by Bryant Simon
The issue with the South, then, was not that southern workers didn’t like unions. It was that the region was late to industrialize, lacked investment, and didn’t attract as many highly capitalized auto or steel plants and railroad facilities as some other parts of the country. Because of the high fixed costs in these sectors, employers faced limited competition and could set, for a time at least, their own prices, passing wage hikes on to consumers. With these kinds of profit-making advantages, management didn’t fight unions quite as hard. The South, however, eventually became home to textile mills, timber camps, and food processors—all fiercely competitive industries that relied on cutting costs, especially labor costs, to turn a profit. That emphasis on cheap kept southern employers outside the New Deal consensus and kept the overall rate of union membership low in the South. When the foundations of the global economy shifted in the 1970s and Keynesian policies fell out of favor, North Carolina and the states around it, with their competitive industries and growing number of anti-union employers, became the norm—not the exception.38
Even before the shift away from the New Deal, hostility toward labor got baked into the region’s politics, especially in North Carolina. Tar Heel politicians tolerated, and even welcomed, anti-union industrialists. They wanted their business. To get it, they passed anti-union legislation, looked the other way when law officers ripped through picket lines, and wrote the new script for the region, erasing the labor militancy of the past from the historical record and turning union men like Burnell McGirt and his Hamlet union brothers into quirky anomalies or dangerous renegades, not “true” sons of the Southland. Their collective efforts paid off and turned union into a dirty word. “North Carolina is guided by the belief that unions are an unnecessary disruption of the routine affairs of business and government,” wrote North Carolina state house representative Paul Luebke, a Durham Democrat and University of North Carolina at Greensboro sociologist, in his 1990 book, Tar Heel Politics. Valerie Ervin, a battle-tested union organizer for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, visited southern factories and small towns for much of the 1980s. But in North Carolina she discovered the real meaning of anti-unionism—it wasn’t just ideology, it was force. “The toughest state I’ve ever worked in,” Ervin said about the Tar Heel state. “People are afraid for us to come to their homes. They feel that there’s going to be violence.”39
While they treated the railroad and its unions as an exception, Richmond County employers and government officials were no more welcoming to unions than was the rest of North Carolina. Labor organizers like Ervin could expect to be greeted there with about as much warmth, to paraphrase a Time magazine reporter, as white Mississippians had extended to freedom riders coming into their state in the 1960s. The county’s anti-unionism started at the top with the most powerful person around.40
In 1991, the Charlotte Observer called Richmond County’s chief law officer, Raymond Goodman, “the last of the old-style sheriffs.” Slim, balding, bespectacled, and slowed by a pair of heart attacks, Goodman might not have fit the role as well as he had in the past, but he still wore a big hat, rode shotgun in a champagne-colored Lincoln Continental, and chomped throughout the day on an unlit Garcia y Vega cigar. He let his deputies run around the county enforcing the law while he ate lunch at the Wendy’s or the Holiday Inn and sat on a sofa just inside the front door of his furniture business in downtown Rockingham, right across the street from the county courthouse building. If he saw a politician or a reporter he wanted to talk with passing by, he sent one of his clerks out to chase him down and bring him into the store. Lawyers, judges, and shop owners stopped in to gossip with him about the comings and goings in Ellerbe and Hamlet or about who would win the next big race at the Rock—Rockingham Speedway, the massive one-mile oval NASCAR track on the northern edge of the county that was partly owned, some said, by the sheriff himself. Just behind him in the showroom, newlyweds peeked at the price tags hanging off bedroom sets and retired farmers picked out new La-Z-Boy chairs for their living rooms. Railway conductors and field hands asked the sheriff for favors, advice, and loans. It was politics and business the old-fashioned way. Goodman never forgot a name, a face, a family connection, or who owed him money or had done him wrong.41
In his first run for the Richmond County sheriff’s office in 1946, Goodman lost. But he won in 1950 and never lost again. An unwavering Democrat with a pile of dependable votes in his pocket, beginning in the 1960s Goodman hosted a parade of candidates for statewide office who stopped by the furniture store and made small talk as they asked for his endorsement. This made him a player in the state capitol when his party was in office, and even when it wasn’t. When Hamlet officials needed money to upgrade the city’s water treatment facilities, they went to Goodman, and he marched a band of local leaders up to Raleigh to see the person in charge. They left with the money they needed. Even as the sheriff became a statewide power broker, he never took his eye off Richmond County or loosened his grip on the area.
Goodman didn’t carry a gun, but people in Rockingham, Hamlet, Hoffman, Cordova, and the North Yard still feared him. “Raymond Goodman is the Godfather,” reported a labor reformer after visiting the county. “Untouchable” was how another characterized his local standing. “Raymond Goodman, the Sheriff of Richmond County, has had people beaten and is crooked as a dog’s hind leg,” a local resident complained to Governor Jim Hunt, unaware perhaps of the alliance between the rough-and-tumble lawman and the upright Democratic politician. “But the people of Richmond County,” he confided, are “scared to say anything of his actions.”
According to some local observers, Goodman and his men stopped cracking heads in the 1960s and ran the county through a system of “accumulated favors.” When his deputies brought a farmhand to jail on a drunk and disorderly charge, the sheriff might let him go the next morning, but if he did, Goodman expected his vote and his wife’s vote and anyone else’s vote living in that house in the next election and every one after that. He cut through red tape for local business owners and found jobs for the sons of supporters in his store, on county road crews, and on various maintenance details. He always took care of local preachers, donating money to help with an addition to the social hall or to fix a leaky sanctuary roof. On Christmas and Easter, he sent his deputies out on county time with fresh turkeys and tins of cookies to pass out to his customers as a thank-you for their business and their votes.42
When not many others did, Goodman courted the support of African Americans. To him, votes were like money; it didn’t matter where you got them from, since they all counted the same at the final tally. When black railroad workers and farmhands couldn’t take out loans at the bank, Goodman or one of his allies, someone like D.L. McDonald, gave them store credit and leaned on them at election time. The sheriff hired a few black deputies long before most small-town sheriffs dared to do so. Both on the streets and when it came to policing, African Americans generally considered Goodman “fair and impartial,” even if they didn’t completely trust him or the informers he kept on his payroll in their communities. A full decade before Congress signed the Voting Rights Act into law, Goodman made sure African Americans could register to vote in Richmond County. In 1972, he helped to make Maceo McEachern the first black man elected to the Richmond County Board of Education since Reconstruction. After McEachern moved up to the County Board of Commissioners, the two men clashed over a few key issues, and Goodman orchestrated McEachern’s defeat in 1982. When racial tensions crested in Hamlet in 1975 after the local magistrate refused to issue an arrest warrant for Sergeant Bryant in the beating of Rhonda Scott, Goodman stepped in and personally arrested the lawman. Many African Americans repaid him for the loans, jobs, and political support he provided by voting for him in each of his election campaigns and supporting the candidates he supported. Others pointed to what he had done to McEachern and how Bryant’s trial got postponed again and again. They said Goodman threw crumbs their way, not real jobs or real power.
But still, until he retired in 1994, the sheriff was just about the only game in town.43
Goodman didn’t learn politics at home. His father worked at a loom in a textile mill in Cordova, a short drive south from Rockingham. He cut hair on the side. He needed the extra money to put food on the table for Goodman and his fifteen brothers and sisters, who squeezed themselves into a rented mill house. Like most working-class southerners, the Goodmans didn’t worship on Sundays in a fancy church with a college-educated preacher delivering the sermon. When Goodman’s father died, he didn’t leave his son a plot of land or a pile of money. Goodman had to make it on his own and without a lot of connections. He quit school long before the graduation ceremony and went to work in the mill. Most days when he finished his shift, he climbed into a truck and made deliveries for a local dry-cleaner. In 1938, a year after finishing a stint in the Navy and marrying Alice Smith from down the street in the mill village, Goodman took a job with a Rockingham furniture and hardware store. Eventually, he bought that business and renamed it R.W. Goodman. He expanded it over the years, adding a clothing store with fine suits and ties and buying up the buildings around it for showrooms and offices until he controlled almost an entire city block in downtown Rockingham.
By the 1970s, Goodman lived with his wife and children in a sprawling 3,300-square-foot home on one of Rockingham’s fanciest, most elegant tree-lined streets. In addition to the furniture and clothing complex, he owned Richmond Yarns, Inc., a mill that employed 210 workers and was valued in 1975 at $2 million. His growing wealth came from his stores and factory and, it seems, according to some, from kickbacks on real estate deals and other ventures. “You didn’t do business in Richmond County,” explained William Morris, a former Imperial maintenance man, “without giving something to R.W.” Again and again, state and county roads ended up running through property owned by Goodman and his closest associates. In order to finish their projects and thoroughfares, the government paid the sheriff and others top dollar to sell their land. Still, some said that Goodman made his real money overseeing the county’s moonshining operations. At least, that’s where the initial cash for his more legitimate enterprises may have come from. In 1957, law officers accused Goodman of stealing and then selling illegal liquor. He got off from those charges. But, after that, locals joked that the sheriff and his deputies were as much on the lookout for federal AFT agents as they were for thieves and shoplifters. As ABC stores and restaurants serving beer and wine opened up in the county, some thought Goodman was changing with the times, scaling back his liquor business and orchestrating shakedowns and payoffs from the area’s drug traffickers.44
When it came to business, whatever the business was, Goodman wanted to keep things the way they were. He wanted access to low-wage workers for his mills and retail operations and room to make deals without anyone poking around in his affairs. He didn’t need rich people on his side; he needed people who needed loans and favors. It was one thing for the railroads to pay well—and do it over in Hamlet—but he didn’t want that to become the county-wide norm. That’s why, some said, he kept out other textile plants and why he tried to block Indiana-based Clark Equipment, a manufacturer of complex truck and bus transmissions, from purchasing an abandoned mill in Rockingham in the economically pressed mid-1970s. Even though the company was looking to escape from a union up north, some were convinced that the sheriff didn’t want a rival firm coming into his county, setting a higher bar for wages and benefits. “He didn’t want to pay these kinds of wages,” Mike Quick heard some say. This was one time, though, at least in the short run, that Sheriff Goodman didn’t get his way.45
Clark Equipment broke ground on a highly automated and massive plant on Highway 74, west of Rockingham, in September 1974. The company stayed in business there for a dozen years, providing one thousand dependable, well-paying jobs, jobs like the ones that used to exist on the railroads.46
In the early 1970s, as Clark searched for a new location in the area, Martin Quick returned from Vietnam hoping to work alongside his cousins and uncles on the railroad. Nothing opened up there, as Seaboard had just about stopped taking on new hires. Quick bounced from low-wage job to low-wage job. His frustrations mounted. But Quick caught a break when he got a position doing “gear work” with Clark Equipment.
Finally, he said, he “felt good. I could hold my head up.” He opened a bank account at the credit union and made enough so that his wife, Mary Alice, could stay at home with the kids. It didn’t last, however.
In 1986, citing the lower wages paid by its foreign competitors, Clark closed up shop in Richmond County. Some whispered that local workers lacked the skills and discipline needed for the plant’s high-end manufacturing. Others pointed to a close union vote in 1979, when the United Steelworkers of America lost an election to represent Clark workers in Richmond County by less than ten votes out of almost eight hundred cast.47 Still others pointed, again, to Goodman. Without Clark around, there would be less labor market competition, and he could pay his workers less and have greater control over others through credit and patronage.
Trying to make ends meet in the wake of Clark’s departure, Martin Quick worked for a time at Imperial Food Products and then in construction; he was building prisons in 1991. None of these jobs paid enough to support his family, so his wife, Mary Alice, took a job working on the line at Imperial. In those same years of economic uncertainty, their marriage grew shakier.48
So did the Richmond County economy. After Clark’s departure, average weekly manufacturing wages dropped in the area from $307.93 to $282.57 per week. That was closer to the cheap economy Sheriff Goodman wanted.49
Goodman liked unions about as much as he liked high-paying jobs and people who asked too many questions about his business operations and official duties.
Bob Hall of the Durham-based progressive and pro-labor Institute for Southern Studies chuckled when he recalled Goodman. He remembered the hat, the car, the cigar, and the sheriff’s fierce anti-unionism. Years after the Hamlet fire, he recounted a story he had heard about a labor organizer at a local motel.
Early one afternoon, a representative from the textile workers’ union checked into one of the motels on the highway cutting across the outer edges of Rockingham. By the time he set his bag down in his room, Goodman knew he was there. When the union man came back outside a little later with some buttons and brochures, a sheriff’s cruiser was waiting for him, ready to escort him back across the county line.50
Years later, a local politician cracked that Goodman tried to keep everyone in the area “barefoot and backward.”51 At the very least, he wanted to make sure that wages stayed low and outsiders stayed out of his business. That sounded like the kind of place Emmett Roe was looking for as well, especially if it had an ample supply of cheap labor and civic leaders willing to look the other way.
2
SILENCE
Emmett Roe didn’t stick out like Raymond Goodman did. He didn’t drive a fancy car, wear a big hat, or smoke a fat cigar. And he didn’t seem to care what people thought about him. He didn’t care if they slammed him for not playing the part of a small-town southern businessman very well. He didn’t care if people talked about his stocky frame, his throwback crew cut, or the white socks that always seemed to peek out from under his frayed and grease-stained work pants. He didn’t mind if they joked about the rumpled jackets he wore to meetings with bankers and lawyers. He didn’t care if they considered him gruff or belligerent or even vulgar, or if they whispered about his skipping church and Lion’s Club meetings. “You would have been a bit embarrassed about him at lunch at the country club,” chuckled Bill Sawyer, a die-hard Republican, ex-Marine, and representative of the Chamber of Commerce in Cumming, Georgia, where he occasionally encountered Roe, who owned a factory there, “He would have looked like he had just worked on your car.” Yet, while Roe wasn’t polished or a glad-handler or an operator like Goodman was, he still shared with the sheriff the fierce and determined commitm
ent to have regulators, unions, and local, state, and federal leaders stay out of his business.1
Emmett Roe’s business was food, mostly cheap food. By the time he bought the Mello-Buttercup Ice Cream plant on Bridges Street in Hamlet in 1980, the fifty-three-year-old Roe, born in 1928, had been in the food business for more than thirty years. After leaving the Navy, where he had spent his time stateside, he got his start in his hometown of Troy, New York, selling butchered beef out of the back of his car. As he entered the second half of his twenties, he took a job with Empire Frozen Foods, which supplied restaurants, cafeterias, schools, and other commercial outlets with oversized boxes, bags, and blocks of processed foods.2
In the early 1960s, Empire offered Roe a chance to move up the corporate ladder, but it meant leaving Troy. However, at this point it wasn’t a bad move for the married man and father of two sons and a daughter. By then, according to one local resident, Troy was a “town filled with hooligans and miscreants.”3 Once famed as the home of Uncle Sam and as an industrial hub churning out the nation’s first machine-made collared shirts, the upstate New York city’s glory days were long gone, and its downtown was crumbling. So, Roe said yes when Empire offered to promote him to executive vice president and put him in charge of a chicken-processing plant in Moosic, Pennsylvania, a town with five thousand residents, six miles south of Scranton.