ABSTRACT
The textile industry had an image problem. By the late 1960s, Southern mill owners were being buffeted by social, political, and economic forces over which they could no longer exercise the paternalistic control they had long been accustomed to. The Civil Rights Movement had bared to the nation the oppressive hierarchy and racism that lay just beneath the genteel pretensions of the “Southern way of life.” The Movement was also, to be fair, showing that conditions for African Americans in the North were not much better, if better at all.
