June 8, 2026
They Killed the Singing Widow
On September 14, 1929, a mob of Loray Mill employees shot Ella May Wiggins dead in broad daylight in front of more than 50 witnesses. A North Carolina jury acquitted every one of them in under 30 minutes. Her crime was organizing Black and white Southern textile workers into the same union, and writing songs nobody could forget.
On September 14, 1929, Ella May Wiggins climbed into the bed of a pickup truck in Bessemer City, North Carolina. She was 28 years old. She rode with roughly 22 other unarmed members of the National Textile Workers Union toward a rally in Gastonia, about 10 miles away.
Armed men at a roadblock turned them back. Carloads of Loray Mill employees pursued the truck, forced it off the road, and opened fire. A single bullet hit Ella May in the chest. She said, "Oh my God, they've shot me," and died in the truck bed in the arms of a fellow worker. More than 50 witnesses were present. It was the middle of the afternoon.
Who she was
Ella May was born in East Tennessee in 1900. By 1929 she had given birth to nine children and buried four of them. The four she lost went down from whooping cough and the other poverty diseases that followed Southern mill families into their cabins. She told a journalist named Margaret Larkin in 1929 how it happened: "I was working nights, and I asked the super to put me on days, so's I could tend 'em when they had their bad spells. But he wouldn't... So I had to quit, and then there wasn't no money for medicine, and they just died."
She earned nine dollars for a 72-hour night shift at American Mill No. 2. She lived in Stumptown, a Black neighborhood in Bessemer City, because the pay was not enough to afford white housing. When she joined the NTWU in 1929, she did the one thing Southern mill owners could not tolerate. She walked her Black neighbors into the Gaston County local and signed them up alongside the white workers.
The strike
The Loray Mill was the biggest textile mill in the South, over 2,000 workers, owned by Manville-Jenckes of Providence, Rhode Island. The NTWU, affiliated with the Communist Party's Trade Union Unity League, launched the strike on April 1, 1929. The demands were plain: a 20-dollar weekly minimum, equal pay for women and children, an end to the stretch-out, and union recognition.
The NTWU was communist-led. That is a fact. The Charlotte and Gastonia papers used it as a bludgeon, and the state used it as a license. The strike at the mill was effectively broken within weeks. On June 7, 1929, Gastonia police chief Orville F. Aderholt was shot in a confrontation at the strikers' tent colony. He died the next day. The state indicted 16 strike leaders and organizers. After a mistrial, 7 defendants were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 5 to 20 years.
That is what a dead cop was worth in Gaston County. Twenty years.
The acquittal
Ella May was killed in the week after that first mistrial, when the anti-union mob in Gaston County was riding high. At least five Loray Mill employees were indicted for her murder. Manville-Jenckes, the company, posted their bond. A witness quoted in the Durham Morning Herald on September 16, 1929, said the men at the roadblock "looked like (law) officers from the authority they were taking."
At trial in March 1930, with more than 50 witnesses available to the prosecution, the jury deliberated less than 30 minutes and acquitted all of them.
That is what a dead union songwriter was worth in Gaston County. Thirty minutes.
What she left
Ella May wrote at least three strike ballads, including "Mill Mother's Lament," set to the tune of an old murder ballad called "Little Mary Phagan." The opening verse goes:
We leave our homes in the morning, / We kiss our children good bye, / While we slave for the bosses, / Our children scream and cry.
Woody Guthrie called her the pioneer of the protest ballad. Every labor song Guthrie ever wrote, every verse Pete Seeger ever carried into a hall, runs through her.
She was pregnant when they shot her. She left five living children: Myrtle, 11; Clyde, 8; Millie, 6; Albert, 3; and Charlotte, 13 months.
The men who shot her went home. The verse did not.
Sources
- Wiggins, Ella May (NCpedia biography)
- The Justice System Failed Ella May (North Carolina State AFL-CIO)
- Gastonia Strike (NCpedia)
- Loray Mill Strike (Wikipedia, as a pointer to primaries)
- Margaret Larkin, "The Story of Ella May," New Masses, November 1929
- Ella May Wiggins And "Mill Mother's Lament" (NC Arts Council)
- The 1929 Loray Mill Strike Was a Landmark Working-Class Struggle in the US South (Jacobin)
- Loray Mill Strike (Encyclopedia.com)
- Mill Mother's Lament: Keeping Ella May Wiggins' Legacy Alive (LAWCHA)
- Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (UNC Press, 1987)
- John A. Salmond, Gastonia 1929: The Story of the Loray Mill Strike (UNC Press, 1995)