Labor

Labor organizer, lobbyist, and administrator Matthew S. Lynch was the grandson of an organizer of New England shoe workers. Lynch began working in a Chattanooga hosiery mill and joined his first union as a teenager. In 1934 he graduated from…

Founded in 1917 and edited by owner and publisher Jake Cohen (1877-1945), this weekly newspaper served as the official organ of the Memphis Trades and Labor Council, an American Federation of Labor affiliate. Prior to his journalistic efforts, the Russian-born…

When African American sanitation workers in Memphis began a strike on February 12, 1968, few then suspected the walkout would escalate into one of the climactic struggles of the civil rights and labor movements of the 1960s. By the time…

Harry L. Mitchell, one of the founders of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and president of the National Farm Labor Union, was born near Halls, the son of James Y. Mitchell, a tenant farmer and Baptist preacher. Mitchell graduated from…

The Nashville Trades and Labor Council, organized in 1890, was most responsible for the passage of the Tennessee child labor law and the local barber's Sunday closing law. Composed of three delegates from the different unions in Nashville, the Council…

In October 1926 American Bemberg began the manufacture of "artificial silk," or rayon, at its new plant in Elizabethton. The parent company, J. P. Bemberg, was the German affiliate of Vereinigte Glanzstoff Fabriken (VGF), one of the international giants in…

Located in Marion County, Richard City is significant for its associations with the development of industrial company towns in Tennessee in the early twentieth century. In the early 1900s, representatives of the Dixie Portland Company, including engineer Ellis Soper, cement…

International president of the United Furniture Workers, W. Carl Scarbrough was born in Henderson, the son of Joseph Scarbrough, a farmer. Scarbrough graduated from Chester County High School in 1952 and married his wife Faye that same year. They had…

Technically defined, sharecropping is a land and labor arrangement whereby an individual or family receives a stipulated proportion of the crops produced on a particular plot of land in return for their labor on that same plot. The legal status…

Stanton Everett Smith, local, state, and national officer in the American Federation of Teachers, the Tennessee Federation of Labor, and the Tennessee State Labor Council, was born in Wyoming, Ohio, in 1905, the son of Charles Henry Smith, an accountant.…

Representative of the many textile mills that opened in Middle Tennessee in the early twentieth century, Tennessee Knitting Mills began operations in Columbia, Tennessee, in June 1931 as Massachusetts Knitting Mills. In that year, a group of Bostonians led by…

The Patrons of Husbandry, or Grange, was the first general farm organization in the United States. Established by the Minnesota agricultural reformer Oliver H. Kelly in December 1867, it briefly flourished in Tennessee during the 1870s, providing Tennessee's small farmers…

Lucille Thornburgh, union organizer and labor newspaper editor, was born in 1908 in Strawberry Plains, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Thornburgh. After graduating from Rhea County High School in Dayton she lived in Denver, then Los Angeles, and…

Located in the rugged, isolated area at the juncture of Fentress, Overton, and Putnam Counties, the five communities of Wilder, Davidson, Twinton, Crawford, and Highland Junction comprised the Wilder-Davidson Coal Mining complex which flourished from 1903 until the mid-1930s. This…