One of the first organizing campaigns Sentner spearheaded was also one of the most radical. The Funsten Company was a collection of food-processing plants near the Mississippi where black and white women toiled in dingy conditions to rid nuts of their shells. After many clandestine meetings and planning, an upstart leader named Carrie Smith argued with the boss for two hours before taking to the picket line. Smith carried a Bible in one hand and a brick in the other. “Girls,” she announced, “we can’t lose!”
The strike ended with a meeting at the Labor Lyceum, the St Louis Communist Party headquarters, where Sentner, Smith, and Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann reached an agreement. Sentner argued that taxpayers were subsidizing the Funsten Company because so many of Funsten’s workers toiled all day long and still qualified for relief. In the end, nut pickers doubled their wages. Black workers achieved equal pay but still no union.
As Feurer writes, “The model of the strike was electrifying in St. Louis’s black working class, and to activists across the country.” It also broadened the fundamental definitions of who a worker was. Industrial factories demanded labor power. White and black, men and women — all were subject to the flattening logic of the assembly line.
For recognizing the rights of black women in their workplace, the strike at Funsten allowed Communists to “come out with prestige” in the black working class. Toni Buneta — a Yugoslavian packinghouse worker whom Sentner met and married while organizing — noted that there was a particular St Louis taboo around white people entering a black household. White Communists were the first to break it.
In the aftermath of Funsten, Sentner was offered opportunities to organize black ragpickers, laundry workers, longshoremen, metalworkers, and steelworkers. On flimsy charges, he was arrested by federal authorities, who held him for several days. Senter’s success had put him on the state and federal radar.