This year’s America 250 commemorations have often presented the United States as a finished achievement, a steady march toward freedom, equity, and democracy. But that story can’t be told honestly without reckoning with the South.
That’s why the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation is partnering with Nonprofit Quarterly on South at 250, a series on how Southern communities have organized for racial justice, economic power, and multiracial democracy for generations.
The series opens with an article by MRBF CEO Flozell Daniels, Jr. on Local 22, the union of predominantly Black women workers who struck R.J. Reynolds Tobacco in 1943. They were led by women whose names deserve to be known:
Theodosia Simpson, a quiet but steady leader among the women in the stemmery.
Velma Hopkins, who helped organize the walkout after a coworker’s death and believed in developing every shop steward into a leader.
Moranda Smith, who became one of the first Black women elected to national union leadership in the United States.
Viola Brown, the chief shop steward whom fellow members called brilliant and indispensable.
Their organizing won better working conditions. It also registered voters and built Black political power in Winston-Salem. And it’s part of MRBF’s origin story, and the nation’s.
The South is where supposedly impossible democratic ideas were imagined and made real.
We hope you’ll give it a read…
Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation
Building power to advance racial equity across the American South
