In the early 1900s, textile mills in North Carolina were filled with children, working 10 to 12 hours, six days a week. In 1908, the National Child Labor Committee hired photographer Lewis Hine to capture their working conditions in an effort to publicize the conditions and lobby elected officials to make changes and enforce laws.
Forty of the images Hine took make up an exhibit at the N.C. Museum of History, "The Photography of Lewis Hine: Exposing Child Labor in North Carolina, 1908 -1918." It opens Friday.
The exhibit features children in mills across the state including Catawba, Cabarrus, Gaston, Lincoln and Rowan counties. "If I had to use one word to describe them, I would say 'haunting,'" says B.J. Davis, education section chief at the museum and the exhibit's project manager. There are girls running warping machines, boys covered in lint after long hours as doffers and sweepers. Doffers replaced bobbins on spinning machines.
Over time, after Hine's images began appearing in newspapers, they helped draw attention to the exploitation of children. Yet they also drew debate.
"Some people thought they were too explicit, and some thought they weren't explicit enough," Davis says. "I think that's because many of them were posed. But Hine formed a connection with his subjects, and so do you. You're able to look in their eyes and get a feeling for who they are. They're not just people. He humanizes them."
Keeping careful notes
Hine, a former teacher, was hired by the committee in 1908, after attracting notice for his images of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. Davis says he used a lot of ploys to gain access to the mills, including donning disguises and making up identification cards. When he couldn't get in a mill, he snapped photos of the children coming to and from work, carefully documenting their age and length of time at work on a notepad he hid in his jacket. Hines died in 1940.
Some of the children captured by Hine's lens have relatives still living in the state. In fact, when some of Hine's images were put on display by the Gaston County library a few years ago, a UNC-Chapel Hill professor had his students track down some of those relatives, Davis says. He's since heard from a genealogist who has found some 250 living relatives of Hine's subjects.
That's just one of the ways the powerful images can resonate with visitors, says Davis. "The historical links to the state's textile industry helped create the new South, bringing North Carolina into the 20th century," he says. "These images provide a window into both a historic period in North Carolina that was transformative, yet is for the most part gone. But the story has been transported to Cambodia and Taiwan and Sri Lanka.
"And with Latino and migrant workers, it's still a big issue here," he says.
