Moranda Smith

-Moranda Smith was a black labor organizer and unionist who served as the first regional director of Winston-Salem, North Carolina's local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America (FTA) in the 1930 and 1940s.
-Born of a sharecropping family in South Carolina, Smith led thousands of Winston-Salem workers to win $1,250,000 in back pay in the leaf houses and stemmeries. In 1943, after a Black worker fell dead at a Reynolds Tobacco Company plant, Smith, along with thousands of other Black women, participated in a spontaneous sit-down leading to a massive walkout forcing Reynolds to temporarily shut down.
Her leadership at the local 22 saw a 50% rise of minimum wages. The union also increased voter registration in the area, leading to the election of the first Black alderman in the South. Throughout her career as a unionist, Smith worked extensively, "openly defying" the Ku Klux Klan.
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Moranda Smith was a union organizer and leader of tobacco workers in North Carolina, who throughout the 1940s initiated a challenge to the racial discrimination, disfranchisement, and economic exploitation of workers in the South
By Dawn Ziegenbalg Feb 5, 2017

(Editor’s note: This story originally ran in the Winston-Salem Journal on April 30, 2000. “Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South,” by Robert Korstad, was published in May 2003.)

Ku Klux Klan leaders in Apopka, Fla., didn’t want Moranda S. Smith to visit their town in the late 1940s.

Smith was a black woman who had become a regional leader in the labor movement after helping her fellow tobacco-workers unionize at R.J. Reynolds in Winston-Salem.

When Klan members heard of her visit to Florida, they tried to force a black worker into divulging her whereabouts. They beat him and threatened him, but he stayed silent.

Smith heard of the attack and was furious. Her friends said she walked down the middle of the town’s main street to show that union members wouldn’t be intimidated.

It was that same spirit that led Smith to help organize tobacco workers at Reynolds.

The union movement began here in 1943, when an elderly worker died after a plant foreman refused to let the worker go home, according to a union newsletter. Thousands of women staged a spontaneous sit-down, which grew into a walkout of 10,000 workers.

Reynolds’ plants shut down for several days until the company agreed to meet with a workers’ committee that was negotiating for better wages and working conditions. In 1944, thousands of workers — led by Smith and others — formed Local 22 of the Tobacco Workers International Union.

The union won a three-year contract. In May 1947, after nearly nine weeks of haggling with Reynolds over a new contract, the workers struck. The walkout lasted for 38 days.

But the walkout influenced more than a contract. Smith and others helped organize voter-registration drives. Soon, black voters had put the first black official on the board of aldermen, and later, on the school board.

Smith was successful because she was persuasive, said her sister-in-law, Lucille Gwynn. “She had a gift of gab, and she did not mind facing tough issues,” she said.

Smith was also literate and skilled, said Robert Korstad, an assistant professor at Duke University who is working on a book about Local 22. “She became one of the teachers who worked to educate some of the other workers,” he said.

Korstad’s father, Karl Korstad, had been the southeast regional director of the international union, and Smith had served as his assistant.

When he stepped down, Smith became the first woman to serve as regional director.

On April 13, 1950, Smith died of a stroke at 34.

Her funeral drew 3,500 people, both black and white. Singer Paul Robeson, who was a leader in the Progressive Party, flew in from New York to offer a eulogy.

“It’s hard to believe that this person who has given so much to the Negro worker is gone, “ he said. “Yet there are thousands of us to carry on her labor. Her name will remain deep in the hearts, not of the Negro people, but all people.

Source: https://www.journalnow.com/.../article_6f564830-e5e8-5e7c...

Source: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/smith-moranda-1915-1950