From Calm to Catastrophe

On September 6, 1934, roughly 300 protestors began a peaceful protest on the grounds of the Chiquola Mill. It seems that there was never any intent for violence, at least not on the protestors’ side.

The mill’s superintendent and town mayor at the time, Dan Beacham, evidently shut down the mill’s operations for the day and called for armed police and area residents – that he deputized himself – to surround the protestors. Anyone that he could find that was anti-union was expected to join the standoff. So, at this point the protestors were outnumbered and completely surrounded, yet they continued their peaceful protest.

Now, this is the part that my brain had a hard time processing: A World War I machine gun was placed on the mill roof. I have so many questions about this. The main ones being why and how?

Newspaper article following massacre

Apparently, a small fight broke out in the crowd, and bullets started flying. Seven workers lost their lives. About thirty more were wounded. I read that all of the dead had been shot in the back, like they were trying to run away, and that in itself is a terrifying thought.

All that blood spilled, and yet the events of that day remained unspoken about, shunned, and ignored for decades. This amazed me – the idea that something so tragic and terrifying can happen in such a small town and yet it could be ignored. Then I realized something that suddenly put it all into perspective. The workers had two choices: go back to the mill to work or face unemployment and let their families starve. Protestors watched their friends and families get shot or were even shot themselves, yet they could not dwell on it, they had to return to their jobs as if not a thing had happened. It was survival.

So, what began as a peaceful protest as part of a national movement for improvements in wages and working conditions in textile mills was escalated to a point that claimed lives and became an unspoken scar on the “little town with a big heart.” Many of the wounded were treated on scene and died years later with the scars from bullets never removed from their bodies.

The families of those who died struggled to make ends meet. People who wanted to speak out against the mill were reportedly silenced through threats of being evicted from the mill-owned houses they resided in and instead swore allegiance to the mill and vowed silence to save their families. One thing that just added to the sadness of the entire situation was that there were not funerals for the workers who were killed. Remember how the mills owned everything? They used this control and power to make sure that every church and mortuary denied the families funeral services. The thought of losing someone I loved and not being able to give them a proper funeral just breaks my heart. The entirety of the events of that day and the aftermath on the town breaks my heart.