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Social Unrest in the "Milltown"
By RIC MARSHALL
The national networks called Greensboro "a southern
textile mill town.'' Time magazine called us' 'home of
several of the nation's largest textile mills." But the
Greensboro Daily News denied that characterization,
noting that Greensboro now has more college students
than mill workers. Is Greensboro really a milltown?
Originally it was indeed. The mills drew workers to
the area, and the presence of those workers in turn brought
in the bankers, the retailers and the grocers. It brought in
the schools and the need for government. And eventually
all these things combined to spawn the colleges and
universities of the area, the shopping centers and all
the expressways. It all harks back to those mill workers.
Where do all those jeans come from anyway? What
about the shirts on our backs, or maybe the sheets on our
beds? Sometimes we at the universities forget just who
makes these things. We move through four years of
*'higher education" and learn to view the world through a
"broader perspective." We learn about abstract concepts
like truth, democracy, communism and the KKK.
In the mills it's a different story. The concepts come
to have something more than a passing relationship with
reality. The work is hard, and never lets up till the shift
change. The noise level is so bad that earplugs are required
by law. For some of those in the mills, communism is
much more than a rhetorical concept; it is the promise of
equality and a vision of the common good; it is a
recognition of the needs of the worker.
And so, through the streets they went marching, in
pursuit of the communist vision. Unlike all the marches of
the sixties, this was a march organized not by students
dealing in concepts, but a march that was led by real
workers, in search of a genuine vision. Now was the
violence of the previous weekend motivated solely by
political concepts, but was rooted in real-life conflicts. It
was Americans shooting at Americans, and nobody was
calling it an accident.
On Wednesday, February 3,1960, the first sit-in in the
nation was staged here in downtown Greensboro, signaling
the coming of the civil rights movement. I cannot help but
wonder whether these recent events might not signal a
similar kind of beginning.
It only makes sense that it would begin in a
"milltown."
