Louisville's Black Laborers of the Campbell Tobacco Company, 1915-1930
Introduction
Text-to-speech Audio
People generally do not know the history of Louisville, Kentucky’s tobacco processing industry and most importantly, the Black workers who did the industry’s manual labor. This digital map tells the story of 21 Black Louisville residents and the landscape around them as they worked for the Campbell Tobacco Company in 1920. In the face of hazardous workplace conditions and racial segregation, Louisville’s Black community created businesses, healthcare and educational services, and community spaces that cultivated resiliency outside of the workplace. This is their story as told by a historian 100 years later.
Images
This photograph shows a factory room at Campbell Company full of retiers, hunched over benches busy retying bundles of tobacco. The company paid workers by how much tobacco they processed in a day, by the piece. This pay system incentivized and was supposed to motivate the level of production.
Here you can see on a Sanborn fire insurance map the three Campbell Company buildings. The buildings are colored pink which means they were brick.
Backstory and Context
Text-to-speech Audio
The first stop on this map is the spot where the Campbell Company factory once was between 1905 and 1940. This was considered 1114 West Liberty Street. Look around this location and you will see that there is no large 14 story tobacco building with two adjoining buildings that were two and three stories high. In fact, there's not much there at all. You'll see construction. This is because Campbell Company's factory was where Beecher Terrace was from 1939-2018, and where Beecher Terrace will be once it is reconstructed again after the 2018 demolition to make way for again newer housing.
The Campbell Company was a tobacco company that specialized in the export of tobacco to markets in African and South American countries. They were a rehandler, meaning they purchased tobacco from a warehouse in Louisville and then repackaged it to fit the specifications that their clients wanted. Farmers brought the tobacco from rural Kentucky farms to urban Louisville and sold it at warehouses in downtown Louisville, just west of 9th and Main Street, in an area called "the Breaks." Campbell Company then purchased the tobacco bundles, took them apart, assessing their quality, and repackaging them in bundles that fit what their clients specified. One such specification was that the tobacco be of the same length in each bundle, for example.
So a cohort of some 100 employees did this work of grading, stemming, retying, hanging, packing, and pressing jobs. Grading entailed putting tobacco of a similar quality together. Stemming was removing the woody stem. Retying involved using another leaf of tobacco around the bundle to tie them together. Hanging was the process of tying these tobacco leaf bundles to the ceiling and allowing gravity to do the drying work. Then the dry tobacco bundles could be packed and pressed.
This map is about 21 of the employees, all African American, that did this work.