Charleston's Cigar Factory Strike, 1945-1946

Exhibit Splash Image

Sources

About the Author
Dwana Waugh is an assistant professor in history and the History Education Coordinator at North Carolina A&T State University. She received her PhD in history from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her research interests include the history of school desegregation and the twentieth century civil rights movement.

Editorial Contributors
Robert Korstad, Duke University
Kerry Taylor, The Citadel: Military College of South Carolina
Deborah Wright, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture

Additional Credits
Special thanks to the College of Charleston's Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture (particularly for access to the Isaiah Bennett Papers), the South Carolina Historical Society, and to the Georgia State University Southern Labor Archives for providing access to archival materials for this exhibition.

Sources

"Carolina Voices of the Civil Rights Movement Conference," Transcript and Video Recordings of the South Carolina Voices of the Civil Rights Movement Conference, 1982, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina.

Cooper, Patricia. “Cigar Making.” In Gender and Technology: A Reader, edited by Nina E. Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Arwen P. Mohun, 207-237. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Fraser, Steve and Gary Gerstle, eds. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Honey, Michael. Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Jackson, Augusta V. “A New Deal for Tobacco Workers.” The Crisis (October 1938): 322-330.

Kelley, Robin D. G. ‘‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South.” Journal of American History 80 (June 1993): 75-112.

Kelley, Robin D.G.  Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Korstad, Karl. “Tobacco Road, Union Style.” The New Masses (May 7, 1946): 13-15.

Korstad, Robert. Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in Mid Twentieth-Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Korstad, Robert and Nelson Lichtenstein. “Opportunities Lost and Found: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement.” Journal of American History 75 (December 1988): 786-811.

Lau, Peter F.  Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865.  Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006.

Lichtenstein, Nelson. Labor’s War at Home: The CIO and World War II. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Lichtenstein, Nelson. The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

Meffert, John, Sherman Pyatt, and the Avery Research Center. Charleston, South Carolina: Black America Series. Charleston, South Carolina: Tempus Publishing Incorporated, 2000.

Nelson, Bruce. Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Petersen, Bo. “‘We Shall Overcome’ Civil Rights Anthem Rose to Prominence in Charleston Strike.” Post and Courier, September 21 2003.

Seeger, Peter. “History of ‘We Shall Overcome.'"

Union Voice. New York: Distributive, Processing and Office Workers of America, 1952. In the Isaiah Bennett PapersAvery Research Center for African American History and Culture, College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina.

Oral Histories

Doster, Lillian Mae Marsh. Interviewed by O. Jennifer Dixon, November 21, 2008. Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Frazier, Marjorie Amos. Interviewed by O. Jennifer Dixon, June 24, 2008. Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.