When 20,000 textile workers went on strike in the 1928 New Bedford Textile Workers Strike, 18-year-old factory worker Eulalia “Eula” Mendes (1910-2004) became a leader in her mill and community by encouraging Portuguese industrial migrant workers to participate in the strike. Later, she traveled nationwide to support other fights for justice and equality.

Eula left Portugal with her working-class family in 1912 and settled in New Bedford, a textile city with a large Portuguese-speaking community. At the young age of 14, Eula became her family’s primary breadwinner as a bobbin worker in a textile factory. In 1928, when the city’s textile workers went on strike in opposition to a 10% wage cut planned by the factory owners, Eula began attending meetings run by regional and national labor organizers.

She became a leader at her mill and in her community by promoting Portuguese worker participation in the strike. Eula translated the speeches of labor leaders into Portuguese and gave speeches herself. She became an organizer for the communist-influenced Textile Mill Committee (TMC), which demanded a wage increase, a 40-hour workweek, and an end to child labor. Eventually, Eula became a member of the TMC’s executive committee serving in a leadership role as secretary.

The TMC organized thousands of workers into pickets, rallies, and parades that attracted the attention of law enforcement and city officials. The National Guard and local police used force and arrested many strikers, including Eula. She noted that she “was arrested a number of times... We sometimes stayed [in jail] for just a few hours, sometimes overnight or sometimes even days or weeks, but we were usually let out on bail. And a few days later maybe we were arrested again.”

After six months, the strikers accepted a smaller pay cut and returned to work. For Eula, the 1928 strike sparked a life of union organizing. She traveled nationwide with the International Ladies Garment Workers and other unions to support other uprisings in the fight for justice and equality. Eula’s activism continued with her Communist Party affiliation in New Bedford and the region, and she refused to sign a Loyalty Pledge to promise that she was not a Communist.

The strike did not accomplish all the goals the TMC hoped for, but it did change the relationship between textile workers and mill owners in the city and New England for decades to come. After years of being ignored by the established mill craft unions, ethnic communities found a voice through the TMC and developed a new interest in unions, which encouraged them to come together to advocate for greater representation.

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Strike! Strike! Strike!

It was a warm summer day in July of 1904, and tensions were running high in Fall River, Massachusetts. Earlier in the month, the Fall River Cotton Manufacturers’ Association had announced a 12.5% wage cut in all of the conglomerate’s mills. Now, after two weeks of unsuccessful negotiations between the Association and union locals, a city-wide strike was looming on the horizon. The question dominating everyone’s thoughts -- would the operatives across the border in Tiverton’s Bourne Mill join their Massachusetts colleagues in the strike or prove loyal to their employer?

Founded by a group of Fall River textile magnates in 1881, the Bourne Mill complex was constructed at the southern end of Cook’s Pond, joining several other mills already using the pond as a source of water for the mills’ steam engines. This location, however, placed the mill just over the state border into Rhode Island, resulting in the peculiar situation where several of the mill’s structures physically bridged the border. Beginning modestly with a single, five-story granite mill finished in 1883, the Bourne Mill complex eventually expanded to include more than twenty buildings of brick and granite.

Unlike all of the other mills in Fall River, Bourne Mill operated on a unique financial model where employees were involved in a profit-sharing initiative. Under this plan, if the mill made a profit and paid dividends to investors, “faithful” employees also received a biannual dividend that was calculated as a percentage of their wages. The impetus for this innovative strategy came from Jonathan Bourne -- the namesake of the mill and one of the founding investors. Bourne made his fortune in the whaling industry and was accustomed to the “lay” system used on whalers where all of the crew received a percentage of the profit at the end of a successful voyage. At Bourne Mill, this initiative was intended to both increase productivity and bolster employer-employee rapport.

As the New England textile industry began to face increasing pressure in the early twentieth century from southern mills, the Fall River Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, like other northern mill conglomerates, confronted the challenge of cutting costs in order to continue turning a profit. Introducing more efficient, Northrop automatic power looms that required less supervision was one way that many mills began to adjust to the increasingly competitive environment. In 1898, Bourne Mill purchased a number of Northrop looms, allowing the mill management to reduce the number of weavers in half. Despite the mill operatives’ opposition, the Northrop looms were an inevitable part of progress in the textile industry. Two years after Bourne Mill purchased its first automatic looms, it embarked on a major expansion of its weaving facilities, constructing a new, sawtooth-roofed, granite weave shed that allowed it to double the number of Northrop looms in operation.

In addition to the introduction of the Northrop automatic looms, relationships between the mill corporations and the mill operatives were further strained by a general “slowdown” in the northern textile industry in first years of the twentieth century. In this charged environment, the 12.5% decrease in wages proposed by the Fall River Cotton Manufacturers’ Association was a flashpoint. On July 25th, over 25,000 Fall River textile workers -- and most of the employees of Tiverton’s Bourne Mill -- walked out of the mills. Despite its fifteen years of successful operation, the Bourne Mill’s profit-sharing initiative had not generated enough employee goodwill to keep the mill in operation. Like the mills across the border in Fall River, Tiverton’s Bourne Mill would remain closed for the next six months. It was not reopened until after the union locals successfully negotiated for only a 7.5% wage decrease in January of 1905.

Although the Fall River textile industry seemed to recover rapidly from the effects of the 1904 strike, this conflict prefigured the eventual end of the New England cotton manufacturing industry. Northern mills simply could not compete with southern mills’ lower labor costs, newer equipment, and better access to raw cotton. Bourne Mill continued to operate though the 1940s, with World War II providing the mill with a major production boost.

In 1953, the mill was sold to Berkshire-Hathaway, a textile conglomerate formed by Warren Buffett in the 1950s. By the end of the decade, Berkshire-Hathaway, realizing that the textile industry was abandoning New England, decided to divest themselves from the mills they had recently acquired . Bourne Mill, along with six other Berkshire-Hathaway mills, closed in 1961.

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Imagine the Fox Point waterfront in the 1940s. Cargo ships lined up to get into crowded docks. Longshoremen bustled along the busy quays. Crowds waited to welcome packet ships bringing new immigrants and news from Cape Verde.

Many of the longshoremen who worked the docks had themselves come into this port on the packet boats.  Until the 1950s, most of the packet boats were repurposed schooners and aging whalers. Crewed by skilled seamen, these vessels made regular trips between American ports and the islands of Cape Verde off the African coast, transporting people, letters, food, and freight.

Cape Verdean immigration to Providence, and greater New England, began the early nineteenth century, when men from the islands were recruited by whaling companies looking for good seamen and inexpensive labor. By the early twentieth century, Portugal’s oppressive colonial rule of the islands, combined with drought and starvation, forced families to consider leaving Cape Verde. Many immigrants moved to Providence and New Bedford, joining family members and friends already in the United States.

The waterfront neighborhood of Fox Point, bounded to the north by Power Street, became the heart of Cape Verdean Rhode Island until the late twentieth century. Today, some Cape Verdeans still live in the area, but most were forced to relocate as urban renewal projects dramatically changed the neighborhood. Beginning in the 1950s, Brown University also bought and developed land in the neighborhood; the ensuing gentrification made it prohibitively expensive for working class families to live there.

At the same time that longtime Fox Point residents were being forced to move elsewhere, the Fox Point docks were also changing. After World War II, “containerization,” the increasing use of shipping containers, drastically decreased the numbers of jobs available on the docks. Many longshoremen actively resisted the changes. In 1971, a historic strike on the west coast shut down the ports for 130 days. The Cape Verdean longshoremen who worked in Fox Point were members of Local 1329 of the International Longshoremen’s Association, the first labor union in the United States founded by Cape Verdeans. Local 1329 played an important role in the national labor union and in the lives of the Cape Verdean longshoremen and their families. Ultimately, resistance to automation was not successful and by the end of the twentieth century almost ninety percent of longshoremen jobs had been lost to automation.

These docks are filled with the memories of work, change and resistance, and the journeys of people and things from Cape Verde to Providence. Though the Cape Verdean community is no longer concentrated in Fox Point, more Cape Verdeans still live in Massachusetts and Rhode Island than anywhere else except Cape Verde. Many of them still gather each year in India Point Park to celebrate the islands’ independence from Portugal on July 5th, a day filled with festivities, educational events, and food.

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