Eula McGill at a Labor Rally

Eula Mae McGill (1911-2003) was one of the first paid women labor organizers in the South. She grew up in a blue-collar family of industrial laborers and craftspeople who participated in union activities. As a young adult, Eula experienced challenges in employment as a result of her union loyalty and outspoken demands for fairness and equity. Her work led her first to Birmingham, Jefferson County, and then across the state as a union representative, labor organizer, and activist.

McGill was born May 15, 1911, to Joseph Hamilton McGill and Mary Rachael Sue Ann, in Resaca, Georgia, and was the younger of two daughters. The family spent the early years of her life in an area referred to as Nance’s Spring, near Resaca, where her father worked as a carpenter for an ore mine. Her mother primarily worked in the home but spent a period of time cooking for workers in a boarding house where the family lived. It was during these formative years of her childhood that McGill began to learn about unions through her observations. Her mother took her to union meetings in town where she listened to speeches and heard about the plight and demands of the laboring class. Her older sister, Clara Pringle, born seven years prior, lived in the Ensley Highlands area of Birmingham with her husband. She too worked for unions in the Birmingham area, sometimes alongside Eula.

Following the closure of the ore mine, the McGill family relocated to Gadsden, Etowah County, where her father began work at Gulf State Steel Company a few years prior to the start of World War I. At age seven, McGill asked her father to explain unions to her, as an official union member himself, after she went on her first picket line with her mother during a 1919 strike at Gulf State Steel. She learned that her father joined a union because he believed that people should not be satisfied with their current condition and should always be trying to better themselves. This message and the ability to better one’s working conditions through the union left a lasting impression on McGill.

At age 14, McGill had to seek employment to help supplement her family’s income because her father struggled to find work. She took a job as a spinner at Dwight Manufacturing Company, which was the largest textile mill in Alabama for decades. In later years, she reflected in interviews about her experience in textile mills and as a union organizer, including that she was a terrible spinner, but this was the only work available to her at that young age.

Union organizing, persuading workers to join or form unions, in the South in the 1920s and 1930s was far more challenging than in northern industries because of incredibly entrenched anti-union sentiments and policies. Such policies in the South required an “open shop” in which membership was not required for employment and weakened the power of the union. In addition, companies could immediately remove union members or sympathizers from company-owned housing. The Great Depression exacerbated the conditions experienced by everyday laborers. Many of those organizing for unions at the time worked as volunteers rather than as paid employees. McGill joined these ranks in Gadsden and witnessed the common practices of union volunteers and members being harassed, flogged, and fired. McGill, her young infant, and her parents moved to Birmingham to live with her sister around this time. In 1932, she officially joined the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), a nationwide labor organization focused on improving pay and safety conditions for women and also spent a short time working in Selma, Dallas County, for the Selma Manufacturing Company as a spinner. She continued her organizing work alongside her sister before going on to serve in leadership positions primarily in the textile industry through the 1934 General Strike, a nationwide strike across various industries that particularly targeted textile mills. The strike had mixed results. It led to passage of the pro-labor Wagner Act of 1935, which provided protections for unions and created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to enforce the act’s provisions, but the implementation of these wins failed to fulfill on their promises. Unions never again organized at such a high level. The work of the WTUL caught the attention of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who invited members of the Birmingham and Huntsville, Madison County, delegations to stay in the White House in 1936 while they were in Washington, D.C., for the organization’s national convention.

Upon her return home to Alabama from the 1936 convention, McGill was fired and blacklisted among regional textile mills for her union participation. She remained in contact with Eleanor Roosevelt for many years, meeting with her at various speaking engagements and conferences focused on labor rights, human welfare, and activism across the South. At one such meeting, McGill was introduced to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), a union that later fell under the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Although unemployed, she continued doing unpaid work for the unions, and in 1939, the ACWA hired her as an official, paid organizer and business agent. As the first female business agent in the South, she traveled across the region to help workers negotiate better contracts with companies and later boasted her impressive feat of getting all her shops 100 percent unionized. Agents typically met with company representatives and negotiated on behalf of the employees to improve pay and conditions but also to form a “closed shop.” Closed shops required union membership for all employees and created a stronger environment for laborers. The daily work was difficult, she later recalled, with some campaigns involving daily arrests on the picket line followed by numerous court appearances. Violence and threats remained a mainstay but never deterred her determination to unionize as many workers as possible.

In 1982, McGill retired, and in 1991, Birmingham mayor Richard Arrington Jr. declared May 15th “Eula McGill Day” in honor of her dedicated work as a labor activist. She was inducted into the Alabama Labor Hall of Fame in the same year. Her work also included the founding of the Alabama Organized Labor Foundation.

On December 28, 2003, McGill died in Birmingham. Her legacy as an advocate for unions and working people has remained an inseparable part of her memory.