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His sins were many, under the law of the land, and his penance, severe.

For organizing the Piedmont Leaf strike of 1946 at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., a labor action that cast a long shadow on civil rights in the South, Philip Koritz was to be banished from North Carolina for life.

Still, just to be certain, the judge who set Koritz's penalty for a charge of resisting arrest on a picket line first sentenced the Local 22 director to six months' hard labor on a chain gang in Sparta, near the Virginia line.

Day in, day out, Koritz loaded boulders into a crusher, then carted the small rocks in a wheelbarrow up a plank. At dark, he downed a bowl of slop and fell on his bunk, arms and legs knotted, stomach and chest muscles turning to bands, like steel. Pushing rocks up a hill has that effect.

So when Koritz picked up his Unsung Hero award a month ago at the black-tie Sit-In Movement Inc. banquet in Greensboro, even an ageless Harry Belafonte confessed to doing a double-take: The erect, sturdy Koritz looks, and holds forth at 91, more like a man of 71.

But what about that arcane banishment order entered somewhere on a piece of microfiche in the Forsyth County Hall of Justice, or the forgotten mob scene that got Kor­itz ejected from North Carolina in the first place?

It is one tale he has rarely lingered over or paused to tell at all.

Yet there was a day, some 20 years back, when the union leader was en route to an international labor conference and rode a taxi in from an airport in the Philippines. There, an unmistakable smell hit him - the same smell that greeted him the day he arrived in Winston-Salem in 1944 .

It was not the sweet, pungent scent of flue-cured tobacco. It was the stench of neglect: sludge and raw sewage running down dirt streets and under the shotgun houses in what was disparagingly called "Monkey Bottom" - the black section where the lowest-paid R.J. Reynolds Tobacco workers lived.

Like Manila, Winston-Salem also had mansions, in magnolia-shaded Buena Vista, home to the families who ran the city's banks, factories, political boards and newspaper. Entrenched, linked by marriage, the families were the Haneses, the Chathams, the Grays and the Reynoldses.

But it wasn't until Koritz beheld the downtown skyline and the headquarters of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. - a 20-story scale version of the Empire State Building, designed by the same architects - that the New York City-born union organizer understood what lay ahead.

"I knew this was formidable," Koritz recalls of what was then the world's largest tobacco company, booming at the height of World War II. "I knew we were in for a fight."

As did his parents, Russian-born Jewish sweatshop organizers and activists before him, and both his sons, union organizers in his footsteps, Philip Koritz arrived on the scene of a fight that had already started.

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"I just can't believe our folks will permit outside interests to come among us and, by creating hatred through false statements and promises, tear down this house of protection which has taken us generations to build."

- Will Reynolds, brother of company founder R.J. Reynolds, in a personal letter to workers handed out by foremen the night before the vote in favor of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) by 65 percent of some 10,000 Reynolds employees

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The fight started in the usual way, at the usual place. That is, not at the top of the ladder, or the middle rung, not by anybody with anything to lose.

No, it broke out on the bottom, where someone had been kicked too many times and decided, one day, enough. No getting kicked today. And this being the South, before air conditioning, it goes without saying that June 17, 1943 , was warm and close.

The bottom rung of the world's largest tobacco company was actually upstairs, the fifth floor of No. 65, a leaf plant where a shift of 198 black women worked as 50-cents-an-hour stemmers, separating hard stems from dry leaves, expected to do this work more quickly than ever.

Why? Labor grew scarce stateside during World War II, and demand went up. Much of the male workforce in general went overseas, and just as GIs needed bullets to keep the war effort going, they needed Camels, too.

Step one of the cigarette-making process occurred in the leaf plant stemmeries. So in a sense, the fate of the granite giant towering over the Camel City rested in the hands of these 50-cents-an-hour workers.

But as black workers, according to the rule in factories across Jim Crow's South, they were automatically classified as "unskilled" and paid significantly less than white workers. This was true even though the stemmers, for example, needed years of experience to ply a fairly specialized trade and, as of 1943, had learned to operate new high-speed machines Reynolds had introduced.

It was the system, and it always worked in tobacco, textiles - everywhere. Divide and conquer. Keep the black workers resenting the whites for that 10 cents more an hour they made. Keep the white workers resenting the black workers for working so cheaply and making them fear for their jobs.

Keep them separate. That way, they never get to join forces in a ... shhhh. Real union, black and white.

So. Back to our warm, close June morning, and the fight about to break out. No one seems to recall the name of the widow with the five children who started the issue, complaining that she felt ill and couldn't keep up with her work on the stemming machine.

In retrospect, freezing the frame on history, this might seem an odd omission. Imagine if a black woman had sat down in the front of a transit bus in Montgomery, Ala., and no one had written down her name.

After all, the resulting leaf house sit-down would spread through eight other leaf plants, other Reynolds departments and even factories belonging to other owners in Winston-Salem, at the time the top industrial city in the state and the third-busiest industrial center in the South after Baltimore and Richmond.

The leaf strike that followed would challenge the status quo in a bell-jar-tight company town, lead to an early victory for civil rights and result in a key voter drive bringing the first political defeat of a white candidate by a black challenger in the 20th century not only in the state, but also in the South .

Yet the widow's name appears nowhere in "Civil Rights Unionism," a scholarly 2003 study by Duke historian Richard Korstad, nor in "The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.," the long-embargoed corporate history written by Nannie Tilley in 1964 and published in 1984.

Then again, considering the tragic, jaw-dropping moment that was about to set the sit-down in motion, it's understandable why everyone forgot all about the widow.

No one forgot the name of James Pickens McCardel, 38. He was the longtime truck pusher who stood up, according to both Korstad's and Tilley's accounts, to say that the men of the casing room in charge of bringing tobacco into the stemmery would stand in support of the women.

No sooner did the words leave his mouth than McCardel fell dead on the leaf house floor.

The cause: an apparent brain hemorrhage that the workers, fairly or unfairly, blamed on overwork. McCardel had been ill, but afraid to go home sick.

Either way, they had a casualty before the walk-out even began. And in the days that followed, in the tranquil city of Tanglewood and Buena Vista, thousands of black R.J. Reynolds workers, as well as some white workers, walked out of the factories.

Joining them were sympathetic Brown & Williamson workers, maids and bell men from the Robert E. Lee Hotel. Hardly a straw to break Joe Camel's back. But enough to disturb the placid view from the 20th floor of the art deco building that looked like the Empire State Building.

Only smaller.

 * * * * *

"The Municipal Court ... demonstrated in forceful manner the determination of the local courts to discourage mob violence and the reign of chaos and anarchy in community life."

- editorial by Winston-Salem Journal Editor Santford Martin, appointed to Emergency Citizens Committee by Robert M. Hanes, Wachovia Bank president and major Reynolds stockholder

 * * * * *

All the faces and the names are disentangled now, 66 years later . Bowman Gray Sr.'s son - not the former RJR chairman, but the other one, Gordon - doesn't own the Journal anymore, and RJR isn't RJR.

And that skyward-reaching, white-domed Wachovia Tower seen for miles from the interstate that's now owned by ... who? Wells Fargo? It sits on the spot where the union hall was in 1945: Local 22 of the FTA - Food, Tobacco and Agricultural Workers.

Though, of course, you could just leave out food and agriculture, because just in terms of tobacco, just in terms of Reynolds, 6,833 employees voted to bring in the CIO that night after old Will wrote them that letter from his fishing camp in Florida. And there was no union hall big enough to hold a crowd like that, in the city or in the state.

But seeing as this was now a biracial union, that would technically have offended the sensibilities of Jim Crow anyway because Jim Crow dictated separate facilities for black and white. So Local 22 met at a nearby schoolyard and started drawing up a list of wage, hour and working condition demands.

Each elected position had a black officer and a white officer. Koritz met with every plant, every shift, and the long process of contract negotiation started. It remained peaceful, mostly.

But as Duke's Korstad documents in "Civil Rights Unionism," direct action by black workers threatened the old patronage system by which certain "pet" leaders in the black community were rewarded with schools, hospitals and other white charitable works.

As pointed out in the official RJR history commissioned by Bowman Gray Jr. - the one that didn't see the light of day for 20 years - the Journal in May 1947 ran a front-page exposé, a taste of the Red Scare to grip Washington with the rise of Sen. Joe McCarthy in 1950.

The headline, stretched across the front page, came as contract negotiations with Reynolds were to resume: "Communist Union Collusion in City is Exposed."

In the coming days, the paper published a front-page box listing all Local 22 officers, "14 of whom were shown to be members of the Communist Party."

But for Koritz, the worst had already occurred: a melee in which police and picketers had clashed. Police Chief John Gold, wielding a billy club, personally assisted in the arrests, according to court testimony.

The Local 22 director, rushing to the scene, had told police to unhand a man who was a Reynolds employee and not a picket-line participant.

A Journal photo showed Koritz, cigarette calmly dangling from his mouth, stopping the end of the officer's billy club with his hand as he was charged with resisting arrest.

Meanwhile, three black Local 22 members also faced charges, including a pregnant worker who became hysterical as police loaded her into a cruiser.

The magistrate ended up letting Koritz return to the picket line if he promised to get the crowd to go home. The picketers did.

A front-page editorial in the Journal, published by the Reynolds chairman's son, praised the police and condemned the protesters.

"The difference between civilization and barbarism can be summed up in one word - LAW. ... Thus, the Journal joins with all sincere Americans in support of Law and the officers charged with its enforcement."

In the end, Local 22 got the contract, got the raise and a good resolution, and Koritz went back to his family in Boston, then San Francisco and wherever the CIO sent him next.

There was just one problem: his court date in North Carolina. He could refuse extradition. No way they would come for him. But what about the three black workers?

"What does a person do?" he asked aloud recently at his son Richard's house in Greensboro, tired from the civil rights Sit-In dinner, his story almost over now.

"Here I am 91 years of age, and I still don't know. The average worker is tied, more or less, to their family and their work. They can't say, 'Hell, I'll leave North Carolina and move to San Francisco.' I made a decision that it wouldn't be fair for the white person to escape and the black workers to pay the price."

So when his court date came up for resisting arrest, Koritz stood with his three co-defendants, who like the rest of the key players from the leaf strike of 1946 are all long since gone: Margaret DeGraffenreid, Betty Keels Williams, Cal Jones.

And for the next six months in the mountains near the Virginia border, away from his wife and son, he lifted boulders into a crusher and pushed a cart of rocks up a hill.

Labor made him strong. It might have made him live this long.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com