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90 years ago, Black women led a multiracial strike at a St. Louis factory [1]
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Date: 2023-05-24
In 1933, the Funsten Nut factory in St. Louis found itself at the center of a significant labor strike. Though separated by racially segregated floors and facilities, the factory’s workforce of women laborers began to take to the streets by the hundreds.
The strike came at a time when St. Louis was a center of radical organizing, said Devin Thomas O’Shea, who wrote about the strike in April in a lengthy story in Jacobin .
During the Great Depression, St Louis’s unemployment shot through the roof. Overall joblessness jumped from 9 to 30 percent. Black workers took the first and most severe cuts, with 70 percent of the black workforce becoming either unemployed or severely underemployed. But 1930s St Louis was also rich with radicalism. Both the Communist and the Anarchist were nationally circulating newspapers published in St Louis. So was Frank O’Hare’s National Rip-Saw (later Social Revolution), which served as an intellectual clearinghouse for Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party. Globetrotter Publishing House turned out radical pamphlets with titles like “Women Under Capitalism,” “Socialism for the Farmer,” and “Socialism and Faith in Practice.”
“In the heart of the Great Depression, this strike is all about Black female workers,” he said. He noted that the time period featured “spontaneous ‘poor peoples’ campaigns erupting in cities around the country, including St. Louis, where the dispossessed of the city basically march on City Hall and stand outside for days on end.”
The strike ultimately put about 2,000 Black women workers on the streets. As the strike stretched on, the workers on the picket line were joined by their white counterparts.
“On the second day, lots and lots of the white workers walk off the job as well,” O’Shea said. “So there's a huge amount of solidarity.”
The strike ended on May 24, 1933, with the factory owners agreeing to increase their workers’ wages. Though the strike is little-known today, O’Shea argued that the Funsten Nut strike helped shape the following decades of labor and civil rights activism.
“This is something that had not happened in the American labor movement before,” he told St. Louis on the Air. “It's a really keystone example of, as David Roediger, a labor historian says: ‘Up until this point, labor is white and male,’ and this is a huge change.”
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