African Americans in the Mill Village

African Americans in the Mill Village. . African Americans experienced the textile mill world very differently than white families. Mills did not offer the same work opportunities to black men and women as they did for whites. Life in the mill village was also restricted, and black workers typically had to seek housing and recreation elsewhere. . . Owners offered African American men only the dirtiest and heaviest work. Most commonly, they unloaded cotton bales from wagons in the mill yard. Some also worked in the boiler, picker, or opening rooms. Many were employed in the construction of the mills and mill houses. Although there were not many opportunities, black men often made the most of the few they had. Some men were able to move slowly up the job chain to better positions. Still, black men almost never received the highest-paying jobs. . . The mills afforded black women even fewer opportunities than black men; African American women almost never found employment in the mills. Rarely, mills employed African American women to clean bathrooms or floors. More often, they worked in the village, taking care of families’ homes and children. These arrangements could cause bitterness, as Billie Douglas describes, “when my children were born, I would try to do for my child because it seemed like I would be away from mine all day taking care of somebody else’s.” . . I started off working with a woman scrubbing in the mill, scrubbing floors and different things. I was pretty swift, so the yard foreman wanted me out there unloading cotton. I stayed on the yard for ten years and finally a job of running a machine came open in the opening room. After a number of years I got a chance to move up to the picker room. . Baxter Holman, black textile mill worker in Hanes Mill, near Winston-Salem, North Carolina . . Mill policies regularly forbade African Americans from living in the mill villages; instead, many lived just outside the boundaries. When mills did provide housing for African American families, it was separated from the rest of the mill village – sometimes located behind the mill, as with Hanes Mill’s “colored row.” In comparison to the houses white mill workers occupied, those provided for blacks were usually smaller and of poorer quality. . . Frustrated by the lack of available jobs for African Americans in the textile mills, several black businessmen opened an experimental black-owned and operated mill in Concord, North Carolina in 1897. After securing initial funding from Washington Duke, the Coleman Manufacturing Company found it difficult to acquire additional financial support from white investors who doubted a business run by blacks could thrive. Even after being forced to hire a white manager in 1903, the venture still proved unsuccessful and ended completely in 1906. Decades later, African Americans would break the textile industry’s racial barriers, and dominate its workforce. . This historical marker is Near Burlington in Alamance County North Carolina