1964–1965 Scripto strike

Its main production facility was based in Sweet Auburn, an African-American neighborhood of Atlanta, and the company's workforce was primarily made up of black women.

From the onset, the strike had the support of several civil rights organizations, including the A. Philip Randolph Institute, Operation Breadbasket, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the latter of which was led by Martin Luther King Jr. King was an avid supporter of the strike, as many of the strikers were congregants of his Ebenezer Baptist Church, and he helped coordinate a nationwide boycott of Scripto products.

[1] Additionally, from 1951 to 1954, the company operated an ordnance plant that produced artillery shells for the United States Armed Forces during the Korean War.

[8] Following the company's relocation to Sweet Auburn, Scripto began to recruit employees from the local African American community for low-wage positions.

[1] However, despite the perception of Scripto as a better employer than other options in the city, workplace discrimination against African American workers there was still persistent, and the company's management was still made up entirely of white people.

[11] During this same time, Carmichael turned down several offers to relocate the plant outside of the city,[12] and company executives made it a point to continue to hire black women.

[5] In an attempt to win support, the ICWU ensured that the drive focused not only on traditional labor activism topics but also on civil rights.

[1][5] The union called on James Hampton, an African American labor activist and Baptist preacher, to go to Atlanta and help with their organizing efforts.

[5] In the meantime, hoping to prevent a successful union vote, the company instituted several changes, including the formation of an employee committee and the removal of racial segregation signs from the plant's bathrooms and water fountains.

[9][4] A week after the election had taken place, Thomas C. Shelton of the Atlanta-based law firm Kilpatrick, Cody, Rogers, McClatchey & Regenstein, Scripto's legal counsel, filed objections with the NLRB, arguing that the union's use of racial rhetoric and drawing connections to the larger civil rights movement had caused the "sober, informed exercise of the employees' vote" to be impossible, rendering the election null.

[17] Finally, on June 9, 1964, after about ten months of petitioning, the NLRB denied Shelton's requests and awarded the ICWU a certificate of representation for Scripto.

[19] Carl Singer, a businessman who had previously worked in Chicago for the Sealy Mattress Company, was brought in to replace Carmichael as Scripto's president and chief executive officer.

[6][7] On November 25, 1964, the day before Thanksgiving,[7][15] workers constituting almost the entirety of the first shift met at the ICWU union hall on Edgewood Avenue, near the factory, and demanded that a strike be commenced.

[18] The action caught Levine off guard, and he was unsure what had prompted the sudden movement, though he speculated that it stemmed from disappointment from the workers' bargaining unit that had spread to the rank-and-file employees.

[20] Through the course of the strike, Scripto hired replacement workers to keep the plant running, and they placed "Help Wanted" advertisements in many local newspapers, including the Daily World, which prompted controversy among the paper's primarily black readership.

[26] The union viewed the issue as a racial one, as the company's proposal would have resulted in a vast majority of the African American workforce receiving a substantially lower raise than their white counterparts.

[26] Additionally, the union alleged that a reason for this was that the company did not offer training to African Americans that would have allowed them to be classified as skilled workers.

[27] At that time, many members of Atlanta's black elite, which included Jesse Hill, Samuel Woodrow Williams, and the younger King's father, among others,[29] did not want to see him engage in the same type of high-profile activism that he had been involved in elsewhere.

[20] On November 29, the younger King, acting in his role as the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an Atlanta-based civil rights organization whose headquarters were only a few blocks from the plant,[14] sent a telegram to Carmichael wherein he expressed his support for the strikers, criticized the company for being anti-union and racially discriminatory, and said that he would call for a boycott of Scripto products if the strike persisted.

[25][note 2] On December 1, King was scheduled to speak to a large group of strikers at a rally held across the street from the factory, but he was unable to attend the meeting due to a meeting he had with Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover that same day in Washington, D.C.[31][20] The Reverend C. T. Vivian, who had moved to Atlanta in 1963 to become an executive in the SCLC,[32] took his place,[31] while other speakers included the Reverend Joseph E. Boone, Georgia State Senator Leroy Johnson, and union negotiator Phil Whitehead.

[33] Vivian had been the primary voice within the SCLC for supporting the strike, as he viewed unions as a way for African Americans to attain economic equality based on his previous work experience in civil rights organizing in Illinois.

[9] While Vivian viewed the strike as a way to strengthen the bond between organized labor and the civil rights movement, SCLC executive Hosea Williams saw the strike as a way for King to buck the local black leadership and lead a demonstration in Atlanta, which was viewed as a major center for African American culture in the United States.

[37] The next day, within 24 hours of returning, King marched in a picket line with several other protestors,[38][37] including a union representative from the ICWU's international headquarters in Amsterdam.

[10] Vivian contacted 2,500 SCLC affiliates to inform them of the boycott, and the organization made requests to merchants to remove Scripto displays from their stores.

[38] John Lewis, the chairman of the SNCC, wrote a letter to the General Services Administration (an independent agency of the United States government) urging them to also honor the boycott.

[38] The GSA responded that they would investigate the matter,[38] specifically concerning whether Scripto was in violation of Executive Order 10925, which mandated equal opportunity in the workforce.

[51] On January 9, 1965, the union and company announced in a joint statement that they had come to an agreement on a new labor contract,[51][52] and the strike was called off that day.

[47] Meanwhile, both white business leaders and the black elite in Atlanta felt that King's actions had disturbed a system that they had in place that saw gradual civil rights progress in exchange for a deemphasis on overt protests.

[60][61][62] In the immediate aftermath of the strike, King had vowed that there would be "more to come" with regards to working with labor activists,[63] and in 1965, the SCLC considered training union organizers.

[65] Around this same time, The Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit organization, began to focus its efforts on combating urban decay in the area.