Ora Lee Malone, a union organizer and foot solider for social justice causes over the span of half a century, died Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012 at Beauvais Manor on the Park in St. Louis. She was 93.
She had been infirm for some time said a niece, Carol Jackson, a U.S. District judge.
Her fight began with voting rights for blacks in Alabama during a time so dangerous she knew a man who was shot for attempting to vote. Her struggle moved north to St. Louis where she organized a garment factory union of mostly black workers. Eventually, she joined Nelson Mandela’s fight to end apartheid.
“She lived a life of struggle,” said Lew Moye, the former longtime head of the local Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. “But she was strong in her convictions.”
She worked to help repeal the Boswell Amendment, which was enacted in 1946 to prevent African Americans from registering to vote by requiring “interpretations” of the Constitution.
“The catch was, you could memorize the whole Constitution, but if they asked you something and your interpretation didn’t satisfy the registrar, who was probably an eighth-grade dropout, you were turned down,” she said.
Opponents won repeal of the amendment, but problems persisted. “The thing that really cleared it out was the Voting Rights Act of ’65,” Mrs. Malone said.
By 1965, Mrs. Malone, who went to Washington, D.C., to lobby on behalf of the Voting Rights Act, had become a well-known labor leader and social activist.
She had arrived in St. Louis in 1951 and found a job as a piece-worker at the California Manufacturing Company, a men’s jacket manufacturer. Most of the employees were women. The Garment Workers Union started leafleting the shop.
“The company would keep us there ‘til night, telling us what they were going to do to us if we organized a union,” Mrs. Malone said in Lift Every Voice and Sing, a collection of narratives of St. Louis African Americans in the Twentieth Century.
She scheduled a meeting for the 60 workers with the union representative. They all signed their union cards, and she was elected the shop steward of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, the first predominantly black union shop in St. Louis. There she remained for 19 years.
“For a woman and a black woman to stand up to management took a lot of guts,” said Jackson. “She cared so much about the average worker and she believed that everyone was entitled to fair treatment in the workplace.”
She subsequently spent another 19 years as the union’s international representative for the St. Louis District, the first black to hold that position. She represented nearly 30 stores and three clothing and textile factories in St. Louis, eastern Missouri and Southern Illinois.
When the Textile Workers Union of America boycotted clothing giant J.P. Stevens and Co., Mrs. Malone devised a unique local tactic.
“Ora would have us go into stores and we’d put all these J.P. Stevens-made items in our carts, take them to the counter and leave them,” Moye said. “We’d tell the clerk that we wouldn’t buy J.P. Stevens, and walk out of the store.”
It took 17 years, but J.P. Stevens was finally organized.
In the 1960s, she helped establish the St. Louis chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a labor and civil rights organization, and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, serving on its national executive board.
During the 1970s, she co-founded the national Coalition of Labor Union Women, the New Democratic Coalition and served as legislative chair of the Christian Women’s Fellowship.
She was there at the inception of the Women’s Political Caucus, working with Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan to advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment, to get more women elected and to address so-called “women’s issues” such as pay equity and day care.
After her retirement from the union in 1989, she became a commissioner for Metro (then Bi-State Development Agency) and the St. Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority, the agency charged with overseeing the construction a stadium to lure a new football team. It was completed in 1995.
Mrs. Malone helped ensure that 20 percent of the workers were black and at least five percent were women.
After working in St. Louis for decades, she once declared that she believed the city to be worse than Alabama, except in the area of voting.
“You have such hidden prejudices in St. Louis that you don’t run into in Alabama,” she said.
She walked the picket lines during the 1970s teachers’ strikes in St. Louis. She was on the frontlines in the fight to save Homer G. Phillips Hospital. From the moment she arrived in St. Louis, she had her hand in every political race. She helped DeVerne Calloway become the first black woman elected to the Missouri Legislature in 1962.
In the ‘80s, she joined the Free South Africa Movement. When the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists wanted to put bodies in front of the U.S. consulate in Washington, D.C., to protest apartheid, Mrs. Malone was there.
As South Africa worked its way toward eliminating apartheid, she continued to enlist the aid of the Teamsters to ship tons of fabric so that the women could make clothing. After Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, she made a trip to Botswana.
“It was an amazing trip for a little girl from Mobile, Ala.,” Jackson said.
Ora Lee Thomas was born on Christmas Eve in 1918, in Brooksville, Miss., William and Lillian Thomas’s eldest child. She was raised in Whistler, Ala., a stone’s throw from Mobile. She would go back and forth between her grandparent’s Mississippi farm and her parent’s home in Whistler, attending private school mostly in Mississippi. She attended a semester of junior college in Alabama before going to work full-time.
She married Sturdivant Malone, a Merchant Marine. They had no children.
Mrs. Malone was preceded in death by her husband, her parents and three brothers, Albert, John and Grantford Thomas.
In addition to her niece, survivors include two sisters, Annie Jackson and Manassie Williams, both of St. Louis; three brothers, Marvin Thomas, of St. Louis, William E. Thomas, of Mobile, Ala. and Robert Earl (Jean) Thomas, of New Orleans.
Edited for length and reprinted with permission from stlbeacon.org.
