"Norma Rae": Mother of the Textile Bowl?

 

The Textile Bowl Trophy has been in Clemson's possession since 2012.

© Tim Peeler, 2021

NOTE: If you enjoy reading "One Brick Back" and would like to help offset research expenses for stories such as this, please make a small donation to the cause and help keep these posts free of ads. Also, I couldn't have written this or any other piece about the textile industry without the input of my friend Devin Steele, editor and publisher of eTextileCommunications.com. He is literally "The Voice of the U.S. Textile Industry," starting his successful newsletter in 2014 and building it from scratch after traditional media began to go away. Read about his journey here: Greenville Business Magazine. If you want to learn more about the textile industry, subscribe to his weekly newsletter here and follow him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Devin gave me my first job as a writer for Technician, NC State's student newspaper, in 1984 and we've both been plugging away at it ever since. I still don't know whether to thank or curse him.

 In the late 1970s, the textile industry that had long propped up the economies of North and South Carolina and employed more than a million workers in each state took a couple of major hits.

First, on March 2, 1979, 20^th Century Fox Studios released director Martin Ritt’s "Norma Rae," a fictionalized account of the real-life struggle of Crystal Lee Sutton to unionize the J.P Stevens cotton mill in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, and to get her co-workers to join the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.

The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture that year (losing to "Kramer vs. Kramer"), and Sally Field won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Sutton, a single mom with three children making $2.65 a hour folding towels at the plant who led the dangerous organizing campaign in notoriously anti-union North Carolina.

Then, the next year, the Charlotte Observer assigned a half-dozen reporters and four editors to investigate the textile industry in both states for a high incidences of byssinosis, a rare asthma-like respiratory disease caused by breathing dust particulates from unprocessed cotton.

Comparable to coal workers pneumoconiosis (CWP), or “black lung disease” among coal miners, the incurable affliction became known as “brown lung disease.” It was something plant operators, state and federal regulators chose to ignore for far too long.

On April 14, 1981, the Observer won the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service for its series “Brown Lung: A Case of Deadly Neglect,” a total of 22 articles and eight editorials that exposed the lack of industry control and concern for the health of its workers, many of whom sought disability compensation for lost wages after contracting the disease. It was the first of five Pulitzers the paper has won in its history.

Needless to say, the textile industry that provided more manufacturing jobs than any other industry in the two states at the time needed a major positive publicity boost, to take it back to the pre-World War II days when textiles accounted for 40 percent of the states' workforce.

So the N.C. Textile Manufacturers Association and the S.C. Textile Manufacturers Association came up with an idea: The Textile Bowl, pitting NC State and Clemson together in a college football game at the culmination of Textile Week in both states. They even got the Greenville, South Carolina,-based Textile Hall Corporation, the longtime promoter of the wildly popular Southern Textile Basketball Tournament, to provide a silver cup for the winner. The NCTMA and the SCTMA also kicked in $500 for each of the school’s textile scholarship funds.

At the time, both the biggest land grant universities in the two states were among a dozen institutions around the nation that had textile programs that offered a full range of textile degrees, from undergraduate to PhD., to improve the design and production of clothing goods and textile manufacturing.

The day before that inaugural game, hopes were high, as one industry official said, that both states were in “the early stages of a new textile revolution.”

Oh, how that prediction came true – but not in the way the industry leaders wanted. Despite and because of multiple interventions from federal leaders in Washington, the textile industry began a rapid decline throughout the 1980s, losing jobs to Asian manufacturers with low-cost goods and depressed labor costs. Hundreds of plants—particularly those that once employed my mom, many neighbors and parents of friends—closed in western North Carolina.

With the passage of the Canadian-U.S. Free Trade Agreement in 1988 and the North American Free-Trade Agreement in 1994—both created to eliminate trade barriers within the participating countries— textile manufacturing in both states cratered. In 2003, Fieldcrest-Cannon shut down Cannon Mills, the world's largest textile manufacturing plant, located in Kannapolis. Overnight, 5,000 employees lost their jobs.

When the Great Recession of 2007-09 hit, there seemed to be little hope of ever seeing textiles return as a viable economic sector in either state. Clemson shut down its textile school and folded its textile degree programs into departments within its engineering college, following the model of many other universities. It still does groundbreaking work in the field, but with a lesser commitment to having a college devoted to it.

That left NC State as the only university in the country with a school or college devoted solely to textile education and development, with more than 1,000 degree-seeking students enrolled annually.

Slowly, it has led the way in restoring the once-dominant industry through advanced technology.

Famously, A. Blanton Godfrey, former dean of NC State’s College of Textiles, said in 2012: “Norma Rae would have trouble getting a job [at a textile plant] today. But if she wants to sit at a computer terminal and program the reboot, that’s different. It’s a very different world.”

Higher transportation costs, tariffs and rising wages in China and other countries helped revive domestic interest in textiles, along with an emphasis on “Made In America” brands by big-box retailers.

In 2004, NC State even joined forces with UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, six other research institutions and industry partners to create the North Carolina Research Campus on the site of the former Fieldcrest-Cannon manufacturing plant in Kannapolis. It is a thriving 350-acre research park devoted to studying human health through nutrition and developing safer, healthier foods.

In 2018, thanks to $28 million gift by Frederick “Fred” Eugene Wilson Jr. and three generations of the Wilson family, College of Textiles was renamed in their honor, becoming just the second named college at NC State.

The college is responsible for a modern resurgence of the textile industry, both in the state and nationally, thanks to a concentration on technological efficiency, sustainability and advancement, plus the development of the world’s first Nonwoven’s Institute. NC State is now a global leader in wearable technology. It even helped former Wolfpack football players in bringing new athletic products to the market.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in February 2020, the Wilson College of Textiles pivoted quickly to help companies increase production of personal protective equipment and continues to develop new and efficient processes. Now, North Carolina’s 600-plus textile and nonwoven manufacturing plants export a national leading $2 billion in goods and products and the Wilson College of Textiles churns out graduates and innovative ideas for industry partners.  

But what about football? Wasn’t that the point of the Textile Bowl?

Program from the inaugural Textile Bowl

Well, 40 years ago this season, NC State jumped out to an early lead in the inaugural game, thanks to a 13-yard touchdown run by Larmount Lawson in the first quarter, the first rushing touchdown given up by the Tiger defense in its first seven games. Clemson rallied with 10 points in the second quarter, held the Wolfpack to just 63 yards of total offense in the second half and cruised to a 17-7 victory. It was the team's seventh consecutive victory en route to winning the school’s first of three football national championships.

[NOTE: Updated to reflect last year's 27-21 double-overtime win by NC State in Carter-Finley Stadium.] The Tigers, in recent years, have won 15 of the last 17 games in the series, which began back in 1899. They had won eight in a row prior to last year's loss in Carter-Finley Stadium. They own a 28-11 record in games branded as the Textile Bowl, but last year's win by the Wolfpack put the coveted Textile Bowl Cup back in Raleigh since that game.

The old rivals did not meet two years ago for the first time since 1969 and ’70, but the rivalry is now on track to continue until one of the two schools opts to move to another conference, if re-alignment ever actually happens.

Sure, Clemson has won most of the football in the rivalry, but NC State has taken an insurmountable lead in the textile industry’s revival.