The people who honor the culture of North Carolina’s textile mill workers may not be lionized by history. Neither they nor the workers themselves will be receiving million-dollar bonuses. But they haven’t been forgotten. At least not by filmmaker Joel Blackwelder.
Blackwelder, whose grandfather worked in Plant Six of Cannon Mills, has created a documentary, Fading Fabric: Remembering Our Textile Heritage, that’s a love letter of sorts to textile workers and the folks who preserve the culture of cotton mill life. The one-hour film, which received the Best Documentary Award at the Southern Exposure Film Forum in November, is set to air at 4pm April 2 on public television station WTVI.
“Not enough Southern history is being recorded by Southern people,” Blackwelder said. “That’s one of the reasons I did this. We’re losing history.”
Less a recounting of the history itself than a paean to the people who preserve the culture, Fading Fabric documents how artists, activists and mill-worker descendents have used mediums from drama to music to the Internet in depicting mill town life. The film, begun as a project for eighth graders in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, features performances and interviews with activist Si Kahn, singer/songwriter Mike Seeger, poet Michael Chitwood, cartoonist/novelist Doug Marlette and Corine Cannon, the first African-American to work a production job at Cannon Mills.
As the industrialization of the South brought families from the mountains and countryside to work in towns and cities, the mill became a microcosm of the issues of the day: child labor, working rights for blacks, the employment of women, union organization and Communism. As Fading Fabric recalls, those issues were not always resolved peacefully.
Marlette, the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper cartoonist, recalls learning how a National Guardsman stabbed his labor-activist grandmother during a 1934 strike. But not everything depicted in the film is so dire: Viewers are introduced to a man who has devoted a Web site to remembering a largely abandoned mill town, Cliffside. Other people describe how creating musicals and writing songs have helped preserve remnants of a fading culture. The film gives a brief glimpse of Warren Coleman, a turn-of-the-century black businessman who tried to open a mill owned and operated by African-Americans.
“A project like this that really celebrates the culture created by textile mill people is, I think, a wonderful validation of the lives of many Carolinians,” said Levine Museum of the New South historian Tom Hanchett, who is interviewed in the film.
About 100,000 North Carolinians are employed in textile jobs today, Hanchett said. That’s little more than a third of the number employed in mills just 15 years ago. When Pillowtex announced in 2003 it was shuttering five North Carolina plants, the 5,500 lost jobs constituted the biggest single layoff in state history.
Without the mills, Hanchett said, Charlotte would not know the prosperity it enjoys today. “Textile history is such an important part of the bedrock of this region,” he said. “Even as so many new people come, the basic reason for the rise of cities here, for the rise of banking here, is still in that textile history.”
Blackwelder grew up in Concord near Plant Six of what was then Cannon and would later become Pillowtex. His grandfather worked in the mills, but it wasn’t until he spent two summers in college working in Plant One as a machinist’s helper that he became immersed in mill culture. That was in 1977 and 1978, before the mills had begun obvious signs of decline, he said. “They were going great guns. Running six days and three shifts,” Blackwelder said.
Other workers called him “college boy” and taught him lessons he couldn’t find in books. “They had their own wisdom,” he said. “It was a real eye-opener to learn that, I guess. You find that there’s a lot of wisdom that people have that doesn’t have anything to do with college.”
More than a quarter-century later, he hasn’t forgotten those lessons: “The cotton mill industry was the bridge, really, from the destruction after the Civil War to the banks that we have downtown. That was all built on the backs of these people, in a sense.”
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2006.
