Historic Charlotte

company expresses the desire,” union organizer
Albert E. Jones announced.
The president of the Southern Public
Utilities Company, which operated
Charlotte’s streetcars after 1911, was Z. V.
Taylor, the same man who had just sold his
Myers Park Colonial Revival style home to
James B. Duke and one of the men who had
persuaded the U.S Army to locate Camp
Greene in Charlotte. Taylor’s position
remained unchanged throughout the strike.
He refused to submit to the workers’
demands and accused Albert Jones of being
an outside agitator.
Taylor was condescending in his characterization
of the strikers. “We know our ‘boys’
too well,” he proclaimed on August 12th.
“They are of our blood. They were raised by
the same kind of mother as our mothers.”
Taylor called the labor unrest “dastardly, cunning,
unfeeling” and insisted that the company
could not afford to raise the pay of the
strikers. As for the union, he agreed to recognize
a local union but not one affiliated with
the Amalgamated Association of Street &
Electrical Railway Employees.
The situation worsened when a large, boisterous
crowd, composed mostly of mill workers
from North Charlotte, gathered outside
the electric substation on Elizabeth Avenue at
Sugar Creek around midnight on August
12th. The demonstrators had come to give
their support to the local electrical workers
who had also gone out on strike. Two electricians
had pulled the switches inside the
Elizabeth Avenue substation in the afternoon
and had cut off power to the entire city for a
brief period. The police had arrested the pair
for trespassing. Z. V. Taylor feared that the
mill workers who had assembled that night
on Elizabeth Avenue would try to seize the
substation and cut the power again. He there-
✧
The original Charlotte Speedway located in
Pineville near South Boulevard and the
Southern Railway tracks.
COURTESY OF CAROLINA ROOM, PUBLIC LIBRARY
OF CHARLOTTE AND MECKLENBURG COUNTY.
CHAPTER X
79