolds to have moved new workers into the divisions where we had strong membership and a good steward system. You take, for example, Reynolds played hay-do on us during the election. We couldn't avoid it. In the white departments where there were no stewards, Reynolds paraded, hundreds of people went into those different departments--no one there to say no--and voted floaters against our union, hundreds of them. We were told afterwards, but we couldn't get nobody to represent the union at the poll that knew the department and who was eligible and who wasn't. BK: Yeah, that strike was a whole other story. RB: Oh, it sure was, I'm telling you. END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A