by Studs Terkel
“The grand jury met. Same man called and said, ‘You ought to have her sons there. They saw it.’ I got ahold of the dean at Miles College: ‘Put them boys on the train. I’ll get your money for you.’ I met the train. I said to the clerk, ‘I want these boys to testify before the grand jury.’ She almost fell dead. ‘The sheriff issues subpoenas,’ she said. ‘He’s the man who done the killin’.’
“I walked into his office. A short, fat fellow with hobnailed boots, two pistols, handcuffs, bullets around his belt, blackjack in back pants pocket, shirt all open. I said, ‘You Sheriff White?’ He said, ‘I’m Sheriff White.’ I said, ‘My name is E.D. Nixon. I represent the NAACP.’ You oughta seen him when I said that. ‘I’m here to ask you to subpoena these boys. They got a grand jury at three o’clock about the killin’ of their mother.’ He looked at me. He didn’t know what to say.
“He pulled out a pencil. He licked it. He took him so long to trace out the boys’ names. I said, ‘You know the state pays eight cents a mile for travel. Both these boys are entitled to transportation.’ He said, ‘It’s a hundred miles from here to Birmingham!’ I said, ‘That’s correct. And thirteen from Montgomery to where the case is, and three miles from the college to the station. So you got 116 miles.’ He said, ‘Yeah, that’s right.’
“He started figurin’ on a piece of paper. I could see he didn’t know what he was doin’. So I figured it out ahead of time. I wrote the figure and I said, ‘I believe when you get through figurin’ yours up, this’Il tally.‘ He grabbed my sheet and said, ’Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.’ He wrote a voucher. I got the money.
“Of course, he was acquitted. The woman died ‘from causes unknown.’ But he couldn’t believe his eyes. He just couldn’t believe a Negro had the courage to challenge him. I had nothing on me. If I had a pocket knife and had been arrested, that’s all they needed.”
I was in St. Louis when Randolph spoke that Sunday in ’28. He says, “If you stick with me, the day will soon come when you’ll be making $150 a month.” I couldn’t see a man raising my salary from $62.50. But I put a dollar in the collection anyway.
When I got home the next morning, the manager met me as I stepped off the train. “I understand you attended a meeting of the Brotherhood yesterday.” A stool pigeon had told him. I said, “That’s right.” He said, “If you continue to go, you won’t have no job.” Well, I won’t let nobody push me around. I said, “I joined the Brotherhood yesterday. I think I got enough money to carry any so-and-so to jail who messes with my job.” I never had any trouble after that.
In the course of my speaking, I got into hot water quite a bit. I took care of grievances. The southern white man couldn’t see why he had to abide by a contract that was agreed upon by the Company. Despite the fact that Randolph started the Brotherhood in 1925, they were not recognized as a bonafide union until 1938. During that time, a whole lot of us were gettin’ fired. Any time the Company felt you’d done anything—if you had anything to do with the Brotherhood, they got rid of you. Or punished you… .
I was once called in. The supervisor wrote me up, said I was talkin’ to “some woman.” The woman was my wife. I said, “Mr. Maloney, that woman is Mrs. Nixon. And I’m gonna demand you respect her as Mrs. Nixon, just as you would expect me to respect Mrs. Maloney as Mrs. Maloney. And I want my statement in the record.” It knocked him for a deck of tombstones.
They found me guilty of dereliction of duty. They gave me eight days on the ground. You get no pay for that time. The Chicago office of the Company said eight days. The local man made it read: eighteen days. So I said to my wife, “They’re askin’ for a fight and they’re gonna get it.”
The Brotherhood appealed it to the Relations Board.49 I was found not guilty, and the Pullman Company had to pay me for all the time lost. And that my record be clear of all charges.
We had a porter named Cooley. He was extremely large and weighed close to three hundred pounds. The Company wanted to get rid of him. The superintendent got on the train at Montgomery. He weighed three hundred and some odd pounds. Cooley gave him a pillow. He stretched out on the sofa and shut the door. When he got to Atlanta, he wrote a statement saying Porter Cooley failed to shut the toilets between Montgomery and Atlanta.
He told the conductor to write up Cooley as no good. The superintendent’s letter was May 31st. The conductor dated his letter June 6th. And the superintendent quoted the conductor in his letter.
At the hearing, I said he must be a fortune teller. He could read what the conductor wrote seven days before he wrote it. I wonder if he would read my hand. I’d like to have him tell my fortune if he’s that good.
What won the case, though, was weight and width. The superintendent stated that Porter Cooley didn’t lock the toilet doors from Montgomery to Atlanta. There were seventeen stops between. That means the superintendent would have to get out of that drawing room and walk to the other end of the car and back thirty-four times. He’d have to pass Cooley each time. If he weighed three hundred and some odd pounds and Cooley weighed close to three hundred, together they weighed close to six hundred pounds. You know the aisle of a Pullman car, it’s about thirty inches. It just wasn’t wide enough. He couldn’t pass him once, let alone thirty-four times. I pointed this out. We won the case.
Sure, there are fewer Pullman porters today. That’s because railroads are goin’ downhill. The plight is much of its own fault. No regard for passengers. What a railroad sells is service. When a man bought a ticket, it was service he bought along with transportation: cordial treatment, sanitation, ticket claims all that. They ran away a whole lot of passengers. I wanted to go to New Orleans last week. There was only one train, leaving at 11:50 at night. My God, there used to be a train out of here every three hours… .
POSTSCRIPT: He was a key figure in the Montgomery bus boycott. Mrs. Rosa Parks, the lady who was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus, was his secretary at the NAACP. It was he who issued the call to all the black preachers of the city. It was he who suggested the young pastor, Martin Luther King, Jr., as head of the Montgomery Improvement Association. The rest is history… .
Joe Morrison
Half his working life was spent in the coal mines of southwestern Indiana —“as poor a part of the country as we could afford.” He was born there. The remainder of his work days were in steel mills. He quit school at fourteen for his first job “in the fields.”
“My father was a farmer and a coal miner, ten kids and I’m the oldest. He wanted me to do something else. Every parent worried about their kids gettin’ killed in mine explosions. Just a few miles away, they had gas, where mines exploded and we had one in 1927, killed thirty-seven men.
“The coal industry was hit in ‘26 and never did fully recover. Coal and lumber, they was the two things hit pretty hard. There was a dip in 1919, it picked up some. But in ’26, there was another one. Coal and lumber never did recover.
“1929 is when it hit banking and big business. But we had suffering and starvation long before that. In the early Twenties, mines shut down, nothin’ for people to live on. Children fainted in school from hunger. Long before the stock market crash.”
ONCE I COUNTED the people that I give a lift to from Detroit to southern Indiana. It was fourteen people that I give a lift to that day. One was a woman with three children. Detroit was a one-industry town. When auto went down, everything went down. If there was a job in the auto plant, there’d be two hundred men for that job. (Laughs.)
In ‘30 and ’31, you’d see freight trains, you’d see hundreds of kids, young kids, lots of ‘em, just wandering all over the country. Looking for jobs, looking for excitement… . The one thing that was unique was to see women riding freight trains. That was unheard of, never had been thought of before. But it happened during the Depression. Women gettin’ places by ridin’ freight trains. Dressed in slacks or dressed like men, you could hardly tell ’em. Sometimes some man and his wife would get on, no money for fare.
You’d find political discussions going on in a boxcar. Ridin’ a hundred miles or so, guys were all strangers, maybe two or three knew each other, pairs. There might be twenty men involved. They would discuss politics, what was happening. What should be done about this, that and so forth.
What was the spirit of the people … ?
Oh, they was ready for revolution. A lot of businessmen expected it. The Government sent out monitors. They had ‘em in these Hoovervilles, outside the town, along the railroads, along the highways. In monitoring these places, they got a lot of information. The information was: revolution. People were talkin’ revolution all over the place. You met guys ridin’ the freight trains and so forth, talkin’ about what they’d like to do with a machine gun. How they’d like to tear loose on the rich… .
You don’t find much political talk any more among workingmen. You go to a tavern now, it’s around ball games, something like that. Seldom ever politics or war. The old crackerbarrel discussions we had at home, always lively.
Up until since the end of World War II, you always found a bunch of young workers, up and coming, that read a lot. They liked to discuss history and things like that. They read Socialist and Communist publications. Of course, the Communists didn’t come till a later period. The Socialist literature—I remember when I was seventeen down in the lead mines in Missouri—they’d get from them things, they could give a congressman a pretty good run for his money. Even in these small towns, they passed newspapers, magazines around. People that couldn’t subscribe, they’d ask everybody to save their papers, and they’d pass ’em on and so forth. People read and talked more than they do now.
Maybe they’re thinkin’ today, but they don’t talk. There’s an apathy. They’re so busy trying to keep their bills paid. And the unpopularity of their being interested in anything they’re confronted with. People forget a lot. The younger generation has simply forgotten the history of these periods. It’s being covered up.
The terror that’s placed upon people—the McCarthy times. The guys begin to clam up and say nothin’. I was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the Fifties. When I went back to the mill, it was only a couple of guys that acted afraid, afraid to talk to me the first day. After the first day, it was O.K.; they got over it. All the men went out of their way to be friendly, to aid me in any way they could. But none of ’em didn’t want to talk about it. We’ve reached a place where people just got over doing anything about things they didn’t want to face. They’re afraid of being branded, being called Red or something.
In ‘34 I got discharged over a hassle we had with the mine company. I was on the union’s grievance committee. They had me blacklisted in the fields there. I never got a job until I went to work in the steel mills in ’36. I bummed around a little in some temporary jobs, anything I could get. Had a big family, seven children, they were all small. So you just had to hustle for whatever you could get.
I went to work in a car shop. That’s when the CIO started organizing steel. Half the organizers we had there came from coal. Among ‘em were some good organizers. But among ’em was also pie cards,50 they didn’t do anything but make a lot of noise. You see it crop up today.
It was rough going. You’d get a little relief. There was some surplus commodities, flour and stuff like that. You’d get a day’s work now and then on the farm. You might run into a week’s work, a road job or something like that. That’s the way people got along.
Mary, 22
MY FATHER lived on a farm. When the Depression came around, the first thing he did was go to New York City to look for a job. He took a job as a strikebreaker, because he really didn’t know what it would mean. He didn’t realize how bad this would be, or how dangerous. Or what striking people would think of this. He remembers being shadowed by people with guns and all sorts of things like that. He really got out of that job quickly. He didn’t know what he was doing, he was that naive… .
Gordon Baxter
Attorney. An alumnus of Yale University and Harvard Law School, ’32. “Children in eighth grade today have more knowledge of what’s going on in the world than I had all during college. I was sitting there listening to William Lyon Phelps lecturing about Tennyson and Browning, the most terrible crap in the world, but I didn’t have the judgment to know it was a lot of crap.
“Those times, people went through school insulated from everything except the immediate environment. Very few people doubted their ability to make a living. Success was measured by income: to get ahead fast in the business world. If people thought of going into teaching, they didn’t say anything about it. They were regarded as kind of nuts.
“It was really in my last year at law school that I noticed something was going on. At the New Haven football games, I met Yale graduates, who a couple of years before were claiming it was easy on Wall Street. Now the market crashed, and they were back at school, out of jobs. The world rushed in on us suddenly… .”
In 1937, at the age of thirty-two, he became general counsel and vice president of a large company, employing ten thousand. It was engaged in the making of die castings, appliances and automotive parts.
THERE WAS a wave of sit-down strikes. Newspapers and respectable people said it was bad enough to have strikes, but it was clearly immoral as well as unlawful to seize property. In those days, strikes were broken by the importation of strikebreakers. Sitting down in a factory kept strikebreakers from getting in. It was a new technique. When suddenly the rules of the game, which the unions had always lost, were altered by the sit-downs, there was an outcry.
You hear the same kind of talk about student demonstrators today. It’s all right for them to protest peacefully, but they must do it in accordance to the rules
There was a sit-down strike at one of our plants. We had a plant manager who dealt with these labor troubles. In his way, he was a nice guy, but his appearance was that of a cartoon factory boss: cigar in the corner of his mouth, a big square face and a big square frame. He had ways of beating the strikers that were not generally published, but known to manufacturers.
There was a police detail in Chicago known as the Industrial Squad,51 in charge of a lieutenant, Make Mills. When a strike occurred, Mills would arrange to arrest the leaders. They’d beat them up, put them in jail, make it pretty clear to them to get the hell out of town. Mills got tips, $1,000, or if it was a was a serious thing, $5,000. He made a hell of a lot of dough to get the agitators, as they were called.
These were organizers, some of whom didn’t work in the factory. With his plainclothesmen, Mills would get them in a saloon. They’d have free drinks, then a fight would break out.
His uniformed men would come in and arrest the organizer, beat hell out of him, put him in jail. They got a lot of people out of town. There was an awful lot of rough stuff going on.
The factory was shut down. I was drawn into it. The union had filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, 52 The issue was union recognition. The complaint: blacklisting.
The company sent letters out in very fancy language: we will pay the best wages, we will always discuss grievances with employees, but will allow no outside intervention. Newspaper editorials were urging employees to return to work. Each day of the strike was costing them money they’d never recover.
I was handed a stack of cards to take downtown to our attorneys. Some of those I examined had notations: “Union agitator, do not rehire.” Others were marked with little round dots. The employment manager told me they indicated a union sympathizer. Many of them had been or were to be fired. If any prospective employer were to ask about them, he’d be told: “Don’t hire him—troublemaker, agitator.” The word “Communist” wasn’t used much at the time. “Red,” though, was a common term.
I took the cards to Twynan, Hill and Blair. The operating head of the thing, Blair, came out of the Northwest as a successful railroad attorney. He represented many big companies and was a member of our board.
A tremendous bore, a funny little guy, about five feet four, small mustache. All his clients were saints, under attack. He was about seventy at the time.
When he’d get agitated, it would upset his stomach, he’d bounce up and down in his leather chair and reach for mineral water. Then he’d run out in the hall, holler for his secretary and relieve himself by dictating letters.
He had a special phrase he liked: “This presents a situation pregnant with danger.” Of course, it’s a great sustenance for a lawyer. If a danger is pregnant, he’s got to come to the rescue. The annual retainer doesn’t quite cover this. He got a hell of a lot of fees out of this operation.
Blair told me the cards were harmless. It dawned on me that he didn’t know of the existence of the Wagner Act. When I told him, he said, “There cannot be any such law. And if there were, I would not hesitate to advise you it would be unconstitutional because it would be an impingement upon the freedom of contract.” I said, “There is such a law. It’s sometimes called the Wagner Act.” He said, “I never heard of it.” And I said, “It was adjudicated in the Supreme Court and its validity was upheld.” He howled, “That is impossible!” He swiveled around and grabbed for his mineral water.
He called in an associate. “This young man tells me there is a law by the name of the Watson Act.” “The Wagner Act.” The other nodded. “There is? This young man goes further and claims the United States Supreme Court declared it constitutional.” The other nodded. “That, sir, is impossible!” His associate said it was so. “It’s a fine thing!” With that, Blair slapped the stack of cards on his desk, bang. “Well that’s one more of these left-wing New Deal activities. Respectable citizens who built up this country can come in and testify, and their testimony won’t be believed.” The other said, “That’s the way it would go.” Blair said, “We sent the president of the company to deny these charges, and he wouldn’t be believed?” I said, “Mr. Blair, one of the reasons he wouldn’t be believed is because it would be a lie.”
