Scripto produced by Scripto The company now known as Scripto can trace its history back to the establishment of the National Pencil Company in
Atlanta in 1908. In 1913, a young girl named
Mary Phagan was found dead in the company's factory, and in the ensuing firestorm that followed,
Leo Frank, the factory's superintendent, was
lynched. The company's reputation suffered immensely from this series of events, and by the late 1910s, it had declared
bankruptcy. However, local businessman Monie Ferst, who was the son-in-law of National Pencil's owner Sigmund Montag, believed that the company's factory on Forsyth Street in
downtown Atlanta was still valuable and purchased the company from Montag in 1919, renaming it Atlantic Pen. Ferst was already the owner of M. A. Ferst Ltd., the only manufacturer of
pencil lead in the United States at that time, and Atlantic Pen became a manufacturer of
mechanical pencils. The company changed its name to Scripto in the 1920s. In 1931, the company built a new production facility east of downtown. The new plant was located at 425 Houston Street (now known as
John Wesley Dobbs Avenue) in
Sweet Auburn, an
African-American neighborhood of Atlanta. From the 1930s through the 1960s, Scripto significantly expanded its operations, becoming a manufacturer of not only mechanical pencils, but also of
pens and
lighters. Additionally, from 1951 to 1954, the company operated an ordnance plant that produced
artillery shells for the
United States Armed Forces during the
Korean War. By the 1960s, Scripto was one of the largest pen manufacturers in the country and one of the largest employers in the city. The company was selling its products internationally and was the world's largest producer of
writing implements.
Unionization efforts in the 1940s and 1950s Following the company's relocation to Sweet Auburn, Scripto began to recruit employees from the
local African American community for low-wage positions. Many
black women viewed a job at Scripto as preferable to being a
domestic worker for
white Americans, and the company began to employ hundreds of black women at the factory. By 1940, roughly 80 percent of the plant's workforce was made up of African Americans. However, despite the perception of Scripto as a better employer than other options in the city,
workplace discrimination against African American workers there was still persistent, and the company's management was still made up entirely of white people. In light of these issues, starting in the 1940s, there were several unionization efforts among the plant employees. In 1940, the
United Steelworkers (USW) became the first
labor union to attempt to organize the Scripto workers. Their efforts ultimately failed, with union organizers accusing the few white employees who worked in the factory of undermining support for the union.
(pictured 1979) was an early supporter of the USW's union drive at Scripto. In 1946, the USW again tried to organize a union at the Scripto plant, and following a union vote, they began to officially represent the workers in February of that year. The USW's success was due in large part to support from local
black church leaders in the area, such as
Martin Luther King Sr. King's church,
Ebenezer Baptist Church, was located only a few blocks from the Scripto plant, and many of the Scripto employees were congregants of the church. USW official W. H. Crawford later wrote to King to express his gratitude, saying that King's support of the unionization effort resulted in its success. However, Scripto disputed the results of the union election and refused to
collectively bargain with the union. As a result, the USW called for a strike on October 7, and over 500 of the company's 600 African American workers took part in
picketing. The union's demands included a union contract, increased wages, paid vacations, and
eight-hour shifts. The strike lasted for about six months, during which time the strikers were subjected to harassment from members of the
Atlanta Police Department, which at the time included known members of the
Ku Klux Klan. However, on March 22, 1947, with little to no progress made on achieving their goals, the USW called off the strike. Of the 400 workers who had remained on strike until the end, only 19 were rehired by Scripto, prompting the USW to file charges against the company with the
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), though the board later found the company free of any legal wrongdoing. In 1947, following the end of the USW strike, local businessman and former politician
James V. Carmichael became the president of Scripto. As a politician, Carmichael had served in the
Georgia General Assembly in the 1930s and was a candidate in the
1946 Georgia gubernatorial election against
Eugene Talmadge. Despite winning a
plurality of votes, Carmichael lost the election to Talmadge due to Georgia's
county unit system that was used in elections. As a businessman, Carmichael is known for his role in
aircraft manufacturing, as he was an assistant general manager of the
Bell Bomber Plant in
Marietta, Georgia, during
World War II and later convinced the
Lockheed Corporation to locate a plant in the city. He viewed himself as a benevolent employer and took a
paternalistic approach to management. In 1952, before a speech at his
alma mater of
Emory University, he stated that workers had been exploited by business owners in the past and that unionization was one way that workers attempted to fight back against those abuses but also criticized workers for "blindly" following union leaders and advocated instead for an "enlightened management" that would eliminate the need for unions altogether. On issues regarding race, Carmichael was viewed as either a moderate, and in the 1946 election, he openly criticized Talmadge, a
white supremacist, calling his previous administration a "ranting dictatorship" and saying, "No one is going to invest money in industry when you have in the governor’s office a man who is continually stirring up race and class hatred and creating unrest in labor’s ranks". Additionally, Carmichael took pride in Scripto's hiring policies, as it was one of the first companies in the city to employ African Americans in production roles. During the 1950s, when Sweet Auburn was experiencing an economic downturn, Scripto was one of the few companies to continue to grow. During this same time, Carmichael turned down several offers to relocate the plant outside of the city, and company executives made it a point to continue to hire black women. However, during a unionization effort at the company's ordnance plant in 1953, Carmichael fired several of the workers who were involved before the plant shut down the following year.
ICWU unionization In late 1962, the
International Chemical Workers Union (ICWU), an
AFL–CIO-affiliated union that had had recent success in organizing smaller production facilities in the
Atlanta metropolitan area, began a union drive at Scripto. The ICWU believed that the organization effort would be difficult, as the plant's overwhelmingly majority workforce of black women constituted a demographic that the union felt was not typically responsive to organized labor efforts. In an attempt to win support, the ICWU ensured that the drive focused not only on traditional labor activism topics but also on
civil rights. The union called on James Hampton, an African American labor activist and
Baptist preacher, to go to Atlanta and help with their organizing efforts. In discussions with the workers, Hampton compared his own work in labor organizing to the work of civil rights leader
Martin Luther King Jr., drawing a connection between the ICWU's organizing efforts and the activities of the nationwide
civil rights movement. 1963 had been a momentous year for the civil rights movement, as many landmark events had taken place around the time that the ICWU was organizing the Scripto workers, including the
Birmingham campaign in nearby
Alabama, the
Stand in the Schoolhouse Door following the
desegregation of the
University of Alabama, and the assassination of
NAACP field secretary
Medgar Evers in
Mississippi. Hampton also worked with black church leaders in Atlanta, such as King Sr., to get their support for the strike. Hampton was overall successful in getting African American clergy to support the ICWU's efforts, though one notable exception was
William Holmes Borders, the pastor of
Wheat Street Baptist Church, who declined to support the union drive because of his personal friendship with Carmichael. , with the
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom taking place just a month before the vote. By August 1963, the ICWU had
obtained enough authorization cards that they could petition for an NLRB election. The company agreed to an election in late September. In the meantime, hoping to prevent a successful union vote, the company instituted several changes, including the formation of an employee committee and the removal of racial segregation signs from the plant's bathrooms and water fountains. In the ensuing six weeks, the union focused on building
solidarity among the employees and assuaging fears over company reprisals against those involved in the union efforts, while the company focused on appealing to the goodwill that they felt they had fostered with longtime employees. On September 11, about two weeks before the vote was scheduled to take place, Carmichael gathered about 1,000 employees and gave a speech wherein he highlighted his progressive stance on race and urged the employees to vote against unionization, saying in part that "a vote for the union [would be] a slap in the face of one of the truest friends the
Negro ever had in Georgia or in the entire
South". However, to many workers, support for the union drive was tied to the civil rights movement, and in the weeks leading up to the vote, other notable events, such as King Jr.'s "
I Have a Dream" at the
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in
Washington, D.C., and the
16th Street Baptist Church bombing in
Birmingham, Alabama, contributed to an atmosphere of heightened racial partisanship among the workers. On September 27, the election was held, and of the 1,005 employees who were eligible to vote, 953, or approximately 95 percent, did. Of these 1,005, 855 were African American. In a 519–428 result, the union won and became the official representative of the workers. Scripto employees were grouped under the
local union of ICWU Local 754, which was made up almost entirely of black women. A week after the election had taken place, Thomas C. Shelton of the Atlanta-based
law firm Kilpatrick, Cody, Rogers, McClatchey & Regenstein, Scripto's
legal counsel, filed objections with the NLRB, arguing that the union's use of racial rhetoric and drawing connections to the larger civil rights movement had caused the "sober, informed exercise of the employees' vote" to be impossible, rendering the election null. While the Regional Director of the NLRB rejected the objection, Shelton continued to argue that the results of the election was unfair, citing previous NLRB rulings regarding the use of race-related issues in influencing union votes. For instance, in 1962, the NLRB ruled in an election involving the Sewell Manufacturing Company that "appeals to racial prejudice in matters unrelated to the election issues ... have no place in Board electoral campaigns". Additionally, in a 1957 case involving the
Westinghouse Electric Corporation, the NLRB stated that "the consequences of injecting the racial issue where racial prejudices are likely to exist is to pit race against race and thereby distort a clear expression of choice on the issue of unionism". Shelton also argued that the characterization of Carmichael and Scripto by the union was unfair and inaccurate and collected testimony from several prominent individuals that highlighted Carmichael's and the company's stance on race.
Benjamin Mays, president of
Morehouse College and a longtime friend of Carmichael, spoke positively of his positions on racial issues, while former
mayor of Atlanta William B. Hartsfield said that Scripto was well known for their progressive stance on hiring African Americans. Finally, on June 9, 1964, after about ten months of petitioning, the NLRB denied Shelton's requests and awarded the ICWU a certificate of representation for Scripto.
Contract negotiations Despite the NLRB's awarding of a certificate of representation, the ICWU expressed dismay over the negotiations they were having with the company over the terms of a new
labor contract. Jerry Levine, a labor activist from
New York City who had joined the ICWU in October 1963, served as the representative for the ICWU in their negotiations with Scripto. Levine said that the contract negotiations lasted for about six months, during which time he said the company was "going through the motions" of bargaining in
good faith, often spending weeks at a time discussing the contents of a couple of paragraphs. Additionally, important issues such as wages and other economic policies were not being addressed. As the negotiations continued, Levine began to believe that
strike action was the only way to convince the company to agree to a contract, and while negotiations were ongoing, the union sought to strengthen its ties and increase support in the local community. Also during this time, Carmichael had been removed from his position of president by Ferst and placed in the ceremonial role of
chairman. The move came due to Carmichael's poor health and a steady decline in Scripto's sales. For two years leading up to 1964, Scripto had had declining profits, which were attributed to labor costs and increased competition. In his new role, Carmichael was not involved in the contract negotiations and functioned mostly as a
spokesperson for the brand.
Carl Singer, a businessman who had previously worked in
Chicago for the
Sealy Mattress Company, was brought in to replace Carmichael as Scripto's president and
chief executive officer. At the time, Singer was aware that there were contract negotiations, but was not made aware of the issues the company was having with the union. This corporate shakeup was kept private from the general public. By November 1964, the company's proposal to the union would have seen a four-percent wage increase for workers categorized as "skilled" and two-percent wage increases for "unskilled" workers. At the time, unskilled workers at the factory were earning between $1.25 and $1.30 per hour, and the two-percent wage increase would have amounted to about $0.03 more per hour. The union rebuffed with a proposal of an eight-percent wage increase across the board. The union also alleged that the company's proposed wage increase was not an actual pay increase, as the company was planning to offer the raises at the expense of its
Christmas bonuses, which often amounted to about a week's pay. Additionally, the union called the company's proposal discriminatory, as only six African American workers at Scripto were considered skilled. The remainder of the company's skilled employees were white, while the rest of the African American employees were classified as unskilled. At the time, Scripto had about 700 African American employees, most of whom were women, and about 200 white workers. On average, these unskilled workers at Scripto earned $400 below the national
poverty threshold.
Move toward strike action On November 25, 1964, the day before
Thanksgiving, workers constituting almost the entirety of the
first shift met at the ICWU union hall on
Edgewood Avenue, near the factory, and demanded that a strike be commenced. The action caught Levine off guard, and he was unsure what had prompted the sudden movement, though he speculated that it stemmed from disappointment from the workers'
bargaining unit that had spread to the rank-and-file employees. While Levine felt that the timing was not right for the strike, he nonetheless acquiesced to the workers' demands, and they began to prepare for a strike. The employees worked over the holiday in order to have
picket signs made for when the plant reopened on November 27, the day after Thanksgiving. Company executives who were on holiday vacations were alerted to the strike preparations, and many returned to Atlanta early. == Course of the strike ==