26 Facts About Lucille Thornburgh

Lucille Thornburgh was an American labor organizer.

Lucille Thornburgh edited the East Tennessee Labor News for many years.

Lucille Thornburgh was born on September 18,1908, in Strawberry Plains, Tennessee.

Lucille Thornburgh grew up two miles away from Strawberry Plains, in Rolling Hills, Tennessee.

Lucille Thornburgh was one of six children of Thomas and Harriet Swaggerty Thornburgh.

When Lucille Thornburgh was fourteen, her father sold his country store and farm and the family moved to Dayton, Tennessee.

Lucille Thornburgh attended Rhea County High School and graduated in 1924, just one year before the Scopes Trial would make Dayton the focus of intense media coverage.

The family moved to Knoxville shortly after her graduation; they struggled to make ends meet, and Lucille Thornburgh worked for three months at a nearby textile mill.

Lucille Thornburgh traveled across the country from 1926 to 1931, working in a variety of jobs including clerical work.

Lucille Thornburgh took courses at a local business college in Denver.

Lucille Thornburgh was a winding machine operator at the Cherokee Spinning Company, working fifty-hour weeks for less than ten dollars per week.

Lucille Thornburgh obtained a job as a file clerk for the Tennessee Valley Authority, where she was a diligent employee.

Lucille Thornburgh's activities organizing for the American Federation of Labor made her a minor target in anticommunist hearings during the 1940s and 1950s.

Lucille Thornburgh's name was listed as a suspected "red" during the 1942 House Un-American Activities Committee hearings.

Lucille Thornburgh was mentioned as one of the TVA employees suspected as having communist or socialist tendencies during a Senate questioning of TVA Chair David E Lilienthal.

Lucille Thornburgh did not engage in union activism on the job, arguing that the TVA "could take care of itself," but volunteered as an organizer for bakery and laundry workers in Knoxville.

Lucille Thornburgh was elected as the vice president of the Tennessee Federation of Labor in 1937.

Lucille Thornburgh was promoted and transferred to the TVA location near Wilson Dam in Alabama in 1939, but returned to Knoxville in 1942.

Lucille Thornburgh took a position with the American Federation of Labor in 1943.

Lucille Thornburgh faced gender discrimination from the local labor councils, who she said were unwilling to pay her more than the managing editor, even though she did the majority of the work on the paper.

Lucille Thornburgh faced pressure to reign in her radicalism from the more conservative Knoxville Labor Council.

Lucille Thornburgh was finally recognized as the primary editor on the masthead in 1962.

Lucille Thornburgh received a scholarship in 1947 to study labor and economic issues for a year at Ruskin College, learning more about the British trade union movement.

Lucille Thornburgh served on the board of the Highlander Folk School, but when the school became well known for its civil rights activism, the AFL forced her to choose between labor unionism and her role at the school.

Lucille Thornburgh participated in efforts to integrate Knoxville's lunch counters and restaurants.

Lucille Thornburgh was buried in the cemetery at Pleasant Grove Piney Baptist Church in Jefferson County, Tennessee.