
          Myra Page: Daughter of the South, Worker for Change
          By Frederickson, MaryMary Frederickson
          Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 10-12, 14-15
          
          On a summer evening this past August, Myra Page sat surrounded by
books, papers and manuscripts in her home of thirty-nine years in
Yonkers, New York, telling the tale of her most recent
demonstration. Her lively eyes belied the eighty-two years that her
face and hands proclaimed. A week before, she had joined a group of
thirty peace activists, mostly women, as they faced fifty uniformed
American Legionnaires in front of Yonker's World War I memorial.
          The men insisted it was "sacriligious" for the demonstrators to
gather at the memorial that steamy Sunday morning on the anniversary
of the Hiroshima bombing. Tension mounted as members of both groups
exchanged comments about nuclear weapons. Several legionnaires proudly
recalled where they had been when the bombs exploded in 1946; some
argued that their lives had been saved, others that it hastened the
end of the war.
          As Page stood near the commander of the group, he whispered that he
didn't want another war either, that he didn't want his grandson to
have to fight.
          The legionnaires moved into formation three deep around the war
memorial. The protesters took positions across the street. As Page
crossed over with her comrades, the Commander spoke to her again. This
time loudly. "Don't worry lady, there'll never be another war!"
          In reporting this event, as she had the many demonstrations and
protests in which she participated during six decades of work for
labor, civil rights and human 

rights causes, Myra Page focused on the
personal, highlighting the irony of a Legion commander disclosing
private feelings about war to a peace activist. This personal
perspective has been at the core of Page's work, as a reformer and
labor organizer in the 1920's, as a reporter for the labor press in
the 1930's, and then as a writer of fiction. Her dual objectives have
been to relate social conditions on a human scale and to place
personal struggle within a framework of broader issues.
          Sustained throughout a lifetime, Myra Page's belief in the priority
of human rights developed during her childhood in Virginia. Myra, born
Dorothy Page Gary, and her younger brother learned their first lesson
in Southern racial mores one summer on their grandfather's farm in the
Shenandoah Valley. Abruptly, they were forbidden to play together with
a black friend. Told that the child would lose his job on the farm if
they disobeyed, Myra and her brother wept with a "great unnamed
misery." She wrote later that "something big and ugly had descended
upon us. Something which awoke in me a vast incoherent questioning and
hate."
          Page's father, the town physician in Newport News, Virginia, was a
humanitarian who served as a volunteer on the staff of the local black
hospital, and treated black and white, rich and poor in an era when a
family doctor was "almost like a preacher." Although opposed to his
eldest daughter becoming a doctor, Page's father took for granted that
his four children, male and female, would go to college. He had seen
enough destitute widows to want his three daughters to have the means
to make their own living.
          Page's mother did not openly oppose the status quo. Regarding race,
she "accepted the traditional pattern in the South," while confiding
to her children that she "thought it was a big mistake." Page saw her
mother and three aunts as leading limited lives marked by ignored
talents and suppressed sadness. She felt that she "couldn't follow the
path that any one of them was following." For her, "the woman
question, without being very concrete, developed very early."
Pressured by her mother to conform to a preconceived pattern of "the
way life should be," Page rebelled against the traditional belief that
daughters "owed everything to the family."
          Page lived in a home filled with "endless books" and with parents
who argued about George Bernard Shawl As a child accompanying her
father on rounds to see his patients, Page saw "both sides of town,
and all that went on." Like Mick Kelley in Carson McCuller's
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Page roamed the town,
went to the waterfront piers, met children from the nearby Irish
shantytown, and watched the dockers load ships. In the years before
World War I, Newport News was a bustling town dominated by the noise
of a shipyard filled with crews which built ships twenty-four hours a
day. As Page grew older she heard news stories of lynchings and rumors
about the Klan. But she also attended the meetings of an integrated
community group, the Newport News Joint Committee, established to deal
with public works and educational facilities. Sitting separately, on
opposite sides of the aisle, the black and white group worked to
obtain sewers and a high school for the black section of town. In
addition, black longshoremen in Newport News formed a union during
this period, and then helped organize their white
counterparts. Although in separate locals, the two groups worked
together-and added a different chapter to the long history of craft
unionism in the shipyard. Page's father supported organized labor,
many of his patients were union members, and with them he viewed
labor's platform as one antidote to the high rate of industrial
accidents that plagued workers in Newport News.
          Page grew close to Belle Franklin, the black woman who worked in
her parent's home; they sang hymns and folk songs in the kitchen and
shared Myra's school lessons. Myra was repeatedly told, by Belle, to
be glad she wasn't "born colored." Their bond deepened when Myra
discovered that her ambition to become a doctor was thwarted because
she was born female. The black woman understood, when other adults did
not, about "the injustices and the yearning for things you could not
have." Myra began to rebel against "this bad Southern tradition of
women."
          When Page left home to attend Westhampton College in Richmond, she
carried with her a complex legacy inherited from a society permeated
by racial segregation, divided by fixed class lines, and steeped in a
tradition of inflexible gender roles. At Westhampton, in the
supportive atmosphere of a woman's college, she found allies in her
search for new ideas and ways to change Southern society. On Friday
afternoons at tea in a liberal professor's apartment, Page and a few
close friends read The Nation and The New
Republic, periodicals not allowed in the college library. "We
were pacifists," Page recalled over sixty years later, "and very much
against the idea of going into the First World War."
          A small group of students, including Page, became active in the
YWCA in order to give substance to New Testament concepts of
brotherhood and peace. Page remembers:
          
            It was in college that we first got a chance to know black
students, girls mainly, at the summer YWCA conferences. Up there in
the beautiful rarefied air of Blue Ridge, North Carolina, you know, so
many things seemed possible. At Blue Ridge we were able to be friends,
to ignore color lines and to have discussions.
          
          Following one of the YWCA conferences, Page and a close friend
decided to invite a black YWCA secretary they had met at Blue Ridge to
speak at Westhampton. Over the opposition of "ill-prepared" classmates
who "went by us in the hall as if we had some disease that was
catching," Page and her small group of friends organized and attended
the first integrated meeting on their campus in 1917.
          Through interracial work in the YWCA, by teaching music to young
industrial workers in a Richmond settlement house, and by working with
women at the state reform school, Page met people from many
backgrounds during her years in Richmond. Gradually, she began to
evaluate the regional effects of racism and industrialization, and to
question her own place and function in the society which surrounded
her. A dozen years went by, however, before Page wrote about the
chaingangs she had 

seen as a student in Richmond (The
Nation, 1931) and about her experiences with the forbidden
black playmate, with Belle Franklin, and in the YWCA (The
Crisis, 1931).
          *  *  *
          Page began to write about the South only after she left the region,
a process which occurred in stages, over a period of several
years. Her first step out of Virginia was to attend graduate school at
Columbia University in New York City. Page studied sociology with
Franklin Henry Giddings and anthropology with Franz Boas, sat in on
John Dewey's classes and attended lectures by Harry F. Ward and Harry
Emerson Fosdick: "it was like a whole world opening up."
          In the North, Page continued to be plagued by questions about
race. In her university dormitory the young black woman who cleaned
the rooms talked with the students about literature, and offered to
loan one of Page's roommates her set of Victor Hugo's writings. The
students discovered that the woman had graduated from college with
honors, but could not get a job, except cleaning floors.
          A year later, convinced that "the future of the country would lie
with the workers getting organized and making good sensible reform,"
Page joined the YWCA Industrial Department. As part of what she viewed
as "a real movement of women for democracy," Page agreed to return
home to work with women factory operatives. Still close to her family,
Page wanted to return South, and the YWCA's goals of interracial
harmony and industrial reform meshed with her own agenda for social
change in the region. Page came back to Virginia in 1920, "with a
little sociology theory and Christian philosophy," to a job as YWCA
Industrial Secretary in Norfolk.
          In this non-union town, Page began to organize groups of women
workers and to plan educational programs designed to prepare them for
union membership. There were problems from the beginning. Page had to
seek permission from management to meet with workers during their
lunch hour, and then enter factories to face women who were convinced
that she represented the company. In addition, several YWCA board
members from the business community accused Page of "talking unionism"
and stressed that they would not continue to finance that kind of
socialism through the YWCA. Progressives within the YWCA counseled
Page to proceed gradually, to have patience and look ahead, but to
Page, "suddenly the whole thing was a farce." She wrote later:
          
            We had been trained to believe that social relations would
right themselves through Peace and Persuasion, through changing hearts
one by one. Finally, for me there was no going on. The theory simply
did not work. The system was stronger than individuals, and the
solution depended on changing the system itself.
          
          Page resigned from the YWCA in 1921. Feeling that little social
change could be accomplished in the South, she decided to
leave. Despite close family ties and over her parents' objections,
Page was determined "to break away" from a region totally dominated by
a rigid system of caste and class.
          Page left Norfolk for Philadelphia and St. Louis and~ worked as a
wage-earner in department stores and factories. In Philadelphia she
clerked at Wannamaker's until the management discovered she had a
college degree and suspected she might be an organizer. A stint in the
hat trade, where organized male workers opposed the entry of women
into the union, taught Page about occupational segregation by gender
and demonstrated the consequences for the labor movement.
          After several attempts to get work in the clothing trade, Page went
to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America's Philadelphia
office. There she met Hilda Shapiro, a staunchly feminist clothing
worker from the New York's East Side. Page and Shapiro worked together
for the next four years as rank and file organizers for the
Amalgamated. The two women organized picket lines and entered open
shop factories to get the workers to come out. In one shop Page
remembered being "scared to death" when the boss came at them with a
hot iron. Page found the whole set-up "like a jungle."
          But the "vicious" experiences she had in unorganized shops
contrasted sharply with her work-life in union factories. For Page,
the union shops were havens in which men and women of different
nationalities and races could work together. She saw herself
participating in "one great movement" of workers, and the answers she
had been seeking in Norfolk began to appear. Through the labor
movement, Page saw the goal of interracial industrial unionism, what
she described later as "a freedom to be fought for and won, black and
white alike," as an attainable end.
          After four years in Philadelphia and St. Louis, Page left the shops
to return to school and train as a teacher in workers' education. At
the University of Minnesota, Page obtained a doctorate in sociology,
taught a course in social movements, joined the teacher's union, and
became active in the Twin Cities labor movement. Appointed head of the
Education Committee of the Minnesota State Federation of Labor, Page
organized speakers and classes for union locals throughout the
state.
          As she taught the history of women in the trade union movement to
women in St. Paul, spoke at cooperatives, and interviewed miners in
the Iron Range, Page thought about her first organizing experiences in
Norfolk. Soon, she formulated a plan to write about textile workers in
the South. To document the "traditional Southern attitudes" she saw as
hampering union organization, Page lived for several months in a mill
community outside Columbia, South Carolina.
          Two books resulted from Page's PhD research on Southern
Textiles. The first, Southern Cotton Mills and Labor
(1929) appeared immediately after a wave of textile strikes had spread
across the Piedmont. The second work, Page's first novel, entitled
Gathering Storm (1932) was a fictional account of the
Gastonia Strike of 1929. In both manuscripts, she provided an analysis
of textile workers which transcended traditional 

accounts. Page argued
that although the culture of Southern textile workers (unlike that of
miners) did not foster collective organization, neither did it
preclude intense class consciousness and overt expressions of
discontent. Taking the long view of textile unionism, she wrote:
          
            Ever since the textile industry has been well established in
the south, there have been intermittent union campaigns there. Usually
these organizing efforts have been initiated by spontaneous strike
movements among southern textile workers, with a national union then
coming into' the field. In consequence, union efforts have often been
rather sporadic and poorly organized. Also company opposition has been
ruthless. Nevertheless, in nearly one half of a century of struggles,
this section of the American working class has shown itself capable of
courage, sacrifice, leadership and endurance that speaks well for the
determination of southern mill hands to conquer all difficulties and
build their union movement.
          
          Page held two basic criteria as crucial for the labor movement in
the South: First, it was essential to "organize black and white
workers on an equal footing in industrial unions and unite them in
struggles for full economic, political and social rights." Second,
Page contended that only a "system of collective ownership and
operation of mills" would provide the fundamental reorganization
required to provide workers with a decent standard of living.
          Page criticized AFL organizing efforts in Southern textiles,
arguing that the United Textile Workers (UTW) repeatedly entered local
strike situations too late and then withdrew active support
prematurely. Moreover, Page continued, the UTW either ignored black
workers entirely or segregated them into separate locals.
          In 1929 Page felt that the momentum for major change had begun and
that "nothing can stop the revolt of Dixie mill hands. now under way."
But the early 1930's proved to be difficult years for organizing and
for the realization of interracial unionism. Nonetheless, as she met
with interracial groups of union men and women she argued that as
Southerners "learned through their industrial struggles the common
economic lot of white and black wage-earners, and the necessity of
common action," they would be freed of racial prejudices.
          During the 1930's Page's work as a reporter for the labor press
took her into Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee
and Arkansas. But it was in Alabama that she began to see the promise
of what the union organization of agricultural workers, miners and
industrial workers could mean.
          Page came to Alabama several times in the early 1930's at the
request of union men and women in "this land of steel, coal and
cotton." She traveled by train into a rural Alabama county to meet
with members of the sharecropper's union and there found "brave people
who were taking so much into their stride." Page had great confidence
in this predominantly black group of men and women who were fighting
to obtain basic control of their worklives in a county where they
comprised eighty-five percent of the population. In Birmingham, Page
met with miners, one-third of whom were out of work, who had "downed
tools" and demanded the right to bargain collectively and to obtain
equal rights for black and white miners on the job and in the
union.
          In 1932, Page wrote phrases which echo fifty years later:
          The big steel mills of Morgan's T.C.I. and Mellon's Republic Steel
Corporations which belch their crimson tongues of smoke and flame
against the night, today are running around forty percent
capacity. Nearly one-third of Alabama's coal miners are without
work. In Birmingham, unemployed are estimated at forty-five to fifty
thousand, affecting one out of every three households.
          As Page left Birmingham to return to her home in the Northeast, she
predicted that "the outbreaks and struggles against Morgan and banking
and landlord rule will become increasingly more violent and sweeping
in character." Threatened strikes among miners and steelworkers meant
to Page that "the working masses in this steel and coal stronghold of
the South are in motion, and as Birmingham goes, so goes the South."
The organizing activity of workers in Birmingham confirmed Page's
belief in interracial industrial unionism, and offered the promise of
a time when the South "will be freed of its shadows; when its toiling
people will march shoulder to shoulder, beyond the color line."
          The optimism of Page's rhetoric in the early 1930's reflected her
belief that out of the ferment of the Great Depression "big changes
were going to take place . . . that the working people were really
going to get more control of their lives, and there would be much more
democracy in the country." Page recalls that in the 1930's, "I could
see that change was coming," and in Birmingham and other parts of the
South that vision was palpable. But there were also unrealized,
perhaps unrealistic, dreams: the belief that black Southerners would
demand and be given distinct regions, or a separate nation; that the
violence against Morgan in Southern steel areas like Birmingham would
spread to workers in other Southern industries, and that the Southern
working-class would oust the economic imperialists who controlled the
region's natural and industrial resources; also unrealized was her
firm hope that the organization of Southern workers was inevitable,
and once accomplished would be the key to labor's strength
nationwide.
          "We were young, enthusiastic, and thought things were going to
happen faster," Page remembers. Today Page remains hopeful--"that one
of these days we will get a working-class party" in the United States;
that racism 

will diminish as the South and the nation become
thoroughly integrated; that the United States has learned and will
never forget the hard lesson of Vietnam; that the "creativity and
determination of the American people" will allow us to solve our
problems.
          During the late 1930's Page took up her pen more frequently and
struggled with questions about the South in her writing. As a member
of the League of American Writers she was asked to come to Highlander
Folk School in 1938 and 1939 to teach classes and workshops. While at
Highlander, Page visited miners' families in the Tennessee
mountains. Later she met Dolly Hawkins Cooper, the woman whose story
she tells in Daughter of the Hills (1978, first
published in 1950 by Citadel Press as With Sun In Their
Blood). Page's friendship with Hawkins grew out of an intense
admiration for the strength of the women whose fathers, husband' end
sons mined coal, and an appreciation of "a woman's part in the coal
miner's struggle."
          During these years Page continued to report for the labor press and
to write radio play scripts and short stories to supplement her
income. She had married John Markey, a fellow graduate student from
Minnesota and then college professor, and they had had a daughter and
a son. Page still felt "a certain pull, a certain allegiance to the
South." But family visits to Virginia in the 1930's were "painful,"
and Page's rejection of the social and political status quo was
manifest in her unwillingness to rear her children in the South.
          In the post-war period, Page traveled South each summer and, again
at Highlander Folk School, shared in the expansion and development of
the civil rights movement. "We had crucial sessions at Highlander,"
Page recalls. "The Southern people working in the field were leading
. . . I took a little part, but not very much, because I wasn't living
and working then in the South." But it was the movement for which Page
had worked since before World War I.
          As Page participated in civil rights work in the 1950's and 1960's,
she noticed many Southern white women who "connected with the
movement." To her, "it was noticeable that so many came north and
worked." Page argues that these were Southern women who saw parallels
between their own limitations and lack of freedom and that of black
people. She believes that many of these white women, as she had done
in 1920, felt a special kinship to the black quest for civil rights
and as a result either "they got out from down there, or if they did
stay in the South, they worked with the movement."
          As the progressive gains of the 1960's became apparent within the
South, Page shifted her attention to include an even wider range of
issues: expanding civil rights efforts, anti-war work against Vietnam,
a growing woman's movement, environmental concerns, and support for
the United Mine Workers of America (to Page "the enduring backbone of
the American labor movement").
          In June of 1980, Page returned to Newport News, Virginia, the town
she had left sixty years earlier. Three months before her visit, the
community's 16,500 shipyard workers had won their first United Steel
Workers of America (USWA) contract with Tenneco. Members of the union
had invited Page to come South. She met with many of the shipyard
workers (black and white, male and female) who had fought for three
years and endured an eleven week strike to win company recognition of
Local 8888 (see Southern Changes, June 1979). The
union's contract with substantial wage increases, a grievance
procedure, a health and safety committee and better medical benefits
and pensions, signaled to Page that "In Tidewater and the South, a new
day has begun" (see Mountain Life and Work, November
1980). The union's victory affirmed many of the principles that Page
had believed in and fought for since she left Virginia to join the
labor movement in 1920 (see Southern Exposure, Winter
1981).
          Over the years Page had seen many of her political dreams and
social ideals flounder; early textile organizing efforts in the South
faltered, the dream of a worker controlled society has not been
fulfilled, a classless social system has yet to be established. On the
other hand, the civil rights movement transformed American society,
and the women's movement has realized many changes for which Page
worked. The union victory in Newport News was both a substantive and
symbolic triumph. Organization of the shipyard workers was a goal that
Page had sought for years, and it validated her theory, considered too
radical in the 1920's and 1930's, that Southern workers could organize
effectively only when black and white joined forces. Symbolically, the
victory held a special personal significance for Myra Page--Dorothy
Markey--because it meant that in a sense she had been able to come
full circle, and to come home.
          
            Formerly a research fellow at the Wellesley College
Center for Research on Women, Mary Frederickson is now assistant
professor of history at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. This
article copyright, 1988, by Mary Frederickson.
          
        