Covington Hall reports on the 1912-13 interracial strike of lumber workers in Jim Crow Louisiana led by the I.W.W. Photo is of the November 12, 1912 meeting calling the strike. Legendary Southern revolutionary, the Wobbly organizer and poet Covington Hall, a southern white activist whose organizing of Louisiana’s timber workers forced him to confront race, in contradictory ways to be sure, in ways few other white radicals of the time did, were willing, or dreamed of doing. He is deserving of much greater understanding and recognition, also a he was a very fine, witty writer.

‘With the Southern Timber Workers’ by Covington Hall from The International Socialist Review. Vol. 13 No. 11. May, 1913.

ON NOVEMBER 11, 1912, thirteen hundred members of the National Industrial Union of Forest and Lumber Workers, I.W.W., voted to go on strike unless the American Lumber Co. of Merryville, La., a subsidiary concern of the Santa Fe Railroad, withdrew its order discharging and blacklisting fifteen men who had appeared, as witnesses and otherwise, in the Grabow Trial. This order the Santa Fe refused to rescind and every last worker on the plant and in the woods walked out. The Santa Fe and the Southern Lumber Operators’ Association then issued an order blacklisting the entire 1,300, which, however, they have not been able to make stick, as labor, on account of low wages, long hours, brutality of gunmen, smallpox, meningitis and other terrible conditions is scarce and hard to get.

Through November, December, January and up to February 16th, the strike was peacefully maintained, the UNION persuading the strikebreakers to leave as fast as the company brought them in. This did not suit the Santa Fe and, on that date, a mob of about 300, composed of businessmen, gunmen, scabs and other employees of the Santa Fe and American Lumber Co., all drunk on prohibition whiskey and styling themselves the “Good Citizens League of Merryville,” was let loose on the defenseless Unionists and a reign of terror that has not yet ended was inaugurated.

This mob first seized Fellow-workers Charles Cline, local secretary, and Charles Deeney, who was in charge of the soup kitchen, gave them a terrible beating and drove them out of town with orders not to return under penalty of death. Next it tore down the tent in which the soup kitchen was run, pulling it down on the heads of the women fellow-workers who were in it at the time, slashed it to pieces and shipped it, with part of the contents of the Union Hall, which the mob also raided, to DeRidder, La., about twenty miles away.

Then the mob turned on all the most active Union men, slugging several badly, and ordered them to leave town under penalty of death. Men drifting into the town, who had never heard of the Union or the strike, were seized, thrown into jail, brought into “court” and given the option of going to work for the American Lumber Co. or being run out of town.

Be it said to the eternal honor of the hoboes, the last one of them chose the last option rather than scab on their fellow-workers, though many were frightfully misused by the Santa Fe’s thugs for refusing. Persons on the ground at the time describe the saturnalia of violence as beyond words to picture. On the night of February 16th, they say, whiskey-crazed scabs and gunmen, black as well as white, were everywhere running amuck, clubbing and shoving pump guns and high-power rifles into the faces of every man and boy suspected of the crime of belonging to the Union or of sympathizing with it.

The leaders of this mob were: T.J. Coggins, special agent of the Santa Fe, one “Captain” Evans, “ex” of the notorious Texas Rangers, who claimed to represent “Judge” J.W. Terry of the Santa Fe in charge of the American Lumber Company, “Doctor” J.L. Knight, who had skinned the boys so fiercely that they refused to consider him when they had forced from the old manager the right to elect their physicians; B. “Hawk” Carroll, cockroach banker ; Gilbert Hennigan, cockroach merchant; Jim Mitchell, shipping clerk, and Supt. Geo. Walden of the American Lumber Company; L.C. Bishop, cockroach merchant; W.P. Windham, postmaster of Merryville; W.E. Smith and “Captain” Johnson, scab-herders for the Santa Fe, and “Deputy Sheriffs” Fred Hamilton and Kinney Reid, Jr., so you can see that all “our best citizens” were arrayed against the “lawless I.W.W.”

But, somehow or other, for some strange reason, the WORKERS stuck closer than ever to the blacklisted UNION and, so, at this writing, the mills are still down and likely to rot on their foundations unless the Santa Fe and the association come to terms. The part played by the women in this struggle, no words can praise too highly. When the men were all deported, led by Fellow-worker Fredonia Stevenson, who has been ordered out of the town, they took up the battle and truly fought as their pioneer mothers fought in the days of old. Their splendid resistance has done more than all else to loco the “heroes” of the “Good Citizens’ League,” and to hold the mills down, and THEY will win the strike as sure as the sun goes down if their sisters on the outside will aid them with food and clothing. This surely is not much to ask and something ALL LABOR owes these warrior women who are holding at bay one of the most infamous enemies of UNIONISM on earth, the British Plunder-bund called the Santa Fe Railroad System.

Why doesn’t the Union appeal to the Governor of Louisiana for protection against all this lawlessness? He, like the Governor of West Virginia, is nothing but a “Reformer,” a servile tool of the Lumber Trust. He has BEEN appealed to and he has not even backed, or offered to back Socialist Mayor Presley of DeRidder, La., the ONLY public officer in Louisiana who has ever tried to do his sworn duty, against the thugs of the Long-Bell Lumber Company. They demanded Presley’s resignation because he refused to issue a proclamation prohibiting a mass meeting that had been called by the Union, and tried to run him out of town.

Here in Louisiana, the “state,” as in West Virginia, beyond being a legalized gun-toter for the Lumber, Sugar, Cotton and Railroad Kings, is making this fight, at Merryville, a straight stand-up fight between the WORKERS and CAPITALISTS, between the INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY and the INDUSTRIAL DESPOTISM, with no quarter asked, expected or given.

ALL who love FREEDOM and the WORKING CLASS will, therefore, go to the aid of the striking lumber jacks at Merryville, who, men and women, white and colored, native born and foreign, are standing shoulder to shoulder, as WORKERS should, fighting for the overthrow of peonage, the building of a FREE SOUTH, doing all that in them lies, to advance the cause of the only class worth serving, the WORKING CLASS.

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v13n11-may-1913-ISR-riaz-ocr.pdf