FROM The Negro in Africa and America (1902) by Joseph Alexander Tillinghast:

In 1899, at the town of Fayetteville, N. C, a silk mill was established by an able mulatto, Mr. T. W. Thurston, acting as agent for the silk manufacturing interests at Patterson, N. J. Within a short time there were 400 operatives at work with 10,000 spindles. It was avowedly an experiment with negro labor, and it ” has proved a signal success.” Let us note carefully the conditions upon which success has depended. A correspondent of the New York Journal of Commerce, writing under date of October 27, 1900, says: ” Mr. Thurston, who is evidently a man of ability and strong character and well educated, has a theory of his own in regard to the way in which a negro mill should be managed, and it is of a somewhat startling character.” He then quotes Thurston, who, after stating that his operatives have proved quite satisfactory, adds:

“But no one can make a success of a mill by applying white methods to colored people. With the latter there is but one rule to follow, that of the strictest discipline. Call it military despotism, if you will. There are no indulgences in this mill. Kindness would be construed as weakness and advantage taken of it to the detriment of our work. Faults and irregularities are severely punished.”

The correspondent then drew out the fact that this discipline takes the form of whipping.

“The punishment is not light ; it is severe ; anything else would be a waste of time. It is upon this system that we have to rely to secure a proper performance of duty. All the help engaged here, under twenty-one years of age, are put absolutely under my control, by certificates from their parents or guardians, from six o’clock in the morning to six o’clock at night, and I am free from all responsibilities as to the course I pursue towards them during that time. No one desires more than I do to see the position of my people improved ; but I have no false ideas as to the present condition of the majority of them. They lack the sense of responsibility, and are like children where money is concerned. . . . My methods may be decried by humanitarians, but I am proving their success.”

When the mill was first opened this rigid discipline did not exist. The result was that the operatives “were indifferent to their work and behavior, and it was necessary either to correct or discharge them. They preferred the latter, and Thurston, feeling that if he did not have power to discipline the young operatives, he would be compelled to give up,” finally resorted to the system already described. This experience illustrates the fact, elsewhere pointed out, that, even under present conditions, the negroes do not feel the same incentives to work, or respond to them as efficiently as the whites. In this case there has been a partial reversion to a former method of securing steady work from an indolent people. Mr. Thurston is clearly of the conviction, founded upon hard experience, that it will not do to rely upon the ordinary incentives in the case of a majority of negroes. Indeed, he says plainly : ” Forty years ago they whipped [white] boys in mills, as some of the successful manufacturers of to-day can testify from painful experience, and we are beginning just so many years behind.” He attributes the failure of other mills operated by negro workmen to the attempt to treat them like white labor. We have here an instance of an employer, who might well say that his negro operatives are satisfactory and his enterprise a success, but only on condition that he wields a power of discipline over them, such as no body of white workmen would brook for a single day.

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