You Factory Folks Who Sing This Song Will Surely Understand: Culture, Ideology, and Action in the Gastonia Novels of Myra Page, Grace Lumpkin, and Olive Dargin

First published in 2007. In early 1929, two organizers for the American Communist Party’s recently established National Textile Worker’s Union (NTWU) journeyed south by motorcycle to investigate the potential for beginning organizing work among textile workers in the Piedmont region. One of these organizers, Fred Beal, decided to try his luck in Gastonia, North Carolina, which had been described to him as key to organizing the South In a chain of events whose rapidity and magnitude took Bea...