In 1934, Southern textile workers took the lead in a nationwide strike that saw half a million walk off their jobs in the largest single-industry strike in the history of the United States. For a time, these new union members, in response to New Deal legislation, stood up for their rights and became a force to be reckoned with in the South. Then management moved in and crushed the strike. Some mill workers were murdered, thousands more were blacklisted, and many were so intimidated that "union" became a dirty word in Southern communities for decades to come.
Little known, barely publicized, rarely acknowledged in history books, the General Textile Strike of 1934 remains a stirring, yet amazingly forgotten chapter in Southern history. The Uprising of '34, a film by famed documentarian George Stoney and independent filmmakers Judith Helfand, (Producer of Blue Vinyl and other documentaries), and Susanne Rostock, examines this hidden legacy of the labor movement in the South and its impact today. For decades, it seemed as if all memory of the General Textile Strike had been buried with the workers who died in its front lines. Stoney and Helfand spent nearly six years tracking down and interviewing surviving strikers and their relatives in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina.
The Uprising of '34 is a startling documentary which tells the story of the General Strike of 1934, a massive but little-known strike by hundreds of thousands of Southern cotton mill workers during the Great Depression. This is a heartfelt testimony, often spoken for the very first time, contains extraordinary archival footage of the strike itself and the miserable working conditions that led to the walk-out. Mill owners' non-compliance with New Deal legislation resulted in speeded-up production, which forced workers to produce the same in eight hours that they used to in 12 and for wages far below the federal government's newly established minimum.
The mill workers' defiant stance — and the remarkable grassroots organizing that led up to it — challenged a system of mill owner control that had shaped life in cotton mill communities for decades. Sixty years after the government brutally suppressed the strike, a dark cloud still hangs over this event, spoken of only in whispers if at all.
Excerpted from:
No comments:
Post a Comment