Ella May Wiggins - She Was Murdered For Her Cause

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Ella May Wiggins.

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Blog Created: 1-18-2024

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Ella May Wiggins (ca. March 1900 – September 14, 1929) was a union organizer and balladeer who was killed during the Loray Mill Strike in Gastonia, North Carolina.

According to Like a Family, a 1987 account of "the making of a Southern cotton mill world," the Gastonia protest collapsed in the aftermath of Wiggins's death. Her union, the National Textile Workers Union, ultimately was "too weak to challenge the economic and political power of the cotton manufacturers and to organize the labor force."

Union organizing ~

A native of Sevierville, Tennessee, Wiggins by 1926 settled in Gaston County, NC, living in an African-American neighborhood outside Bessemer City known as Stumptown. Her neighbors would look after her children as she worked as a spinner at American Mill No. 2. According to an article published online by the North Carolina Museum of History, "she worked twelve-hour days, six days a week, earning about nine dollars a week."

She became a bookkeeper for the union, which was Communist run, and traveled to Washington, D.C., to testify about labor practices in the South. She also told her story: “I’m the mother of nine. Four died with the whooping cough, all at once. I was working nights, I asked the super to put me on days, so’s I could tend ‘em when they had their bad spells. But he wouldn’t. I don’t know why. ... So I had to quit, and then there wasn’t no money for medicine, and they just died.”

She also sang her ballads, including her best-known song, “A Mill Mother’s Lament,” which has been recorded by Pete Seeger, among others.

Wiggins believed in organizing African-Americans along with whites, and in a close vote, her local NTWU branch voted to admit African-Americans to the union.

Death ~

On September 14, 1929, she and some other union members drove to a union meeting in Gastonia. They were met by an armed mob, and turned back. They had driven about five miles toward home when they were stopped by a car; armed men jumped out and began shooting. Wiggins was shot in the chest and killed. Her five children were sent to live in orphanages.

Five Loray Mill employees were charged in Wiggins's murder but were acquitted after less than 30 minutes of deliberation in a trial in Charlotte in March 1930 despite the fact that the crime was committed in daylight and more than 50 people witnessed it. Meanwhile, her fellow NTWU organizer Fred Beal and six other comrades were tried and convicted of conspiracy in the unsolved killing of a local police chief.

Wiggins was buried in the Bessemer City Cemetery on North 13th St. Her's is one of the biggest markers there, after being expanded by the A.F.L-C.I.O. in 1979 to include a marker inscribed, "She died carrying the torch of social justice." Her maiden name is misspelled on the marker at her gravesite.

Three of her children were later buried near her.

Legacy ~

Wiggins's life and death inspired many works of fiction, including Strike!, a 1930 work by Mary Heaton Vorse, where Wiggins is given the name Mamie Lewis, and The Last Ballad (2018) by North Carolina writer Wiley Cash, which won the Southern Book Prize for Literary Fiction. "Prosperity Mill", by the Swiss-American author Mary Anna Barbey, was originally written and published in French. It is now available in English. The plot follows closely the strike of 1929 in Gastonia and Ella May appears in her own name.

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FROM: Pediment Publishing

Published Nov 15, 2016. Regarding Gaston County Memories: The Early Years. By Jon Shields

Ella May Wiggins Rallied Gaston County Textile Workers ~

On April 1st, 1929, nearly 2,000 workers from Loray Mill in Gastonia walked off the job to kick off one of the most controversial and impactful labor strikes in United States history. The movement in North Carolina gained momentum in part due to the work of Ella May Wiggins, and began to unravel after her tragic death.

Searching for a way to care for her large family, young mother and Tennessee native Ella May Wiggins made her way to the Carolinas and the textile mill industry in the 1920s. She worked as a spinner and bounced from mill to mill in search of better pay and conditions, but found that each situation was as dire as the last.

When the National Textile Workers Union began focusing its attention on the conditions in Gaston County, Wiggins got involved with the union as the Bessemer City branch's secretary and became a critical influencer for the movement.

Wiggins was a mother of nine, four of whom died in early childhood, and was pregnant with another. Unable to provide proper nutrition and medicine to her growing family despite working twelve hours a day, six days a week, she was adopted as a symbol of the movement. She became renowned for her ballads that helped garner support and inspire workers to unionize.

Her best-known ballad, "The Mother's Lament," begins:

We leave our homes in the morning

We kiss our children good-bye

While we slave for the bosses

Our children scream and cry

And when we draw our money

Our grocery bills to pay

Not a cent to spend for clothing

Not a cent to lay away

It is for our little children

That seem to us so dear

But for us nor them, dear workers

The bosses do not care.

The strike was tempestuous. Union supporters, anti-strike groups, and law enforcement violently clashed on a number of occasions. At the apex of the conflict, a merciless anti-strike force known as the "Committee of 100" attacked a truck full of union workers on the way to a rally, fatally shooting Wiggins.

The movement lost its footing following the tragedy and conditions barely improved, but strikers' efforts were not completely in vain. In 1934, a massive strike encompassing the entire eastern United States was built on the foundation laid in Gaston County, making textile labor conditions a national issue.

But understand, all workers

Our union they do fear

Let’s stand together, workers

And have a union here.

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The children of Ella May Wiggins, September 1929. From left: Albert, Myrtle, baby Charlotte, Millie, Clyde. Millican Pictorial History Museum.

Textile workers from Gaston County preparing to testify before Senate in 1929. Ella May Wiggins is the second woman from left. Millican Pictorial History Museum.

A Bessemer City home where union activist and organizer Ella May Wiggins was laid after being fatally shot by a mob of anti-strike vigilantes known as the “Committee of 100” on September 14, 1929. She became known as “The Martyr of Loray Mills.” Millican Pictorial History Museum.

Nine individuals charged with the murder of Gastonia police chief O.F. Aderholt during the Loray Mill Strike were acquitted, October 21, 1929. Photo courtesy of Gaston County Museum of Arts and History.