• Page 361 →Corine Lytle Cannon (b. 1919). Always outspoken and assertive, Cannon is a political leader in her community. Her mother, Rosa Lytle, was self-educated and her family owned property, but, like many farmers, lost much of it during the Depression. Cannon had many different jobs, the first at age 14 as a live-in housekeeper for a poor white mill family. When the mill began hiring Blacks for production work, she signed up, telling them, “I’m not a servant and I'm not going to lift a broom.” In 1962, Cannon was in the first group of African American women hired to do production work by Cannon Mills in Kannapolis, North Carolina.
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Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls, Corine Lytle Cannon postcard

From Women Making History: The Revolutionary Feminist Postcard Art of Helaine Victoria Press by Julia M. Allen and Jocelyn H. Cohen

  • (front quote) “My mother was a brilliant person. She came second to nobody. She was the rock of the family ... She would never, never give up. She would always say, well, it could be worse. Let's get over this hurdle because there's another one coming. With this next one let's jump a little bit higher. We can make do. We'll just have to do like the people over the river, when we don't have it, we'll just have to do without it. Wherever there's a will there's a way. Whatever you do, do it just a little bit better than everybody else.” Printed letterpress in silvery lavender. Quotes on front and back: from an interview with Cannon, Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South by Victoria Byerly.
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