The passing of a working-class hero

by Jack Neely

When we came up with our 100 Most Influential Knoxvillians of the century, we didn't know that one would be with us for only another week.

Lucille Thornburgh died over the weekend. An important early union leader, she spent her middle age as editor of a regional labor weekly. Well into her 80s, she remained a force to be reckoned with on several community causes, one that the powerful had learned they could ignore only at their own peril. Those who missed Lucille Thornburgh's funeral on Tuesday might still make it to a special memorial at the Unitarian Church, at 7 p.m. on the 24th.

I met her in the fall of 1984, when I spent a rainy afternoon at her comfortable home on Cecil Avenue in North Knoxville. I was working on a story about "grassroots activism" among the elderly for Southern Exposure, a magazine based in North Carolina.

I approached her front door with some trepidation. I knew her by her legendary status as a working-class hero, leader of an unpopular strike. Young liberals in the '70s spoke about her with awe, bragged about just knowing her. I had heard about her willfulness, her fierce resolve.

What I did not expect was her grace. She greeted me at the door, a slender woman with white hair and black-rimmed glasses. We sat in her living room, with only the natural light from the front window. She was quieter, gentler, more gracious than I expected a legend to be, and something about the way she spoke surprised me. She would cringe to hear me call her accent and affect aristocratic: I'd better not. But she was the most pleasant subversive I'd ever met.

Anyway, I had a tape recorder I'd carried in awkwardly under my wrinkled raincoat and laid it on her coffee table.

"Please don't turn that on," she said. "I don't like to have my voice recorded." She had an electric spark in her eye which, for the moment, could pass for a twinkle.

I obliged. Not only for her, but for nearly every interview I've done since. I always take notes on a pad, maybe just out of homage to Lucille Thornburgh.

We talked at some length, mainly about her lively leadership of two estimable activist groups, the Tennessee Valley Energy Coalition (TVEC) and Solutions to Issues of Concern to Knoxvillians (SICK). I ended our conversation wishing I'd agreed to write a profile of Lucille.

"I've been called a Communist by people who don't know Communism from rheumatism," she said—without mentioning that one of those was the Knoxville News-Sentinel in 1947. It was a charge she denied politely but firmly. And without fear. Communist or not, she was, after all, already blacklisted.

She grew up in Strawberry Plains, daughter of a white grocer in a predominantly black zinc-mining community. She was not quite 17 in 1925 when her family moved to Knoxville. To help out, she found work in a textile mill: the burgeoning Cherokee Spinning Company. She kept the spools spinning through the night shift—5 p.m. to 5 a.m., 50 hours a week. The mill paid her 17 cents an hour—with no sick leave, no benefits, no paid holidays or vacation. And for 131 female workers, the company provided only one toilet. In nine years there, Lucille was a faithful worker but developed a reputation for speaking out when something didn't suit her.

In 1933, an AFL organizer sought her out. With Lucille's help, the union recruited several coworkers to meet secretly in a hotel room downtown. The new local presented requests that seem humble by modern standards, and they were negotiating the terms—when the United Textile Workers of America called a general strike. Centered in the South, it became known as the Uprising of '34. Strikebreakers elsewhere resisted it violently, leaving 16 dead. The 1995 PBS documentary on the Uprising featured an interview with Lucille about her part in it.

That strike failed. Lucille and thousands of other textile workers who had participated were blacklisted from the industry. Lucille went to work for union-friendly TVA, but stayed close to the labor movement that had been, for a time in 1934, her only friend. She joined the state's Central Labor Council, the first woman in its history.

She wasn't a radical by nature, and it wasn't fashionable to seem radical in Knoxville in the 1930s. "While I had no social philosophy at that time," she later wrote, "I knew something was wrong when men and women spent their lives in drudgery jobs, never getting ahead, barely eking out a living and going to an early grave. Surely, I thought, this is not the American way of life! So I began searching for a way that I might help change things." In 1942 she went to work for her union, the AFL, on its Labor League for Human Rights, in New York. The AFL was apparently so impressed with her they offered this 39-year-old high-school graduate a one-year scholarship to Oxford University.

She came home "full of ideas" and became associate editor of the Knoxville Labor News; it was called the East Tennessee Labor News by the time she took over as editor in 1961, a post she held for a decade. She also became a board member for the socially progressive Highlander School.

But when I met her that day in 1984, scribbling in a notebook on top of an unused tape recorder, I was there to talk only about the community crusades she had launched after she had turned 70, leading picket lines to fight for a better deal for the poor and the aged.

I didn't know her as well as many others did, but ran into her often unexpectedly at meetings and backyard barbecues. She was dependably the most interesting person in any room. Many here knew her much better than I did. But I'm not sure anyone ever had a mind and heart quite big enough to know the whole Lucille Thornburgh.