by Bryant Simon
Adding to the town’s pain, over the course of the 1970s, Hamlet had fought a losing retail battle with neighboring Rockingham. A K-Mart and then a Walmart—which one Hamlet man called the “big box over yonder”—opened on the highway connecting the two towns, but both were within Rockingham’s city limits and tax jurisdiction. Cars from Hamlet filled the spots in the football field–sized parking lots in front of the discount stores and at the supermarkets, buffets, and fast food outlets next to them. The wide-aisled Food Lion sold peaches and tomatoes from California and New Jersey for less than farmers could grow them a county or two away. The McDonald’s churned out burgers at half the price of the grill in downtown Hamlet. Revco, the national chain with a store in Rockingham, charged less than the pharmacy on Main Street for aspirin, Q-tips, and rubbing alcohol. As paychecks shrunk and jobs disappeared, these bargains were harder and harder for many to pass up.25
Starting in the 1970s, as work vanished on the railroad, Hamlet and the small towns in Richmond County and across the country began to mimic the new stores popping up on the retail horizon, the Food Lions and Walmarts. Working people, like these chains, had to survive on the cheap. Prices were lower, but so were wages. With the railroad slowly laying off hundreds of men, there were fewer well-paying, benefit-rich union jobs in town and more part-time posts—or full-time positions that paid part-time wages and didn’t include health insurance or retirement contributions. As pay envelopes shrunk, working people depended more and more on everyday low prices, especially with public assistance barely covering the basics and getting cut by lawmakers in Raleigh, it seemed, every year. As the jobs people held changed and their paychecks weren’t what they used to be, Main Street, with its locally owned shops, became too expensive, a retail anachronism of an older time, pushing people toward the aisles of the low-price chains and away from downtown.
Another sharp blow to Main Street, to Hamlet’s downtown life, came in 1975. It came like it did to so many places in the United States—with bursting flames and angry shouts. It surprised some, especially in Hamlet’s white community, but not everyone.
When Glenn Sumpter moved to Richmond County in 1970 to edit the local paper, he remembered thinking that race relations there were “basically better than in Hickory,” the white-majority, western North Carolina town where he had been working for years as a reporter and columnist. Locals told him that the county “had been free of racial incidents” and was slowly adjusting to the ramifications of the Supreme Court decisions of the Earl Warren era and the civil rights acts of the Lyndon Johnson years.
Any sense of racial calm would be undone around 3:30 a.m. on Thursday, June 5, 1975. That’s when two Hamlet police officers drove their cruiser past the closed-up stores along Hamlet Avenue and stopped in front of the City Café, where Rhonda Scott, a twenty-year-old African American woman, was sitting on the curb with four other African Americans. They were waiting for cabs to take them home. As the police drove up, two people got into a car and drove away. That left Scott and her two friends. The white officers asked for their names. Scott didn’t answer right away. She said she wouldn’t give them the information until they told her why they needed it. Her cab arrived. Scott climbed in. Maybe she said something, maybe she didn’t. Before the car drove off, Sergeant James Bryant grabbed the door and tried to drag Scott out of the vehicle.
According to the police report, Scott got ahold of the officer’s slapjack. Trying to pry it away from her, he hit her with his flashlight and then with his .357 Magnum pistol. Somehow, the gun discharged. Bryant said he shot into the air. Scott ended up in the hospital with scrapes and bruises and a possible grazing wound on her back from a pistol shot. The police charged her with drunk and disorderly conduct.
Within hours, Scott filed a formal complaint against Bryant “for violating my civil rights, brutality, use of degrading language and gesture, and exceeding normal restraint and authority in exercising the performance of his duty.” The local magistrate, however, refused to charge the police officer.
The next afternoon, a Friday, Hamlet’s black community, led by the local NAACP chapter, took to the streets in a hastily organized demonstration against Bryant and the police, city leaders who refused to charge him, and the everyday indignities they endured in their hometown. Fearful of violence stoked by rumors circulating within the white community that marchers planned to show up armed with guns, the police chief issued riot gear to his men and called in twenty highway patrolmen and fifteen state troopers. The rally took place without any disturbances and the streets of Hamlet cleared without incident. But as darkness fell, the town exploded. A fire erupted at Enterprise Auto Parts. Minutes later, the Builder’s Supply Company and Pinecroft Industries burst into flames. More fires broke out at the Hamlet Housing Authority and at an office owned by landlord D.L. McDonald in the county’s North Yard section. The fire department received additional reports of brush fires along Bridges Street, near the eventual Imperial site. When Eugene Ross, a firefighter, pulled up to investigate, he was pelted with gunfire. It missed him but shattered his car windows and scratched his young son, who sat in the passenger seat. As Mayor Earl Covington drove through African American sections of Hamlet, rocks rained down on his car. An unnamed white woman told the police that two black men grabbed her for no reason and roughed her up.
During the next few days, an uneasy peace hung over Hamlet, largely because Richmond County Sheriff Raymond Goodman stepped in and issued a warrant charging Sergeant Bryant with “assault with a deadly weapon.”26
The rioters in Hamlet hoped, perhaps, like rioters in Oxford, North Carolina, did in 1970, that their demonstration would “cost these white people . . . enough goddamn money they was gonna start changing some things.”27 That yearning for something different and better would not be immediately rewarded. In the political campaigns in Hamlet after the riots, a new mayor and three new city council members were elected. Not one of them was black. Money didn’t rush into town to create new well-paying jobs or better housing for African Americans either.
Reverend Harold Miller arrived in Hamlet twelve years after the riots to preach at a Baptist church on the black side of town. He looked around and saw a “close-knit,” “hard-working,” and faithful community. It was the kind of place that wherever you went you ran into someone you knew. But it was also, Miller noted, a place that was still largely segregated and on the “decline economically.” Hamlet felt to him like it was “stuck in time,” in both good and bad ways.28
“Stuck in time.” That’s exactly what the producers of the gangster film Billy Bathgate, starring Dustin Hoffman and Nicole Kidman, were looking to find. As they sketched out the film in 1988, they searched for a location to shoot a few scenes that resembled the small town of Onondaga, New York, in the 1930s. They settled on Hamlet, in part because of the same economic decline that Miller noticed, which, as a result of the flight of business to the box stores and the riot, had emptied out the downtown area over the previous two decades. This meant that the film crews wouldn’t have to relocate too many establishments or move too many cars to get the look and feel they wanted. All they had to do was pry off a few layers of aluminum siding to get down to the buildings’ original stonework and facades and they were back in the past. Locals played the parts of extras strolling between shops like the men and women coming off the Orange Blossom Special might have done sixty years earlier.29
With its star turn at the movies, things seemed to be looking up for Hamlet. In June 1990, the National Civic League named Hamlet an All-American City. The judges praised the town for its efforts to save Hamlet Hospital, expand the local library, and stage the annual Seaboard Festival, a yearly fall gathering of craft vendors, food stands, long-distance runners, and live bands celebrating the community and its railroading past. The town heralded its new national distinction by putting up red, white, and blue flags up and down Main Street.30
But a movie appearance, awards, and patriotic banners couldn’t stop the
town’s economic slide. They couldn’t bring back the railroad or re-create the trickle-down effect that good-paying jobs used to have in the homes and stores of Hamlet. The movie crews had painted in one of the windows of the Terminal Hotel, “Dining Room. Best Coffee in Onondaga.” For years, though, the aging inn had operated as a flophouse, renting rooms to transients by the day—and even the hour. Around the corner, For Rent signs hung in the windows of many Main Street and Hamlet Avenue stores. Some places had no signs at all, and no merchandise either, just empty and dust-filled display cases facing the street. The opera house was long gone. The movie theaters had already played their last picture shows, and the bank doors were locked tight. St. James, the Catholic church, moved to the outskirts of town near Rockingham, and its old downtown location got turned into a restaurant and caterer that by the early 1980s was on the verge of going out of business. Only a handful of other businesses were still operating along Main Street,31 including a cluttered hardware store and an old-timey drugstore that still mixed up cherry Cokes and vanilla cream sodas to order. One of the busiest places downtown was the soup kitchen.
When the Imperial plant burned down, Hamlet’s freight yards and maintenance shops employed fewer than 600 men, down from 1,500 ten years earlier and more than twice that number ten years before that. The gabled and graceful depot at the bottom of Main Street opened just twice a day, and just long enough for a speeding Amtrak train to stop for a couple of minutes in the morning and a few minutes before midnight to let off a passenger or two before hustling north to Richmond or south to Atlanta. A coin-operated metal box filled with a handful of local papers replaced the newsstand. The only people around were the stationmaster and the occasional train buff. No one was there to greet the trains with chicken dinners or opera tickets to sell anymore.32
It wasn’t just the railroads that were in decline, nor was it simply a matter of Hamlet’s commercial spaces being in the midst of decay. The economic rot was much wider. Nearby Rockingham, with its fast-flowing streams, had been a textile center since 1837, before electricity had even arrived in the county. By the end of World War II, Richmond County had ten mills that employed, by one estimate, as many as 15,000 women and men, running two and three shifts a day, churning out underwear for Hanes, T-shirts for Fruit of the Loom, and rayon bedsheets for Burlington Industries. Although textile workers never got paid like railroad workers did, the mills provided jobs, housing, and enough money to keep families afloat, especially with two or three people from each household laboring in the noisy and dusty plants. By the 1980s, however, boxer shorts from Haiti and pillowcases from Guatemala filled the racks at the K-Mart store along the highway between Rockingham and Hamlet. Jobs tending looms and spindles in North Carolina left the state and landed farther south, in Mexico, and east, in Malaysia. Several of the ones still open—Burlington Mills, L’eggs Hosiery, and Union Underwear—invested in new, automated machines, cut their workforces, and slashed their payrolls. By the 1970s, Richmond County’s mills were down to 5,000 total employees. During the 1980s, the local textile industry lost another third of its jobs, and another 10 percent of the positions vanished by the time of the Imperial fire. As a percentage of total employment, textiles provided 52 percent of the county’s manufacturing jobs in 1979; by 1990, this number had fallen to 38 percent, and it would keep falling as American manufacturers of yarn, T-shirts, and linens faced ceaseless competition from corporate spin-offs and upstarts in the Global South.33
Ada Blanchard, an African American woman employed by Imperial in 1991, worked in a Richmond County spinning mill during her high school years in the late 1970s. After that, she went up north for a decade. When she came back, she noted, “those jobs in the mills were gone.”34
As the jobs Blanchard once knew drifted overseas and Mack trucks hauling forty-eight-foot trailers replaced railroad cars, men with jobs that could support a family and pay the mortgage on a roomy house with a porch and backyard pool were becoming a rarity in the Sandhills of North Carolina. With the good jobs gone, there wasn’t as much pressure on employers to keep wage rates up. That turned Hamlet and Richmond County into a buyer’s market for employers. More and more, all that was left for working people in these parts were dead-end service jobs at the places out on the highway and jobs in food-processing plants at low hourly rates and without benefits or lifetime guarantees of employment or union protections for seniority rights and safety. And increasingly the places that had jobs to offer would just as soon hire women as men and pay them less if they could get away with it.
This wasn’t only a local problem. Factories were closing in well-established manufacturing centers and small towns everywhere. As the economy shifted, the nation’s social contract got rewritten in fits and spurts. Under the New Deal order that held sway in the United States from the 1930s until the 1970s, policy makers shared a loose consensus about the lessons of modern American history and the obligations of government. Underconsumption, they believed, had triggered the onslaught and dislocations of the Great Depression. Raising demand across the board, many thought, would set the stage for the nation’s economic rebound and for sustained and robust growth across the country for years to come. Economic health was, above all in this view, about aggregate demand. Borrowing ideas from Henry Ford and John Maynard Keynes, New Deal government, business, and labor leaders thought a tighter labor market would produce a larger number of better paying jobs, and that the more working people made, the more they would spend, and that the more they spent, the more high-wage work there would be, for men, and prosperity for everyone else. Under Democratic presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and then under the Republican regimes of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, the government did what it could through spending, regulations, and legal changes to keep the cycle of higher wages and increased purchasing power going.
With the Wagner Act, workers gained in 1935 the right to organize and collectively bargain. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set mandatory minimum wage and maximum hour standards for laborers to spread out work and boost take-home pay. During World War II, government officials protected unions and preserved the earning capacity of production soldiers. In the postwar era, unions pressed for and won cost-of-living increases, paid family vacations, fully funded pensions, and company-provided health care. When laborers fell on hard times, the government stepped in with worker’s compensation, unemployment benefits, and retirement pay. Bolstered by the New Deal safety net, laborers and their families would, it was hoped, have some money to spend at the grocery store and the meat market even during hard times, keeping themselves and the economy from hitting rock bottom. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, there was, notes the historian Bruce Shulman, “little disagreement . . . over the fundamental principles for organizing American life,” including the broad benefits of decent wages and the need for taxes to pay for the safety net that hung beneath the economy.35
More, then, was central to the entire New Deal social bargain. The more people made and the more they had in the bank and in their homes, the more cars and radios they bought, the better, it was believed, for everyone. At the heart of the New Deal idea of America was the working man, not so much the grizzled miner or the gaunt millhand, but the stout autoworker, the plumber, and the railroad worker. A man in work pants and steel-toed boots with a car out front, a mortgage to pay, a home entertainment system in the living room, and a swimming pool in the backyard. A wife and kids standing behind him. Christmas club and savings account books in a desk drawer. A bowling ball and fishing rod in a closet. A union pin fastened to his jacket. This man symbolized the New Deal world of more.
Yet, by the time the Billy Bathgate crew left Hamlet, the New Deal order was unraveling at breakneck speed. With global competition on the rise and the economic pie no longer growing, people everywhere in the 1970s and 1980s grumbled about taxes and social programs and who deserved government support and who didn’t. Meanwhile, thirty years of steadily
rising wages led some businesses to invest (again) in labor-saving technologies. Smaller, undercapitalized firms, which were proliferating, looked (again) for cheaper workers. As they did, many of the jobs that had sustained white men as breadwinners—like those on the railroad—disappeared, replaced by positions flipping burgers, taking orders at fast food restaurants, processing chickens and pigs, and changing beds in hotels and hospitals. In this new economy, employers, especially ones operating in competitive industries that didn’t require huge capital investments in equipment and physical plants, searched for larger pools of cheaper labor. They didn’t care who swam in them. The more people looking for a job the less they would have to pay and the less say workers would have about their working conditions. The first thing employers looked for as a sign that they were in the right place for less expensive and less boisterous laborers was the lack of a union.
Southern boosters, businessmen, and commentators created a myth about the region. They told people that southerners didn’t like unions, that they wouldn’t bend their stiff red necks to the yoke of organization. They used numbers to back up their portraits.36 In the 1970s, only 14 percent of non-farm workers in North Carolina belonged to a union, as compared to 30 to 40 percent in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. Like all myths and like all statistics, these numbers hide as much as they reveal. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, southern workers pressed their employers for pay hikes and improved conditions. They walked off the job and staged massive region-wide strikes. As late as the 1980s, Houston construction workers were plastering their pickup trucks with union stickers, Birmingham steelworkers were wearing union pins on their overalls, and CSX workers in Hamlet were proudly declaring their allegiance to their unions.
“I believe in unionized labor,” Hamlet’s Burnell McGirt told an interviewer for a local oral history project in 2009. “I belonged to the Brotherhood of Signalmen,” he proudly added. Another Hamlet resident (and southerner), Walter Bell, declared, “You can’t beat the union. Because if you didn’t, the company will take advantage of you.” His neighbor, Jimmy Stricklin, thought that everyone, not just union members, benefited from organized labor. Unions, he said, made sure there were no children in the mills and people had money to spend downtown. When Josh Newton’s dad’s railroad union went out on strike one time in Hamlet, his cousin crossed the picket. That relative never got another invitation to the Newton house again.37