by Bryant Simon
In Hamlet and other dots on the map between the nation’s cities and oceans, the stories were the same. Statistics sketched the plotlines of decline. The numbers told of joblessness and falling hourly wages, population loss and store closings. By 1990, 40 percent of North Carolina’s rural families lived below the poverty line. The percentages were even higher for African American families. Fewer than one in six black men in the old railroad towns and county seats held white-collar jobs.28 By the 1970s, many of the best paid in the black community worked in factories, at rail yards, and on the docks. Yet, just like on the Southside of Chicago, in North Philadelphia, and in soot-covered Bessemer outside of Birmingham, rural areas hemorrhaged these kinds of blue-collar positions, like the one that Georgia Quick’s husband held that had allowed him and those like him to support a family and play the role of a “decent daddy,” as the urban ethnographer Elijah Anderson has called it.29 These were husbands who made enough money, and earned the social respect that went with it, to take care of most of the financial needs of their wives and children with a little left over for a night at the movies and even some to put away as a buffer against hard times.
But decent-paying options for working-class men, especially African American working men, were drying up across North Carolina and the rest of rural America. As the mills, foundries, and machine shops closed their doors and the empty storefronts and vacant windows along Main Streets multiplied, working people like Garry and Georgia Quick saw their options dwindle and their prospects dim. With so many avenues of opportunity closing down for so many, places like Gibson, Bennettsville, and Hamlet became, in the words of the journalist Osha Gray Davidson, “rural ghettos.”30
The mid- to late 1980s marked the height of the Reagan-era boom on Wall Street and across much of the Sun Belt. But Hamlet didn’t share in the economic resurgence. As the CSX railroad cut back, eliminating the best and safest jobs for miles around, unemployment in Richmond County jumped to 9.7 percent, lower than it was during the 1970s, but more than 3 percentage points above the state average and double the rate for the urban centers of Charlotte, Greensboro, and Raleigh. For African Americans, joblessness reached well above double digits. That number would go up again before the end of the 1980s as Clark Equipment closed and the county’s textile mills scaled back.31 With work disappearing, to borrow sociologist William Julius Wilson’s phrase for what had plunged the nation’s inner cities into despair and dislocation in the 1970s and 1980s, wages evaporated and the lack of spending trickled down throughout the small-town community. Hamlet Hospital, along with local banks, churches, shoe stores, and greasy spoons, closed or scaled back. Rates of depression, suicide, child abuse, and domestic violence spiked. Some took to the bottle; others fell into the darkness of crack and meth.32
With drugs came crime followed by more aggressive policing. In the months on either side of the Imperial fire, the local paper, the Richmond County Daily Journal, chronicled a litany of break-ins, robberies, and drug busts. Someone held up a Hamlet Christian bookstore at gunpoint in broad daylight in 1991. Over a three-day span in the fall, police nabbed Cedric Hester and charged him with possession of twenty-two grams of cocaine; they arrested Ronald David Buck and Wilbur Alphonso Dockery on charges of intent to distribute cocaine. A few months earlier, the paper had reported on a rash of “strong-armed burglaries” in Hamlet. Just weeks before the fire, a drug deal, or maybe a same-sex prostitution deal, gone bad, two people disappeared from The Pantry, a convenience store known for illicit activities, not far from the Imperial plant. They were later found dead in the woods. That followed another double murder four months earlier. “It seems like maybe drugs and violence have just reached the saturation point in the big cities,” speculated Hamlet police chief Terry Moore in 1991. “It’s beginning to spread to the countryside.”33
Cordelia Steele, a social worker in the area who was educated at Bennett College in Greensboro, a historically African American liberal arts college for women, had another take on the community’s budding drug and social problems. “If you are poor, if you are minority,” she observed in her decades of work on the ground in Richmond County, “you may not know how to get social services and may distrust mental health services.” Without access to these options, Steele observed, many people pressed by economic and family pressures started “to self-medicate, and before you know it, you are physically addicted.”34
Widespread unemployment and drug use created mounting demands for social services. Faced with cuts from both Washington and Raleigh, local governments around Hamlet could not keep pace with the swelling need for drug treatment, family counseling, and job training. Schools didn’t seem to be responding to the developing crisis either. In 1980, almost half of Richmond County residents over twenty-five years old hadn’t graduated from high school. In an economy that increasingly valued education over muscle and college degrees over union cards, local students scored on average seventy points below the state’s average on the SAT, and even further behind their counterparts living in metropolitan areas.35
The Reverend Harold Miller detected a sense of “social restlessness among young people” when he got to Hamlet in 1988. If you didn’t have an education, he said, “nothing was happening. There was little opportunity.”
Miller also noticed what others noticed, that those who could—those with a diploma and enough money to pay for moving costs and a deposit on an apartment—got out of the area and disappeared into the twisting streets of the suburbs of Charlotte, Columbia, and Atlanta. Without their best and brightest, small towns couldn’t make up for their subpar schools and couldn’t compete for the high-wage industries that might have helped to pull their communities out of the doldrums.36
The brain drain stretched across Hamlet’s racial and class divides. Josh Newton grew up “upper lower class,” as he called it, in a white railroad family. They went out for a fast food dinner once a month and to Jimmy’s Seafood in Rockingham once a year. He hadn’t been much farther than Southern Pines, twenty miles north of town up Route 1, before he went to college. But once he left for Belmont-Abbey College in 1983, he never moved back to Hamlet to live. Neither did many of his more ambitious high school classmates. “Few came back,” Newton recalled, “except one guy who opened a small law firm.”37
African Americans joined their white classmates in the flight out of town. The gains of the civil rights movement certainly didn’t end segregation in Hamlet, but they did provide some with the chance to move up, often by moving out. Allen Mask Sr., an African American school administrator, raised two sons in Hamlet, both of whom would become doctors. Neither came back home after medical school. “Ain’t nothing to come back to,” Mask lamented. “Really, they would come back if there was something to come back to.”38
One thing to come back for was Friday night football games under the lights. By the 1970s, Richmond County had only one high school. Students, parents, alumni—just about everyone, black and white, in the area—filled the stadium to watch the Raiders race up and down the field. More often than not, the games ended with a drink and a victory celebration before the fans went their separate ways back to their homes and neighborhoods that were still divided by class and race. In the years on either side of the fire, the county’s African American community, Hamlet’s especially, produced a startling collection of top-tier football and baseball players. Some credited American Legion coach and railway worker George Whitfield for the development of the local talent; others said it was coincidence or fierce ambition born out of desperation to get out of their fading hometown and county any way they could. In the mid-1980s, the “Fantastic Four”—Louis Breeden, Mike Quick, Franklin Stubbs, and Perry Williams—all starred at Richmond Senior High School. After that, they played for big-time universities and then with the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, and Cincinnati Bengals. None of them, though, settled back in Hamlet or spent the off-season there training or living near their parents and relatives.39
/> Most working people, however, stayed put in Richmond County. Mike Quick’s cousin, Martin Quick, the husband of Mary Alice Quick, who was killed in the fire, wanted to get out of Hamlet in the 1980s, but he couldn’t do it. He didn’t think he had enough education and because of that, he said, he was “afraid” that he “couldn’t make it in a city or up North.”40
Mattie Fairley couldn’t escape either. Born and raised in Hamlet, she lived with her husband and children in a rented duplex a short walk from the Imperial plant. When Maurice lost his construction job in the 1980s, “they talked about going somewhere.” But they never left, and she went to work for the Roes. “I can’t get out of Hamlet,” Mattie told a reporter from the Washington Post after the deaths of many of her friends at Imperial.41
Larry Lee knew people like Mattie Fairley and Martin Quick. For most of the 1980s, Lee worked as the executive director of a seven-county regional planning commission in northern Alabama and traveled from one rural ghetto to another pushing for adult education as a way to drag people out of poverty. He watched the downward spiral of places like Florence, Alabama, a place like Hamlet, where the loss of good, well-paying jobs was followed by poverty, crime, and surging rates of incarceration leading to fractured families and often increased numbers of single moms in search of work, any kind of work. That’s how it went across the rural South. Lots of people and lots of places were hungry for investment and employment opportunities. Enter the new company coming into a small town to play the part of the savior. Rarely, though, did the new enterprise bring salvation. More often, it came to seize a monopoly over a local labor market flooded with job seekers and run its operations just the way it wanted without local officials putting up much of a fuss. That was the tale of the rural ghetto that Lee observed again and again. The changes left people “hungry” and “vulnerable,” especially, he noted, women “with no husband or a husband without a job and a couple of children who would need a job.”42
By 1990, Georgia Quick lived in one of those places, and she was on her way to becoming that kind of woman. Her husband’s job was not as secure as it once was, and neither, it seems, was their marriage. There were arguments about bills and about what to do. Nerves got frayed. Words were exchanged. Tenderness turned to bitterness. Garry stayed away more and more. As paychecks shrank and good jobs continued to disappear, so too did men—North and South, white and black, in cities, in company towns, and in the countryside. In an economically rational response to work for men drying up, women and teens went looking for jobs in larger numbers, creating even greater downward pressure on wages and leaving employers with a newfound surplus of people to exploit and get rid of if they couldn’t keep up with the pace of work or follow all the rules or complained about the conditions.
The pressures of the rural ghetto, just like those of the urban one, weighed the heaviest on African Americans. Often, they were the last hired and the first fired. Calling the years after 1973 “black folks’ worst nightmare,” the well-regarded St. Petersburg Times pointed to a massive jump in African American poverty and unemployment rates across the country during the Carter and Reagan years.43 According to the paper’s extensive research, the key factor was the restructuring of the economy and the resulting disappearance of steady jobs for undereducated men as unionized factory operatives, machinists, longshoremen, and painters and handymen for schools and hospitals. At the same time, federal budget cuts reduced the number of state and municipal posts and chopped construction, plumbing, and carpentry payrolls. The loss of all of these jobs hit male laborers hard, especially in the African American community. Systematically denied a decent education by segregation, the funneling of black students into vocational courses, and outright racism, a smaller percentage of black men than white men spent enough time in the classroom to move into professional and high-tech jobs. That meant that African Americans for decades depended disproportionately on blue-collar work for their wages and avenues out of poverty. According to one study, well into the 1970s, more than 70 percent of all black men in cities and surrounding areas held blue-collar jobs. In a stunning turnaround, by 1987 the industrial employment of black men had plummeted to 28 percent. The sharp reduction in public services, stemming from Reagan-era cuts, meant that once the jobs left, little was done to bring them back or to train unemployed laborers for new opportunities.44 With the New Deal on the wane and the tone of the nation’s politics changing, there was no Marshall Plan for the nation’s urban or rural ghettos nor was there an updated version of the WPA. Only more spending cuts, attacks on welfare, and a racially targeted war on drugs followed the mass layoffs.
Detroit, of course, was the nation’s onetime arsenal of democracy and a postwar industrial juggernaut. But the forces of deindustrialization slammed the city and especially its black communities. By 1980, half of Detroit’s adult male population, by then the majority of whom were African American, worked sporadically or not at all. This turned out to be more than just a Detroit problem. Black men in Watts, in Greensboro, and in Richmond County, North Carolina, struggled under the weight of massive joblessness. So, too, did working-class white men, but they didn’t have to deal, like black men did at the same time, with the meanness of the American past, lingering discrimination, new(ish) policing and prison regimes, and the everyday injuries of racism.45
In their book American Apartheid, sociologists Douglas Massey and Mary Denton try to make sense of the changes taking place in the African American community from the 1970s forward in the United States. “Ghetto blacks,” they note, “face very different neighborhood conditions created by residential segregation.” “A large share,” they continue, “live in geographically isolated and racially homogenous neighborhoods where poverty is endemic, joblessness is rife, schools are poor, and even high school graduates are unlikely to speak Standard English with any facility.” When employment opportunities dried up in the Carter years, black men in these walled-off areas, they further explain, generally lacked connections to employers in new and emerging industries. They remained stuck, then, in places from which work kept disappearing. As a result, Massey and Denton contend, “young men coming of age in ghetto areas are relatively unlikely to find jobs capable of supporting a wife and children.”46
Sitting in a church social hall around the corner from the Imperial site twenty-four years after the fire, Annette Zimmerman thought about the job market in the area in the 1980s. Black men in largely segregated South Hamlet, she recalled, didn’t have many options. “There just wasn’t nothing,” she said, shaking her head. Without job opportunities, men started to vanish to, as Zimmerman remarked, “who knows where.” That left behind a lot of single moms, Zimmerman included. Some opted for public assistance. But most southern states paid so little into welfare that AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) and food stamps together barely added up to half of what was needed to cross the poverty line. Perhaps this explains why North Carolina and South Carolina had two of the lowest percentages of families receiving welfare in the country. These statistics weren’t about a lack of need; they were about the logic of cheap. State governments in the Carolinas kept taxes low for businesses and services lower for those in need. In the 1980s, with New Deal thinking in retreat, lawmakers drained federal and state budget lines aimed at the poor. These cuts in welfare spending, in turn, added additional workers to the labor pool, making the women and men in it, yet again, even more vulnerable targets for companies like Imperial.47
“My husband wasn’t doing what he should have been doing,” explained a southern woman about to take a job in a poultry plant in the 1980s, “so I went over there to make up the money not in my household.” This mirrored what was going on in the lives of Georgia Quick, Annette Zimmerman, Loretta Goodwin, and so many of the other women on the line at Imperial. Most didn’t want to be there; they had to be there.48 With men making less, more women entered the paid labor force and stayed in it longer, adding, yet again, to the glut of workers in the labor markets, which
in turn pushed down wages and muted, one more time, the voice of labor. But what other choices were out there?
“Women who’d grown up with the expectation that they’d have partners to help them raise their children” found themselves in the 1980s and beyond “with none,” remarked the award-winning memoirist Jesmyn Ward, who grew up in Mississippi’s rural ghettos. Her father bounced from job to job, household to household. He never left for good, but he wasn’t a constant presence at her house either. He had “relationships with other women and married them and left them also.” “Perhaps,” Ward speculated, her father and his friends were looking for “a sense of power that being a Black man in the South denied them.” And perhaps they were looking for an economy that had left them, too.49