This history of Alabama's coal miners documents the struggle between labour management as well as interracial unionism and white supremacy. The text covers the contribution that District 20 of the United Mine Workers of America played in the state's labour movement.
It Is Union and Liberty
Alabama Coal Miners and the UMWTHE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 1999 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8173-0999-2Contents
Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................ixIntroduction Edwin L. Brown and Colin J. Davis...............................................................................11. The Early Years: Alabama Miners Organize, 1878-1908 Daniel Letwin.........................................................112. Having It Their Way: Alabama Coal Operators and the Search for Docile Labor, 1908-1921 Brian M. Kelly.....................383. Rising from the Ashes: Alabama Coal Miners, 1921-1941 Peter Alexander.....................................................624. Alabama Coal Miners in War and Peace, 1942-1975 Glenn Feldman.............................................................845. Wildcats, Caravans, and Dynamite: Alabama Miners and the 1977-1978 Coal Strike Robert H. Woodrum..........................111Appendix: Officers of the United Mine Workers of America District 20, 1898-1998...............................................131Notes.........................................................................................................................133Bibliography..................................................................................................................165Contributors..................................................................................................................179Index.........................................................................................................................181
Chapter One
The Early Years: Alabama Miners Organize, 1878-1908 Daniel Letwin
Birmingham, Alabama, lies at the southern tip of Appalachia, at the heart of an extraordinary concentration of coal and iron. Along its southeast edge looms Red Mountain, a hundred-mile-long ridge of hills rich in hematite. Sandwiching the city are three coalfields, the Cahaba and Coosa fields to the south and east, and-by far the largest-the Warrior field, extending seventy miles long and sixty-five miles wide to the north and west. Birmingham was established in 1871 at the initiative of financiers and railroad investors eager to develop the coal and iron deposits of northern and central Alabama. The extracting of coal in antebellum Alabama was a modest, primitive enterprise. The absence of adequate railroad links, regional markets, capital, and knowledge about local geology prevented the rise of a coal and iron center in Alabama to rival those of Pennsylvania and Ohio.
By the 1870s, however, Alabama's coalfields were ripe for development. Although the depression of the mid-1870s momentarily derailed the takeoff forecast by Birmingham's founders, by the end of the decade large-scale production was under way. Beginning at the nearby Pratt mines and expanding across much of Jefferson, Walker, Bibb, and Tuscaloosa Counties, the surge of coal (along with iron) production during the late nineteenth century placed the Birmingham district onto the industrial forefront of the New South. In 1870 the Alabama mineral region produced a modest 13,000 tons of coal, while a mere thirty years later it yielded a whopping 8.4 million tons. The population of Jefferson County, where Birmingham was situated, likewise soared, from 12,345 in 1870, to 23,272 in 1880, to 88,501 in 1890, to 140,420 in 1900.
As drifts, slopes, and shafts took the place of small-scale surface mining, so the scattering of local citizens engaged in the gathering of coal was replaced by a convergence of wage laborers from far and wide. The labor force of the coalfields was racially mixed from the start. In the early years, whites made up a modest majority of the miners; over the 1880s and 1890s, however, African Americans comprised a growing proportion of the workforce, and by the turn of the century they were in the majority. Both blacks and whites worked as skilled pick miners, generally in the same mines, although seldom side by side in the same "rooms." Blacks figured predominantly, but not exclusively, among the laborers who worked under the supervision of skilled miners, either black or white. At many mines, convicts leased from the state or the counties, overwhelmingly black, were used as cheap and controllable labor.
Observers were struck by the diversity of the mine labor force. A traveler captured it vividly in 1893: "The fellow clad in stripes in the county prison camp at Coalburg, the diminutive Hungarian slav, or Slavisch, as locally known, the industrious German or Frenchman, the native Afro-American in the majority, the honest Scotchman with his twang, all are here in one and the same mine. The native Alabamian of the mountains and experienced and raw material from every section of the United States are likewise on hand in no contemptible numbers." This variety of social backgrounds, and especially the mix of black and white, would intensify the challenge, and the drama, of miners' organization throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Despite their social diversity, there was much that the miners experienced in common. Like other mineral regions around the country, the Alabama coalfields witnessed chronic tensions between the miners and the operators. Living conditions in the coal camps-the company store, rent levels, wages, the weighing and screening of coal, the hours and conditions of work, the subcontracting of unskilled labor, the leasing of convicts, the operators' power to fire, dock, and otherwise penalize the miners, the miners' right to unionize and to receive contractual recognition-all provoked rancorous and at times bloody conflict. Alabama miners particularly detested the sweeping power wielded by many coal and iron operators. In 1890 a Carbon Hill miner complained bitterly that the operators "assume the power to buy and sell alike. They dictate to us when we shall work, how we shall work, how long we shall work, how much work shall be done, and the amount of pay they shall pay for the labor performed. Labor has no rights."
Miners responded to meager pay, harsh conditions, and overbearing employers in varied ways. Many acted individually, moving from mine to mine, alternating between mining and farming, shifting among different occupations around the district, or balancing mining with other activities, such as hunting, fishing, gardening, and varied forms of leisure. Even prisoners forced to work underground found ways to confront their dehumanizing circumstances-whether through labor strikes or hunger strikes, physical resistance or flight. Such desperate lines of response usually ended in defeat, but each succeeded now and then in placing a check on the company's power.
But it was through organization that the miners aired their aspirations most visibly. The first stirrings of a labor movement in the mineral belt arose at the very dawn of coal and iron production, under the standard of the Greenback-Labor Party. Throughout 1978 and 1879, Greenback-Labor clubs proliferated across the Birmingham coal district. Through regular meetings, contributions to the National Labor Tribune, and participation in political campaigns, the Greenback-Labor Party gave Alabama's early miners a collective voice. Their grievances ranged from the swelling power of finance and industrial capital throughout the nation, to the corrupt hegemony of Redeemer governments around the South, to the immediate issues of low pay, unsafe mine conditions, and, most heatedly, the leasing of convicts to the mines. While Greenbackism enjoyed wide appeal among the miners in statewide elections of the late 1870s and early 1880s, it faded as an active movement in the coal belt by the end of 1880. In its wake, however, the loyalties of Greenback miners now flowed to another, more broadly structured movement, the Knights of Labor.
Drawing on the Greenbackers' moral critique of Gilded Age America and the Redeemed South, the Knights of Labor first set down roots in Alabama in 1879. Birmingham rapidly emerged as one of the hubs of southern Knighthood, claiming dozens of local assemblies and nearly four thousand members during the peak years of 1886-87. The Alabama Knights emphasized the coal district in its legislative agenda. More significant still, it extended miners' activism into the workplace itself. Throughout the 1880s, the coalfields witnessed a series of skirmishes between miners and operators, chiefly strikes or lockouts. While these were mostly isolated, short-lived affairs, the Knights provided a moral vocabulary, an organizational vehicle, and a network of support to embolden miners, as one Knight exhorted, "to resist the tyranny imposed ... by the selfish and greedy, who think that the employer ought to have it all and the poor, hard-working miners nothing." Increasingly, however, the Knights' role in these efforts wavered between active involvement and aloofness, reflecting the order's uneasiness over conflict with employers, especially strikes. By the end of the decade the Knights of Labor was in decline around the Birmingham district, as it was throughout the nation.
Neither the Greenbackers nor the Knights achieved a lasting presence in the Alabama coalfields (although two local communities, Trevellick and Powderly, bear the names of the founders of the Knights). Each succumbed to the power of the operators, internal divisions over strategy, the regional opposition to organized labor, and their group's decline nationally. But these early movements shared meanings that cannot be measured in concrete achievements. First, at the dawn of the Birmingham district they challenged the notion (widespread at the time, and since) that southern labor was indifferent to organized labor. Second, they established that, even in the late-nineteenth-century South, a racially mixed workforce was not always incapable of labor solidarity.
Of course, any effort by southern workers to organize across the color line was charged with drama. The prevailing culture of the region was scarcely hospitable to labor movements of any sort, let alone interracial ones. Although white and black miners experienced common conditions and often had close contact underground, their lives outside the mines were sharply divided by the color line that spread through all parts of the New South. In mining communities across the district, blacks and whites lived in separate sections, sent their children to separate schools, worshiped in separate rate churches, and fraternized in separate lodges, athletic clubs, sewing circles, and brass bands. Black and white inhabitants did interact on the margins of daily life, on terms that ranged from amicable to hostile, and at times even violent. Consider an 1891 episode at the mining camp of Cardiff, involving no less a bastion of American culture than baseball. A game in progress between the "white nine" of Cardiff and the "negro nine" of nearby Brookside, the Birmingham Age-Herald reported, came to an abrupt halt when a young white man named John Harden appeared with a Winchester rifle, announced that the white team "would not play with the negroes that day," and ran the black players out of town. An integrated game between racially defined teams; a festive atmosphere dashed by an act of sour intolerance-here were captured both the extent and the limits of interaction between blacks and whites in the mining communities.
The shared concerns of black and white miners underscored the imperative of organizing across the color line. The Jim Crow attitudes and distrust between the races that permeated the region-and the mining towns themselves-highlighted the obstacles to interracial unionism. From the outset, local Greenbackers and Knights of Labor faced a crossroads familiar in American labor history. One path for white unionists was to exclude African Americans, or to banish them to the periphery of the organization. The alternative was to organize all workers in the trade, regardless of race.
In the Alabama coalfields, both the Greenbackers and the Knights chose the path of interracialism. Both campaigns sought out-indeed, were built by-miners of each race, as networks of black and white Greenback clubs and Knights local assemblies cropped up around the district. Within each movement blacks and whites shared leadership roles by organizing local bodies, recruiting members, negotiating with the operators, delivering speeches, and reporting of current struggles to local or national organs. And each group fervently advocated fraternity between black and white miners. One white Greenback organizer urged miners of his race to "drop our prejudice and bigotry," describing these as "the lever that's keeping labor in bondage to capital." The Knights of Labor, the Birmingham Negro American observed, "are doing a noble work ... in trying to elevate and protect the rights of the working classes. It also relegates the color line." Such depictions should not be exaggerated. Each movement went only so far in confronting the dominant assumptions of white supremacy. None wholly eliminated racial strains or hierarchies within their ranks, or overcame stubborn veins of antipathy among the miners to interracialism. And to the extent that white Greenbackers and Knights did challenge these assumptions, their motivations flowed at least as much from the practical perils of labor disunity as from qualms about racial injustice. Still, through their egalitarian rhetoric and their very existence as racially mixed enterprises, these associations stood as a conspicuous exception to the culture of white supremacy. There is no sign that racial tensions within them contributed to the decline of either organization.
However short-lived, the impassioned campaigns of the Greenback-Labor Party and the Knights of Labor signaled that Alabama's coal miners were prepared to organize-even across the color line-to attain higher wages, better working and living conditions, and greater dignity and independence at the mines. In the 1890s a new, more lasting organization would emerge to build upon that promise.
In January 1890, about one hundred delegates from miners' groups around the country convened in Columbus, Ohio, to establish a new organization, the United Mine Workers of America, charged in its preamble with "educating all mine workers in America to realize the necessity of unity of action and purpose, in demanding and securing by lawful means the just fruits of our toil." At its founding, the UMW represented an estimated seventeen thousand miners, divided into twenty-one districts. That April a gathering of miners in Birmingham founded District 20 of the UMW.
An air of expectancy greeted the launching of District 20, as organizers set about building locals across the coal belt. But through the year the operators, led by the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company (TCI), declined either to recognize the union or to entertain any of its demands. In late November the union called a strike, and the response was immediate. By the end of December the strike had spread to all the major companies-the Tennessee, the DeBardeleben, the Sloss, the Cahaba, the Virginia and Alabama, and the Mary Lee-involving fifteen to twenty thousand miners in such key coal towns as Pratt Mines, Blue Creek, Blocton, Coalburg, Cardiff, Brookside, Carbon Hill, Warrior, Henry Ellen, Cordova, Corona, and Brookwood. The mineral district had never seen a strike of this scale. But by mid-January the union-unable to overcome mass evictions, strikebreakers, repression by armed guards, and a hostile press-conceded defeat. The effect of the miners' loss was most vividly illustrated at Warrior, where returning strikers were made to sign "iron-clad" contracts curtailing their right to raise demands, and conceding the company broad powers over hiring and firing, discipline, and the organization of work.
The tactics used by the operators to defeat the strike were familiar to veterans of the coalfields. At Blue Creek, however, the flamboyant Henry F. DeBardeleben of the DeBardeleben Coal and Iron Company introduced a new inflammatory element, with repercussions that would extend well beyond the strike-the company began systematically to recruit African Americans from outside the district to work as strikebreakers. Before long, the other major operators followed suit.
The introduction of black strikebreakers tested as never before the miners' capacity to withstand the divisive potential of race. Certainly that potential was very real. On New Year's Day at the Blue Creek town of Adger, a group of white miners' wives reportedly "got rampant when they saw the colored folks sandwiched among them," and confronted them with frying pans, tongs, tin pans, "and everything else imaginable," causing the frightened blacklegs to take refuge in the mines. The women then unfurled a banner depicting a black miner, the word "scab" inscribed underneath. There were reports of strikers shooting and otherwise intimidating the newly arrived black strikebreakers. The UMW worked hard to preserve unity between black and white miners. "We have no flight to make on the negro," declared national organizer Patrick McBryde. The union pledged material support to strikers of each race, and implored them to curb their hostility toward black strikebreakers. The strategy paid off, as large numbers of black miners rallied to the union's call. The union-affiliated Alabama Sentinel regularly described spirited meetings of black and white strikers.
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