James David Hammett opened the Chiquola Mill in 1903 for the production of coarse cotton sheeting, and the small upstate South Carolina town of Honea Path reshaped itself around the looms. Small farmers from across the region, squeezed off their land by tightened credit, migrated to the mill for wages. By the early 1930s, Honea Path was home to around 2,700 people, most of them dependent on the mill or its satellite industries. Children worked alongside adults -- some unpaid, because they were officially just 'learning' the trade. The economic decline that followed the First World War brought the stretch-out: more production, same pay, longer exhaustion. Workers watched their quotas rise while their wages stayed flat. Without union organization, scattered wildcat strikes flared and fizzled. In 1929 alone, 79,027 workers participated in eighty-one separate strikes across South Carolina. None lasted.

Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932 changed the calculus. For the first time, a president openly encouraged workers to join unions, and the United Textile Workers surged from 15,000 members in February 1932 to 270,000 by 1934, expanding rapidly into the Southern states. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 created codes meant to curb the worst abuses. But the Code of Fair Competition for the Cotton Textile Industry was written by men like Thomas Marchant, a cotton magnate, and George Sloan, the industry's chief lobbyist. The result was a $12-per-week minimum wage that couldn't compensate for reduced hours -- effectively institutionalizing the stretch-out and cutting weekly wages by 25 percent. The union demanded recognition, a $20 minimum wage, and the reinstatement of fired workers. When those demands went unmet, the textile workers' strike of 1934 mobilized workers up and down the East Coast.

The picket line formed outside the Chiquola Mill on the morning of September 6, 1934, part of the massive national textile strike. Dan Beacham was not going to tolerate it. As mayor, he controlled the town's law enforcement. As magistrate, he controlled its courts. As mill superintendent, he controlled its economy. Beacham ordered an armed posse of strikebreakers to fire into the crowd of picketers. As the workers turned to flee, the shooting continued. Six strikers were killed -- shot in the back as they ran. A seventh was mortally wounded. Thirty others fell with injuries. The violence at Honea Path was among the deadliest episodes of the 1934 strike, which saw similar clashes at mills across the Carolinas and New England.

What followed the killings was a masterwork of suppression. At the coroner's inquest, eleven strikebreakers were charged with murder. But Beacham, serving as the local magistrate, ensured they were acquitted. When two eyewitnesses testified that he had personally given the order to fire, Beacham had them arrested and charged with perjury. Dozens of workers were fired for participating in the strike or even expressing sympathy for the union. Families were evicted from their company-owned homes. The strikebreakers circulated a rumor that the workers themselves had fired first -- a falsehood that persisted in Honea Path well into the 1990s. The larger national textile strike collapsed on September 23, and with it, any hope of unionization in the town. Mill superintendents continued to hold the mayor's office for decades.

The conspiracy of silence held for sixty years. Families of the dead and the survivors passed the story down in whispers, but publicly Honea Path did not speak of Bloody Thursday. That changed in 1994 with the publication of the documentary 'The Uprising of '34,' which brought the massacre and similar incidents across the South into public view for the first time. The film prompted Frank Beacham -- the grandson of Dan Beacham himself -- to begin investigating his grandfather's role in the killings. His journalistic work confirmed the long-suppressed truth. Today, a stone marker in Dogwood Park memorializes the workers who died. The Chiquola Mill Massacre stands as one of the starkest examples of unchecked corporate and political power in American labor history -- a place where the man who ordered the killing also ran the court that investigated it.