Uncovering History’s Secrets: “The Uprising of ‘34”

A Documentary about the 1934 Textile Strike with Program by Dr. Anne McLeod

Photo courtesy of Wayne State University Labor Archives.

“Just before I graduated in 1978, I was working on a family history project for a Georgia history course. We had studied the transition in the South from an agricultural economy to one based on industry, including textiles. My paternal great-grandmother’s husband died in 1916, leaving her with 10 children and a cotton farm in Gaylesville, Alabama. During the Great Depression, as the children grew up, they began moving to the town of Trion, Georgia, to work at the cotton mill that was then Riegal and is now Mount Vernon. Eventually, the entire family moved and Nona sold the Alabama farm. I figured this was an excellent example of the shift from farm to town, and I’d be able to interview my grandmother and her sisters about their lives on the farm and later in Trion,” Anne explained.

“One of my grandmother’s sisters mentioned the 1934 strike, and I noticed her daughter had a funny look on her face, almost like she didn’t want her mother to say anything about it. Then my aunt told me not to ask my grandfather about it because, ‘He won’t talk about it.’ I was immediately drawn to the story and wanted to find out more,” Anne said. “It had happened about six weeks after my father’s birth, and I could only imagine the tough decisions that the young workers faced during a chaotic time. Then I learned that the first people who died during the strike were killed right there in Trion. In fact, I knew the daughter of one of the victims. I was hooked.”

When Anne first learned about it in 1978, there were limited accounts of the strike, mostly primary sources such as newspaper accounts. “I read what I could in the newspaper archives at UGA, but there were no histories of it that I could find, which was frustrating.”

Fast-forward to 2004, when she returned to Athens to start a Ph.D. in language and literacy education. “My advisor was also a history buff, and he encouraged me to integrate this history that had captured my imagination into my analysis of how the American labor movement is represented in novels for young people. By then two books about the strike had been published and the documentary ‘The Uprising of 1934’ had come out. George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock had produced this documentary in 1995 that included interviews with mill workers, and I was able to use it as one of my sources,” she said.

“I learned that workers had been sworn to secrecy about the strike by mill management. People promised to never mention the union again, and they didn’t. The interviews in this video bring this almost-forgotten history to life again. I think it’s hard to understand the history of workers in the South without being aware of what happened in early September of 1934,” Anne said.

Anne will introduce the film, which lasts 87 minutes, and will then discuss some of the historical research she did related to the project. The program is free and open to the public. Parking is available in front of the library, around the corner at Moon Lake Campus, and on the grass beside the library.