Wilbur Hobby

Wilbur Hobby (November 8, 1925 – May 9, 1992) was an American labor unionist.

Wilbur Hobby was born in Durham in 1925, the son of a bricklayer and a cleaning lady who divorced when he was eight years old.

The family struggled to make ends meet throughout most of his childhood.

Sometimes, he had to skip school to pick up free groceries for the family, which included four brothers.

Hobby moved more than twenty times, usually within the blue-collar Edgemont section of Durham.

His father abandoned the family when he was seven or eight years old.

Hobby dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

He then worked various odd jobs, including as the Durham Bulls first uniformed batboy.

For a brief period of time, he moved to Dayton to work as a trainer for a minor league baseball team, the Dayton Ducks.

Hobby returned to Durham in 1942.

He stated that "[t]he war was going on and November rolled around and I became seventeen and so I threatened to kill myself if my mother didn't sign for me to get into the navy".

Hobby served in the South Pacific.

His ship participated in the retaking of the Philippines.

His oldest brother, however, did not survive the war; he was killed in Saint-Lô, France, in 1944.

Hobby also saw action near China before he was discharged in 1946.

Hobby returned to Durham in 1946.

He took a job at the American Tobacco Company's plant in Durham as a machine oiler for 75 cents per hour and joined the Tobacco Workers International Union without much thought.

In fact, Hobby had developed some anti-labor sentiments during the war, viewing workers who went on strike as Selfish while soldiers risked their lives defending the right to strike.

Hobby credits a specific instance during a night shift as changing his attitude towards unions.

His tasks suddenly were split onto two floors instead of just one, making it extremely difficult to get everything required done in the allotted time.

When he asked a friend what to do about the situation, Hobby was referred to their union representative.

A day later, all was back to normal, and Hobby had discovered how a union could provide security and stability in the workplace.

He went to the next meeting simply to express his gratitude, and he guessed that he ended up going to every successive one for the next fifteen years.

Hobby's interest in the union was duly noted, and he was soon elected president of the plant's night shift.

During the Korean War, Blacks were not required to eat at separate tables from whites (President Truman legally desegregated the armed forces in 1948).

Despite his expectations of an awful experience, Hobby decided to sit with two Blacks one day.

Reflecting back on the experience years later, Hobby said, "I was visibly surprised when I didn't feel any physical pain. I was … twenty-five years old and expecting physical pain just because I sat down and ate with them".

Upon his return to Durham, Hobby decided to enroll at Duke University, where he studied political science and labor economics.

He combined this with his old job at the tobacco plant and also became the editor of the Durham Labor Journal, a pro-union publication.

Hobby's tenure was short-lived, however, because he was called back into the U.S. Navy in 1950 during the Korean War.

He served for 18 months.

During this time period, Hobby's opinion on racial issues began to take on their mature form.

Feeling overworked, Hobby dropped out of Duke a semester short of graduation in 1955.

This aided Hobby's rise in the labor movement.

He was the president of the North Carolina chapter of the American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) from 1969 to 1981.

Hobby also was active in North Carolina politics, running unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for Governor in 1972.

Hobby strove to provide security and stability to the working lives of ordinary people, something he never had as a child.

He used politics as a means to this end, but he entered the field at a time when segregationist forces were still very strong in the South.

Hobby attempted to counter this by promoting a populist message that crossed racial lines that he hoped would become part of mainstream political conversation in North Carolina.

However, his career ended in scandal with a conviction on felony corruption charges in 1981.