The National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP) was of the American Communist Party. They are demanding the standard UMW provision requiring the company to pay a royalty of seventy-five cents a ton on mined coal into the UMW Welfare & Retirement Fund. He hopes the other side will do the same. Find the perfect harlan county coal stock photo, image, vector, illustration or 360 image. There were constant beatings of the miners by the Sheriffs deputies. He says that wages are no longer a problem and that the amount of the royalty to be paid into the UMW Welfare & Retirement Fund is not crucially important. Grace Elizabeth Hale. Coal companies refused to back down while the Red Cross refused to give aid . But will Norman Yarborough ever agree to recognize the UMW? It was the most violent attack of the Harlan County Coal wars and the most violence would only last fifteen minutes in total but would forever change the name to Bloody Harlan. McQueen says that in late 1972 he burned his fingers to the bone on a switchbox where a blown fuse had been hot-wired. I have attended the University of Kentucky. The judge's fines and sentences were appealed. And, even so, it usually takes forty-five minutes to an hour for the inspector to get from mine entrance to the face of the coal. Overturned car bodies everywhere. Horn's letter questions the fair-mindedness of the inquiry members. Destitute miners were in no position to take a 2 wage cut; yet, in February of 1931 the newest in a long series of wage cuts occurred, reducing miners' weekly pay by 10 percent. It seems to me that for a great many people in Harlan County-for poor people and a lot of coal miners the whole county is a jail. The coal miners, lean and tough from Kentucky mountain life, knew how to fight back. We soon get into a discussion about Dreiser's 1931 inquiry. 25 (N.L.R.B. There were shots exchanged and all three deputies and one striker were killed. When drafting these articles, I found that many things have not been taught to the future generations about the struggles for coal miner rights have been in the Appalachian Mountains. The National Industrial Recovery Act only partially succeeded in accomplishing its stated goals when it was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on May 27, 1935, which was three weeks before the Act was set to expire. He fined the UMW $20,000. Four men were arrested in connection with this murder. No wonder R C Cola has so many signs everywhere. Those with running water rent for around $20 a month, plus electricity. It was a nearly decade-long conflict, lasting from 1931 to 1939. . With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners' sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs. October 31, 2016. "We took the sticks with us," she says. On Jan. 25, 1890, a new union, the United Mine Workers of America, was formed, and in 1903 its young president, John Mitchell, led the union on a successful 24-week strike. Blair. Ky., told the Senate Civil Liberties Committee as it resumed its investigation of alleged terrorism in connection with Harlan County Coal Operators' efforts to resist union organization drives. He tells me that the miners plan to picket on Wall Street, hoping to give Duke problems with its stock. Sheriff T. R. Middleton replaced Blair under the pro-union campaign platform. That means, among other things, an average daily wage of $45. The kind of house she would like, if she could find one, would rent for about $50 a month, but she and her husband cannot pay that much. We are handed copies of court records concerning a certain Claude Beach, who has been hired by Eastover during the strike as a "security guard." The officials were listed were the "veteran safety director of the Harlan Coal Operators Association, and Rufus Bailey and H. Hamlin, state . "The danger's just the same," they say. On Friday, March 25, a continuous mining machine operator was killed by a wall collapse at the Huff Creek No. ", Bill McQueen says that when the shuttle's lights and brakes were not working and the inspector was coming, the foreman would say, "Park it." Hennen attributes this abandonment to the increasingly conservative John L. Lewis, the longtime and powerful president of the UMWA, who feared . There was no standard contract for the miners. "They don't want miners havin' any say in safety." I say that the issue is whether or not the men will be allowed to have their own union to protect their safety and secure and maintain decent wages and benefits, that if enough pressure is put on Duke Power Company, maybe something will give. Harlan County. And you wondr why I keep running my mouth . Why haven't the car bodies been removed from the highway and the streets? B.W. They had no safety committee, the miners say, and the federal reports bear them out. those in the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association, were run as open shops from October 27, 1933 - March 31, 1935. "A gun thug pulled a gun on us, and I broke a switch over his head, and the little gun thug pulled out," Lois Scott says matter-of-factly. He says that negotiations were broken off on November 28, 1973, because of the miners' insistence on the full terms of the standard UMW contract. Evarts welcomed the miners because it was filled with spurned politicians and business owners who wished to see the company stores and company men in political positions vanish. . The remaining workforce then went on strike as a sign of solidarity with those that were fired from their jobs. ", We break for lunch, prepared by the women of the Evarts Community Center. This caused the clergy to denounce the union. Special Judge F. Byrd Hogg, a neighboring county judge who has been assigned to the case, entered an early order limiting the strikers to three pickets at each of two entrances to the Eastover Mining Company property. The motorcade stopped and the deputies got out of their cars to return fire. The coal companies refused to back down from their positions and change anything. "The way I figured it, they done that because it was just a faster, way of getting coal." On the way back to the Mount Aire at the end of the day, we pass back through Brookside with its deteriorating mining-camp houses along the stinking Clear Fork River. Other clippings detail the earlier bloodshed and misery in Harlan County. I look at the government statistics once more. Sheriff Blair was voted out of his office in 1933 and died just a year later. [citation needed] On February 16, 1931, in order to prevent operating at a loss, the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association cut miners' wages by 10%. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. In the bloody 1930s coal wars, miners known to be union members were fired and evicted from company-owned homes. Harlan County U.S.A. by Felicia Elliott, August 2, 2016. But what of the people of Harlan County? They are merely a service organization, Yarborough says. Mine operators viciously opposed miners' efforts to unionize, particularly in Harlan County. She doesn't know where she will go when the camp is closed. Harlan County Coal Operators' Association. It comes to a bill of about $20,000 a week for the national union. Neither will Dr. Robert Coles, psychiatrist and author of Children of Crisis. The final straw was when the Harlan County Coal Operators Association cut miners' wages by 10%. There were only three cars in the motorcade each of which contained a sheriffs deputy. She says that she and some of the other women hid out last night to avoid being served with a contempt citation from Judge Hogg's court. Lois Scott explains that during the first confrontation at the mine, she saw a pistol in the front seat of every "scab" car she looked into and that a company "gun thug" pointed a submachine gun at the women from the porch of the Eastover office. When the smoke had cleared, the bodies of three guards and one miner were found, and an undetermined number of other dead and dying had been carried away into the mountains. J. D. Skidmore says that, back in the mines, the phones are always out of order, there is no transportation out until the end of the shift, and it's a one-hour walk to daylight. The men and women were released on good behavior. As discussed in a previous video. The Harlan County Coal Operators Association, still functioning today, spent nearly a half million dollars from 1927 to 1938 to combat unionism, most of it going to pay strongarm men to terrorize the miners and their families. 5355 after Local Union 4495 at Black Mountain folded up. He then answers a question he wasn't asked. the foreman would just say, "We gotta run coal. I currently live in Tennessee but my hope is to one day come back home to live in the beautiful mountains once more. Dateline Newport News, Virginia, November 12, 1931: Dreiser denies the charge and says he wants people to concentrate on the facts of the labor dispute and "get the American mind off sex for a moment." Daniels was one of the most hated deputies in the county due to his anti-union views. Conflict broke out again the 1970s in what was known as the Brookside strike. Someone had planted dynamite in his automobile and when he started it up the car blew up. Done Citation. Burger Chef. Afterwards, they gathered near the picket line at the Eastover property in Brookside. Yarborough's affidavit stated that "the group swarmed out into the roads, stopped cars, and forced company employees into coercive conversations and indulged in generally raucous name-calling and abuse." After the railroad arrived in 1911 . "I've seen some hurt and some killed. We gather back in Evarts and announce that our report will be ready in two or three weeks. Before this war was over it is not known exactly how many miners, coal operators, deputies, and bosses would be killed. It is an area of Kentucky that you only go to if you are intentionally going to the county. "Not at all," Yarborough says. Harlan County sits in the sweet spot of coal mining in southeastern Kentucky. The decision caused unrest in the county among the miners. The company will probably demand a new election. Our driver points out Norman Yarborough's two-story frame house, across the highway from the camp and up out of the river bottom. The group included John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, and a number of other writers and artists. We look back on the film, which screens this Sunday, February . Eight miners were sentenced to life in prison for the actions that were taken on May 5, 1931. The women furnish the panel with a copy of a report from the Harlan County Health Department, dated October 12, 1973, which states that the drinking water in the Eastover mining camp, where approximately thirty of the striking Brookside families live, is "highly contaminated" with fecal bacteria. Source for information on Harlan County: Encyclopedia of the Great Depression dictionary. On February 16, 1931, the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association reduced wages for miners in that part of eastern Kentucky by 10 percent. Yarborough is tough and unyielding. With this Supreme Court ruling, all but one of the open shops in Harlan County went back to the previous mine operations. Now and then, there is a neat, new frame house or a Pic and Pay market between scattered tarpaper shacks. An open shop is where union membership is allowed but not mandated to work at that location. They just laughed about it, and we kept on cuttin' coal. Documents the 1973 Kentucky coal miners' strike against the operators of the Brookside mine and the Duke Power Company, which resulted from the company's refusal to honor the . They relate federal mine-safety figures which show that in 1971 the accident rate in the Brookside mine was three times the national average, and in 1972 was twice the national average. It was two o'clock on a Monday morning when the accident occurred, and he'd been in the mine., more than twelve hours. HARLAN COUNTYHarlan County, Kentucky, is a rural county located in a major coal-mining region in the Appalachian Mountains. ", "They've done discriminated me," Grover Jennings continues. Three of our Inquiry members plan to talk with the president of Duke Power Company. Apparently, this is one of Eastover's major objections. The Citizens Inquiry meets in the attractive, river-rock Evarts Community Center, directly across the Clear Fork from the site of the 1931 "Battle of Evarts." USBM Final Investigation Report (1.7 Mb) Successful Rescue . On May 5, 1931 the pot boiled over; in Harlan County Kentucky, heavily armed deputies and company men, called "gun thugs" by miners, confronted disgruntled union men on a road near Evarts. They want portal-to-portal pay from the time they enter the mine until they leave it. "Boss walks up and says, 'We've got to make this mine look good now, boys; the inspector's comin','" Jerry Johnson says. But I ain't leaving because this is my home.". After nearly 40 years of working in coalmines, David . Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. Now, forty-three years later, Harlan County is again gripped in a UMW strike, this time at the Brookside mine of the Eastover Mining Company, and another citizens' group has been formed. The Harlan County Wars took on its own epic spin on the ongoing fight between labor disputes and the coal operators and owners lasting almost ten years. Many of the houses have no running water, and these families have to carry all their water from a common outdoor spigot. "With all those state police, we knew we had three choices," she says. A Committee was formed and conducted by Activist Theodore Dreiser under the auspices of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP). I don't like- workin' in them kind of conditions." Why wasn't the fuse replaced at once? It has assets worth $2.5 billion. Depression-era Harlan County, Kentucky, was the site of one of the most bitter and protracted labor disputes in American history. Battle of Evartshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Evarts, National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/new-deal/national-industrial-recovery-act-of-1933/, Battle of Evartshttps://pipiwiki.com/wiki/Battle_of_Evarts, Battle of Evartshttps://wiki2.org/en/Battle_of_Evarts, Harlan County Warhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County_War, A Brief History of Harlan County, USAhttps://labornotes.org/blogs/2019/08/brief-history-harlan-county-usa, Harlan County Warhttps://everipedia.org/Harlan_County_War, https://appalachiancenter.as.uky.edu/coal-strike/background-coal-strike, https://appalachiancenter.as.uky.edu/coal-strike/local-elite, https://appalachiancenter.as.uky.edu/coal-strike/new-york-writers, https://appalachiancenter.as.uky.edu/coal-strike/national-miners-union-and-other-radical-groups, The Wagner Act of 1935 (National Labor Relations Act)https://www.thebalancecareers.com/the-wagner-act-of-1935-national-labor-relations-act-2060509#:~:text=%20The%20Wagner%20Act%20defines%20and%20prohibits%20five,or%20administration%20of%20a%20labor%20organization.%20More%20, BOMB IN AUTO KILLS KENTUCKY OFFICIAL; Harlan County Attorney Predicted Assassination for Backing Troops in Election.https://www.nytimes.com/1935/09/05/archives/bomb-in-auto-kills-kentucky-official-harlan-county-attorney.html#:~:text=HARLAN%2C%20Ky.%2C%20Sept.%204%20%28AP%29.%20%20The%20death,his%20automobile.%20View%20Full%20Article%20in%20Timesmachine%20%C2%BB, Elmon Clay Middleton https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/70804679/elmon-clay-middleton, KENTUCKY HOLDS FOUR IN AUTO BOMB KILLING; Harlan Prosecutors Death Is Laid to His Fight Against Slot Machines.https://www.nytimes.com/1935/09/06/archives/kentucky-holds-four-in-auto-bomb-killing-harlan-prosecutors-death.html, Blackjewel Bankruptcy Leaves Damaged Lands and Miners Compensation in Limbo, https://ohiovalleyresource.org/2021/03/22/blackjewel-bankruptcy-finalized/, This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/?fbclid=IwAR21nYphw4Dul-_EwuAmSWgzsvPLNwsMM0FtV75j0y-mGUHq-lCZjJxZot8, For more about us, you can visit our Facebook at:https://www.facebook.com/kytnliving, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs0oV5gFzIS2JdMJ3HvTOgA, When we forget our past and who we are as a people, then we become who they say we are. the meeting room. [6] Nearly four thousand miners working and living in Harlan County, Kentucky lost their jobs in the Great Depression. In response to the violence, the Kentucky National Guard was called upon and arrived for the first time in the county to try to stem the violence. Crossing the Clinch River, we turn onto Highway 421 and leave the modern world. 1938) Copy Citation . They lobby in Frankfort and Washington and sponsor an annual "Coal Miners Day" to try to get more high school students interested in mining engineering. Now, Tony Boyle is among those who have been convicted of complicity in the murders, and Arnold Miller is the head of the revamped union. It read: RE-ELECT GAW, JAILER.
Physical Traits Of Norwegian Ancestry,
Bonnerup Funeral Service Obituary,
Articles H