Cigar Factory workers created the anthem of the civil rights movement

In October 1945, 1,200 workers walked out of this building to begin a strike that lasted five months. At the time, the factory was a massive industrial operation producing Cremo and Roi-Tan cigars. It employed 1,400 people, 900 of whom were Black women. They left their stations to protest low wages and racial discrimination, maintaining a picket line outside these brick walls through the winter.

To keep their spirits up while they marched, the strikers sang. One of the songs they used was a gospel hymn called I'll Overcome Someday. A worker named Lucille Simmons changed the refrain to We Will Overcome and slowed the tempo. This version became the signature sound of the local strike.

Two members of the union, Anna Lee Bonneau and Evelyn Risher, eventually taught the song to Zilphia Horton, a co-founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Horton altered the words further, and the musician Pete Seeger later popularized it as We Shall Overcome. Activists who learned the song at the Highlander school carried it across the South, where it became the anthem of the civil rights movement.

The building itself started as a textile mill in 1882 before the American Tobacco Company took over the lease in 1903. It remained a cigar factory until 1973 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The strike that defined its history ended on April 1, 1946, with a settlement that granted the workers raises and a promise of better treatment.