Appalachian History Series – The Plant 65 Strike: R.J. Reynolds, Black Women Workers, and Local 22
In June 1943, a labor protest inside one Winston-Salem tobacco plant changed the history of North Carolina work, race, and politics. What began in R. J. Reynolds Plant No. 65 as a sit-down strike by mostly African American women leaf workers quickly spread through the company’s operations and helped create United Tobacco Workers Local 22, one of the most important examples of labor-based civil rights activism in the mid twentieth-century South. Later historians would call that tradition civil rights unionism, but the people who launched it were responding to something more immediate: punishing work, low pay, racial inequality, and the knowledge that the city’s prosperity rested on labor few people in power respected.
Work Inside Reynolds Before The Strike
By the early 1940s, Reynolds was not just another employer. NCpedia describes it as the largest tobacco manufacturing facility in the world, and its Winston-Salem plants sat near the center of the city’s economic life. Black workers, especially Black women, filled many of the hardest and lowest-paid jobs in the leaf houses and stemmeries. Duke’s summary of Robert Korstad’s work notes that Winston-Salem was a city of women workers, and that more than half of the city’s gainfully employed women worked in tobacco factories. In those departments, labor was hot, dusty, repetitive, and tightly supervised, with Black workers pushed into the roughest positions under Jim Crow management.
Plant No. 65 stood on Chestnut Street between First and Third Streets. The workers there were largely African American women who stemmed tobacco leaves, separating leaf from stem in conditions that later accounts remembered as exhausting and dangerous. A later reconstruction based on oral history and contemporary reporting describes a work floor choked with tobacco dust, fast-moving machinery, and rising production pressure during wartime. By spring 1943, the sense that management had increased the pace beyond what many workers could bear had become a source of daily anger.
June 17, 1943
On June 17, 1943, that anger broke into action. NCpedia and the North Carolina historical marker program both identify that date as the beginning of the grassroots sit-down strike in Plant No. 65. Later accounts place Theodosia Simpson among the central early leaders, while Korstad’s work, as summarized by Duke, emphasizes that it was no accident that a Black woman worker stood near the center of the movement.
One of the most remembered moments of the opening protest involved James McCardell, a Reynolds worker who, according to later reconstructions, stepped forward in support of the women and then collapsed and died on the factory floor. Whether the stoppage had already been loosely planned or whether the shock of his death transformed grievance into revolt, the effect was immediate. What might have remained a limited protest became something larger, more emotional, and much harder for the company to contain. The women did not simply complain. They stopped work and forced management to respond.
The Walkout Spreads Across Winston-Salem
The action did not stay confined to one room. By the next day, workers in other Reynolds departments were refusing to turn on their machines until grievances were heard, and the stoppage widened into a broader shutdown. The Atlanta Daily World, reporting on June 24, 1943, said 3,000 Black workers were on strike in Winston-Salem at Reynolds and other workplaces including Brown and Williamson, Hanes, the Mengel Box Factory, and the Robert E. Lee Hotel. That same report said the strikers demanded “higher wages, lighter work and better working conditions,” and it noted that more than 14,000 white workers had been forced into idleness because their own jobs depended on Black labor.
That newspaper report matters because it captured the deeper truth of Winston-Salem’s labor order. Black workers had been assigned the least respected positions, but the city’s industrial life could not function without them. When they withdrew their labor, the effects traveled outward fast. The strike showed, in public and unmistakable form, that Black workers were not peripheral to the city’s economy. They were central to it.
Later retellings of the strike also emphasize the role of Black churches, neighborhood networks, and mass meetings in sustaining the protest. That combination of workplace action and community organizing became one of the defining features of the movement that followed. This was not only a factory story. It was a city story, and soon it would become a political story too.
From Wildcat Protest To Local 22
The most important legacy of the June strike was that it did not end as a brief outburst. Workers and organizers turned the protest into an enduring union drive under the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Later scholarship and public history consistently identify the result as Local 22, the only union Reynolds workers ever successfully built at the company. An NLRB-supervised election on December 16 and 17, 1943 gave the CIO union more than two-thirds of the vote, and Reynolds was ordered to bargain. On April 13, 1944, the company signed a contract recognizing the union.
Recognition mattered because it converted anger into structure. Later accounts of Local 22 describe negotiations that produced a grievance procedure, seniority protections, holidays, and other improvements in working life. Archival records in the M. H. Ross Papers and surviving issues of The Worker’s Voice show that Local 22 quickly became more than a bargaining unit. It became a vehicle through which tobacco workers explained their struggle to one another and imagined a broader kind of democracy in Winston-Salem.
Why Local 22 Mattered Beyond The Factory
Local 22’s importance reaches far beyond Reynolds. NCpedia describes the June 17 strike as the opening of seven years of labor and civil rights activism. The National Park Service labor history theme study goes further, noting that Local 22 trained Black members in leadership roles, encouraged the participation and leadership of Black women, registered thousands of Black voters, and helped bring about the election of a Black representative to the Winston-Salem Board of Aldermen. Duke’s summary of Korstad’s work likewise argues that Winston-Salem’s tobacco struggle anticipated major themes of the later civil rights movement by linking worker dignity, racial equality, and political citizenship.
That wider significance helps explain why the 1943 Reynolds strike still draws so much attention from historians. It challenged more than wages. It challenged the racial and civic order of a southern city where industrial power, white supremacy, and political influence were closely tied together. Local 22 showed that Black working-class women were not simply participants in southern reform. They were often the ones who forced it forward.
The Legacy Of The 1943 Strike
Local 22 would face harder years after its first victories. Public officials, employers, and anti-Communist critics pushed back hard in the late 1940s, and by 1950 the union lost its last rights to represent Reynolds workers. Even so, the memory of June 1943 remained the foundation of the movement. The strike proved that workers long treated as expendable could organize themselves, command public attention, and win a place in North Carolina history.
What began in Plant No. 65 was therefore larger than a dispute over factory conditions. It was a declaration that Black labor in Winston-Salem would no longer remain silent while carrying the city on its back. The women who turned away from their machines in June 1943 did not just interrupt production. They opened one of the most important chapters in the intertwined history of southern labor and Black freedom.
Sources & Further Reading
Atlanta Daily World. “3,000 Workers Strike in N.C.” Atlanta Daily World (Atlanta, GA), June 24, 1943, City Edition. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn82015425/1943-06-24/ed-1/?st=text
“Atlanta Daily World (Atlanta, Ga.) 1932-Current, June 24, 1943, Image 1.” Georgia Historic Newspapers. https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn82015425/1943-06-24/ed-1/seq-1/
Southern Oral History Program. “Interview Database.” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/project/collection/sohp/
Russell, John. “Oral History Interview with John Russell, July 25, 1974. Interview E-0014-2.” Documenting the American South. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://www.docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/html_use/E-0014-2.html
M. H. Ross Papers. “Local 22 [organizing at Reynolds, Winston-Salem, North Carolina], 1944–1950.” Georgia State University Library Special Collections. https://archivesspace.library.gsu.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/247
M. H. Ross Papers. “Local 22 organizing at Reynolds, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.” Georgia State University Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/mhross/id/95963/
Korstad, Robert R. “The Workplace and the Union in Tobacco: Winston-Salem, N.C., 1943–1950.” Georgia State University Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/api/collection/mhross/id/97127/download
National Negro Congress. National Negro Congress Records, 1933–1947. New York Public Library Archives. https://archives.nypl.org/scm/20648
Hill, Michael. “United Tobacco Workers Local 22: Civil Rights and Tobacco Unionism.” NCpedia. 2012. https://www.ncpedia.org/united-tobacco-workers-local-22
North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. “Tobacco Unionism (J-115).” January 10, 2024. https://www.dncr.nc.gov/blog/2024/01/10/tobacco-unionism-j-115
City of Winston-Salem. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company Factory 64 Labor Strikes. https://www.cityofws.org/DocumentCenter/View/4063/36—RJR-Labor-Strikes-Factory-64-PDF
Gerard, Philip. “The 1940s: Workers Unite.” Our State, August 27, 2018. https://www.ourstate.com/workers-unite/
Korstad, Robert Rodgers. Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. https://uncpress.org/9780807854549/civil-rights-unionism/
Korstad, Robert, and Nelson Lichtenstein. “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement.” Journal of American History 75, no. 3 (December 1988): 786–811. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1901530
Griffin, Larry J., and Robert R. Korstad. “Class as Race and Gender: Making and Breaking a Labor Union in the Jim Crow South.” Social Science History 19, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 425–454. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history/article/class-as-race-and-gendermaking-and-breaking-a-labor-union-in-the-jim-crow-south/8C688260D3B771691A0D5CDA8C4110B8
Wells, Jennifer. “The Black Freedom Struggle and Civil Rights Labor Organizing in the Piedmont and Eastern North Carolina Tobacco Industry.” M.L.A. thesis, University of South Florida, 2013. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/4790/
National Park Service. Labor History in the United States: A National Historic Landmark Theme Study. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/upload/Labor_History_in_US-Theme_Study-Final-revised.pdf
Winston-Salem Journal archive. Newspapers.com. https://journalnow.newspapers.com/
The Sentinel. “Newspaper Story June 1943.” The Sentinel (Winston-Salem, NC), June 30, 1943. Newspapers.com. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-sentinel-newspaper-story-june-1943/191023114/
Author Note: When we think about Appalachian labor history, coal usually comes first, but tobacco workers shaped the region’s story too. This is one of those moments where Black workers in a North Carolina factory forced change that reached far beyond the plant floor.