Vaporwave

Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music and a subgenre of Hauntology, a visual art style, and an Internet meme that emerged in the early 2010s, and became well-known in 2015. It is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples of smooth jazz, 1970s elevator music, R&B, and lounge music from the 1980s and 1990s. The surrounding subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and pop culture, and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades. Visually, it incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, stylized Greek sculptures, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.

Vaporwave originated as an ironic variant of chillwave, evolving from hypnagogic pop as well as similar retro-revivalist and post-Internet motifs that had become fashionable in underground digital music and art scenes of the era, such as Tumblr's seapunk. The style was pioneered by producers such as James Ferraro, Daniel Lopatin and Ramona Xavier, who each used various pseudonyms. After Xavier's album Floral Shoppe (2011) established a blueprint for the genre, the movement built an audience on sites Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan while a flood of new acts, also operating under online pseudonyms, turned to Bandcamp for distribution.

Following the wider exposure of vaporwave in 2012, a wealth of subgenres and offshoots emerged, such as future funk, mallsoft and hardvapour, although most have waned in popularity. The genre also intersected with fashion trends such as streetwear and various political movements. Since the mid-2010s, vaporwave has been frequently described as a "dead" genre. The general public came to view vaporwave as a facetious Internet meme, a notion that frustrated some producers who wished to be recognized as serious artists. Many of the most influential artists and record labels associated with vaporwave have since drifted into other musical styles. Later in the 2010s, the genre spurred a revival of interest in Japanese ambient music and city pop.

## Characteristics

Vaporwave is a hyper-specific subgenre, or "microgenre", that is both a form of electronic music and an art style, although it is sometimes suggested to be primarily a visual medium. The genre is defined largely by its surrounding subculture, with its music inextricable from its visual accoutrements. Academic Laura Glitsos writes, "In this way, vaporwave defies traditional music conventions that typically privilege the music over the visual form." Musically, vaporwave reconfigures dance music from the 1980s and early 1990s through the use of chopped and screwed techniques, repetition, and heavy reverb. It is composed almost entirely from slowed-down samples and its creation requires only the knowledge of rudimentary production techniques. Although, some artists like Dan Mason create vaporwave music from scratch.

The name derives from "vaporware", a term for commercial software that is announced but never released. It builds upon the satirical tendencies of chillwave and hypnagogic pop, while also being associated with an ambiguous or ironic take on consumer capitalism and technoculture. Critic Adam Trainer writes of the style's predilection for "music made less for enjoyment than for the regulation of mood", such as corporate stock music for infomercials and product demonstrations. Academic Adam Harper described the typical vaporwave track as "a wholly synthesised or heavily processed chunk of corporate mood music, bright and earnest or slow and sultry, often beautiful, either looped out of sync and beyond the point of functionality."

Adding to its dual engagement with musical and visual art forms, vaporwave embraces the Internet as a cultural, social, and aesthetic medium. The visual aesthetic (often stylized as "AESTHETICS", with fullwidth characters) incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, and cyberpunk tropes, as well as anime, Greco-Roman statues, and 3D-rendered objects. VHS degradation is another common effect seen in vaporwave art. Generally, artists limit the chronology of their source material between Japan's economic flourishing in the 1980s and the September 11 attacks or dot-com bubble burst of 2001 (some albums, including Floral Shoppe, depict the intact Twin Towers on their covers).

## History and legacy

### Origins and precursors

Vaporwave originated on the Internet in the early 2010s as an ironic variant of chillwave and as a derivation of the work of hypnagogic pop artists such as Ariel Pink and James Ferraro, who were also characterized by the invocation of retro popular culture. It was one of many Internet microgenres to emerge in this era, alongside witch house, seapunk, shitgaze, cloud rap, and others. Early cloud rap artists like Bones, 90's Bambino, and GothBoiClique especially drew heavily on vaporwave and witch house, with genre boundaries not becoming distinctly defined until later. Vaporwave coincided with a broader trend involving young artists whose works drew from their childhoods in the 1980s.

"Chillwave" and "hypnagogic pop" were coined at virtually the same time, in mid-2009, and were considered interchangeable terms. Like vaporwave, they engaged with notions of nostalgia and cultural memory. Among the earliest hypnagogic acts to anticipate vaporwave was Matrix Metals and his album Flamingo Breeze (2009), which was built on synthesizer loops. Around the same time, Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) uploaded a collection of plunderphonics loops to YouTube surreptitiously under the alias sunsetcorp. These clips were taken from his audio-visual album Memory Vague (June 2009). Washed Out's "Feel It All Around" (June 2009), which slowed down the 1983 Italian dance song "I Want You" by Gary Low, exemplified the "analog nostalgia" of chillwave that vaporwave artists sought to reconfigure.

Vaporwave was subsumed under a larger "Tumblr aesthetic" that had become fashionable in underground digital music and art scenes of the 2010s. In 2010, Lopatin included several of the tracks from Memory Vague, as well as a few new ones, on his album Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1, released in August under the alias "Chuck Person". With packaging that resembled the 1993 video game Ecco the Dolphin, the album inspired a host of suburban teens and young adults to formulate what would become vaporwave. Seapunk followed in mid-2011 as an aquatic-themed Tumblr subculture and Internet meme that presaged vaporwave in its concern for "spacey" electronic music and Geocities web graphics. Like vaporwave, it was defined by its engagement with the Internet, an approach that is sometimes described as post-Internet.

The musical template for vaporwave came from Eccojams and Ferraro's Far Side Virtual (October 2011). Eccojams featured chopped and screwed variations on popular 1980s pop songs, while Far Side Virtual drew primarily on "the grainy and bombastic beeps" of past media such as Skype and the Nintendo Wii. According to Stereogum's Miles Bowe, vaporwave was a fusion between Lopatin's "chopped and screwed plunderphonics" and the "nihilistic easy-listening of James Ferraro's Muzak-hellscapes". A 2013 post on a music blog presented those albums, along with Skeleton's Holograms (November 2010), as "proto vaporwave".

### Early scene

Vaporwave artists were originally "mysterious and often nameless entities that lurk the internet," Adam Harper noted, "often behind a pseudo-corporate name or web façade, and whose music is typically free to download through Mediafire, Last FM, Soundcloud or Bandcamp." According to Metallic Ghosts (Chaz Allen), the original vaporwave scene came out of an online circle formulated on the site Turntable.fm. This circle included individuals known as Internet Club (Robin Burnett), Veracom, Luxury Elite, Infinity Frequencies, Transmuteo (Jonathan Dean), Coolmemoryz, and Prismcorp.

Numerous producers of this online milieu took inspiration from Ramona Xavier's New Dreams Ltd. (credited to "Laserdisc Visions", July 2011). The first reported use of the term "vaporwave" was on an October 2011 blogpost by an anonymous user reviewing the album Surf's Pure Hearts by Girlhood, however, Burnett has been credited with coining the term as a way to tie the circle together. Xavier's Floral Shoppe (credited to "Macintosh Plus", December 2011) was the first album to be properly considered of the genre, containing all of the style's core elements.

Vaporwave found wider appeal over the middle of 2012, building an audience on sites like Last.fm, Reddit and 4chan. On Tumblr, it became common for users to decorate their pages with vaporwave imagery. In September, Blank Banshee released his debut album, Blank Banshee 0, which reflected a trend of vaporwave producers who were more influenced by trap music and less concerned with conveying political undertones. Bandwagon called it a "progressive record" that, along with Floral Shoppe, "signaled the end of the first wave of sample-heavy music, and ... reconfigured what it means to make vaporwave music."

After a flood of new vaporwave acts turned to Bandcamp for distribution, various online music publications such as Tiny Mix Tapes, Dummy Mag and Sputnikmusic began covering the movement. However, writers, fans, and artists struggled to differentiate between vaporwave, chillwave, and hypnagogic pop, while Ash Becks of The Essential noted that larger sites like Pitchfork and Drowned in Sound "seemingly refused to touch vaporwave throughout the genre's two-year 'peak'." Common criticisms were that the genre was "too dumb" or "too intellectual".

### Wider popularity

In November 2012, seapunk aesthetics were appropriated in music videos by the pop singers Rihanna and Azealia Banks. The exposure catapulted the subculture to the mainstream, and with it, vaporwave. That same month, a video review of Floral Shoppe, published by the YouTuber Anthony Fantano, helped solidify the album as the representative work of vaporwave, but was also credited as a pivotal moment in the decline of the genre. Soon after vaporwave was spotlighted in the mainstream, it was frequently described as a "dead" genre. Such pronouncements came from the fans themselves.

Following the initial wave, new terms were invented by users on 4chan and Reddit who sought to separate vaporwave into multiple subgenres. Some were created in jest, such as "vaportrap", "vapornoise" and "vaporgoth". Further subgenres included "eccojams", "utopian virtual", "mallsoft", "future funk", "post-Internet", "late-nite lo-fi", "broken transmission" (or "signalwave"), and "hardvapour". Joe Price of Complex reported that "most [of the subgenres] faded away, and many didn't make sense to begin with. ... The visual aspect formed faster than the sound, resulting in releases that look the same but fail to form a sonically cohesive whole."

In 2013, YouTube began allowing its users to host live streams, which resulted in a host of 24-hour "radio stations" dedicated to microgenres such as vaporwave and lo-fi hip hop. The Swedish rapper Yung Lean and his Sad Boys collective inspired a wave of anonymous DJs to create vaporwave mixes, uploaded to YouTube and SoundCloud, that appropriated the music and imagery of Nintendo 64 video games. Titles included "Mariowave", "Nostalgia 64", and "ZELDAWAVE" Dazed Digital's Evelyn Wang credited Lean with "allowing vaporwave to leak IRL [and] encouraging its unholy coupling with streetwear". She cited their associated fashion staples as "frowny faces, Japanese and Arabic as accessories, sportswear brands, Arizona iced tea, and the uncanny ability to simultaneously communicate in and be a meme."

At the end of 2013, Thump published an essay headlined "Is Vaporwave the Next Seapunk?". Although the author prophesied that vaporwave would not end "as a joke" the way seapunk did, the genre came to be largely viewed as a facetious Internet meme based predominately on a retro visual style or "vibe", a notion that frustrated some producers who wished to be recognized as serious artists. Many of the most influential artists and record labels associated with the genre later drifted into other musical styles.

In 2015, Rolling Stone published a list that included vaporwave act 2814 as one of "10 artists you need to know", citing their album Birth of a New Day (新しい日の誕生) as "an unparalleled success within a small, passionate pocket of the internet." The album I'll Try Living Like This by Death's Dynamic Shroud.wmv was featured at number fifteen on the Fact list "The 50 Best Albums of 2015", and on the same day MTV International introduced a rebrand heavily inspired by vaporwave and seapunk, Tumblr launched a GIF viewer named Tumblr TV, with an explicitly MTV-styled visual spin. Hip-hop artist Drake's single "Hotline Bling", released on July 31, also became popular with vaporwave producers, inspiring both humorous and serious remixes of the tune.

As of 2016, vaporwave albums, including Floral Shoppe, continued to rank among the best-selling experimental albums on Bandcamp. The scene also maintained a dedicated following on communities such as Reddit. Price reported that, for those outside of these arenas, the genre was generally considered to be "a big joke". He added that "Users of the various vaporwave sub-Reddits will always take it very seriously for the most part, but even there people are discussing whether or not vaporwave is still going strong." Despite their objections to the label, serious artists of the movement continued to be tagged as vaporwave.

In 2019, user comments that state "AESTHETIC" remained ubiquitous on YouTube videos concerning the Internet. George Clanton, a prominent figure in the genre, commented that the "vaporwave" banner still functioned well as a marketing tag for music that is not necessarily considered of the genre. In September, he organized the first-ever vaporwave festival, 100% ElectroniCON, in New York City, where various artists associated with the genre such as Saint Pepsi, Vaperror, Nmesh, 18 Carat Affair, and Clanton himself performed live, most of them for the first time in their careers.

### Political appropriations

In December 2012, Dummy published what was considered the "definitive" article on vaporwave, authored by Adam Harper, in which he equated the genre to accelerationist political theory. The article had the effect of inspiring "a wave of content ambiguously celebrating a dystopian capitalism". In early 2016, the satirical publication Rave News reported that prominent vaporwave producers had scheduled an emergency summit in Montreal to discuss "creeping fascism" in the scene. Although the article was facetious, its comment section attracted many vaporwave fans who defended such political beliefs. In August, Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin recommended that alt-right members embrace synthwave instead of the rock genres traditionally associated with far-right movements, as he felt that synthwave represented the "Whitest music ever". His remarks popularized the musical and visual aesthetic dubbed "fashwave", an updating of fascist tropes inspired by vaporwave that was celebrated by many members of the alt-right.

In 2017, Vice's Penn Bullock and Eli Penn reported on the phenomenon of self-identified fascists and alt-right members appropriating vaporwave music and aesthetics, describing the fashwave movement as "the first fascist music that is easy enough on the ears to have mainstream appeal" and reflective of "a global cybernetic subculture geared towards millennials, propagated by memes like Pepe the Frog, and centered on sites like 4chan". The Guardian's Michael Hann noted that the movement is not unprecedented; similar offshoots occurred in punk rock in the 1980s and black metal in the 1990s. Hann believed that, like those genres, there was little chance fashwave would ever "impinge on the mainstream".

By 2019, pink vaporwave-inspired hats that promoted 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang became popular among his supporters. National Review commentator Theodore Kopfre reported that it was part of a trend indicating that Yang had "replaced Donald Trump as the meme candidate."

## Critical interpretations

### Parody, subversion, and genre

Vaporwave was one of several microgenres spawned in the early 2010s that were the brief focus of media attention. Users on various music forums, as quoted by Vice, variously characterized the genre as "chillwave for Marxists", "post-elevator music", and "corporate smooth jazz Windows 95 pop". Its circulation was more akin to an Internet meme than typical music genres of the past, as authors Georgina Born and Christopher Haworth wrote in 2017,

> Vaporwave's cultural practices knowingly replicate and parody the addictive, almost compulsory participation that feeds social networks, where the voluntary labor of the user community drives the system and generates value. Anyone with an Internet connection can produce vaporwave ... The uniformity of these memes is encouraged by their rapid imitation among the genre's hyperactive online subculture, fueled by affective contagion.

Pitchfork contributor Jonny Coleman defined vaporwave as residing in "the uncanny genre valley" that lies "between a real genre that sounds fake and a fake genre that could be real." Also from Pitchfork, Patrick St. Michel calls vaporwave a "niche corner of Internet music populated by Westerners goofing around with Japanese music, samples, and language". Vice writer Rob Arcand commented that the "rapid proliferation of subgenres has itself become part of the "vaporwave" punchline, gesturing at the absurdity of the genre itself even as it sees artists using it as a springboard for innovation."

Speaking about the "supposedly subversive or parodic elements" of vaporwave in 2018, cultural critic Simon Reynolds said that the genre had been made redundant, in some respects, by modern trap music and mainstream hip hop. He opined: "What could be more insane or morbid than the subjectivity in a Drake record or a Kanye song? The black Rap n B mainstream is further out sonically and attitudinally than anything the white Internet-Bohemia has come up with. Their role is redundant. Rap and R&B ... is already the Simulacrum, is already decadence."

In a 2018 Rolling Stone article that reported the Monkees' Mike Nesmith's enthusiasm for the genre, author Andy Greene described vaporwave as a "fringe electronic subgenre that few outside irony-soaked meme enthusiasts have even heard of, let alone developed an opinion on." Nesmith praised the genre and attributed its sound to be highly reminiscent of psychedelic trips.

Music critic Scott Beauchamp wrote that vaporwave's stance is more focused on loss, the notion of lassitude, and passive acquiescence, and that "vaporwave was the first musical genre to live its entire life from birth to death completely online". He suggested that expressions of hypermodulation – precisely tuned "micro-experiences" resulting from social media algorithms funneling different people with similar interests into obscure topics – inspired both the development and downfall of vaporwave.

### Capitalism and technology

Vaporwave is cited for espousing an ambiguous or accelerationist relationship to consumer capitalism. and a popular trend within its audience from 2015 to 2019 was to use vaporwave songs and music videos to escape reality by observing and remixing commercial products and popular trends of the past. Numerous academic books have been published on this subject, a trend that was provoked by Adam Harper's 2012 Dummy article and its attempt to link the genre to punk rock and anti-capitalist gestures. In the article, he wrote that vaporwave producers "can be read as sarcastic anti-capitalists revealing the lies and slippages of modern techno-culture and its representations, or as its willing facilitators, shivering with delight upon each new wave of delicious sound." He noted that the name itself was both a nod to vaporware and the idea of libidinal energy being subjected to relentless sublimation under capitalism.

Music educator Grafton Tanner wrote, "vaporwave is one artistic style that seeks to rearrange our relationship with electronic media by forcing us to recognize the unfamiliarity of ubiquitous technology ... vaporwave is the music of 'non-times' and 'non-places' because it is skeptical of what consumer culture has done to time and space". Commenting on the adoption of a vaporwave- and seapunk-inspired rebrand by MTV International, Jordan Pearson of Motherboard, Vice's technology website, noted how "the cynical impulse that animated vaporwave and its associated Tumblr-based aesthetics is co-opted and erased on both sides—where its source material originates and where it lives". Beauchamp proposed a parallel between punk's "No Future" stance and its active "raw energy of dissatisfaction" deriving from the historical lineage of Dada dystopia, and vaporwave's preoccupation with "political failure and social anomie".

Michelle Lhooq of Vice argued that "parodying commercial taste isn't exactly the goal. Vaporwave doesn't just recreate corporate lounge music – it plumps it up into something sexier and more synthetic." In his 2019 book Hearing the Cloud: Can Music Help Reimagine The Future?, academic Emile Frankel wrote that vaporwave was reduced to "a commercial shell of itself" by those who fetishized the 1980s and "retro synth-pop". He likened the scene to PC Music, a label that "was seen to warp from an ironic affirmation of commercialism, to become just regular pop. ... Anything that uses irony as a method of critique runs the risk of misrecognition."

## Offshoots and subgenres

### Future funk

Future funk is a French house-inspired offshoot that expands upon the disco and house elements of vaporwave. It involves much of the same visual imagery drawn from 1980s anime, with reference points including Urusei Yatsura, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, and Sailor Moon. Musically, future funk is produced in the same sample-based manner as vaporwave, albeit with a more upbeat approach. Most of the music samples are drawn from Japanese city pop records from the 1980s, and the genre has led to an increased exposure of city pop music to western audiences.

Some of the most popular future funk artists include Macross 82-99, who pioneered the genre with his Sailorwave album series in 2013, Other artists described as being the most popular in future funk include Skylar Spence (aka Saint Pepsi), Tsundere Valley, Ducat, and Yung Bae.

### Hardvapour

Hardvapour emerged in late 2015 as a reimagination of vaporwave with darker themes, faster tempos, and heavier sounds. It is influenced by speedcore and gabber, and defines itself against the utopian moods sometimes attributed to vaporwave. Hardvapour artists include wosX and Subhumanizer.

### Mallsoft

Mallsoft amplifies vaporwave's lounge influences. It may be viewed in connection to "the concept of malls as large, soulless spaces of consumerism ... exploring the social ramifications of capitalism and globalization". Popular mallsoft artists include Disconscious, Groceries, Hantasi, and Cat System Corp.

### Fashwave

Fashwave (from "fascist") is a largely instrumental fusion of synthwave and vaporwave that originated on YouTube circa 2015. It is also been described as an extremist subset of the non-extremist latter promoted by neo-Nazis. With political track titles and occasional soundbites, the genre combines Nazi symbolism with the visuals associated with vaporwave and synthwave. According to Hann, it is musically derived from synthwave, while Heavy contributor Paul Farrell writes that it is "considered to be an offshoot from the harmless vaporwave movement." A similar offshoot, Trumpwave, focuses on Donald Trump. Artists include CybernΔzi, Xurious, Andrew Anglin and Elessar.

### Others

- Eccojams: an early subgenre that, according to Lopatin, started out as a simple exercise looping up a slowed-down segment of a certain song while adding vibrating echoes.
- Vaportrap: emphasizes samples from video games and early 21st-century computer software, and themes on angst, desolation and modern technology.
- Simpsonwave: a YouTube phenomenon made popular by the user Lucien Hughes. It mainly consists of videos with scenes from the American animated television series The Simpsons set to various vaporwave tracks. Clips are often put together out of context and edited with VHS-esque distortion effects and surreal visuals, giving them a "hallucinatory and transportive" feel.
- Late night lo-fi (or late-nite lo-fi): slowed down 1980s pop and jazz that mimics recorded programs on old 4:3 televisions.
- VHS pop: a more positive variant of late night lo-fi with richer sound and vibrant aesthetics.
- Utopian virtual: using Ferraro's concept of a virtual life soundtrack, with crisp and unreal early 3D computer graphics.
- Signalwave (or broken transmission): sampling and distorting radio broadcasts, television programs, and stations, especially The Weather Channel.
- Slushwave: the ambient side of vaporwave, creating a musical environment to "get lost in". Artists include 2814 and desert sand feels warm at night.

## See also

Online musical genre and visual aesthetic


1964–1965 Scripto strike

Workers for the Scripto company in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, held a labor strike from November 27, 1964, to January 9, 1965. It ended when the company and union agreed to a three-year contract that included wage increases and improved employee benefits. The strike was an important event in the history of the civil rights movement, as both civil rights leaders and organized labor activists worked together to support the strike.

Scripto produced writing implements and lighters in the 1960s. Its main production facility was based in Sweet Auburn, an African-American neighborhood of Atlanta, and the company's workforce was primarily made up of black women. Since 1940, there had been various attempts to unionize the factory, including an effort by the United Steelworkers in the 1940s. By and large, unionization efforts were supported by members of Atlanta's black elite and by black church leaders in the area, who believed that a union could help improve the working conditions and wages for the workers. In 1963, the International Chemical Workers Union (ICWU) was able to unionize the plant. This came during the civil rights movement, and union organizers succeeded in part by tying their union drive to the larger fight for civil rights that was occurring throughout the country and especially in the southern United States, where the plant was located. Following the unionization, the ICWU sought to secure a labor contract with Scripto, but the company instead challenged the union in court, arguing that the union election had been unfair. After the National Labor Relations Board ruled against the company, they remained reluctant to negotiate with the union, and negotiations continued into November 1964. The main point of contention regarded wage increases, as the union wanted an eight-percent raise across the board while the company pushed for a four-percent wage increase for "skilled" employees and a two-percent raise for "unskilled" employees. The union argued that this was racially discriminatory, as almost all of the factory's white employees were considered skilled and nearly all of the African American employees were considered unskilled.

On November 25, the day before Thanksgiving, many workers gathered and announced plans for a labor strike. Working over the holiday to prepare picket signs and coordinate logistics, they began their strike on November 27, with about 700 workers performing a walkout. From the onset, the strike had the support of several civil rights organizations, including the A. Philip Randolph Institute, Operation Breadbasket, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the latter of which was led by Martin Luther King Jr. King was an avid supporter of the strike, as many of the strikers were congregants of his Ebenezer Baptist Church, and he helped coordinate a nationwide boycott of Scripto products. However, as the strike continued, both the union and company remained at an impasse in negotiations, and eventually, King began to negotiate in secret with company president Carl Singer over an agreement to end the strike. After several weeks of discussions, King agreed to call off the boycott if Singer agreed to give the striking employees their Christmas bonuses. This deal, which was made without the knowledge of the union, was announced on December 24 and saw an end to King or the SCLC's involvement in the strike. Union representatives were upset with King's actions, which some historians say may have constitute an unfair labor practice. However, by this time, the union's strike fund had been nearly depleted, and without the SCLC's support, they were willing to negotiate a compromise with the company. On January 9, 1965, the union and company signed a three-year labor contract that saw an across-the-board wage increase of \$0.04 per hour for every year of the contract. Additionally, workers improved employee benefits, such as additional vacation days and increased pay for working afternoon shifts.

In the aftermath of the strike, King received criticism from many different groups for his involvement, including labor activists and business leaders, and as a result, King and the SCLC refrained from involvement in another major labor dispute until the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968. Meanwhile, the company and the union developed a better relationship and jointly worked on a replacement to the "skilled"/"unskilled" system that had been at the root of the labor dispute. However, in 1977, with the Sweet Auburn facility considered outdated and the company facing increased competition, Scripto closed the plant and relocated to another facility in the Atlanta metropolitan area. The plant was eventually demolished and today the site is a parking lot for the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park. Discussing the strike in 2018, historian Joseph M. Thompson stated that, while it is primarily viewed by historians in the context of King's involvement and the larger civil rights movement, it also represents a longstanding history of labor organizing among African American women in Atlanta, comparing it to other events such as the 1881 Atlanta washerwomen strike and saying, "Within this broader context, the 1964 Scripto strike looks less like a product of the midcentury civil rights movements and more like a victory in the long fight for black women's economic rights in Atlanta".

## Background

### Scripto

The company now known as Scripto can trace its history back to the establishment of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta in 1908. In 1913, a young girl named Mary Phagan was found dead in the company's factory, and in the ensuing firestorm that followed, Leo Frank, the factory's superintendent, was lynched. The company's reputation suffered immensely from this series of events, and by the late 1910s, it had declared bankruptcy. However, local businessman Monie Ferst, who was the son-in-law of National Pencil's owner Sigmund Montag, believed that the company's factory on Forsyth Street in downtown Atlanta was still valuable and purchased the company from Montag in 1919, renaming it Atlantic Pen. Ferst was already the owner of M. A. Ferst Ltd., the only manufacturer of pencil lead in the United States at that time, and Atlantic Pen became a manufacturer of mechanical pencils. The company changed its name to Scripto in the 1920s. In 1931, the company built a new production facility east of downtown. The new plant was located at 425 Houston Street (now known as John Wesley Dobbs Avenue) in Sweet Auburn, an African-American neighborhood of Atlanta. From the 1930s through the 1960s, Scripto significantly expanded its operations, becoming a manufacturer of not only mechanical pencils, but also of pens and lighters. Additionally, from 1951 to 1954, the company operated an ordnance plant that produced artillery shells for the United States Armed Forces during the Korean War. By the 1960s, Scripto was one of the largest pen manufacturers in the country and one of the largest employers in the city. The company was selling its products internationally and was the world's largest producer of writing implements.

### Unionization efforts in the 1940s and 1950s

Following the company's relocation to Sweet Auburn, Scripto began to recruit employees from the local African American community for low-wage positions. Many black women viewed a job at Scripto as preferable to being a domestic worker for white Americans, and the company began to employ hundreds of black women at the factory. By 1940, roughly 80 percent of the plant's workforce was made up of African Americans. However, despite the perception of Scripto as a better employer than other options in the city, workplace discrimination against African American workers there was still persistent, and the company's management was still made up entirely of white people. In light of these issues, starting in the 1940s, there were several unionization efforts among the plant employees. In 1940, the United Steelworkers (USW) became the first labor union to attempt to organize the Scripto workers. Their efforts ultimately failed, with union organizers accusing the few white employees who worked in the factory of undermining support for the union.

In 1946, the USW again tried to organize a union at the Scripto plant, and following a union vote, they began to officially represent the workers in February of that year. The USW's success was due in large part to support from local black church leaders in the area, such as Martin Luther King Sr. King's church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, was located only a few blocks from the Scripto plant, and many of the Scripto employees were congregants of the church. USW official W. H. Crawford later wrote to King to express his gratitude, saying that King's support of the unionization effort resulted in its success. However, Scripto disputed the results of the union election and refused to collectively bargain with the union. As a result, the USW called for a strike on October 7, and over 500 of the company's 600 African American workers took part in picketing. The union's demands included a union contract, increased wages, paid vacations, and eight-hour shifts. The strike lasted for about six months, during which time the strikers were subjected to harassment from members of the Atlanta Police Department, which at the time included known members of the Ku Klux Klan. However, on March 22, 1947, with little to no progress made on achieving their goals, the USW called off the strike. Of the 400 workers who had remained on strike until the end, only 19 were rehired by Scripto, prompting the USW to file charges against the company with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), though the board later found the company free of any legal wrongdoing.

In 1947, following the end of the USW strike, local businessman and former politician James V. Carmichael became the president of Scripto. As a politician, Carmichael had served in the Georgia General Assembly in the 1930s and was a candidate in the 1946 Georgia gubernatorial election against Eugene Talmadge. Despite winning a plurality of votes, Carmichael lost the election to Talmadge due to Georgia's county unit system that was used in elections. As a businessman, Carmichael is known for his role in aircraft manufacturing, as he was an assistant general manager of the Bell Bomber Plant in Marietta, Georgia, during World War II and later convinced the Lockheed Corporation to locate a plant in the city. He viewed himself as a benevolent employer and took a paternalistic approach to management. In 1952, before a speech at his alma mater of Emory University, he stated that workers had been exploited by business owners in the past and that unionization was one way that workers attempted to fight back against those abuses but also criticized workers for "blindly" following union leaders and advocated instead for an "enlightened management" that would eliminate the need for unions altogether. On issues regarding race, Carmichael was viewed as either a moderate, and in the 1946 election, he openly criticized Talmadge, a white supremacist, calling his previous administration a "ranting dictatorship" and saying, "No one is going to invest money in industry when you have in the governor’s office a man who is continually stirring up race and class hatred and creating unrest in labor’s ranks". Additionally, Carmichael took pride in Scripto's hiring policies, as it was one of the first companies in the city to employ African Americans in production roles. During the 1950s, when Sweet Auburn was experiencing an economic downturn, Scripto was one of the few companies to continue to grow. During this same time, Carmichael turned down several offers to relocate the plant outside of the city, and company executives made it a point to continue to hire black women. However, during a unionization effort at the company's ordnance plant in 1953, Carmichael fired several of the workers who were involved before the plant shut down the following year.

### ICWU unionization

In late 1962, the International Chemical Workers Union (ICWU), an AFL–CIO-affiliated union that had had recent success in organizing smaller production facilities in the Atlanta metropolitan area, began a union drive at Scripto. The ICWU believed that the organization effort would be difficult, as the plant's overwhelmingly majority workforce of black women constituted a demographic that the union felt was not typically responsive to organized labor efforts. In an attempt to win support, the ICWU ensured that the drive focused not only on traditional labor activism topics but also on civil rights. The union called on James Hampton, an African American labor activist and Baptist preacher, to go to Atlanta and help with their organizing efforts. In discussions with the workers, Hampton compared his own work in labor organizing to the work of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., drawing a connection between the ICWU's organizing efforts and the activities of the nationwide civil rights movement. 1963 had been a momentous year for the civil rights movement, as many landmark events had taken place around the time that the ICWU was organizing the Scripto workers, including the Birmingham campaign in nearby Alabama, the Stand in the Schoolhouse Door following the desegregation of the University of Alabama, and the assassination of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers in Mississippi. Hampton also worked with black church leaders in Atlanta, such as King Sr., to get their support for the strike. Hampton was overall successful in getting African American clergy to support the ICWU's efforts, though one notable exception was William Holmes Borders, the pastor of Wheat Street Baptist Church, who declined to support the union drive because of his personal friendship with Carmichael.

By August 1963, the ICWU had obtained enough authorization cards that they could petition for an NLRB election. The company agreed to an election in late September. In the meantime, hoping to prevent a successful union vote, the company instituted several changes, including the formation of an employee committee and the removal of racial segregation signs from the plant's bathrooms and water fountains. In the ensuing six weeks, the union focused on building solidarity among the employees and assuaging fears over company reprisals against those involved in the union efforts, while the company focused on appealing to the goodwill that they felt they had fostered with longtime employees. On September 11, about two weeks before the vote was scheduled to take place, Carmichael gathered about 1,000 employees and gave a speech wherein he highlighted his progressive stance on race and urged the employees to vote against unionization, saying in part that "a vote for the union [would be] a slap in the face of one of the truest friends the Negro ever had in Georgia or in the entire South". However, to many workers, support for the union drive was tied to the civil rights movement, and in the weeks leading up to the vote, other notable events, such as King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C. and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, contributed to an atmosphere of heightened racial partisanship among the workers. On September 27, the election was held, and of the 1,005 employees who were eligible to vote, 953, or approximately 95 percent, did. Of these 1,005, 855 were African American. In a 519–428 result, the union won and became the official representative of the workers. Scripto employees were grouped under the local union of ICWU Local 754, which was made up almost entirely of black women.

A week after the election had taken place, Thomas C. Shelton of the Atlanta-based law firm Kilpatrick, Cody, Rogers, McClatchey & Regenstein, Scripto's legal counsel, filed objections with the NLRB, arguing that the union's use of racial rhetoric and drawing connections to the larger civil rights movement had caused the "sober, informed exercise of the employees' vote" to be impossible, rendering the election null. While the Regional Director of the NLRB rejected the objection, Shelton continued to argue that the results of the election was unfair, citing previous NLRB rulings regarding the use of race-related issues in influencing union votes. For instance, in 1962, the NLRB ruled in an election involving the Sewell Manufacturing Company that "appeals to racial prejudice in matters unrelated to the election issues ... have no place in Board electoral campaigns". Additionally, in a 1957 case involving the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, the NLRB stated that "the consequences of injecting the racial issue where racial prejudices are likely to exist is to pit race against race and thereby distort a clear expression of choice on the issue of unionism". Shelton also argued that the characterization of Carmichael and Scripto by the union was unfair and inaccurate and collected testimony from several prominent individuals that highlighted Carmichael's and the company's stance on race. Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College and a longtime friend of Carmichael, spoke positively of his positions on racial issues, while former mayor of Atlanta William B. Hartsfield said that Scripto was well known for their progressive stance on hiring African Americans. Finally, on June 9, 1964, after about ten months of petitioning, the NLRB denied Shelton's requests and awarded the ICWU a certificate of representation for Scripto.

### Contract negotiations

Despite the NLRB's awarding of a certificate of representation, the ICWU expressed dismay over the negotiations they were having with the company over the terms of a new labor contract. Jerry Levine, a labor activist from New York City who had joined the ICWU in October 1963, served as the representative for the ICWU in their negotiations with Scripto. Levine said that the contract negotiations lasted for about six months, during which time he said the company was "going through the motions" of bargaining in good faith, often spending weeks at a time discussing the contents of a couple of paragraphs. Additionally, important issues such as wages and other economic policies were not being addressed. As the negotiations continued, Levine began to believe that strike action was the only way to convince the company to agree to a contract, and while negotiations were ongoing, the union sought to strengthen its ties and increase support in the local community. Also during this time, Carmichael had been removed from his position of president by Ferst and placed in the ceremonial role of chairman. The move came due to Carmichael's poor health and a steady decline in Scripto's sales. For two years leading up to 1964, Scripto had had declining profits, which were attributed to labor costs and increased competition. In his new role, Carmichael was not involved in the contract negotiations and functioned mostly as a spokesperson for the brand. Carl Singer, a businessman who had previously worked in Chicago for the Sealy Mattress Company, was brought in to replace Carmichael as Scripto's president and chief executive officer. At the time, Singer was aware that there were contract negotiations, but was not made aware of the issues the company was having with the union. This corporate shakeup was kept private from the general public.

By November 1964, the company's proposal to the union would have seen a four-percent wage increase for workers categorized as "skilled" and two-percent wage increases for "unskilled" workers. At the time, unskilled workers at the factory were earning between \$1.25 and \$1.30 per hour, and the two-percent wage increase would have amounted to about \$0.03 more per hour. The union rebuffed with a proposal of an eight-percent wage increase across the board. The union also alleged that the company's proposed wage increase was not an actual pay increase, as the company was planning to offer the raises at the expense of its Christmas bonuses, which often amounted to about a week's pay. Additionally, the union called the company's proposal discriminatory, as only six African American workers at Scripto were considered skilled. The remainder of the company's skilled employees were white, while the rest of the African American employees were classified as unskilled. At the time, Scripto had about 700 African American employees, most of whom were women, and about 200 white workers. On average, these unskilled workers at Scripto earned \$400 below the national poverty threshold.

### Move toward strike action

On November 25, 1964, the day before Thanksgiving, workers constituting almost the entirety of the first shift met at the ICWU union hall on Edgewood Avenue, near the factory, and demanded that a strike be commenced. The action caught Levine off guard, and he was unsure what had prompted the sudden movement, though he speculated that it stemmed from disappointment from the workers' bargaining unit that had spread to the rank-and-file employees. While Levine felt that the timing was not right for the strike, he nonetheless acquiesced to the workers' demands, and they began to prepare for a strike. The employees worked over the holiday in order to have picket signs made for when the plant reopened on November 27, the day after Thanksgiving. Company executives who were on holiday vacations were alerted to the strike preparations, and many returned to Atlanta early.

## Course of the strike

### Early strike activities

The strike began on November 27, 1964, the day after Thanksgiving, with a walkout. Approximately 85 percent of the plant's workforce participated in the strike, made up primarily of about 700 black women. However, 117 skilled workers, which included six black men, did not participate in the strike. Under Georgia's right-to-work laws, the plant remained open during the strike, and according to the plant's general manager, the factory was continuing to operate under its three-shift schedule without interruption. Outside the plant, the striking employees carried picket signs with slogans such as "We're Human Beings — Not Machines" and "We Won't Be Slaves No More" and sang protest songs including "We Shall Not Be Moved" and "We Shall Overcome". In the first week of the strike, the Atlanta Daily World, the city's African-American newspaper, reported on the strike with front-page coverage. National news agencies also covered the strike, with their reporting focusing primarily on the racial issues at play. Through the course of the strike, Scripto hired replacement workers to keep the plant running, and they placed "Help Wanted" advertisements in many local newspapers, including the Daily World, which prompted controversy among the paper's primarily black readership. Meanwhile, strikers received a weekly strike pay of \$57 from the union, in addition to fringe benefits. The ICWU did not initially have the provisions in place to fund the strike, and for the first two weeks, Levine met with local labor leaders and activist groups to help fund the strike. While labor leaders were largely supportive of the strike and offered financial support, rank-and-file union members were less supportive.

### Initial attempts at mediation

A week after the strike began, representatives from the union and the company met with William S. Bradford, a mediator for the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, to attempt to resolve their issues. The main point of discussion in the meetings regarded the differences in pay increases between unskilled and skilled employees. The union viewed the issue as a racial one, as the company's proposal would have resulted in a vast majority of the African American workforce receiving a substantially lower raise than their white counterparts. Additionally, the union alleged that a reason for this was that the company did not offer training to African Americans that would have allowed them to be classified as skilled workers. The company rejected the union's view that the matter was primarily racial and instead argued that the dispute was a purely economic one. Throughout the strike, the company continued to downplay the racial aspect of the labor dispute. During these mediation sessions, both sides held to the same pay raise proposals that they had made before the strike. Additionally, the company's proposal would not have seen workers' union dues withheld from their paychecks. As a result, during the first few weeks of the strike, the two sides remained at an impasse in negotiations.

### Involvement of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

From the early days of the union drive, both King Jr. and King Sr., who were co-pastors at Ebenezer Baptist, voiced their support for the ICWU's efforts and kept up to date on the ongoings at Scripto. The younger King had grown up in the same neighborhood that the plant was in, which was only a few blocks from his house, and many of the employees who were involved in the union drive were church congregants, such as Mary Gurley, who was a leader of the strike and an influential member of the church. King Jr., who by this time was an internationally recognized leader in the civil rights movement, had returned to Atlanta in 1960 to pastor at Ebenezer. At that time, many members of Atlanta's black elite, which included Jesse Hill, Samuel Woodrow Williams, and the younger King's father, among others, did not want to see him engage in the same type of high-profile activism that he had been involved in elsewhere. The city's African American power brokers had spent years crafting agreements with the city's white power structure for racial progress, and many were fearful that the younger King's actions could jeopardize the status quo. While the younger King had kept a primarily low-profile during most of his time in Atlanta, he nonetheless engaged in civil rights activism within the city, such as his involvement in the Atlanta sit-ins in 1960. Early in the strike, The Wall Street Journal reported that the younger King was among several prominent African American leaders who supported the strike.

On November 29, the younger King, acting in his role as the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an Atlanta-based civil rights organization whose headquarters were only a few blocks from the plant, sent a telegram to Carmichael wherein he expressed his support for the strikers, criticized the company for being anti-union and racially discriminatory, and said that he would call for a boycott of Scripto products if the strike persisted. On December 1, King was scheduled to speak to a large group of strikers at a rally held across the street from the factory, but he was unable to attend the meeting due to a meeting he had with Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover that same day in Washington, D.C. The Reverend C. T. Vivian, who had moved to Atlanta in 1963 to become an executive in the SCLC, took his place, while other speakers included the Reverend Joseph E. Boone, Georgia State Senator Leroy Johnson, and union negotiator Phil Whitehead. SCLC executive Ralph Abernathy also became involved in the strike effort at this time and participated in picketing with protesting workers.

Vivian had been the primary voice within the SCLC for supporting the strike, as he viewed unions as a way for African Americans to attain economic equality based on his previous work experience in civil rights organizing in Illinois. By contrast, King's view of organized labor was more mixed. While he was a vocal advocate for economic justice and often solicited unions for financial support, he was also often critical of unions as hindrances to economic mobility for African Americans, as many unions in the United States at the time discriminated against black people and barred them from membership. Additionally, while some unions had supported King's March on Washington the previous year, the AFL–CIO did not, and many of their associated unions were not active in organizing workers in the southern United States. Overall, most of the support for the strike from black clergy and civil rights leaders in the city stemmed less from their support for organized labor and more from the fact that many of the strikers were members of their congregations. However, in a December 4 television interview, King stated, "We have decided that now is the time to identify our movement very closely with labor". While Vivian viewed the strike as a way to strengthen the bond between organized labor and the civil rights movement, SCLC executive Hosea Williams saw the strike as a way for King to buck the local black leadership and lead a demonstration in Atlanta, which was viewed as a major center for African American culture in the United States.

On December 4, King left Atlanta to travel to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. He spent about two weeks traveling during this time, including to London, New York City, and Washington, D.C., before returning to Atlanta on December 18. The next day, within 24 hours of returning, King marched in a picket line with several other protestors, including a union representative from the ICWU's international headquarters in Amsterdam. Coming so soon after his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance, the action helped to bring international attention to the strike. The following day, on December 20, King spoke to about 250 striking employees at a rally at Ebenezer Baptist. During the speech, he reiterated the SCLC's support for the strike and stressed the interconnectedness of the labor movement and the civil rights movement, saying, "Along with the struggle to desegregate, we must engage in the struggle for better jobs". Throughout the strike, King's involvement was highly criticized by many conservative groups. Local businessman and politician Lester Maddox placed an advertisement in The Atlanta Journal that called King and the SCLC activists "Communist inspired racial agitators", while Calvin Craig, a grand dragon of the United Klans of America, said that King was "overstepping the bounds of Christianity" by getting involved in the strike.

### Boycott

One of the biggest contributions that the SCLC had to the strike effort was in organizing a national boycott of Scripto products as a way to apply pressure to Scripto. Vivian contacted 2,500 SCLC affiliates to inform them of the boycott, and the organization made requests to merchants to remove Scripto displays from their stores. In addition, several other civil rights and labor organizations supported the boycott, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the A. Philip Randolph Institute, Operation Breadbasket, and the Atlanta Labor Council. Over 500,000 leaflets were printed and distributed to local unions across the United States asking them to respect the boycott. These leaflets featured a crying Santa Claus with a printed message reading, "Don't buy Scripto products". John Lewis, the chairman of the SNCC, wrote a letter to the General Services Administration (an independent agency of the United States government) urging them to also honor the boycott. At the time, Scripto held two contracts with the federal government of the United States, and Lewis stated in his letter that Scripto had been able to underbid other manufacturers for these contracts by engaging in "economic slavery" with their African American workers. The GSA responded that they would investigate the matter, specifically concerning whether Scripto was in violation of Executive Order 10925, which mandated equal opportunity in the workforce. However, nothing came of this investigation by the time the boycott ended.

### Negotiations between Singer and King and the end of the strike

At a meeting between union and company representatives on December 21, the company put forward a proposal that included a four-cent pay increase across the board. However, the union balked at the proposal, which would have still included the removal of the workers' Christmas bonuses. By this time, almost all parties involved in the strike were experiencing hardships caused by the labor dispute. Strikers were losing approximately \$50 a day in lost wages, while the ICWU had exhausted almost all of their strike funds. Additionally, leaders within the SCLC were worried about the potential negative consequences that a failed strike could have on their organization, which they had helped to elevate from a local issue to a nationally known issue. Meanwhile, the company, despite reporting that their production levels and sales were comparable to pre-strike levels, had seen their reputation damaged by the strike. Despite this, picketing continued, with Levine leading about 200 strikers on a march through downtown on December 23.

Unbeknownst to Levine and others in the union, over the course of several weeks, Singer and King had been in contact with each other and had discussed ways to bring the strike to an end. Singer, who had been unwilling to negotiate with the union, had telephoned King directly to negotiate with him, despite King having no authorization from the ICWU to act as a negotiator. Over the course of several weeks, King and Singer had four meetings at Scripto's headquarters, with very few people on either side being made aware of these meetings. During the discussions, both sides came to an agreement wherein King would have the SCLC end its boycott if the company agreed to give the workers their Christmas bonuses. King may have been willing to accept this agreement in part because he and the SCLC were planning for a campaign in Selma, Alabama, that would later include the Selma to Montgomery marches, and their planning was behind schedule.

This tentative agreement was reached on the evening of December 23, with Levine being alerted to it while at the march in downtown. A meeting was swiftly set up at Ebenezer Baptist between ICWU and SCLC officials, including both Kings and Levine, and SCLC member Andrew Young was responsible for informing the union officials of the agreement. Vivian was not present and may not have been invited due to his strong union support, as SCLC members may have felt that he would have strongly opposed the agreement. Upon first hearing of the agreement, which he believed was only a proposal, Levine objected to it, as he said that the Christmas bonuses would have been guaranteed in any settlement since the workers were legally entitled to them. Despite Levine's objections, the agreement was made public the next day, and both the boycott and any involvement between the SCLC and the strike ended on December 24. The union felt that King's actions had undermined the strike, and the secret meetings between King and Singer may have constituted an unfair labor practice, as the ICWU was the only legally recognized representative for bargaining with the ICWU workers they represented. However, the ICWU never took legal action on the matter. With the agreement in place between the SCLC and Scripto, the union spent the rest of the year working on a formal proposal that would see an end to the strike. Negotiations resumed on December 29, and though there were still some disagreements regarding pay, an agreement was reached shortly thereafter. On January 9, 1965, the union and company announced in a joint statement that they had come to an agreement on a new labor contract, and the strike was called off that day.

## Aftermath and legacy

### Terms of the contract

The three-year contract signed between the ICWU and Scripto was the first in the company's history and affected about 900 workers. As part of the contract, Scripto's employees received across-the-board wage increases, with an annual raise of \$0.04 every year for the three-year duration of the contract. In 1967, the minimum wage in the United States was increased from \$1.25 to \$1.40 per hour, and some of the workers who were making below this amount had their pay increases adjusted. Additionally, Scripto agreed to rehire 155 strikers whose positions had been taken over by replacements while also agreeing to retain the employees they had hired during the strike. Employees were also guaranteed an additional \$0.21 per hour for afternoon shift work and five paid holidays, as well as two weeks of paid vacation after a year of working for the company and a paid day for attending funerals. The company also instituted a training program that would make it easier for unskilled employees to become skilled employees. The company also agreed to officially recognize the union and instituted a system where union dues were automatically collected from employees' paychecks. Following the strike, the company began to work with the union to address issues regarding racial discrimination, and eventually the company's system of skilled and unskilled workers was replaced with a system of 22 different job grades that had been established in a joint effort between the company and the union. Additionally, King and Singer began to develop a better relationship following the strike, and during King's funeral in 1968, Scripto paid for security for the King family and also closed their plant to allow workers to pay their respects.

### Martin Luther King Jr.

King's involvement in the strike drew criticism from many people, including labor activists and business leaders. Among union organizers, King's secret negotiations with Singer were seen as an interference in the bargaining process. Meanwhile, both white business leaders and the black elite in Atlanta felt that King's actions had disturbed a system that they had in place that saw gradual civil rights progress in exchange for a deemphasis on overt protests. Additionally, some members of the city's African American community felt that Scripto had been an unfair target for civil rights activism, given the company's reputation in the community as a provider of stable jobs and their executives' commitment to hiring African American workers. On January 27, King was honored with a banquet in Atlanta to celebrate his winning the Nobel Peace Prize. However, many of the city's white business leaders voiced their displeasure with King's actions during the strike and initially threatened to not attend the event. In the immediate aftermath of the strike, King had vowed that there would be "more to come" with regards to working with labor activists, and in 1965, the SCLC considered training union organizers. However, given the poor reception of the Scripto strike, the SCLC and King generally refrained from involvement in labor issues. Additionally, Scripto and the ICWU excluded the SCLC from future negotiations after the initial three-year contract expired in the late 1960s. King would not become deeply involved in another labor strike until the Memphis sanitation strike of 1968.

### Later history

Through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Scripto faced increased competition from competitors such as Société Bic and Paper Mate. Additionally, the Sweet Auburn facility, which the company had operated for several decades, had become outdated. In December 1977, Scripto closed their Sweet Auburn facility and relocated their production to a plant in Doraville, Georgia. Through the later part of the 20th century, Scripto would be bought out by several larger conglomerates and their production facilities would be relocated out of Georgia, first to California and later to Mexico. The company continued to own the property in Sweet Auburn until the 1990s, by which point they had been abandoned for many years and were listed as a toxic waste site. This was part of a larger downward trend for the neighborhood, which experienced a severe economic decline through the 1980s and 1990s. Around this same time, The Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit organization, began to focus its efforts on combating urban decay in the area. The organization purchased the industrial area and paid for their demolition and asbestos removal. This was done in part as preparations for the 1996 Summer Olympics, which were held in Atlanta. That same year, The Trust for Public Land turned over the property to the National Park Service, and today the land is home to a parking lot for the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park.

Discussing the strike in 2018, historian Joseph M. Thompson of Mississippi State University said that, while the strike is primarily viewed by historians only in the context of King's involvement and the relationship between the civil rights movement and the labor movement, it also reflected a tradition of organized labor among black women in Atlanta. He points to the previous unionization attempts at the plant as evidence of this and ties the 1960s strike to other moments in the history of Atlanta, such as the 1881 Atlanta washerwomen strike. According to Thompson, "Within this broader context, the 1964 Scripto strike looks less like a product of the midcentury civil rights movements and more like a victory in the long fight for black women's economic rights in Atlanta."

Labor strike in Georgia, United States

December 1964 events in the United States

History of African-American civil rights

January 1965 events in the United States

Labor disputes led by the United Food and Commercial Workers

November 1964 events in the United States


2013 Bahrain GP2 Series round

The 2013 Bahrain GP2 Series round was a pair of motor races held on 20 and 21 April 2013 at the Bahrain International Circuit in Sakhir, Bahrain as part of the GP2 Series. It was the second round of the 2013 GP2 Series and was run in support of the 2013 Bahrain Grand Prix. The first race, a 32-lap feature event, was won by Racing Engineering driver Fabio Leimer from pole position. Stefano Coletti finished second for Rapax and Caterham Racing driver Alexander Rossi took third. Sam Bird won the following day's 30-lap sprint race for Russian Time, with Carlin's Felipe Nasr second and Coletti third.

Leimer held off the fast-starting Coletti to keep the lead and pulled out an significant gap in the following laps before ceding the lead to Adrian Quaife-Hobbs for ten laps after a mandatory pit stop for tyres. Leimer retook first place after Quaife-Hobbs's pit stop and held the position to win the race. Tom Dillmann started from pole position in the sprint race but lost the lead to teammate Bird before the end of the first lap. Coletti and Nasr gained on Bird in the final two laps as his tyres were worn. Coletti bowed out after running wide and lost second to Nasr before the final lap and Bird held off Nasr to win the race by 0.080 seconds, the closest margin of victory in GP2 Series history.

Leimer's feature race win was his second of the season and Bird's sprint event victory was the first for Russian Time after it took over from ISport International. Leimer lowered Coletti's lead in the Drivers' Championship to one point Nasr maintained third position and Bird's victory moved him to fourth. James Calado performed poorly and fell to fifth. Carlin lowered Rapax's lead in the Teams' Championship to two points. Racing Engineering fell to third and Russian Time moved to fourth with nine rounds left in the season.

## Background

The 2013 Bahrain GP2 Series round was the second of eleven scheduled events in 2013. It was held on 20 and 21 April 2013 at the Bahrain International Circuit in Sakhir, and supported the 2013 Bahrain Grand Prix. Tyre supplier Pirelli brought the yellow-banded soft compound tyres and the orange-banded hard dry compound tyres to the race.

Before the race Rapax driver Stefano Coletti led the Drivers' Championship with 36 points, eleven ahead of Fabio Leimer in second, who in turn, was a further point in front of Felipe Nasr in third. James Calado was fourth on 18 points and Stéphane Richelmi in fifth was six points behind him. Rapax led the Teams' Championship on 42 points; Racing Engineering was seven points behind in second and Carlin were in third with 32 points. ART Grand Prix were in fourth position with 18 points and Arden International were one point behind in fifth. Leimer and Coletti had won the season's previous two races in the opening round in Sepang three weeks prior. Calado and Nasr each took one second-place finish and Mitch Evans had finished in third once.

A total of 26 drivers making up 13 teams were entered for the round with all of them piloting the Dallara GP2/11 car. There were two driver changes for the round. Having been in one of the Caterham Racing cars in the preceding round in Sepang, Ma Qinghua was replaced by the former Formula Renaullt 3.5 Series driver Alexander Rossi for the rest of the year. Robin Frijns, the reigning Formula Renault 3.5 Series champion and test and reserve driver for Sauber, was employed by Hilmer Motorsport to drive in lieu of Conor Daly who left the team after Sepang since he was on a one-round contract with them.

## Practice and qualifying

One half an hour practice session was held on Thursday before the two races. Leimer for Racing Engineering set a benchmark which led the sole practice session—held in variable weather and on a warm track—at 1 minute, 41.361 seconds on the hard compound tyres, a second faster than any one else. His closest challenger was Sam Bird for Russian Time in second in front of third-placed Coletti. Rossi, Marcus Ericsson of DAMS, Nasr, Calado, Russian Time's Tom Dillmann, Johnny Cecotto Jr. of Arden International and Daniel Abt for ART Grand Prix were in positions four to ten. Frijns spun early on but recovered without external assistance. Smoke bellowed out of Cecotto's car at high-speed and he locked his tyres at turn one, overshooting into the sand. Julián Leal stalled at the exit of the pit lane and the stewards investigated whether his mechanics restarted the car outside the pit lane. Leal then narrowly avoided running into the rear of Rossi's car.

Friday afternoon's 30-minute qualifying session saw the drivers' fastest lap times determine the starting order for the first race. The pole position winner was awarded four points for the Drivers' and Teams' Championships. Qualifying began in cloudy weather and most of the field drove onto the track when it started. Rainfall after the first five minutes was not heavy enough to affect the track. Simon Trummer was the early pace setter but was soon eclipsed by his teammate Coletti, who in turn, was suppressed by Ericsson. Leimer then set a new GP2 Series lap record of the track, which he lowered to a 1 minute, 39.427 seconds lap to take pole position. Ericsson appeared to challenge Leimer for pole but slowed after losing time in the final third of the lap to join him on the grid's front row with a time almost a second slower. Nasr equalled his qualifying result from the 2012 round in third. Coletti improved his own fastest lap to go fourth. Dillmann was best of the late improvers and qualified fifth. Richelmi was close by in sixth. Rossi was in the top three early on but fell to seventh by the end. Adrian Quaife-Hobbs (MP Motorsport) locked his tyres on his lap and took eighth. Bird improved late in the session to secure ninth and Frijns took tenth.

Calado was the fastest driver not to qualify in the top ten and was demoted ten places on the grid for causing an accident at the previous round in Sepang. Trummer moved to eleventh and Palmer twelfth, followed by Cecotto and Abt. Sergio Canamasas (Caterham Racing) set the 16th-fastest lap but was sent to the back of the grid after being adjudged by the race stewards to have deliberately forced Trident's Kevin Ceccon off the track while attempting to pass him after qualifying. Kevin Giovesi (Lazarus) was also penalised after the stewards ruled that he impeded Cecotto between turns nine and ten and dropped three places on the grid. Mitch Evans (Arden International) was the only driver to be affected by electrical problem in his car and pulled off onto a run-off area. Evans was restricted to starting 16th. The rest of the field lined up as Ceccon, Leal, René Binder (Lazarus), Jake Rosenzweig (Addax), Nathanaël Berthon (Trident), Pål Varhaug (Hilmer Motorsport), Rio Haryanto (Addax) and Daniël de Jong (MP Motorsport).

### Qualifying classification

Notes:

- — James Calado was demoted ten places on the grid for causing an accident at the previous round of the season in Sepang.
- — Kevin Giovesi was given a three-place grid penalty for blocking another competitor during qualifying.
- — Sergio Canamasas was moved to the back of the grid after race stewards ruled that he had deliberately attempted to force Kevin Ceccon off the circuit.

## Races

The first race was held over 170 km (110 mi) or 60 minutes (which ever came first) and all drivers were required by regulations to make one pit stop. The first ten finishers scored points, with two given to the fastest lap holder. The grid for the second race was determined by the finishing order of the first but the first eight drivers were in reverse order of where they finished. It was run for 120 km (75 mi) or 45 minutes (which ever came first). In contrast to the prior race drivers were not required to make pit stops. The top eight finishers earned points towards their respective championships.

### Feature race

The first race commenced on 15:45 Arabia Standard Time (UTC+03:00) on 20 April. The weather at the start was dry and sunny with an air temperature of 33 °C (91 °F) and a track temperature of 41 °C (106 °F). Ericsson stalled on the grid while the field began the formation lap and had to begin from the pit lane. As the five red lights went out to begin the race, Leimer held off the fast-starting Coletti to lead the field in the opening sequence of corners. Coletti had forced Leimer to defend the lead at turn four and drew alongside through turns five and six but failed to overtake. Bird made a quick start, overtaking Rossi and Quaife-Hobbs on the centre of the circuit for third position. Palmer also made a fast getaway and ran in fifth place after passing Rossi on the main straight. De Jong became the first retirement after the first lap was over when he limped back to the pit lane. He was joined by Varhaug on lap five who had mechanical trouble.

Once the race had calmed down, Leimer was able to lead Coletti by two seconds by the start of lap five and set what was at that point the race's fastest lap. Both were also focused on ensuring their soft tyres lasted for as long as possible. The mandatory pit stops for the switch to the hard compound tyres began on the following lap when several drivers entered the pit lane. Quaife-Hobbs and Dillmann elected to run on an alternative strategy with the latter falling from fifth. During the pit stop sequence, Rossi re-passed Palmer and Frijns battled Leal for tenth and later Giovesi before his own stop. Canamasas was penalised for the second day running as the stewards imposed a drive-through penalty on him, deeming him to have deliberately forced Calado off the circuit. Bird and Nasr had slow pit stops and both drivers fell down the order. Leimer and Coletti made their stops from the top two at the end of the 10h lap and emerged ahead of those who had already made their pit stops.

Leimer's advantage over Coletti had dwindled to 1.3 seconds but he regained some of that lead by overtaking the battling Evans and Giovesi at turn four. Coletti was then delayed by the same traffic jam and was three seconds adrift of Leimer. The yet-to-stop Quaife-Hobbs led and was followed by Dillmann, Leal and Giovesi. Dilmann made his pit stop on the 18th lap and Leal followed on the next lap; Leal stalled as he drove away from his pit box and required assistance from mechanics to restart his car. He subsequently received a penalty for pit lane over-speeding. On the 20th lap and having led the last ten laps, Quaife-Hobbs was the last driver to enter the pit lane and Leimer regained first. Quaife-Hobbs fell behind Dillmann but re-passed him after getting his tyres up to temperature. Frijns moved to the inside of Richelmi on lap 21 into turn one but went into the side of Richelmi's car, damaging his front wing. Frijns drove slowly to the pit lane for repairs but Richelmi had to abandon his damaged car on the circuit. Evans became the race's final retirement on the 25th lap when he stopped on a run-off area with smoke bellowing from his car due to debris penetrating the radiator and overheating the engine.

Attention focused on a battle for seventh between Quaife-Hobbs, Dillmann and Trummer, which saw Trummer passed by the other cars in quick succession on lap 28. Nasr passed teammate Palmer for fifth on lap 30. Leimer held the lead for the rest of the race to achieve his second victory of 2013 and the fourth of his career. Coletti followed 1.9 seconds later in second and Rossi took third. Off the podium, Nasr finished close behind Rossi in fourth place with his teammate Palmer in fifth. Bird slowed in the closing laps but held on to take sixth and fellow Brit Quaife-Hobbs was seventh. Dillmann came in eighth and secured the pole position for the sprint race. Trummer and Cecotto finished ninth and tenth. Outside the top ten, Ceccon finished eleventh having moved up six from his starting position and Calado came twelfth. Ericsson recovered from his formation lap stall to take 13th. Abt, Haryanto, Rosenzweig, Berthon, Binder, Leal, Canamasas and Frijns rounded out the 21 classified finishers.

#### Feature race classification

Drivers who scored championship points are denoted in bold.

### Sprint race

The second race began at 10:50 local time on 21 April. The weather t the start were dry and sunny with an air temperature of 30 °C (86 °F) and a track temperature at 42 °C (108 °F). On the grid, pole position starter Dillmann made a clean getaway to hold off Quaife-Hobbs and keep the lead into the first corner. Quaife-Hobbs attempted to steer onto the inside but ran wide which contributed to some contact within the field. Coletti made a fast start and moved from seventh to third by driving on the outside at turn one. Bird initially got away from his starting position slowly but Quaife-Hobbs's blocked Coletti and allowed him into second place on the inside. Rossi was clipped by Nasr into the first corner, breaking Rossi's front wing. Leimer was on the inside into turn one and Rossi's nose cone made contact with the sidepod and the turning vane of Leimer's car. This affected Leimer for the rest of the event as debris was lodged in his car's sidepod. Haryanto and Ericsson both sustained damage after they hit each other and went to the pit lane before resuming.

Bird drew close to teammate Dillmann and overtook him for the lead exiting the final corner. Dillmann fought back against Bird driving towards the first turn and the two went alongside each other. The two made minor contact in turns one and two, allowing Coletti to get a run on Dillmann and passed him for second. On the next lap, Nasr went to the inside of Dillmann into the first corner and took over third. Calado lost seventh to Palmer on lap four and withstood Abt, his teammate. The field settled down as drivers looked to conserve their tyres, and the top three pulled away from Dillmann. On the sixth lap, Bird came upon a large chunk of debris intto the first corner and locked his tyres trying to avoid running over it. Bird appeared to escape unhindered and the debris was removed by a trackside marshal. Further down the field, a battle for fifth place involved Quaife-Hobbs, Leimer and Palmer. By lap seven, one second covered the trio and Leimer looked for a way past Quaife-Hobbs but was cautious not to allow Palmer to take advantage of the situation. Further back, Berthon lost two positions after Evans and Leal overtook him.

The damage to Ericsson's car became too problematic for him and became the race's sole retirement at its midway point while Binder visited the pit lane twice, putting him a lap behind the leader. Tyres began to show signs of degradation during this period and more action was observed: Ceccon passed Rosenzweig for 11th and caught Cecotto. Canamasas battled with Trummer over who would be the first driver to pass the ailing Berthon who elected to make a pit stop for new tyres. Frijns appeared to falter and fell behind Richelmi, Evans and Leal in quick succession to 16th. Quaife-Hobbs was inexperienced in tyre management in GP2 and him delaying Leimer meant the latter came under pressure. On the 19th lap, Palmer overtook Leimer on the inside at turn one for sixth after the latter ran wide in an attempt to defend position. Calado followed through for seventh at the fourth corner. Quaife-Hobbs's tyres were heavily worn and fell to eighth position when Calado, Palmer and Abt overtook him.

As the race entered its final two laps, Coletti and Nasr gained on Bird whose tyres were worn out. The pressure on Bird was temporarily relieved when Coletti locked his tyres heading towards the tenth corner and then braked deep for the final turn. He overshot the corner and allowed Nasr through to second. Coletti appeared to have flat-spotted his tyres as a consequence and could not remain on the track and his chances for the victory were over. Nasr appeared to manage his tyre life better than other drivers and quickly drew close to Bird on the final lap and pulled alongside him under braking for the final turn. Bird went defensive and controlled the wheelspin in his tyres. Nasr got out of Bird's slipstream but could not pass Bird who held on to win the race. The margin of victory was 0.080 seconds, the closest in GP2 Series history. Coletti took third with a comfortable margin over Dillmann in fourth. Calado was fifth, Palmer sixth, Abt seventh and Quaife-Hobbs eighth. Leimer, Ceccon, Canamasas, Cecotto, Richelmi, Trummer, Evans, Leal, Giovesi, De Jong, Rosenzweig, Rossi, Varhaug, Berthon, Frijns, Haryanto and Binder were the final classified finishers. Bird's victory was the first for Russian Time after it took over ISport International.

#### Sprint race classification

Drivers who scored championship points are denoted in bold.

## Post-race

The top three drivers of both races appeared on the podium to collect their trophies and to participate later in a press conference. Leimer revealed his objective for the feature race was to execute a fast start but in spite of struggling which almost lost him a position to Coletti, declared himself "very happy" as he had waited for some time to achieve another victory in the GP2 Series. When asked if he was not worried about heavy overtaking and tyre management, he replied yes, "but I was much quicker than them so I was not using my tyres that much. It’s not the perfect situation for the tyres, but I still managed to save them." Coletti said he was happy with his team but felt he could have pushed harder earlier in the race due to the fear of wearing his tyres and decided to not take the risk. He commented that he did not inform his team he observed Leimer entering the pit lane on the same lap as him and believed he could have stayed on track for one additional lap. Rossi revealed his apprehension about how his tyres would behave and was uncertain on how to push it but was happy to finish third.

Bird said his victory in the sprint race felt "fantastic", "Being back in GP2 is already feeling very good, being back in the feeder series to Formula One is a great place to be. To win for RUSSIAN TIME after only four races of existence is a very good feeling." He believed that he may have pushed too hard in the wrong time of the race, "it was just a case of keeping it on the racing line and hoping they'd battle it out behind me. Felipe's car was like a rocket at the end. Big thanks to my new team: to win in our fourth race, with no pre-season testing, is amazing." Nasr spoke about car management and maintaining the pace levels with the leaders and believed he could have won in an alternative situation, adding, "But anyway, it’s still a good result. We came here to score big points and it’s quite good to go back to Europe knowing that we have a good car, a good team. It keeps getting better and better. I’m feeling quite confident." Coletti believed his third-place finish contributed towards "a good weekend" for himself and commented that entering the season's European leg leading in points had given him more motivation and hoped to compete at the front of the field in Barcelona, "We’re still a few points ahead – ten I think. But like I said, we need to score big points in Race 1 and I think that in Barcelona we’ll be in the front."

After the round, Coletti still led the Drivers' Championship but Leimer lowered his lead to one point less than it had been before the round. Nasr remained in third place on 48 points. After being in ninth beforehand, Bird moved to fourth position with 33 points while Calado fell to fifth on 24 points. Rapax kept the lead of Teams' Championship although their lead over Carlin was cut to two points. Racing Engineering's results dropped them to third while Russian Time were now in fourth having moved up from seventh. Arden International was fifth with nine rounds left in the season.

## Standings after the race

Drivers' Championship standings

Teams' Championship standings

- Note: Only the top five positions are included for both sets of standings.

Pair of motor races at the Bahrain International Circuit