The Black Workers of Cone Mills

The mill villages that Moses and Caesar Cone built for their workers came with schools, churches, and recreational facilities. What the historical accounts often omit is that these benefits, the schools, the YMCA, the company nurse, were built for white workers. Black workers at Cone Mills occupied the lowest-paid, most physically hazardous positions in the plants: the picker rooms and spinning rooms where cotton dust was thickest, where the risk of byssinosis, the disease that destroys the lungs of textile workers, was highest.

Byssinosis, sometimes called brown lung disease, was the industry's great secret. Workers who spent years breathing cotton fiber dust developed chronic inflammation and scarring in their lungs. Many became disabled and unemployable before they were sixty. The textile industry spent decades insisting that the disease was not caused by cotton dust, that the workers were simply sick from other causes.

James Waller, a pediatrician who would later be killed in the nineteen seventy-nine massacre, co-founded the Carolina Brown Lung Association to document what was happening to Black textile workers in North Carolina and to fight for their compensation rights. The association gave workers a legal framework and a public voice. The textile industry fought it at every turn.

The racial stratification of Cone's factories was not incidental to the labor conflict that eventually led to November third, nineteen seventy-nine. The Communist Workers Party was organizing in those plants precisely because Black workers had been systematically excluded from the benefits the mills provided. The sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter happened one decade before the massacre. Between those two events, in the same city, the fight for equality moved from the lunch counter to the factory floor.