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AFRICAN AMERICAN WORKERS AND THE APPALACHIAN COAL INDUSTRY

AFRICAN AMERICAN WORKERS AND THE APPALACHIAN COAL INDUSTRY Joe William Trotter Jr.

West Virginia University Press / Morgantown

Copyright © 2022 by West Virginia University Press All rights reserved First edition published 2022 by West Virginia University Press Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-952271-18-2 (cloth) / 978-1-952271-19-9 (ebook) Library of Congress Control Number: 2021947905 Book and cover design by Than Saffel / WVU Press. Cover image: Untitled, Appalachia © 1952–2002 Milton Rogovin. Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Foundation.

This book is dedicated with love to my cousin Willie Frank “Pete” Foster

CONTENTS

Preface ix Introduction: The Black Miner in U.S. Labor History xv 1 2 3 4 5

African Americans in West Virginia 1 Migration to Southern West Virginia 11 Inequality in the Workplace 26 Community Formation 55 Environmental Conditions 71

Epilogue: Comparative Race and Ethnic Relations 85 Acknowledgments 97 Appendix: Scholarship, Debates, and Sources 99 Notes 115 Bibliography 135 Sources and Permissions 147 Index 149

PREFACE When I proposed this volume to the West Virginia University Press in the fall of 2019, the devastation of Covid-19 was just months away. Hence, the impact of the pandemic did not figure into my rationale for wanting to publish this book. My motivation for producing this volume stemmed from the impending thirtieth anniversary of my book, Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32 (University of Illinois Press, 1990). I hoped to use this collection of essays to reflect on my personal and professional journey to the notion of proletarianization (class formation) in scholarship on Black coal miners in the southern Appalachian coalfields; explore the transformation of research on the topic since publication of Coal, Class, and Color; and suggest directions that the next wave of research on the topic might take. These objectives remain core elements in the book’s raison d’être, but the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus pandemic on people of African descent represents an even more compelling rationale for publishing these essays at this particular time in the history of the region and the nation. During the early phases of the pandemic, media reports downplayed the potential impact of the virus on poor and working-class Black communities. Evidence of widespread racial disparities in sickness and death from the disease soon dispelled such thinking. Over the past several months, growing numbers of scholars, media, and public policy analysts from a variety of fields have located the roots of these disparities in the concentration of Black people in the most dangerous, unhealthy, and underpaid work, housing, and living conditions in the geography and political economy of the nation. While these debates and discussions accent the need for historical perspectives on these racialized issues, they are unfolding without sufficient attention to African American health care activism designed to creatively combat disease, restore their own health, and insure their survival in the face of substantial trauma. These conversations also elide the precise ways that socioeconomic, labor, and environmental conditions

x / Preface

undermined the health and well-being of the African American community in particular places at specific moments in time.1 By focusing on a variety of issues in the history of African American workers in the Appalachian coal industry, this book calls attention to the ways that a better sense of history can deepen our understanding of the roots of the coronavirus among other epidemics and pandemics in African American history. A few illustrations from the West Virginia coalfields underscore this point. First and perhaps most important, in southern West Virginia, loading coal over a lifetime took its toll on the health of Black miners and exposed them to a wide variety of diseases, particularly tuberculosis during the industrial age. Some Black miners “literally broke themselves down loading coal.” According to one miner, Pink Henderson, “My daddy got so he couldn’t load coal. He tried to get company work [light labor, often outside] but the doctor turned him down, because he couldn’t do nothing. He broke his self down. . . . My brothers done the same thing. They used to be the heavy loaders.” Coal loaders also endured the persistent inhalation of coal dust and particles of coal, black lung or “miners’ asthma,” a slow killer of miners as it was called in those days. Inadequate housing also took its toll on the health of Black miners and their families. In 1927–1928, the West Virginia Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics (BNWS) reported that tuberculosis was a far greater cause of death among Black people than mine accidents. Described as that “great scourge of the Negro race,” tuberculosis accounted for 13 percent of African American health-related deaths compared to less than 8 percent among whites. The BNWS concluded that improvement in Black miners’ health required better “living conditions—proper housing, wholesome food and sanitation,” the “prerequisites of good health.” In addition to charting the health conditions of Black coal miners, this volume also recalls how Black miners, their families, and their communities mobilized movements designed to fight racial inequality in the health care system and counteract the impact of insufficient wages to fully support their families with healthy diets and living conditions. Across the coalfields, as part of their strategy for combatting disease as well as hunger, miners and their families not only cultivated their own vegetable gardens but also maintained a few hogs, chickens, and sometimes a cow for fresh milk and butter. Most important, however, they also collectively used their vote to demand greater access to public funds to serve their education, social welfare, and health needs. They not only worked through the state’s leading Republican legislators but also elected their own numbers to public office. During the early post–World War I years, they sent three Black men, one a miner, to the House of Delegates in Charleston.

Preface / xi

They effectively used their political influence within the Republican Party to secure the establishment of two all-Black colleges (West Virginia State College and Bluefield State College); homes for the African American elderly, deaf, and blind residents; and a tuberculosis facility. In other words, looking back over this collection from the vantage point of current debates and the quest for knowledge to address the challenges of COVID-19, this book illuminates both the conditions that repeatedly exposed African Americans to the most destructive impact of disease as well as some of the most important strategies that they devised to help themselves. In addition, as noted at the outset of this preface, African American Workers in the Appalachian Coal Industry also responds to the need for an assessment of the field since the closing decade of the twentieth century, along with ideas for moving scholarship forward into the third decade of the twenty-first century and beyond. In addition to illustrating key themes, topics, and changes in the history of Black coal miners over time, this book recalls the theoretical underpinnings of my work on Black labor and working-class history thirty years ago. At the outset of my career, I employed the notion of working-class formation or proletarianization as a process by which southern Black migrants made the transition from agricultural labor to wage-earning work in the manufacturing sector of the nation’s expanding urban industrial economy.2 Encouraged by a groundswell of new work employing notions of working-class formation, I embarked upon a case study of Black workers in southern West Virginia, a rural-industrial region of the Upper South. I hoped to deepen our understanding of proletarianization as a process that cut across regional lines, while retaining certain distinctive features from place to place. Various Marxist formulations of class formation shaped my understanding of the proletarianization process, but I was most impressed by profound differences in the experiences of Black and white workers under the impact of global capitalism. An extensive body of scholarship emphasizes how European and Euro-American workers experienced movement into the wage-earning workforce almost exclusively as a process of downward mobility and “immiseration.” White workers entered the world of wage-earning labor as a desperate last resort, as they increasingly lost access to landownership as independent farmers on the one hand and control over specialized skills as autonomous craftsmen on the other. As suggested by the history of Black coal miners in West Virginia, people of African descent helped to build the capitalist economy as enslaved workers before the Civil War and, thereafter, as members of the free but disfranchised and unequal sharecropping and rural proletariat. Unlike their white counterparts, as Black workers rapidly entered the wage-earning industrial workforce during the era of the Great Migration, they

xii / Preface

experienced movement into the industrial working class as a somewhat progressive process of upward socioeconomic mobility. They moved from life and work in previously rigid systems of human bondage and suppression of human and civil rights (with few passageways to equality and social justice) into a closer relationship with the predominantly white labor movement, higher wages, and access to new forms of labor organizing and protests against injustices previously unavailable to them. African American working-class formation nonetheless entailed deeply entrenched patterns of inequality, injustice, and misery along the color line. It was the persistence of inequality during the urban industrial age that underlay the rise of the Modern Black Freedom Movement nationwide during the middle to late twentieth century. The process of African American proletarianization converged across regional lines under the impact of the Great Migration. Massive rural to urban Black population movements transformed the Black population from a predominantly rural southern population into a new national African American population, spread almost equally across the urban North and West on the one hand and the South on the other. As a West Virginian by birth and member of a coal-mining family of fourteen children, I was drawn to the history of Black coal miners in the Mountain State. In addition to my scholarly and intellectual interests, I studied coal miners as a means of better understanding the history of my own family and the coalmining community—which collapsed as the demand for coal declined in the years after World War II. Before I graduated from high school, my family moved from Vallscreek, West Virginia, to Newcomerstown, Ohio, a small industrial town south of the Akron-Canton metropolitan area.3 In many ways that I had not imagined growing up in a coal town in the southern Appalachian region, my research on Black miners revealed that industrial working-class formation defined African American life in the coalfields as elsewhere in twentieth-century America. But it also differed enormously from Black working-class formation in other parts of the nation, North and South. Unlike their kinsmen in the Deep South and other parts of the Upper South and Border States, African Americans in West Virginia retained the vote, endured fewer recorded incidents of mob lynching, and entered a workforce that placed their wages on a nearly equal par with their white fellow miners. While Blacks reported greater access to the rights of citizens, including the right to vote, in the urban North and West none could claim, as West Virginians did, the election of three Black men (one a coal miner) to the state legislature and the passage of an antilynching law during the 1920s. Moreover, when the popular Black state legislator Ebenezer Howard Harper died in office in 1927, Governor

Preface / xiii

Howard M. Gore appointed Mrs. Minnie Buckingham Harper to serve out her husband’s term. In making the announcement of Harper’s appointment, Gore acknowledged her as “the first woman of the Negro Race to become a member of a legislative body in the United States.” 4 While the concept of proletarianization illuminated important similarities and differences in the experiences of Black workers across regional lines, it left important dimensions of working-class life in the shadows. These included most notably the role of women and gender relations and the significance of paid and unpaid labor in the household, domestic, and personal service sectors of the industrial economy. While acknowledging the contributions of proletarianization to our knowledge of Black labor and working-class history, a growing number of studies helped to close these gaps during the final years of the twentieth century and the opening of the new millennium.5 Over the past three decades, scholarship on the class, gender, and racial dynamics of working-class formation established the intellectual foundation for a reformulation of the concept of proletarianization itself. In her recent LAWCHA presidential address, Julie Greene builds upon this scholarship to suggest a new transnational model for future research on African American and U.S. labor and working-class history. Based on “social reproduction” and “social formation” theories, Greene outlines a compelling conceptual framework for the next generation of labor and working-class history.6 In addition to the hard work of theory building, empirical research, and production of new knowledge, however, young scholars of the next generation are already facing fresh new challenges during the age of the coronavirus pandemic. But that is not all. Young scholars are also both witnessing and participating in massive grassroots street protests against police brutality and stiff white supremacist resistance movements. They are also demanding the abolition of systemic racism in American society, culture, and politics. Amid these sweeping changes in U.S. and global history, it is my hope that the history of Black miners will offer inspiration for moving forward during this difficult moment in the history of the nation and the world.

This miner manually lifts a huge piece of coal into the waiting train car. Ordinarily, he would have used a shovel—one in the background to the left and another in the foreground to the right. Courtesy of the Eastern Regional Coal Archives, Craft Memorial Library, Bluefield, West Virginia.

Introduction

THE BLACK MINER IN U.S. LABOR HISTORY

ntil the final third of the twentieth century, enslavement, reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow dominated scholarship on the African American experience. As the Great Migration transformed African Americans from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban industrial people, research on the massive movement of Southern rural Blacks into the nation’s major urban centers gained increasing attention. But migration to urban America was by no means a one-stop process from rural to large urban industrial areas. From the outset of the emancipation years following the Civil War, sharecroppers, farm laborers, and general laborers gradually moved into rural-industrial lumber, railroad, and coal-mining communities. The West Virginia bituminous coal industry became a major magnet of Black migration to rural-industrializing America. Focusing primarily on Black migration, labor, and community formation in southern West Virginia, this volume calls attention to the place of coal mining in the rise of the Black industrial working class and the role of race in the development of the U.S. working class.

Historiography and Debates Research and writing on Black coal miners had their genesis in early twentiethcentury reactions to white supremacist scholarship on the subject. As early as 1909, Yale University geographer George T. Surface conducted a study of Black miners in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. He concluded that the “great majority” of Black migrants were “irregular” in labor and “unstable” in residence. Surface also sanctioned systematic labor discrimination against Black workers in the coal industry. Accordingly, early twentieth-century Black

xvi / Introduction

scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Charles Wesley, Abram Harris, and their white allies defended Black coal miners against such racist stereotypes. They concluded that Southern Black migrants were not genetically “irregular in labor,” “unstable in residence,” or incapable of meeting the knowledge and skill requirements of industrial production. Early twentiethcentury scholars also helped to establish Black migration and labor studies as systematic scholarly fields of historical inquiry.1 Even as scholars like Du Bois, Woodson, Harris, and others defended Black miners against racist perspectives on their lives as workers and as Black people in a predominantly white political economy, they initially accented the vitality, skills, and education of a small segment of the Black working class, what Woodson described as the migration of the “talented tenth.” 2 In the years following World War II, however, the advent of the Modern Black Freedom Movement and the rise of the “New Labor History” transformed our understanding of the masses of Black coal miners, not just the skilled and highly educated few. Following the lead of Herbert Gutman, one of the principal pioneers in the study of the U.S. working class “from the bottom up,” increasing numbers of post–World War II scholars documented the development of Black coal-mining communities as well as patterns of interracial cooperation in the labor movement, particularly the United Mine Workers of America (UMW). Studies by Stephen Brier and Daniel P. Jordan offered groundbreaking studies of interracial unionism in the southern West Virginia coalfields. In his essay, “Interracial Organizing in the West Virginia Coal Industry: The Participation of Black Mine Workers in the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers, 1880–1894,” historian Stephen Brier concluded that “Perhaps the most striking aspect of this episode in American working class history is the fact that southern West Virginia Black miners, many recently migrated from the cities and farms of Eastern Virginia, came to view interracial union organization as the vehicle through which they could fight for their liberation both as workers and as Black people.” 3 Daniel Jordan documented the outbreak of class warfare during the UMW’s effort to organize the unorganized Black and white miners in Mingo, Logan, and other southern West Virginia counties following World War I. He concluded that the “Mingo War” was a unique “interracial affair.” It was “neither conducted along racial lines nor marked by racial violence; as such, for the times, it was certainly atypical.” David A. Corbin’s Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields (1981) and my own book Coal, Class, and Color (1990) documented racial and class dynamics in the development of coal-mining communities in southern West Virginia. Whereas Corbin, Jordan, and Brier underscored how class often

The Black Miner in U.S. Labor History / xvii

“trumped” race in the southern West Virginia coalfields, Coal, Class, and Color not only documented substantial interracial cooperation, it emphasized how the rise of the rural industrial Black proletariat and the building of Black communities unfolded within the larger context of a racially segregated social order, reinforced by the ideas and actions of white workers and elites alike.4 By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a growing number of scholars challenged emerging class over race perspectives in many of the new coal-mining labor studies in West Virginia and nationwide. Following the lead of labor attorney and civil rights activist Herbert Hill and historian David Roediger, these scholars emphasized the persistence of working-class “white privilege” and the very tenuous nature of interracial cooperation in coal, steel, and other U.S. manufacturing firms during the Industrial Age. As Roediger put it in his influential book, The Wages of Whiteness, by the end of the Civil War, working-class whiteness, with deep roots in the antebellum years, was “firmly established and well poised to remain a central value, founded . . . not just on ‘economic exploitation’ but on ‘racial folklore,’ ” as the nation matured as a predominantly urban-industrial society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5 In the meantime, over the past three decades, a variety of studies continued to flesh out the themes of interracial cooperation, conflict, family, and community building among Black people in the Mountain State. These studies include, most notably, James Green’s The Devil is Here in These Hills (2015); Cero M. Fain’s Black Huntington (2019); and Christopher Wilkinson’s Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia (2012).6 In his comprehensive study of the southern West Virginia labor-capital mine wars of the early twentieth century, the late labor historian Jim Green built upon the contributions of a wide range of published studies, as well as his own extensive primary archival research on the subject. The Devil is Here in These Hills is the most detailed account to date of the West Virginia mine wars of the early twentieth century and the fight for democracy among people who ironically were known by their motto—“Mountaineers Are Always Free.” In 2016, PBS aired Randall McLowery’s documentary film, The Mine Wars, based mainly on Green’s book and in consultation with the author.7 While Green’s book and the documentary film reiterated the importance of working-class solidarity in the fight for democracy and social justice in the coalfields, most recent studies deepen our understanding of family, community, and institution-building activities among Black miners in the Mountain State. Historian Cicero Fain breaks new ground in his study of Black life in Huntington. He employs the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological insights of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholars of Black migration and urban community formation. Whereas most research on Black miners focuses on

xviii / Introduction

small, primarily company-owned towns, Fain documents the development of a Black urban-industrial community in the Mountain State. He also emphasizes the primacy of race, “not class,” in the rise of Black Huntington. Fain finds little evidence of interracial working-class cooperation before the turn of the twentieth century. Before the onset of World War I, however, Huntington’s “colored citizens of the East End” established the city’s first African American local of the Socialist Party of America and supported efforts to build bridges between Black and white workers in the city. Until then, in a telling chapter on the development of the Black working class, he succinctly concludes, “Estranged from white workers, blocked by white management, and disdained by a small but growing class of Black leaders, Black workers found no incentive to leave the psychic refuge of race as the prime modality of consciousness.” 8 Like Fain, music historian Christopher Wilkinson deepens our understanding of the heretofore little understood African American music and dance culture in the coalfields and cities of the Mountain State. Focusing on the rise of big band music in West Virginia—including the state’s larger urban centers like Huntington, Wheeling, and Parkersburg as well as the Winding Gulf, Pocahontas, Williamson-Logan, and Kanawha New River coalfields of southern West Virginia—Wilkinson carefully documents the spread of big band music in West Virginia before the advent of the big band era during the mid-to-late 1930s and 1940s. He forcefully and convincingly concludes that Black West Virginians had facilitated this cultural innovation in dance music and dancing through a complicated interplay between their own community-based cultural values, dance styles, and music sensibilities and the regular booking of big bands from New York City, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere to play in coal towns and cities across the state. A series of rich and highly textured personal recollections reinforce the insights of recent historical studies of African Americans in the southern Appalachian coalfields. Specifically, the memoirs of Robert Armstead, Memphis Tennessee Garrison, and my brother Otis Trotter deepen our understanding of the class, racial, and gendered dimensions of Mountain State Black life.9 In his important memoir, Black Days, Black Dust (2002), the first penned by an African American coal miner, Armstead recalls a remarkable forty-year career as a coal miner in the region. Because his life as a miner covered the heyday of the Modern Black Freedom struggle and beyond, his memoir illuminates the bittersweet mix of declining coal-mining employment for Black workers and the gradual upward mobility of a few who remained as the coal-mining industry nearly disappeared. Beginning his mining career as an underground laborer,

The Black Miner in U.S. Labor History / xix

setting timber for mine roofs, Armstead later became a machine operator, foreman, and finally safety director. Born in McDowell County in 1890 to former slaves Wesley Carter and Cassie Thomas Carter, Memphis Tennessee Garrison launched her public schoolteaching career in 1908 and continued to serve her community, the state, and nation until her death in 1988. Garrison later recalled how she desired to become a lawyer, but her parents could not afford the cost of law school. Married to a coal miner, she became an active member of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and influenced the organization’s civil rights struggles across the state and nation. For his part, Otis Trotter opens his story with the challenge of recovering an image of his father in the absence of an existing family photograph of him. He writes, “There is no photograph of my father. My family and I possess no still images of him captured in time, which we can cherish as a tangible connection to the past. . . . He lives in our hearts and minds, and his impact on our family continues to be felt across the generations.” 10 Keeping Heart goes on to relate numerous episodes in the Trotter family’s history in McDowell County during the Great Depression, World War II, and the 1950s. Most important, however, Trotter’s Keeping Heart underscores how his congenital heart disease and the quest for life-saving medical treatment helped to crystalize the family’s decision to move from the coalfields to a small industrial town in eastern central Ohio south of the Akron-Canton metropolitan area. The proliferation of research on West Virginia’s Black miners was closely intertwined with the explosion of studies on African American coal miners across the United States. This scholarship includes studies of Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, and other locations in the North and West.11 In her creative study of Black coal miners and their families in eastern Kentucky, historical sociologist Karida L. Brown analyzes two generations of Black residents of the region’s coal-mining communities: (1) the first generation of Deep South rural Blacks who migrated into the coalfields during the interwar years; and (2) the children of the first generation who spearheaded movement out of the coal region into the major urban centers across the nation in the years after World War II. Brown convincingly argues that both groups of migrants moved under the same imperative—the search for “freedom and citizenship.” 12 Focusing on the Birmingham district of Alabama, labor historian Daniel Letwin explored the development of interracial unionism among Black and white miners in a Deep South industrial city and its surrounding coal-mining towns. He shows how interracial organizing in the Alabama coalfields ebbed

xx / Introduction

and flowed with the business cycle of the state’s coal industry. During each boom period, new spurts of interracial organizing emerged. In relatively rapid succession during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, coal miners rallied across the color line around the Greenback Labor Party, the Knights of Labor, and finally the United Mine Workers of America.13 For her part, historian Ellen Curtin documented the experiences of convict miners, including women, in the Alabama coalfields. Rather than following the usual emphasis on the convict leasing system as a highly exploitative scheme that offered prisoners little room for resistance and self-expression, Curtin accents the preprison culture, attitudes, and behavior that many incarcerated Black men and women took behind prison walls: “Certain characteristics that appear to transfer into prison include racial pride, acting in concert, expectations of justice, and a recognition of the potentially impartial power of the law. All of these qualities aided prisoners in their struggle to survive.” 14 In addition to the experiences of Black miners and their families in Kentucky, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South, studies of Black coal miners in Washington State; Ferber, Texas; and especially Buxton, Iowa, have also illuminated sharp contrasts in the experiences of Black miners from place to place within and across regions.15 Near the town’s founding at the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans soon made up 55 percent of Buxton’s five thousand residents, but their proportion declined to 40 percent as the Great Migration got underway and continued to decline into the 1920s. Whereas the Great Migration reinforced the expansion of Black coal-mining communities in most places, Buxton experienced the reverse. Focusing on the little-known, small coal town of Ferber, Texas, Marilyn D. Rhinehart shows how miners developed a “subterranean community” that cut across racial and ethnic lines and helped to forge amicable and less violent social relations in the aboveground community life of the town than elsewhere. But she offers little explanation for the town’s ethnically and racially divided housing market.16

Conclusion As new studies emerged on African American coal miners across the country, they established the intellectual and empirical foundation for the publication of new and more diverse syntheses on the subject. Labor historians Paul Nyden, Ronald Lewis, and Priscilla Long advanced broad general narratives and comparative syntheses of Black coal miners in U.S. labor and workingclass history.17 To some extent, more recently, historian Michael Goldfield’s

The Black Miner in U.S. Labor History / xxi

study, The Southern Key, reinforces these efforts.18 Together, these studies illuminate the transformation of class, ethnic, race, and to some extent gender relations in the U.S. coal industry over more than a century of time. Building partly upon Nyden’s pioneering history of Black coal miners in America, labor historians Ronald L. Lewis and Priscilla Long offer broader and more complete syntheses of race and ethnicity in the development of the U.S. coal industry. Lewis’s Black Coal Miners in America is a stellar study of Black coal miners across the North and South. Employing a “comparative regional approach,” he documents the emergence of distinct patterns of “race, class, and community conflict” in the bituminous coal industry of the United States. These distinct coal-mining experiences included what Lewis calls, respectively, “expropriation” and “exploitation” in the ante- and postbellum South; “exclusion” in the industrial North; a measure of “equality” in the central Appalachian coalfields of southern West Virginia; and the emergence of “elimination” in the recent period of deindustrialization and global restructuring of the U.S. economy. Training her sight on the development of the U.S. coal industry in the Western states, Priscilla Long reinforces Lewis and Nyden’s effort to integrate Black workers into a broader and more comprehensive understanding of the U.S. coal industry, race, and class conflict. Unlike Lewis and Nyden, however, she accents the role of women and gender as well. She opens her provocative narrative of the nation’s coal industry with the words of Mary “Mother” Jones: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” Nonetheless, Long treats the coal industry as part of the international spread of capitalism from England to the United States. She places “the emergence of a new system of classes” and class relations at the center of her analysis. In her study, miners sometimes forged remarkably unified, alternative communal visions for America that clashed with capitalist commitments to private profit and individualism. But these visions repeatedly withered under the pressure of a diverse and deeply fragmented coal-mining working class. As she concludes, gender, race, culture, nationality, religion, and other issues “divided working people a hundred times over.” 19 While acknowledging the many failures of industrial workers to organize and sustain interracial labor movements, Michael Goldfield argues that such failures were by no means inevitable, especially among coal miners. Focusing roughly on the middle third of the twentieth century, he documents the emergence of coal miners as the “vanguard” of the radical interracial labor movement within and beyond the South. Even as they launched their own militant campaigns, most notably in Birmingham, Alabama, and Paint Creek and Cabin

xxii / Introduction

Creek, West Virginia, miners assisted organizing efforts among other workers, particularly in steel, which they saw as key to the “security of their own union.” 20 Over the next decade, hopefully, as studies employing global methodologies and perspectives comes to fruition, they will lay the groundwork for the development of new and more transnational syntheses on African American workers in the Appalachian coalfields. This collection of essays aims to encourage and reinforce that process.

Chapter 1

AFRICAN AMERICANS IN WEST VIRGINIA

inety years ago, editor and publisher A. B. Caldwell published The History of the American Negro: West Virginia Edition, volume 7. Appearing on the heels of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the rural South and into the nation’s major urban industrial centers, this volume of biographical portraits celebrates the achievements of Black West Virginians and reinforces the very hopeful social, cultural, and political outlook of the emerging “New Negro” of the 1920s. Membership in Black churches and fraternal orders, Republican Party politics, and local chapters of the NAACP figure prominently among the activities of the state’s Black “men of distinction.” Specifically, Caldwell pursues these biographies with an eye for the accomplishments of “representative” African American “leaders” in a wide range of professions and lines of work, for the “inspiration and encouragement” of the next generation of Black Mountaineers, and for the benefit of “future historians” of the state’s Black past. On each of these counts—as a source of inspiration, a call for race advancement, and a document for future historical study—the West Virginia Edition represents a major contribution to knowledge. Through the lens of biography, the West Virginia Edition underscores key themes in the state’s African American history. From the onset of statehood in 1863 through the publication of Caldwell’s book sixty years later, these themes included the ambiguous legacy of slavery and freedom, new patterns of class and racial inequality, and persistent movements for full citizenship and equal rights across the color line. In 1861, when Virginia seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy, western Virginians opposed secession, remained in the Union, and created a new state. After becoming a state in 1863, however, West Virginia did not become a symbol of emancipation for enslaved and free Blacks.

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While the Mountain State enacted a law for the gradual emancipation of enslaved Black children after they reached adulthood, West Virginia nonetheless entered the Union as a slaveholding state. Before the constitutional convention approved gradual emancipation, the original provision stated, “No slave shall be brought or free person of color come into this state for permanent residence after this constitution goes into effect.” Because of this provision, and under the impact of the Civil War, West Virginia’s Black population actually dropped from over 21,000 in 1860 to nearly 17,000, or 3 percent of the total population by the war’s end. In February 1865, however, West Virginia abolished chattel slavery nearly a year ahead of the Thirteenth Amendment. Despite West Virginia’s ambiguous legacy of slavery and freedom for Black people, African Americans from declining tobacco-growing areas of Virginia and other Upper South states gradually moved into the Mountain State. Beginning slowly during the Civil War with notable newcomers such as Booker T. Washington and his stepfather Washington Ferguson, Black migration to the Mountain State accelerated during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the state’s bituminous coal industry dramatically expanded. Under the impact of industrialization, the Black population increased from 25,800 in 1880 to over 64,000 in 1910 and to nearly 115,000 in 1930, about 6 percent of the state’s total. At a time when most industrial firms in the nation excluded Black workers from employment, both the railroad and coal industries hired large numbers of African Americans to open up the bituminous coalfields of southern Appalachia. African Americans helped lay track for the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O), the Norfolk & Western, and the Virginian. Work on the C&O also produced the Black folk hero John Henry, who powerfully contested the steam drill during work on the Big Bend tunnel at Talcott, present-day Summers County. Following the completion of each rail line, substantial numbers of Black railroad men remained behind as part of the expanding coal mining labor force. Blacks made up more than 20 percent of all West Virginia coal miners from the 1890s through the early twentieth century. Whereas the majority of Black migrants moved to West Virginia from the nearby states of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee before World War I, rising numbers of Black migrants from the Deep South states of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi supplanted the Upper South sources of Black migrants during and after World War I. African American workers helped to increase coal production from less than 5 million tons in 1885 to nearly 40 million tons in the southern counties of the state alone by 1910. Although the industry would experience recurring up- and downswings in the demand for coal, southern West Virginia mines produced over 120 million tons in 1925.

African Americans in West Virginia

Weirton

PENNSYLVANIA

Pittsburgh

Wheeling

OHIO

Mason-Dixon Line

Morgantown

Martinsburg

Fairmont

Parkersburg

Fairmont Coal field

Clarksburg a n a wh

i ve

L i ttl e K

New River Coal field

Ra d oa ilr

o rk

Pocahontas Coal field

MILES

Ne w R i v e

Winding Gulf Coal field

VIRGINIA

Kanawha Coal field

i ve r

R iv

te R

Logan

Williamson Coal field

KENTUCKY

Guyan Coal field n

do t

San

Big

Charleston

Huntington

Bluefield

Map of the Mountain State during the early twentieth century. Created by Than Saffel.

Coal companies launched aggressive recruitment drives to bring Southern Black workers into the coal mines. During the war years, one company advertised for workers in the Williamson-Logan coalfields: “Miners Wanted: The Ideal Mining Town of the State. YMCA, Three Schools, Splendid Churches, Shower Baths, Playground, [and] Base-ball Parks.” Black migrants to the Mountain State were by no means simply pulled by the forces of industrial labor demands or pushed by the economic decline of tobacco farming in their old homes; they were also agents in their own movement into the state. African American kin and friendship networks played a pivotal role in the Great Migration of Blacks into the Mountain State. In visits back South, coal miners invariably recruited additional relatives for the coalfields. In his investigation of Black migration during World War I, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama remarked, “It is the returned [N]egroes who carry others off.” Deep South Blacks not only fueled the production of coal, they also helped to transform the culture and politics of the Mountain State. Their achievements,

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however, were closely intertwined with the pioneering political struggles of Blacks from Virginia and other Upper South states, beginning during the Civil War and continuing through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black West Virginians, such as Martin R. Delany, served in the Union forces of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other Northern states. Born in Charlestown, Jefferson County, Delany became a medical officer and attained the rank of major in the Union Army. Based partly upon their service in the Union forces, Blacks in the Mountain State claimed a role in bringing about their own emancipation and the collapse of slavery across the South. Like their counterparts elsewhere in postbellum America, Black West Virginians confronted a long hard road to full citizenship rights. The fight for ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment resulted in fierce opposition from ex-Confederates working through the state’s Democratic Party. Democrats refused to support the measure because it enfranchised Blacks and disfranchised former Confederates. Before Black men could secure the suffrage in West Virginia, Democrats succeeded in passing the Flick Amendment, extending the suffrage to ex-Confederates. In 1870, as elsewhere in the South, the Democratic Party presented itself as the “white man’s party.” At the state’s constitutional convention in 1872, the Democrats also led the fight to disfranchise Black citizens, but failed. The new constitution enfranchised Blacks by a vote of 36 to 30. Unlike their counterparts in other Southern states, Blacks in West Virginia not only won the franchise but also maintained it through the rise of Jim Crow during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, they achieved only partial victory. The new state constitution denied Blacks the right to serve on juries and mandated racially segregated institutions, particularly in public schools. Specifically, the segregationist clause stated, “White and colored shall not be taught in the same school.” Accordingly, West Virginia sanctioned a racially stratified and unequal social order that would spread into a broad range of social service organizations and public accommodations. The state’s Jim Crow order would frame the African American Freedom Movement through the midtwentieth century. Although the incidence of mob violence was less prevalent in West Virginia than elsewhere in the postbellum and segregationist South, African Americans nonetheless confronted white supremacist campaigns and the outbreak of racial violence. In the early aftermath of World War I, in addition to the lynching of two Black miners at Chapmanville, Logan County, local chapters of the revitalized Ku Klux Klan emerged in Logan, Mercer, Kanawha, and other counties of the state. At the same time, Black men, particularly those accused of raping white women, faced summary justice before the law and sometimes died at the hands of the state, despite insufficient evidence of their guilt.

African Americans in West Virginia / 5

In line with West Virginia’s segregationist law that “white and colored shall not be taught in the same school,” this is a segregated West Virginia Department of Mines extension class for Black miners in the 1950s. Courtesy of West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University, Morgantown, West Virginia.

African Americans in the Mountain State did not take racial and class inequality sitting down. Black Mountaineers waged an ongoing fight against efforts to curtail their citizenship rights. In 1872, for example, over sixty Black residents of Jefferson County presented a petition to the constitutional convention requesting the right to serve on juries in the state’s courts of law. Additionally, since the Black percentage of the state’s total population remained among the lowest in the Union, Black West Virginians carefully built alliances with selected white Republican leaders and forcefully advanced their claims for equal treatment. Some of their white allies eloquently argued for the rights of Blacks in their public speeches. In a speech supporting the right of Blacks to testify in court, Governor Arthur Boreman stated, “Until this act of justice is done, all other guarantees are fruitless, and these unfortunate people are left to the mercy of anyone who chooses to inflict injury upon them.” Other white Republicans supported the enfranchisement of Blacks on the basis of their service in defense of the Union during the Civil War: “In war you send the Negro

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to the front . . . in peace you impose upon him all the duties of citizenship; why not let him vote? Republicanism makes no distinction before the law on account of race or color.” Under the impact of the Great Migration, African Americans increased their influence in the politics of the state and heightened their demands for equal rights. During the 1890s and 1910s, Blacks increased their proportion of the state’s voting-age male population from negligible numbers following the Civil War to about 17 percent. As they made the transition to the new industrial era, African Americans also diversified their institutional and political responses to inequality. Black business and professional men took the top leadership positions, and African American workers and women also influenced the development of the Black community. Church membership, mainly in Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal (AME) bodies, rose from less than 15,000 in the pre–World War I years to nearly 33,000 in 1926. Black fraternal orders and mutual benefit societies also enrolled rising numbers, reaching a peak of about 32,000 members before declining during the late 1920s. Established in 1903 under the leadership of Rev. R. H. McKoy, the Golden Rule Beneficial and Endowment Association not only served Blacks in West Virginia but also developed branches in Kentucky and Virginia. In addition to a broad range of churches, fraternal orders, and social clubs, Mountain State Blacks built strong ties to influential national Black civil rights and political organizations. West Virginia branches and affiliates of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA, i.e., the Garvey Movement) proliferated. By the mid-1920s, southern West Virginia alone counted no less than eight local chapters and divisions of the UNIA, while the NAACP reported a dozen active chapters in the region by the beginning of the Great Depression. Even as Blacks joined larger national campaigns for social justice, they also deepened their efforts to build solidarity among themselves as West Virginians. These efforts gained potent expression in the work of the closely aligned McDowell County Colored Republican Organization (MCCRO) and the Black weekly newspaper, the McDowell Times. Under the editorship of Matthew Thomas Whittico, a graduate of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the McDowell Times offered African Americans an alternative to the biased reporting of the white press. In Whittico’s words, “The white press champions the cause of all people except the Negro, and upon the question of his rights . . . it is left to the Negro papers to wage an unceasing warfare upon the enemies of the Negro.” Whittico also coined the popular phrase, “The Free State of McDowell.” This phrase not only accented the paper’s location in the state’s largest center of Black population, it

African Americans in West Virginia / 7

also underscored the determination of Mountain State Blacks to fight for and secure full citizenship for Blacks in West Virginia and the nation. The proliferation of Black institutions facilitated the political mobilization of the state’s Black population. Partly because they retained the right to vote at a time that other Southern Blacks faced increasing disfranchisement, African Americans in West Virginia exercised considerable influence in the politics of the state. Through their alliance with the Republican Party, Black voters largely insured the election of certain white Republicans to state and local positions, but they also insisted on nominating and electing their own numbers to public office. In 1918, three African American men served in the West Virginia State Legislature. Black state representatives included the Charleston attorney T. G. Nutter, the Keystone attorney Harry J. Capehart, and the coal miner John V. Coleman of Fayette County. Based upon their growing political influence in the state, by the onset of the Great Depression, African Americans had secured access to a variety of state-supported Black institutions: the Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics; two state colleges (Bluefield State and West Virginia State); a large number of public grade, middle, and high schools; and a plethora of social welfare institutions serving the state’s Black handicapped, elderly, and tuberculosis patients, to name a few. Moreover, Black legislators had spearheaded passage of a pioneering antilynching law as well as a statute to prevent the showing of racially inflammatory films such as The Birth of a Nation. African American political unity was by no means unproblematic. As elsewhere, the development of West Virginia’s Black community entailed substantial tensions and social conflicts along class, cultural, and gender lines. By the late 1920s, for example, as increasing numbers of Blacks from the Deep South entered the coalfields, Blacks born in Virginia and West Virginia looked down upon the newcomers as less educated and modern than their Upper South counterparts. During the late 1920s, according to one study of race relations in the coalfields, West Virginians regarded the Southerners as “crude,” “emotional,” and “mean” and tended to avoid them. While Black men took most decision-making positions, African American women provided indispensable leadership in the development of Black churches, fraternal orders, and social clubs. In his entry on Margaret A. W. Thompson, one of the three women listed in volume 7, Caldwell notes Thompson’s extraordinary role as president of the state’s Black Woman’s Baptist Convention. She had served as president for twenty-four years: “The work has taken her into every part of the state and there is not a colored woman in West Virginia who is better known than Mrs. Thompson.” Under her leadership, membership in the organization increased from under one hundred to more than fifteen

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hundred. Similarly, Hattie A. Washington, a second Black woman featured in the Caldwell volume, not only served as president of the state Federation of Women’s Clubs in West Virginia but also took an active part in the benevolent Daughters of Rebecca and the fraternal Order of St. Lukes. Like other Black women religious leaders, Washington combined church work with club work, including the Woman’s Improvement League. In addition to their religious, club, and lodge work, Black women also fueled the political and civil rights activities of the Black community, both before and particularly after the enfranchisement of women in 1920. In 1927, Minnie Buckingham Harper became the first Black woman to serve in a state legislature in the United States when she completed the term of her deceased husband, E. Howard Harper of McDowell County. Memphis Tennessee Garrison, a public schoolteacher and civil rights activist, influenced the work of the local and state NAACP; she also shaped the work of the national organization when she spearheaded the NAACP’s Annual Christmas Seal fundraising campaign under the powerful motto, “Merry Christmas and Justice for All.” Garrison also served as secretary of the local Gary branch of the NAACP from 1921 through the remainder of the decade. At the same time that she worked with the NAACP, Garrison worked hard for the McDowell Colored Republican Organization; she also spearheaded a movement to replace the male secretary of the organization with a female. This movement split the MCCRO along gender lines, with men voting against and women voting for placing a woman in the secretary’s post. Between 1926 and 1930, the predominantly male MCCRO defeated efforts of women to gain the position. In other organizations as well, Black women made their tremendous contributions to the life of the state against the barriers of gender and sex, as well as race and class. Despite significant internal social cleavages and conflicts before the depression years, Black West Virginians experienced perhaps their most hopeful moment in the state’s history during World War I and the 1920s. The Great Depression of the 1930s and the technological transformation of the coal industry (particularly the increasing use of mechanical coal-loading machines) set in motion the long-term outmigration of Blacks from the Mountain State to the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. While the state’s Black and white populations both dropped in the wake of the coal industry’s decline, Blacks suffered disproportionate losses. By 1980, Blacks accounted for only 3 percent of the state’s dwindling coal-industry workforce and about the same proportion of the state’s total population. According to one Black miner, management “always put them [loading machines] where Blacks were working first.” Black men, he said, could not “kick” against the machines.

African Americans in West Virginia / 9

As growing numbers of Blacks and whites left the state in the years after World War II, West Virginia’s Jim Crow order gradually crumbled. Similar to the rise of the modem civil rights movement elsewhere, efforts to integrate the schools and open up public accommodations to Blacks and whites on an equal basis met stiff white resistance in some places. In Greenbrier County, for example, civil rights leaders faced intimidation and threats of violence from local white supremacist groups. For the most part, however, the increasing outmigration of Blacks and whites tempered resistance to the desegregation movement in the Mountain State. Unlike other southern states, by the mid1970s the predominantly Black Bluefield State College and West Virginia State College had become predominantly white institutions. Moreover, at the grade school and high school levels, African American residents decried the swift dismantling of Black schools in the wake of the increasing consolidation of Black and white schools. According to R. Charles Byers, professor of education at West Virginia State College, the fall of Black high schools was a “heart-breaking” development, “but what was more deplorable was the injustice that took place in West Virginia. The artifacts, trophies, books, yearbooks, and records now referred to as memorabilia were burned or placed away in boxes and forgotten.” During the closing years of the twentieth century, African Americans continued their uphill struggles for social justice in the institutional, political, social, and economic life of the state. After a brief recovery in the coal industry during the national energy crisis of the early 1970s, the industry plunged downward again by the close of the twentieth century. Beginning during Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition of the 1930s, the state’s Black and white voters had supported the Democratic Party in national elections, but a majority of the state’s white population voted Republican in the presidential elections of 2000, 2004, and in 2008, when the nation elected Barack H. Obama the first president of African American descent. In 1998, however, the state had elected a Marshall University professor, Marie Reed, the second Black woman to serve in the West Virginia House of Representatives, and the first Black woman to gain election to that office in her own right. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Black Mountaineers not only continued their fight to improve conditions and open up opportunities for the state’s small African American population, they also mobilized their resources to recover and preserve the history of Blacks during the height of the segregationist era. In 1988, the First Baptist Church of Charleston hosted the First Annual Conference on West Virginia’s Black History. Sponsored by the Alliance for the Collection, Preservation, and Dissemination of West Virginia’s Black History, the annual conference underscored the state’s loss of a broad range

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of historic institutions. Black Mountaineers and their white supporters not only decried the loss of recent Black history and culture through the closing of Black schools and the reverse integration of historically Black colleges, they also lamented the dismantling of key state-supported Black institutions such as the West Virginia Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics, which closed its doors in 1956 and thus removed a key agency in the fight to improve the socioeconomic status of Blacks across the state. Reissue of Caldwell’s West Virginia Edition in 2012 offers a fine opportunity for us to reassess recent changes in the state’s Black history against the advances in African American life and race relations during and after World War I. Yet, despite its extraordinary contributions to knowledge, volume 7 exhibits certain limitations and blind spots. At a time when the vast majority of Southern Blacks entered the labor force before graduating from high school, this volume features the careers of men who had obtained high school, college, and even MA and PhD degrees from such diverse institutions as Howard University, Penn State, and Yale. It not only downplays the contributions of poor and working-class Black men, it also largely overlooks the vital role of Black women at all levels of the social structure. Only three Black women appear among the 118 entries. Nonetheless, this volume shows how the lives of Black men and women, both elites and workers, were closely intertwined within the larger context of the expanding Jim Crow order. The segregationist system presented extraordinary challenges to the state’s Black population across class, status, and gender lines, but West Virginia nonetheless seemed a great beacon of hope for large numbers of Black people during the first third of the twentieth century. Black men gained a substantial foothold in the bituminous coal industry; their numbers also helped to elect three Black men to the state legislature during the early post–World War I years. Moreover, while the movement for a federal antilynching law faltered, Black legislators spearheaded the passage of such a law in the Mountain State. As suggested by recent developments in African American history in West Virginia, the ninetieth anniversary publication of A. B. Caldwell’s History of the American Negro, West Virginia Edition is an exceedingly timely and welcome event. It offers an extraordinary opportunity to reflect on the state’s African American experience during the opening decade of another century—the era of Barack Obama.

Chapter 2

MIGRATION TO SOUTHERN WEST VIRGINIA

he Great Migration of Blacks to northern, southern, and western cities is receiving increasing scholarly attention, but large numbers of Blacks moved to the southern Appalachian coalfields of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and especially West Virginia. The African American population in the central Appalachian plateau increased by nearly 200 percent between 1900 and 1930, from less than 40,000 to more than 108,000.1 Black migration to southern Appalachia, as elsewhere, was deeply rooted in the social imperatives of Black life in the rural South, as well as the dynamics of industrial capitalism. This chapter examines the origins, sources, and consequences of Black migration to the Mountain State. It also suggests how Southern Blacks helped to organize their own movement and transformation into a new class of industrial workers. Black migration to West Virginia accelerated as the Mountain State underwent a dramatic industrial transformation. The entire state produced only 5 million tons of coal in 1887, but coal production in southern West Virginia alone increased to nearly 40 million tons in 1910, about 70 percent of the state’s total output. As coal companies increased production, the state’s Black population increased from an estimated 25,800 in 1880 to more than 64,000 in 1910.2 Like industrialization in other Southern states, bituminous coal mining helped to transform the region’s largely subsistence economy into a dependent industrial economy, with growing links to national and international markets.3 Between the 1890s and early 1930s, Blacks made up over 20 percent of the state’s total coal-mining labor force.4 African American migration to the Mountain State built on antebellum and early postbellum roots. Booker T. Washington was among ex-slaves who

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migrated into the coalfields and worked in the mines. During the Civil War, Washington Furguson escaped from slavery and followed Union soldiers into the Kanawha Valley. After the Civil War, he sent for his wife, Jane, and her children, including the young Booker T., “who made the trip overland in a wagon, there being no railroad connection as yet with old Virginia.” Booker T. Washington later described his tenure in the mines as an unpleasant experience. “Work in the coal mines I always dreaded. . . . There was always the danger of being blown to pieces by a premature explosion of powder, or of being crushed by falling slate. Accidents from one or the other of these causes were frequently occurring and this kept me in constant fear.” 5 Although Blacks had entered the region in the antebellum and Reconstruction eras, it was not until the railroad expansion of the 1890s and early 1900s that their numbers dramatically increased, giving rise to a new industrial proletariat. Black workers helped to lay track for every major rail line in the region. In his assessment of Black labor on the Chesapeake and Ohio (which produced the Black folk hero John Henry), sociologist James T. Laing concluded that “this important road was largely built by Negro laborers from Virginia.” Upon completion of the Chesapeake and Ohio in 1873, many Blacks remained behind “to work in the newly opened coal mines of the New River district.” The ex-slave James Henry Woodson from nearby Virginia eventually took a job on the labor crew of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway shops and thus paved the way for his young son Carter G. Woodson’s brief stint in the mines of the Kanawha- New River field. The younger Woodson later moved out of coal mining, earned a PhD degree from Harvard University, and founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.6 In 1892, Blacks played “fully as large a part” in the building of the Norfolk and Western Railroad as they did in constructing the Chesapeake and Ohio. As in the case of the Chesapeake and Ohio, following the completion of the Norfolk and Western, many Black railroad men “remained to work in the coal fields” of the Pocahontas Division. Black labor on the Virginian Railroad and the subsequent opening of mines in the Winding Gulf field followed a similar pattern. “When the Winding Gulf Field . . . opened up through the building of the Virginian Railroad in 1909 the Negro again played the part of pioneer.” 7 While a few individuals like Carter G. Woodson and Booker T. Washington eventually moved out of coal mining, gained substantial education, and became part of the national Black elite, most Black migrants finished out their careers as part of the expanding Black industrial proletariat. Under the impact of World War I, working-class Black kin and friendship networks would intensify, bringing a new generation of Southern Black workers into the coal industry.8

Migration to Southern West Virginia / 13

LEGEND Approximate boundaries are shown by dotted lines. Kanawha–New River Field: Kanawha, Fayette, and Boone Counties and part of Raleigh County Winding Gulf Field: most of Raleigh and Wyoming Counties Pocahontas Field: McDowell and Mercer Counties Williamson-Logan Field: Logan and Mingo Counties and part of Wyoming County

Data Sources: Adapted from Otis K. Rice, West Virginia: A History (Lexington University Press of Kentucky, 1985); Cortez Donald Reece, “A Study of Selected Folksongs Collected in Southern West Virginia” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1955); and Philip M. Conley, History of the West Virginia Coal Industry (Charleston: Education Foundation, 1960).

Southern West Virginia. Reproduced with permission from Joe William Trotter Jr., Coal, Class and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 74.