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...
