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Z 116 Z chapter 12 herCuLes and ITs InsIde agITaTOr, huCk dunagIn Word was passed quickly among some of the black workers at the Hercules Powder Company. “Huck wants to see us—right when the shift ends.” Huck Dunagin was not given to calling meetings. He didn’t have to. He always seemed to be everywhere as he walked the floor of the plant. Something was up. Huck Dunagin was big and powerful, a former allZstate lineman in high school football. He was the shop steward blacks had elected. And Huck Dunagin was white. “I’m no integrationist,” he told me years later. “If they wanted to keep the races separate in school, that was okay with me. But my men not be able to vote—my men not be able to hold any job they were capable of holding—I couldn’t permit that.” Integration of the work force, doing away with the “white man’s jobs,” had been too hot a topic to be discussed in Mississippi. Huck reserved that for a national union meeting in Portland, Oregon, to which he brought Richard Boyd. There he broke the news to Boyd that he was the black laZ borer he had chosen to break the color barrier. Now Huck planned to do something about his black workers voting, and he would do it right at the plant. “If you want to register, you go right ahead,” he told a group that included T. F. Williams, Willie Thigpen, Willie Simpson, John Mosley, and the Reverend Sam Hall. “I’ll see that you don’t lose your jobs.” And they did go ahead—making the trip to Circuit Clerk Theron Lynd’s registration office as many times as necessary. They might be denied a loan by a bank—or glowered at in the street—but their jobs would be safe. They had Huck’s word. Rowan High School provided us with five crucial teacher witnesses, and Hattiesburg’s black ministers added valuable testimony, but you shouldn’t have to have a master’s degree—or be a minister—in order to vote in our hercules and Its Inside agitator, huck dunagin Z 117 Z society. A local industry, the Hercules Powder Company, gave us six solid members of the working class. In 1912 the company’s founding had been celebrated in an unlikely setZ ting in Washington’s new Willard Hotel. Row after row of tables filled its ballroom with distinguishedZlooking diners in black tie, all male, of course. Rarely was such a festive banquet held to commemorate the resolution of a court case, but this was no ordinary case. It was the farewell dinner for the countless lawyers who had worked for four years on the duPont antiZ trust case and negotiated the creation of the Hercules and Atlas Powder Companies.1 DuPont’s divestiture was, of course, not voluntary, but rather the result of a successful federal criminal antitrust prosecution commenced in 1907. Price fixing, secret takeovers, and maintaining dummy corporations were among the allegations.2 If the period following the Civil War was the glory period of producZ tion expansion, with mergers and consolidations leading to single domiZ nant production units in many fields, 1890 and the passage of the SherZ man Antitrust Act had signaled its approaching demise. During Theodore Roosevelt’s “trustbusting” terms as president (1901–1909), more than fifty antitrust investigations were commenced by the Department of Justice. In its only term, moreover, William Howard Taft’s Justice Department then initiated ninety such investigations.3 The duPont trial began in September 1908, continuing for more than two years. In June 1912, the trial court approved a negotiated plan of dissoZ lution, and the two new powder companies came into existence, endowed with significant duPont assets.4 Like duPont, a diversified multinational chemical company, Hercules did not long remain content merely to manuZ facture explosives. TreeZstump processing plants in Gulfport, Mississippi, and Brunswick, Georgia, were acquired in 1920, and a new plant constructZ ed on a oneZhundredZacre tract in Hattiesburg north of Gulfport. HattiesZ burg’s chamber of commerce had been aggressively seeking new industry, touting the sixteenZthousandZresident community’s four railroads, electric streetcars, and new hotel.5 Hercules had been in operation for little more than four years when a young Bowdoin College graduate, class of 1917, from Lewiston, Maine, accepted a seventyZfiveZdollarZaZmonth position as a chemist in its Joplin plant in Carthage, Missouri. By the end of the year, Leon Babcock, less than a...

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