Local 22: The Strike That Changed Everything
Near Winston Salem, North Carolina
On the morning of June seventeenth, nineteen forty-three, a man named Robert Black was working on the stemming floor of Plant Sixty-Five at R.J. Reynolds, the largest tobacco manufacturing facility in the world. A coworker collapsed and died at their machine. It was not the first time. The conditions in the leaf houses and stemmeries were brutal: suffocating heat, thick dust, repetitive labor, and wages so low that most workers lived in poverty despite working full-time.
Black sent word through the plant. Ten thousand workers, most of them Black women doing the lowest-paid and hardest jobs, turned away from their machines. They shut down every floor of the factory. Reynolds closed for the day.
What followed in the weeks and months afterward was a sustained union organizing drive. The records of behind-the-scenes negotiations are fragmentary, but the results are documented: by December of that year, Local Twenty-Two of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers won formal recognition from the company. By April of nineteen forty-four, they had their first contract: higher wages, seniority rights, a grievance procedure, and the elimination of the most explicitly segregated working conditions in the factories.
Among the leaders was Moranda Smith, a Reynolds worker since nineteen thirty-three. She was elected in nineteen forty-seven to the national executive committee of the union, making her the first Black woman in national leadership of any American union. Under her direction, Local Twenty-Two also registered tens of thousands of first-time Black voters and helped elect Willie Grier as alderman in nineteen forty-six, the first Black elected official in Winston-Salem since Reconstruction.
The Cold War ended it. Labeled Communist by political opponents during the Red Scare, Local Twenty-Two lost a decertification election in nineteen fifty. Moranda Smith died of a stroke that same year, at thirty-four years old.
Her funeral was one of the largest in Winston-Salem history.
