Yarborough says that he will not agree to the contract applying to Eastover's subcontractors. Nannie Rainey takes us into her four-room house where she and her husband and five children live. There was an addition to where miners could choose their own representation for these negotiations. Five miles north of Harlan, we drive up Inspiration Mountain. Coal employment in Harlan county dropped 53.7% in the second quarter of this year compared with last year, driven by Blackjewel's bankruptcy. Yarborough tells us that the company does not now object to paying the miners for portal-to-portal time for inside mine work, but that the union wants comparability for outside workers too, in effect requiring the company to pay outside workers overtime for all work in excess of a seven and-a-quarter-hour regular day. He fined the UMW $20,000. There are very few vacant houses in the county. We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. He does say, I think primarily for the record, that he would like to see negotiations begin again. Their General Secretary recently released some facts which help to illustrate the reason for much of the unemployment in the county. An open shop is where union membership is allowed but not mandated to work at that location. It is thought that Middleton was assassinated for backing troops who were present in the County to protect the miners. Working barns of gray-black weathered wood. "We want safety all the time, not just when the inspector comes," Jerry Johnson says. Rev. When they went to jail, they say, some of the women took their children with them. She's been picketing with the other women. 2012: $1,552,717. "If we could monitor these inspections, perhaps we could cut down on the fatalities," he says. 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. Big Boy. Burger Chef. A historical marker says we are near the Little Shepherd Trail, the setting for the novel Shepherd of the Hills. corporateBody associatedWith : Heyl & Patterson, Inc . 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. At these locations, the mine wages began to be comparable to other jobs around the nation. When fuses blow, they are not immediately replaced; the cable is spliced or "hot-wired" around the fuse. "Try walking out of there, carrying a man with a broken back," one of the miners says. Duke Power Company appears to be the key to breaking the deadlock in negotiations. The SLU was largely seen as serving the interests of the mine owners rather than the workers. There were only three cars in the motorcade each of which contained a sheriffs deputy. "I've had the foreman to tell me to set timbers or something until the inspector got gone. "We've took about all we can take," he says. It was Miller who defeated W. A. There were ten lodges that were chartered for the National Miners Union. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. Si Kahn says that Eastover tried for a time to operate the mine with "scabs," but that the mine was shut down when the coal miners' wives and other women joined the men on the picket line. 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. Don Dalton, UMW Safety Director for Region Six, explains this. The miners speak of other dissatisfactions with Eastover and the old Southern Labor Union contract. The Wagner Act of 1935 (National Labor Relations Act or NLRA) guaranteed the rights of workers to choose to organize. Sheriff Blair was voted out of his office in 1933 and died just a year later. "I don't like to handle that raw juice," he says. The nearest ridge is green with spruce and pine. Did she find the stick on the ground? But what of the people of Harlan County? If for example, they did not behave in the way the companies wanted them to, they could lose all their benefits up to and including their jobs. J. D. Skidmore says, "I have no chance of getting a job in Harlan County if this strike is not settled." 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. Altogether, it is a heavy financial burden for the UMW. We hope that our hearings will help hold down violence. A month later, back in Washington, I meet with Bernie Aaronson at UMW headquarters. Leroy Helton says he still owes a lot of bills that should have been paid by SLU. They want portal-to-portal pay from the time they enter the mine until they leave it. "They didn't say nothin'; all they want's coal.' Interview Summary. 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. Miner Curtis Cress, 34, says towns that . 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." Lois Scott, a woman of about forty-five, begins to speak first. At first, heading northwest on modern Route 23, through Kingsport, Tennessee, Weber City, Virginia, and Gate City, Virginia, the sights are the same as almost everywhere else in America today. She talks about hiding behind cars on the picket line for protection from the "gun thugs." She talks about a standoff against Basil Collins and the scabs and gun thugs. Enforcing the operators' political will, both within and outside the law, was the Harlan County Coal Operators Association. Mr. It is a warm night and at every bend in the asphalt road we hear a chorus of croaking frogs. "Yarborough says he just don't want nobody tellin' him how to run his mine," Deaton says. Harry Caudill, attorney and author of Night Comes to the Cumberlands, will not be able to join us in Harlan because of legal business. The money was . And always there is a murky roadside stream, beech and sycamore trees lining its banks. 25 (N.L.R.B. "In Harlan County, U.S.A., sound anchors, explains, and makes 'authentic' visual imagery compromised by the long history of documentary work in Appalachia.". There were only nine hundred miners working and 5,800 miners were idle and striking during the first strike. It is clear that these women have been a main factor in keeping the mine shut down. Get a Demo. As the motorcade approached a single shot rang out in the air. Their foothold there ultimately ended because the local clergy who were the labor organizers found out that the union was communist in nature and held animosity toward religion. After the railroad arrived in 1911 . 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. Up at seven on a Monday morning, I walk out onto the balcony of my motel room. (Fifty million tons of union coal are mined in western Kentucky; only 6.5 million tons of union coal are mined in eastern Kentucky.) These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. Name Entry; Harlan County Coal Operators' Association. Source Citation [ }] Descriptive Note Contributors from initial SNAC EAC-CPF ingest. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. . McDonald's. Miners laid in an ambush on the day of May 5, 1931, near the Evarts railroad crossing. Breaks in the cable, they say, are often just wrapped with mask-ing tape and exposed again to the water. No wonder R C Cola has so many signs everywhere. On the plane with me, it turns out, is another member of the Citizens Inquiry, Jacqueline Brophy, who is the director of the Labor-Liberal Arts Program of Cornell University's School of Industrial Labor Relations in New York. ", What about the Southern Labor Union? A reporter asks us again how we can expect to make an unbiased report when we've heard only one side. We agree that most of us lean toward the miners, but we think we can be fair in trying to learn the facts. . It comes to a bill of about $20,000 a week for the national union. The National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP) was of the American Communist Party. "We could lay down, fight the police, or let them scabs go to work. The latest unrest in Harlan County came when in July of 2019, Black jewel LLC filed for bankruptcy and liquidation. "With all those state police, we knew we had three choices," she says. These guards were legally able to protect these men during their off duty time. We stop for fish and chips at a chain-operated Long John Silver's Sea Food Shoppe, as out of place in the Cumberlands as a clam in a spruce tree. ", "They've done discriminated me," Grover Jennings continues. Pay ranged from $17 to $32 day, the average being $25. The mining company had ordered a motorcade to deliver food and supplies to the strikebreakers known as Scabs. 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. Find the perfect harlan county coal stock photo, image, vector, illustration or 360 image. Some of the women say they haven't had a drink of water since moving to the Brookside camp. "Roof falls are a constant hazard, but the bosses just keep on rushin'.". ", 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." : The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931-39 (Paperback) at the best online prices at eBay! Other clippings detail the earlier bloodshed and misery in Harlan County. "Boss walks up and says, 'We've got to make this mine look good now, boys; the inspector's comin','" Jerry Johnson says. Biographical History . As discussed in a previous video. The decision caused unrest in the county among the miners. With the opening left by the United Mine Workers union the openly Communist (NMU) National Miners Union tried to help the miners to organize. Along the way, we pass through the community of Brookside, its mine-camp houses dominated by the brooding tin presence of the Eastover mine building on the hill. It will be a two-hour, winding drive through the Cumberland Mountains to the town of Harlan. But I ain't leaving because this is my home.". The main problem, he says, is that the company wants a "no-strike" clause, so that the union cannot strike during the contract period. This was not just a flashy slogan, and the truth of it is . . On May 24, 1931, Sheriff Blair rescinded the miners right to assemble and tear-gassed a union rally. 9:03 PM. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Over one thousand shots were exchanged during those fifteen minutes. 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. "They sent me to 'Waterhole No. 2011: $1,161,330. These battles will end the Coal Wars proper. It read: RE-ELECT GAW, JAILER. When filmmaker Barbara Kopple traveled to Harlan County, Kentucky, the resulting Academy award-winning documentary, Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) captured a historic story. No, Yarborough says; it just serves as a central clearing house, so that job applicants won't have to go around and apply at each of the mines separately. He was transferred to a worse section, he says. The miners charge that Eastover has hired what they call "gun thugs." Segment Synopsis: Lois Scott continues her conversation from her previous interview. The county was once part of Knox County, only becoming official in 1819. Why haven't the car bodies been removed from the highway and the streets? The Red Cross eventually became involved in the county along with several local charities. Depression-era Harlan County, Kentucky, was the site of one of the most bitter and protracted labor disputes in American history. The next morning the toothpicks were still in place, it was said. HARLAN COUNTYHarlan County, Kentucky, is a rural county located in a major coal-mining region in the Appalachian Mountains. Yarborough replies. The miners say that they want their own safety committee, elected by the miners, as the standard UMW contract provides, with the right to walk out, losing their pay, when there is eminent danger in the mine. On May 5, 1931, the Battle of Evarts began. Neither will Dr. Robert Coles, psychiatrist and author of Children of Crisis. She says that the women decided that they couldn't fight guns with switches and that they had taken sticks with them the next time. With this Supreme Court ruling, all but one of the open shops in Harlan County went back to the previous mine operations. At Washington's National Airport, I board Piedmont Airline's fat little silver jet on a Sunday afternoon in early March. The distance a miner had to walk and how time was looked at was in 15-minute increments. I don't like- workin' in them kind of conditions." The unemployment rate in the county is 7 percent; that doesn't count those who have long since given up looking for the scarce or nonexistent jobs. Sometimes, they'll be a black scum on the rag." Two hundred people crowd. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. [6] Nearly four thousand miners working and living in Harlan County, Kentucky lost their jobs in the Great Depression. Eight miners were sentenced to life in prison for the actions that were taken on May 5, 1931. Duke Power Company of North Carolina, he says, is the sixth largest utility company in the world. "I don't know nothing about the electrical part." I have attended the University of Kentucky. A young woman from the Associated Press asks me, aren't we getting only one side of the story? Mine operators formed the 1 Harlan County Coal Operators Association and through this organization made collective decisions concerning the mines. Since the county began mining, over one billion tons of coal have She pays $10 a month for rent and $10 a month for electricity. The airline magazine contains an article on southern skiing, a feature on hot, winter drinks for the "Piedmont palate," an article on how tough it is to be thirty-three and middle-class today, and a success story about an Atlanta bra, sleepwear, girdle, and pantie company. In the throes of the Great Depression, Harlan County coal owners and operators, in an effort to expand national dependency on their fuel, chose to sell below cost. Whitfield recalls working in his father's coal mines during the first years of commercial mining in Harlan County, and he describes the conditions. Harlan County sits in the sweet spot of coal mining in southeastern Kentucky. 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. He tells me that the miners plan to picket on Wall Street, hoping to give Duke problems with its stock. They file with us copies of specific federal safety violation reports, and they say that nothing was ever done to correct these violations. On one excuse or another, such as not having personnel readily available to accompany the inspector into the mine, the company can delay the inspection. those in the Harlan County Coal Operators . 3.' They have probably helped keep their own men from exploding too. 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. Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analyzed and have not been classified into a category as yet. Si sticks a wad of Red Man chewing tobacco in his cheek and begins to fill us in on the background of the Brookside strike. In the face of what promised to be a lengthy struggle for the Harlan County coal miners of 1931, their wildcat strike had left thousands jobless and many homeless as well. "Yeah," a coal miner says, "but the land's so poor, you can't hardly raise an umbrella on it.". The slab of slate, more than 51 feet long, and 17 feet wide and weighing tons, was dodged by two men. Is that the only objection that is holding up a settlement? The records show that Beach was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in 1954 and sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary, that he was later charged with carrying a concealed pistol (no disposition shown), and that in 1966 he was tried and acquitted on a murder charge. They are neatly and attractively dressed. The men and women were released on good behavior. That year, annual wages dropped from $1,235 to $749. Word precedes him. Sheriff T. R. Middleton replaced Blair under the pro-union campaign platform. The issues had been narrowed down to Eastover's demand for a "no-strike clause" and a limit on the power of the safety committee. (Eastover offered fifty cents a ton.) Its initial land holdings were in the Irwin gas coal basin in Westmoreland County, but as these were exhausted the company purchased 14,000 acres of undeveloped coal land along the border of Boone and Logan Counties in West Virginia in 1923-28. . (This . HARLAN COUNTY COAL OPERATORS ASSOCIATION. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Betty Eldridge is a mildmannered, well-dressed woman of about forty. Bill Doan says, "When I got hurt, I couldn't find Jim Miller, the man who had charge of the sick fund." [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%. I've read that in its heyday, the Blackjoe coal camp consisted of 60 or so houses. But, I say, even without further investigation of each of the complaints, it is possible to conclude that fear is an everyday part of the miners' lives. Before the first meeting of the Citizens Inquiry, we sit around and talk with the Inquiry chairman, Daniel Pollitt, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina. 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.