A jazz opera about the 1940s labor union struggles at RJR Tobacco Company comes home to Winston-Salem

This year marks the 150th anniversary of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, now Reynolds American. Founded in Winston-Salem, it soon became known for leading cigarette brands like Camel. Less well known, however, is the role RJR employees played in the labor union struggles of the 1940s. 

Leading the strikes, in the segregated, Jim Crow South, were Black workers, many of them women. A new jazz opera, Love Songs from the Liberation Wars,  tells this fascinating story. A special showcase performance takes place this Saturday at the North Carolina Museum of Art — Winston-Salem. 

Composer and lyricist Steve Jones lives in D.C., grew up in a labor household, and he’s been well acquainted with the historic strikes at R.J. Reynolds for decades. He says they played a pivotal role in a workers' rights movement in the 1940s.

"And what had happened by 1941, every major factory across the North had been organized," says Jones. "And then they decided, we can't really have a country half organized and half unorganized in the South. That won’t work. So they came south, and that was a big part of what led to the strike at R.J. Reynolds."

Detroit native Elise Bryant is directing Love Songs and has worked in what’s called labor theater for more than 40 years. She’s also a lifetime member of the Industrial Workers of the World. She says the 1943 tobacco workers' strike in Winston-Salem was unique.  

"Principally and largely, it brought Black and white together, not just working side by side, but actually coming together to bring a protest to say, 'Oh no, no, this isn't right,'" she says. "'You know, we're not being paid fairly. We need better pay.' And it's led by women, by women of African American descent, which is highly undocumented in the history of labor unions, in the history of the United States in general. So here we lift up these voices and these stories."

The opera being performed this weekend is based on a book by Duke University history professor Robert Korstad. It’s called Civil Rights Unionism. Korstad says the working conditions in the factories for most Black workers at RJR during this time were difficult: bitter cold in the winter with no heat, and scorching hot in the summer with no A/C. Several thousand Black women separated tobacco leaves from stems by hand from sunup to sundown, while their white foremen pushed them to work harder. Korstad says the Black male workers didn’t fare much better packing tobacco in large round rooms.

"And they would have men who would stand on top of the tobacco, and they would throw tobacco in there, and they would literally run around on the tobacco to try to compress it as much as they can," he says. "They could only stay in there for, you know, 15 or 20 minutes. And they'd kind of go in and out of shifts, and they'd be soaking wet, maybe have a pair of pants on or something, but nothing else."

The factories saw eight to ten thousand people a day — men and women, Black and white, old and young — over the course of two or three shifts. And lines were clearly drawn. Better, higher-paying jobs like putting cigarettes in packs and cartons were almost exclusively for white workers. 

The wartime workloads intensified. Conditions at the factory worsened. And in 1943, after being denied permission to leave due to illness, a factory employee died while working. Several hundred female stemmers began an immediate strike. It spread rapidly throughout most of the facilities. 

As the majority in the factory, this group of female workers had power, and they exercised it. Zakiyyah Niang plays the dual roles of union leaders Theodosia Gaither and Moranda Smith.

"It is a story that's powerful," says Niang. "And it resonates with me. Of course, being a Black woman. It is not that you hear every day of women being able to take this type of leadership, especially in the South, right, with Jim Crow laws. And so to know that these women were unafraid, they probably had deep internal fears, but they were able to push that aside and step forward to be able to make change that has been lasting."

In 1944, after winning the right to be represented by the labor union Local 22, the workers were able to negotiate time off, job security for senior workers, increased wages, and grievance procedures.  

A showcase performance of Love Songs from the Liberation Wars, a jazz opera by Steve Jones, will be performed on Saturday, June 28, at the North Carolina Museum of Art—Winston Salem.