Summerville resident Terrence Fitzroy Smith and his father together clocked more than a half century of working at the recently shuttered WestRock paper mill in North Charleston.
During Smith’s and his father’s time at the plant, they each reached milestones in the mammoth factory on the Cooper River that provided high-paying skilled jobs for Lowcountry families since West Virginia Pulp and Paper (Westvaco) opened the plant on July 1, 1937.
Within a year after Smith’s father, Henry Nathaniel Smith, a Navy veteran from Edisto Island, was hired at the plant in January 1964, he became the plant’s first black employee in the maintenance department. In 1965, the federal Civil Rights Act outlawed workplace discrimination, among other things, and led Westvaco’s management to move Smith over the color line.
Born the year after his father arrived at the plant, Terrence Smith spent four years in the U.S. Army and then he followed his father to the paper mill in 1987. He was certain the plant could provide him a good income like his father. Eventually, Terrence Smith was elected the first black president of the mill’s maintenance union.
On May 2, 2023, WestRock announced it would close the facility and put 500 people out of work. One year later to the day Smith was the last employee to walk out of the silent plant that sounded like a whining jet engine at full production. The day before, WestRock sold the 280-acre site to the S.C. State Ports Authority (SPA) for $105 million.
The SPA will use the WestRock site to expand its North Charleston terminal, the agency has said.
It’s a family affair
A father-son duo was not unusual at WestRock. The employee rolls included many husband-wife pairs and sibling sets, said Smith, whose wife Kim Smith worked 22 years at the mill. During her time, she was elected president of the mill’s steel workers union.
“Plants close every day in America, but when it is knocking on your door, it is a different thing,” said Smith, adding that he’s confident he and other employees who didn’t retire will find work.
Smith said he feels a kinship with the millions of dollars of equipment in the mill that he kept running to make brown packaging materials, boxes for pizzas, kitchen counters and other paper-based products. All of it could be bound for the scrap heap, if it is not sold to another manufacturer, he lamented.
Jack Sharp, WestRock’s human relations manager at the North Charleston plant, told the Charleston City Paper that the plant was “an aging mill that made a product that other people made, and we just couldn’t make it efficiently.”
Most of the people employed at the plant a year ago have found work, Sharp said. “It turned out to be a good time to shut down a plant because people were finding jobs,” he said. “I feel good about where our people landed.”
A vestige of segregation
Henry Smith arrived at the plant under Westvaco’s ownership. He retired in 2000, a year before he passed away.
In January 2002, the company merged with Mead Corp. to become MeadWestvaco Corp. Six years later, MeadWestvaco sold the plant and its 1,000-worker labor pool to KapStone Paper and Packaging Corp. When WestRock acquired the plant in late 2018 from KapStone, Terrence Smith was among the plant’s 900 employees.
He arrived at the plant when it was a Westvaco mill. With each ownership change the workforce declined as automation crept in, he said.
As a mechanic in the plant’s maintenance department, Smith said he learned many life-enriching skills. On a few occasions, he also picked up tips from his father when their jobs overlapped.
Working alongside his father, a painter and carpenter, Smith said, “was exciting because most men still have that little kid inside that wants to please daddy.”
Henry Nathaniel Smith also had an unlikely mentor who helped him navigate a segregated and hostile workplace, Terrence Smith said.
Smith said his father often told the story of the day he was called to the personnel office and offered a job inside the Westvaco plant that was not available to Black employees who worked outside in the wood yard.
“The personnel officer told my dad ‘I see you painted while you were in the Navy, and we have a position to offer you,’” Smith recalled.
At that time, the elder Smith earned $2.09 an hour. He told his son the mill made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. The promotion came with a big raise. Smith recalled that his father said: ‘“Man, I’d be making $3.20 an hour. Yeah, I am going to do this!’”
Many of the White workers, however, didn’t want to work with Henry Smith. “So his boss gave him an assignment that he could do by himself,” Smith said.
The manager told Smith to remove all the signs in the plant that said “colored only or Black only and if [he] couldn’t take them down paint over them,” Terrence Smith said.
“The next thing that happened, the locker room out front at the guard shack that was for White employees was integrated,” Smith said. A less-equipped and smaller locker room was in a building closer to the plant, he added.
Smith said his father told him that “one of the most enlightening things that happened [to him came from] … Mr. Faulkner … when the White employees refused to work with him,” he said, “Mr. Faulkner walked over to him and said, ‘Look here young man, if you need help with anything you can come ask me, but I am not going to be able to help you when them [White] fellas are around.’”
Faulkner’s gesture, Smith said, opened a path for his father to become the plant’s first Black painter and, in turn, it inspired him to follow his father to the paper mill.
“That act of kindness,” Smith said, “paid off for my family a generation later.”
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