The modern Carolina Piedmont gathered steam through
the 1870s and 1880s. Completion of the Atlanta and Richmond Air-Line Railway
offered a direct route from New York to New Orleans and further shifted
the region's orientation away from the Carolina coast. Cotton agriculture,
cotton mills, and tobacco factories proliferated along the new railway
routes and spur lines. Boxcars, hauling northern-made textile machinery
purchased on credit, followed the rail tracks.
In a romance of New South industry that continues into the
twenty-first century, manufacturers, politicians, town boosters, and newspaper
editors boasted of the region's potential for profit. A seemingly bottomless
pool of displaced tenant and sharecropper families provided generations
of cheap, exploitable labor upon which the new industrial class built
its wealth and political power.
The long era of Jim Crow assigned workers — male and female, white
and black — to different industrial and occupational tasks and thwarted
efforts at unionization. Black men and women undertook the dirtiest, dustiest,
hottest, and heaviest tasks in the tobacco factories of the Reynolds of
Winston-Salem and of the Dukes of Durham. All but a handful of African
Americans were excluded from the Piedmont's textile mills and from the
operation of tobacco-processing machinery until the late 1940s.
By the 1920s and 30s, in the gingerbread neighborhoods and first streetcar suburbs of
Charlotte, Greenville, Durham, and Greensboro, captains and lieutenants of Carolina
Piedmont industry resided alongside their cities' leading doctors, lawyers, and merchants.
On the mill hills and in the "bottoms" of these cities, white and black workers lived as
factory "hands" or female domestic "help." Out of this new working class, from the ranks
of cotton mill lintheads and tobacco market street performers, came an indelible outpouring
of Piedmont fiddle-band music and a genre of blues that carried ragtime rhythms. African
American churches birthed a lively music on its way to becoming gospel.
The Depression years brought not only a worsening of conditions on Piedmont farms and
further exodus, but stretch-outs, speed-ups, and lay-offs in the mills and factories. As
the legitimacy of the national political economy came into question after 1929, protests
by Piedmont workers rose to unprecedented levels, culminating in the 1934 General Strike.
Before being overpowered by mill-owner tactics that included evictions and blacklisting,
as well as reliance upon troops and state-backed repression, thousands of millhands shut
down their looms and spinning frames, marched in the streets, and went on strike. It took
the coming of World War II to turn Piedmont Carolinians toward a more singular purpose and
renew economic activity.
The pace of the region's post-war upturn, from Danville to Charlotte to Greenville, continued
to be set by manufacturers, bankers, and businessmen who constituted what political scientist
V. O. Key called an "progressive plutocracy." State government interests and initiatives
complemented those of the "economic oligarchy." Networks of railways, paved roads that grew
into highways, and electric power lines tied together countryside, town, and city. Writing in
1949, following an extended visit to North Carolina, Lewis Mumford celebrated the numerous
colleges and universities, the open spaces, the de-centralized distribution of urban and agricultural
populations, but warned of the tendencies of unplanned, market-driven growth. His words echo today
along the congested Interstate 85 corridor and the euphemistically named "edge cities" that sprawl
through the core of the Carolina Piedmont. "In fifty years," wrote Mumford, cities such as Charlotte,
Raleigh, and High Point "will take on the worst features of metropolitan areas everywhere . . . and
the surrounding countryside will become merely a real-estate speculators' annex to the growing
metropolis."
Sentenced to low wage, low-skilled manufacturing jobs in textiles, apparel, furniture, and tobacco,
Carolina Piedmont workers' standard of living rose minimally in the 1950s and '60s. At the other
end of the economic system, drawn by tax breaks and the anti-union climate, many northern plants
relocated. The accumulating capital from the industrial transformation found its way to banking
centers in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and Raleigh. New initiatives, particularly in North Carolina,
began to diversify the region's manufacturing and business base. The creation of the
"public/private" Research Triangle Park in 1959 typified the continuing effectiveness of the
decades-old collaboration of corporate, academic, and government elites, this time put to the
service of the nascent information and technology age.
Photographs and Video:
One of the opening acts of the modern freedom struggle was the 1960 Woolworth's
lunch-counter
sit-in
in Greensboro, North Carolina. As long-excluded African American citizens
pressed for justice in every aspect of civil and social life, the Carolina
Piedmont registered the changes, whether in court-ordered school busing
to achieve racial balance in Charlotte, in efforts to desegregate factories
and workplaces, or in the number of newly elected black officials. In
reaction, drawing upon anti-government resentment and racial codewords,
initiatives such as Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy pulled large numbers
of blue collar and middle class white voters into the Republican Party
— in this region and throughout the South. What William Chafe has called
the "progressive mystique" with its reformist emphasis upon "consensus,
voluntarism, and the preservation of civility" remains a powerful ideology
of "resistance from above." Twenty-first century transformations of the
Carolina Piedmont's social arrangements await political coalitions capable
of pressing more inclusive agendas of political and economic democracy.
