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.{ 118 }. Chapter Five “MY POLITICS WERE INFLUENCED FROM THE TRADE UNION” Raising Political Consciousness, s–s In 1928 the New York–based Reliance Manufacturing Company opened a plant in the capital city of Montgomery, in the middle of the Alabama cotton belt, where there was easy transportation and a healthy supply of cheap Black labor.The factory,which produced men’s shirts and (later) blue jeans and navy uniforms, employed some 254 workers at its peak, most of them Black women.1 During the 1930s several attempts to organize the plant failed; however, in 1945, at the suggestion of (and with the labor connections of) Edgar Daniel (E. D.) Nixon, a leader of the 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott, the plant affiliated as Local 490 of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), a member of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). One of the sewing machine operators who was active in the drive for union representation was Beautie Mae Osborn Johnson.2 After completing the ninth grade and migrating to Montgomery from her grandfather’s farm in Hope Hull in 1930, Beautie Mae Osborn went to work at Reliance Manufacturing Company. By the end of her tenure, she had spent nearly thirty years as a “swing” worker, moving from job to job in the factory according to where she was needed. She fitted the forms of shirts on a special machine, faced and blocked sleeves, sewed center button strips on the fronts of the shirts, and trained and supervised other women in the use of the industrial sewing machines.In her early days at the factory she was paid according to how many pieces she could complete.“But if you didn’t make nothin’, then you didn’t get anything,” she explained. Before minimum wage was enforced in her shop, she could make between $1.25 and $1.50 a day. In 1940 minimum wage at Reliance was only 25¢ per hour. .{ 119 }. “My politics were influenced froM the trade union” By 1959, her last year at the factory, Mrs. Johnson was making $25 to $30 per week.3 In 1934, at age nineteen, Beautie Mae Osborn met and married a cutter , Charlie Johnson.The cutter jobs, skilled and higher-paying positions at Reliance, were reserved for the men. Very few women made it to the cutting room. No Black woman was ever hired for any clerical position at the plant. The administrative staff was all white, and (apparently in an effort to keep it that way) the plant manager, Clarence Giesing, was hired out of Kalamazoo, Michigan. When ACWA was finally successful in launching a local at the plant in 1945, Mrs. Johnson was among the enthusiastic workers who had voted it in.Thereafter, she became a shop steward, traveling to out-of-state meetings for her local. Already a registered voter in the state of Alabama when the plant became unionized, Mrs. Johnson nevertheless credits her union activity with helping to politicize her thinking: “See, I was a member of the AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations], and they believed in [integration], [and] they were trying to get some people ready so that they could integrate and [they were] trying to get them registered . . . and then I did quite a lot of traveling going different places for my union. . . . And they would always talk about that we needed to integrate and [that] we had to quit taking a little talk on integration, because, see, that’s what [the governor,] Big Jim [Folsom,] did was talk.”4 When other Black and white union organizers questioned her about conditions in Alabama, Mrs. Johnson admitted, her answers were at first quite uncritical. During the period of stepped-up migration out of the South, however, Mrs. Johnson had to face what she would do—stay or go: Now really and truly I did a lot of traveling going different places, and many times . . . I’d meet upon girls in the train station, and when they’d find out I came from the South, they started asking me questions about Alabama and about how we were being treated. But I didn’t think nothing about it at that time. . . . And so . . . I said, “Oh well, I know my place, and since I know my place, I don’t have any problem.” And [later I realized] my place is supposed to be anywhere where I put my money, but you know, I didn’t think too much about it...

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