Oral history interview with Wilbur Hobby, March 13, 1975
Subtitle: interview E-0006, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007)
Contributors: Finger, William R., interviewer; Southern Oral History Program; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project); University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library
Edition: Electronic ed.
Publisher: University Library, UNC-Chapel Hill
Published: 2007
Place of publication: [Chapel Hill, N.C.]
Language: eng
Subjects: Interviews; Labor unions; Officials and employees; Political activity; Politics and government; Political action committees; Voters for Better Government (Durham, N.C.); AFL-CIO. Committee on Political Education; AFL-CIO
Other titles: Interview E-0006, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007); Interview with Wilbur Hobby, March 13, 1975; Oral histories of the American South.
Description: Wilbur Hobby was born in Durham, North Carolina, in 1925. In the early 1930s, Hobby's father, a bricklayer, deserted his mother, leaving her to raise five sons on her own. Hobby describes growing up impoverished in the Edgemont section of Durham, where most of his friends had parents who worked in the tobacco or textile mills. Hobby remained in school through the ninth grade only, dropping out after spending a summer in Ohio working as a bat boy for the Durham Bulls. Shortly after leaving school, Hobby's mother signed a waiver for him to join the Navy at the age of seventeen, and he served in the South Pacific during World War II. He returned to Durham following the war and worked briefly with his father as a bricklayer before becoming employed by the American Tobacco Company. During these years, Hobby married. Although he argues that he had little awareness of the labor movement, with only foggy memories of the 1934 general strike as it occurred in Durham, Hobby explains how he became increasingly involved in labor politics during the late 1940s. Joining the union at the American Tobacco Company in 1946, he soon became actively involved and was eventually elected president of the night shift workers. From there, Hobby became an active participant in the Voters for Better Government in Durham, a coalition of laborers, African Americans, and liberal intellectuals from Duke University. Hobby describes how they became a formidable force in local politics during the late 1940s and 1950s. In addition, Hobby discusses his involvement with other labor organizations, such as Labor's League for Political Education (LLPE) and the Committee for Public Education (COPE). In 1958/1959, Hobby worked briefly for the textile unions in Florida and Georgia after he was fired from the American Tobacco Company. Because of his work with both tobacco and textile unions and the Voters for Better Government, Hobby had become well known enough in the movement to become elected as director of COPE in 1959--a position he held until 1969.
Notes: Title from menu page (viewed on june 6, 2008).

Interview participants: Wilbur Hobby, interviewee; Bill Finger, interviewer.

Duration: 01:28:53.

This electronic edition is part of the UNC-CH digital library, Documenting the American South.  It is a part of the collection Oral histories of the American South.

Text encoded by Jennifer Joyner.  Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers.

Text (HTML and XML/TEI source file) and audio (MP3); 2 files: ca. 138 kilobytes, 162 megabytes.

Original version: Southern Oral History Program Collection, (#4007), Series E, Labor, interview E-0006, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Transcribed by Joe Jaros. Original transcript: 55 p.

Funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported the electronic publication of this interview.

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

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