Biography
Boyd Ellsworth Payton was a regional director of the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA), heading the union's southern region from Charlotte, North Carolina. He became one of the most prominent labor frame-up cases of the postwar South after the bitter 1958–59 strike at the Harriet-Henderson Cotton Mills in Henderson, North Carolina.
TWUA Locals 578 and 584 struck in November 1958 after the mills refused to renew an arbitration clause; the company reopened in February 1959 with strikebreakers, touching off violence that included some sixteen bombings, more than 150 arrests, and an assault on Payton himself. In June 1959 Payton and seven others were charged with conspiring to dynamite a Carolina Power & Light Company substation and to destroy two mill buildings. The case was widely regarded as a frame-up of the union's leadership; by Payton's account, the only evidence the state had against him was a telephone call in which he warned the person on the line that the phone was bugged.
Payton was convicted in 1960 and sentenced to six to ten years in prison. Governor Terry Sanford commuted the sentences on July 4, 1961, and granted Payton a full pardon on December 31, 1964. Payton recounted the ordeal in his memoir, "Scapegoat: Prejudice / Politics / Prison." The case remained a touchstone for the labor and civil-rights movements; in 1974 the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression cited Payton's framing alongside more recent prosecutions as it organized against political repression in the South.
