In 1973 the 13-month Brookside Strike brought almost 200 workers to battle Eastover Coal Company's Brookside Mine and Prep Plant, a company owned by Duke Power. The Brookside labor dispute erupted spontaneously soon after Miller's election. June 17th of that same year, the first strike was over as the last miner had returned to work. Genders. Steeped in Appalachian culture and surrounded by the influence of coal, Harlan County has amassed an interesting reputation and national attention with rest of the world. Jacqueline Brophy asks why public services have broken down. 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.
Inside the Harlan County Coal Miner Protest - Rolling Stone 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. She pays $10 a month for rent and $10 a month for electricity. Harlan, city, seat of Harlan county, southeastern Kentucky, U.S., in the Cumberland Mountains, on the Clover Fork Cumberland River. 2011: $1,161,330. 1 mine in Evarts, in Harlan County, Kentucky. No wonder R C Cola has so many signs everywhere.
Before Senate Civil Liberties Committee. Washington, D.C., April 15 The transcript will be published as a book. These disputes were still brewing when on December 8, 1934, the United Mine Workers Union was threatened by deputies and mine bosses. The decrease in wages, unemployment, and irregular employment caused "poverty, hunger, and disease.". Featuring a haunting soundtrack-with legendary country . Two hundred people crowd. The warrant was never served. Overturned car bodies everywhere. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". Some seventy-five state policemen were on hand as the crowd gathered. "But if they call me and ask if a man works for me, I simply say yes or no.". After the Battle of Evarts, the Red Cross and the United Mine Workers Union refused to help the striking men on the basis that it was now an industrial conflict that needed to be resolved internally. The median family income is $4600 a year. Harlan County Coal Operators' Association. We come into Harlan County at dusk. The United Mine Workers union also cited that they did not have the resources to help in the battle. These interviews with major coal operators document their personal histories and the history of the coal industry in eastern Kentucky during the twentieth century. He speaks of "my people" and "my men." Eight miners were sentenced to life in prison for the actions that were taken on May 5, 1931. October 31, 2016. They range in age from about twenty-one to seventy.
Harlan | Kentucky, United States | Britannica It has assets worth $2.5 billion. During the rest of the afternoon, the miners talk about what has happened on the picket line and in the local court. It is a warm night and at every bend in the asphalt road we hear a chorus of croaking frogs. The miners could be fired if they refused to spend their paychecks only in the store.
Harlan county coal hi-res stock photography and images - Alamy "I've seen some hurt and some killed. The remaining workforce then went on strike as a sign of solidarity with those that were fired from their jobs. McDonald's. He says that he will not agree to the Brookside contract applying to "all" of Eastover's operations. Yellow-dog contracts (Contracts where the employees agreed to never organize into a union before they were employed with a coal company), company unions, blacklists, all tactics that were employed by the companies to bust up unions, and discrimination-based on union activity were all outlawed under this act. Darrell Deaton says there is a direct telephone line to Washington for safety complaints, "but if you identify yourself; you're gonna be out of a job.". A Committee was formed and conducted by Activist Theodore Dreiser under the auspices of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP). In response, the coal owners and operators decided to sell their fuel at below cost to increase the national dependency on coal. Here at Kentucky Tennessee Living we fully support the coal miners and their families. Source Citation [ }] Descriptive Note Contributors from initial SNAC EAC-CPF ingest. 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. Mr. Blanton explained the reasoning behind coal camps. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. In "Bloody Harlan" in the 1930s, miners and union organizers faced bayonets and many died fighting the coal bosses, helping to fuel a national wave of organizing. Lifelong resident of Harlan. Duke Power Company of North Carolina, he says, is the sixth largest utility company in the world.
Battle of Evarts - Wikipedia The members of the Inquiry panel leave the Community Center to visit the coal camp at Brookside-rows of delapidated frame houses, identical except for their weathering gray, green, red, and beige paint. She doesn't know where she will go when the camp is closed. They just laughed about it, and we kept on cuttin' coal. The money was . The women are nervous about testifying, afraid of retaliation. Neither will Dr. Robert Coles, psychiatrist and author of Children of Crisis. (Eastover, to repeat, now pays portal-to-portal wages for inside workers in its other mines and has raised the wages of nonstrikers to the UMW level.) Perched atop Inspiration Mountain is the modern Mount Aire Motel. Duke went into the coal business directly in 1970 when it organized Eastover Mining Company as a wholly owned subsidiary and, through it, bought several mines in eastern Kentucky, including the one at Brookside. 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. (That is a tough point.) I glance at the new Piedmont magazine, Pace. Two more Inquiry panel members join us, Willard Wirtz, who was Secretary of Labor under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and the Reverend Max Glenn, executive director of the Commission on Religion in Appalachia. They point out that most of the big coal companies, such as U.S. Steel and others, have signed UMW contracts, but that the smaller companies of eastern Kentucky have held out. He run all the way down the stairs and out of the jail." Others say they intend to speak and write about what they have heard. The next morning the toothpicks were still in place, it was said. I have taken several classes in Journalism as well as in the Appalachian History, Literature, and Sociology during my time at those schools. 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. ~~ David Sergent. The Harlan County Coal Wars lasted from 1931-1939. When they went to jail, they say, some of the women took their children with them. At Washington's National Airport, I board Piedmont Airline's fat little silver jet on a Sunday afternoon in early March. The Red Cross eventually became involved in the county along with several local charities. Daniels was one of the most hated deputies in the county due to his anti-union views.
The Price of Coal, Part I - kentuckymonthly.com Figure 2: Harlan County Coal Mine Employment, 2000-2016, (KYEEC, 2017) In 1942, shortly after Harlan County experienced record high coal mine employment, the county experienced is highest production levels with 15.6 million tons of coal being produced in this year (KYEEC, 2017). Most of the land is owned by the mining companies. 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. Where will the families go? The Seco Train Accident September 20, 1917, New Bank in the Coal Country Installed in 1911, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Evarts, https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/new-deal/national-industrial-recovery-act-of-1933/, https://pipiwiki.com/wiki/Battle_of_Evarts, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County_War, https://labornotes.org/blogs/2019/08/brief-history-harlan-county-usa, 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, 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, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/70804679/elmon-clay-middleton, https://www.nytimes.com/1935/09/06/archives/kentucky-holds-four-in-auto-bomb-killing-harlan-prosecutors-death.html, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/?fbclid=IwAR21nYphw4Dul-_EwuAmSWgzsvPLNwsMM0FtV75j0y-mGUHq-lCZjJxZot8, The Flatwoods Monster: Weird Appalachia Cases, Rotherwood Mansion: Weird Appalachia Cases, The Brown Mountain Ghostly Lights: Weird Appalachia Cases. When this strike was broken in1924, none of the non-union mines in Harlan County, all of which were members ofthe Harlan County Coal Operators Association, would employ a man from BlackMountain."Many of the men who worked at Black Mountain transferred to LocalUnion No.
Which Side are You On? : The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931-39 "You could hunt for one, but there just weren't one there," he says. But what of the people of Harlan County? "Not at all," Yarborough says. Now and then, there is a neat, new frame house or a Pic and Pay market between scattered tarpaper shacks. 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. Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features. Over one thousand shots were exchanged during those fifteen minutes. Willard Wirtz says that it is important to remember that one side of the dispute felt confident enough about their case to arrange to spread it before the widest possible audience. 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. Tuesday morning: Norman Yarborough has agreed to meet some of our group. Conflict broke out again the 1970s in what was known as the Brookside strike. Its profits in 1973 were $90 million, up 14 percent from the year before. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. At first, there were little battles with gunshots being exchanged between the strikers and the private guards, and the local law enforcement agents. The miners say that all of the strikers have been blacklisted by the Association. A reporter asks us again how we can expect to make an unbiased report when we've heard only one side. On September 9, 1935, for the first time since the beginning of the war, troops were dispatched to Harlan County on behalf of the miners by the Governor of the State of Kentucky. After this, the first strike occurred, in which only about 13% of strikers showed up to work. Nannie Rainey takes us into her four-room house where she and her husband and five children live. We hope that you have enjoyed our stop in Bloody Harlan and the history of the longest and still ongoing coal struggles of the United States. Yarborough comes out of a staff meeting and ushers us hack to a large, paneled meeting room with folding tables and chairs. If you protested this safety violation, he says, "the boss would just say, 'Run it.'" That year, annual wages dropped from $1,235 to $749. It was [and still is] used to signify that what happened in the realm of politics, a field largely controlled by men, affect women's everyday lives. In America, the word describes a region, including Harlan County, Kentucky, between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic coast. The UMW union called in the National Guard to help them. What a marvelous view! 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. Five miles north of Harlan, we drive up Inspiration Mountain. . 4 . The miners and the coal owners were still having disputes. 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. We are picked up at the airport by Si (for Simon) Kahn, a Pennsylvania rabbi's son who graduated from Harvard, came to the Southern mountains as a Vista worker, and remained here, working for local community groups.
Harlan County Struggle Collection, 1931-1932 - LibraryHost 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. Horn's letter questions the fair-mindedness of the inquiry members. If you wouldn't do it, they'd just say, 'Get your bucket.'
The Harlan County Coal War - YouTube 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. Interview Summary. Sudie Crusenberg, a plain woman in a cotton dress, gives us some idea of what life is like for a coal-mining family. Pic from Harlan County USA of a Coal Camp. Big Boy. Expand. It will be a two-hour, winding drive through the Cumberland Mountains to the town of Harlan. [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%. There is a suit still in litigation. One of the better houses is already being demolished. Blaine Sergent, coal leader, putting up his check at the end of a workday in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1946. I can see twenty-five miles to the southeast, five ridges.
Harlan County Revisited - Memory of a Miner