We may live in an age of the most sophisticated information technology ever available to man, but the suppression of historical truth is greater than ever. Corporations re-define and sugarcoat the past. Politicians twist history as quick as one can say “re-election.” News reporting has been cut to the bone, now focusing more on mindless trivia rather than revealing truthful information. It's a dark era indeed for the seekers of honest information.
When I was growing up, an old shotgun stood in the corner of a closet in my home. I was told it belonged to my grandfather and had quite a history associated with it. I knew only that it involved some vague ancient dispute involving a labor union. The details of that dispute were never discussed in my family.
The reasons were part embarrassment by some family members. Plus some very powerful corporate interests in my home state of South Carolina tried to keep a lid on the real story for over 60 years.
That shotgun connected directly to the efforts of Southern cotton mill workers to organize and the attempts of mill owners to keep unions out of their textile businesses at any price. The price was cold blooded murder and a succession of acts so cruel that it's hard to believe today they actually happened.
Of personal interest to me was the fact that my own grandfather -- a textile mill superintendent in the tiny town of Honea Path, South Carolina -- apparently gave the order to a handful of his favored workers to open gunfire on a group of their co-workers at a rally supporting the union. Seven were killed and 17 others wounded on this “Bloody Thursday” morning on September 6, 1934. It was, pure and simply, an act of murder to stop a union. This dark secret was never taught in history classes at school. (And my own mother was the history teacher!)
As a Southern mill town in 1934, Honea Path was controlled by the management of the textile mill. As town mayor and mill superintendent, my grandfather had almost dictatorial power over the workers' lives. He controlled not only the workplace, but the housing (built and owned by the mill), merchants (the mill owned and ran the “company store”), and the churches (also built and owned by the mill.) Should his workers get out of line in any way, he could fire them on the spot and evict them from their homes. As the main employer in town, he held some big sticks. One of those sticks was the rusting shotgun, still resting to this day in the closet in my childhood home.
When workers were given the legal right to organize in the 1930s, the mill owners in the South used every kind of fear tactic imaginable to prevent the formation of labor unions. The organizing efforts ended with the killings in Honea Path and the subsequent black listing and intimidation of those who had tendencies to assert their rights.
Because of the involvement of my grandfather, I have a deep personal interest in trying to understand a culture in which small town neighbors, whose kids played and went to school together, could wake up one morning and fire weapons at each other over the prospects of a labor union. I know that interest is shared by many others who have been denied the story of “Bloody Thursday.”
The genie is now out of the bottle. And nobody can put it back in. If you’re interested in this story, I’ve written about it in Whitewash: A Southern Journal through Music, Mayhem & Murder. You can order it here.
Lois McClain, a young Chiquola Mill spinning room worker, shown just after she was shot on Sept. 6, 1934. This photo, by an unknown photographer, was identified by McClain's daughter, Jessie Mae Holder. The bullet from McClain's bleeding left hand was never removed and was still intact when she died at age 91 in 1993.
Eventually mother of five children, "Granny Lois" McClain, as she was called, worked in the mill until her mid 70s, while also being a volunteer midwife, seamstress, and cook for local townspeople nearly all of her life.
Some years after the shooting, Tom Stallcup, another Chiquola millworker, revealed that he had shot her and asked for her forgiveness, which she granted. Stallcup later became Sunday School teacher for McClain's daughter at the Church of God in Honea Path. His son, Virgil Stallcup, went on play shortstop for the Boston Red Socks and the Cincinnati Reds.
Never in her life did McClain, or her husband, Cowan, also a millworker, discuss the shooting or the mill violence with any of their children. For that reason, the circumstances of McClain's shooting or her role in the labor dispute remain unknown even to her own family.
