Claussen's Bakery

Front: This two-story trapezoidal plan industrial building is one of two surviving Claussen's bakeries in S.C. Built in 1930, the bakery initially employed forty workers who produced 45,000 loaves of bread a day. In February 1967 twenty-two African American employees, including organizer and spokesman Horace Butler Sr., who would later serve as the first African American foreman at the bakery, went on strike to protest discrimination in hiring and promotion practices. Reverse: The Greenville branch of the NAACP, led by Rev. D.C. Francis, called for a boycott of Claussen baked goods in protest. Jesse Jackson, then working as director of SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket, helped bring Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Greenville. On April 30, 1967 King spoke to a crowd of 3,500 at Greenville Memorial Auditorium. King preached economic justice and support for the Clausen workers who “had been called boys...then they stood up like men.”