With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners' sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs. The miners charge that the Harlan County Coal Operators Association is behind Eastover's refusal to sign a contract. ", Bill Doan says that he was hurt in a rockfall at 7:15 one morning and that he didn't get out of the mine until nine o'clock. The bosses wouldn't go in, but I've. These battles will end the Coal Wars proper. We gather back in Evarts and announce that our report will be ready in two or three weeks. In response, the United Mine Workers of America attempted to organize the miners. "We run because we wanted to testify, and if we hadn't run, he woulda had us in jail." "It's one of 'em," Yarborough says. This series of skirmishes and strikes, lasting from early 1931 into 1939, began because of the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association's (HCCOA) decision to cut miners' wages by 10%. 9:03 PM. "I don't try to blacklist anybody," he says. They're trapped. Even though things were doing better for the unions in Harlan County, there was still civil unrest. These women have organized a special kind of feminist movement, and the issues to them are life-and-death issues. Leroy Helton says he still owes a lot of bills that should have been paid by SLU. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". Get a Demo. Leroy Helton says miners often have to splice electrical cable, even though they're not qualified to do so. He sentenced nine men and seven women to six months in jail and fined them $500 each. We look back on the film, which screens this Sunday, February . Only to be escorted to the county line and told not to return. Its profits in 1973 were $90 million, up 14 percent from the year before.
Harlan County War | Military Wiki | Fandom 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." The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". Following this episode, the women say, Norman Yarborough asked Judge Hogg to hold the UMW and a number of miners and women in contempt of the Judge's order limiting the number of picketers to six. It is the second coal mining fatality in . The UMW had made written proposals for compromising these issues a little.
Harlan County | Encyclopedia.com We return to our series on the Coal Wars of the United States with Bloody Harlan and the Battle for Evarts. 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. With the added protection for workers and the addition of collective bargaining between the workers and their employers. 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. Si has signed on as head of the staff for the Citizens Inquiry, which is funded with a five-thousanddollar grant from the Field Foundation. Pierce mentions the "toothpick incident."
He can't never walk again." Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. Harlan County, Kentucky is known for two things: bituminous coal and Bloody Harlan. If those under them behave in an approved manner then they receive housing, work, food, and other perks of their position. 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. Their General Secretary recently released some facts which help to illustrate the reason for much of the unemployment in the county. As part of his New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented and had passed the National Industrial Act. To prevent operating at a loss, on February 16, 1931, the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association decided to cut all wages by ten . They want the terms of the standard UMW contract or better. It is not all Duke's fault by any means.
Hazard County documentary / produced by H. Sinclair. - Internet Archive Harlan, Kentucky coal miner killed - World Socialist Web Site - wsws.org Crossing the Clinch River, we turn onto Highway 421 and leave the modern world. Genders. Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Harlan county coal hi-res stock photography and images - Alamy A Committee was formed and conducted by Activist Theodore Dreiser under the auspices of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP). How does the Harlan County Coal Operators Association fit into the picture? Harlan County U.S.A. by Felicia Elliott, August 2, 2016. I remind her that Duke and Eastover executives were invited, and have refused to appear before us. 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. Five men and their titles are listed and all are doing all they can..
Movie Review: Harlan County, USA (1976) - organizing.work Over one thousand shots were exchanged during those fifteen minutes. 3.' We're all involved. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. They exercised their powers with impunity and operated under Sheriff J.H. They also plan to join with a North Carolina group in protesting Duke's requested rate increase, and they are going to attend the meeting of Duke's stockholders on May 30.
Harlan County War Wiki - Everipedia I don't like- workin' in them kind of conditions." "With all those state police, we knew we had three choices," she says. The Three Point disaster was the worst suffered in the county since December 9, 1932, when 23 men were killed in an explosion in "Zero" Mine of Harlan Fuel Company, Yancey. 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. 1 mine in Evarts, in Harlan County, Kentucky. As discussed in a previous video. 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. An investigation was conducted on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields. Drift mines back into the mountains follow the seam of coal wherever it goes." Done Citation. No concessions or deals were made between the two factions and the membership of the United Mine Workers union plummeted. those in the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association, were run as open shops from October 27, 1933 - March 31, 1935. They are neatly and attractively dressed. It is too early for dolor. Violence erupted that would periodically repeat itself for the next eight years. On September 4, 1935, Harlan County Attorney Elmon Clay Middleton, age 31, was assassinated by a car bomb containing eighteen sticks of dynamite. The transcript will be published as a book. 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. "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. "Here at Brookside, if you called someone from SLU, he might come in a week, he might come in two weeks, but when he did come, he'd go into Eastover's office and talk for an hour," Bill Doan says. A historical marker says we are near the Little Shepherd Trail, the setting for the novel Shepherd of the Hills. Nobody knows how long the UMW can keep paying strike benefits. Those with running water rent for around $20 a month, plus electricity. Why is garbage left on the roadway? "We've took about all we can take," he says. Source Citation [ }] Descriptive Note Contributors from initial SNAC EAC-CPF ingest. At first, there were little battles with gunshots being exchanged between the strikers and the private guards, and the local law enforcement agents. 1938) Copy Citation . Whitfield's family was from Alabama where his father had been in the coal business. She speaks in a soft, pleasant voice. 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. The coal miners, lean and tough from Kentucky mountain life, knew how to fight back. The company also agreed to abide by any agreement reached between the . I have attended the University of Kentucky. Betty Eldridge is a mildmannered, well-dressed woman of about forty. We come into Harlan County at dusk. Mine operators viciously opposed miners' efforts to unionize, particularly in Harlan County. Yarborough says that he will not agree to the contract applying to Eastover's subcontractors. But negotiations for a contract with Eastover soon broke down, and on July 30 the miners at Brookside began the strike that now, as we arrive, is in its eighth month. (That is a tough point.) And lastly, the Harlan Fox Mining Co - presumably derived from the Harlan Fox Coal Co - was in operation from 1925-1932. When Barbara finishes her answer, Wirtz raises a clenched fist and says, "Right on!"
The Brookside Women's Club of Harlan County - New York Women in Film Harlan County Coal Operators' Association. - Details - SNAC "I don't know nothing about the electrical part."
Home - Harlan County .
Coal Strike May End, But Miners Still Fear Future The United Mine Workers of America represented 400,000 miners at that point and promised miners safer work conditions and higher wages. It is a warm night and at every bend in the asphalt road we hear a chorus of croaking frogs. Unemployment in 2017 was 9.4 percent, far above the national average. Yarborough comes out of a staff meeting and ushers us hack to a large, paneled meeting room with folding tables and chairs. Toilet paper clings to the bushes and tree limbs five or six feet up from the rushing stream. J. D. Skidmore says, "I have no chance of getting a job in Harlan County if this strike is not settled." Almost immediately after the explosion became known rescue teams, under the direction of J. F. Bryson, safety director of the Harlan County Coal Operators association, started into the entry. corporateBody associatedWith : Heyl & Patterson, Inc . The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". Where will the families go? Many of the houses have no running water, and these families have to carry all their water from a common outdoor spigot.
The Harlan County Coal Wars 1931-1939 - Kentucky Tennessee Living These interviews with major coal operators document their personal histories and the history of the coal industry in eastern Kentucky during the twentieth century. By 1908 the union had .
PDF "I Am a Union Woman": Gender, Class, and Folk Music in The Harlan As correspondent Bob Simon reports, 47 miners died, six of them from just one county in eastern Kentucky . Kentucky communities discussed include Artemus, Burdine, Jenkins, Jellico, Van Lear, and Wheelwright; and Kentucky counties include Bell, Clay, Floyd, Harlan . "Roof falls are a constant hazard, but the bosses just keep on rushin'.". "They didn't say nothin'; all they want's coal.' He is a sturdily built, self-assured man of about fifty, with a strong, square jaw and a rough, weathered face. Cite. The mining company had ordered a motorcade to deliver food and supplies to the strikebreakers known as Scabs. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads. The prospects for settlement do not look good unless Duke begins to feel public pressure. Dalton points out that there were 132 mine fatalities in the United States in 1973, only seventeen of them in UMW mines. Two hundred people crowd. In June of 1973, in a National Labor Relations Board election, the miners at Brookside voted 113 to 55 to affiliate with the United Mine Workers. A thousand feet below me lies a small, green valley, partly shrouded by the morning mist. Our drive takes us upstream along the yellow-brown Clear Fork River. Some seventy-five state policemen were on hand as the crowd gathered. Available for both RF and RM licensing. But Barbara Bode has arranged for eleven of them to come up onto the stage at the same time, and they seem to take strength from their numbers.
"Faith, power, and conflict: Miner preachers and the United Mine Worker A young woman from the Associated Press asks me, aren't we getting only one side of the story? (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.) It is home to lawyers, doctors and coal operators; it has a hospital, several banks and a few fast-food . But, Aaronson says, Norman Yarborough had then called back to say, simply, that there was nothing of further interest to them in the negotiations More public pressure on Duke is needed, he says. In response, the coal owners and operators decided to sell their fuel at below cost to increase the national dependency on coal. Jacqueline Brophy asks why public services have broken down.
HARLAN COUNTY: Women - The Cinessential He says that they do not need the UMW to look after them; he will do that. There were only nine hundred miners working and 5,800 miners were idle and striking during the first strike. : The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931-39 (Paperback) at the best online prices at eBay! The committee has invited owners as well as workers to participate in the hearings, but the impression we get is that management will not appear. Tuesday morning: Norman Yarborough has agreed to meet some of our group.
Interview with Lois Scott, August 27, 1986 - Nunn Center Midway in the trial, Judge Hogg dismissed the jury and directed a verdict of guilty. Sudie Crusenberg, a plain woman in a cotton dress, gives us some idea of what life is like for a coal-mining family.
Members of The Harlan County Medical Society 1932 On February 16, 1931, the Harlan County Coal Operators' Association reduced wages for miners in that part of eastern Kentucky by 10 percent. The money was . ", 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 Act was an attempt to restructure the industrial sector of the economy and to alleviate unemployment with a public works program. The Federal Government, with the Commissioner of Labor in a fact finding role, acted as a 'neutral' for the first time in contributing to settlement of the bitter coal strike. 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.
"Bloody Harlan" Revisited: Blackjewel Miners Draw On Labor History Bright yellow forsythia has begun to bloom in the yards of Harlan and Brookside and Evarts. A shoulder blade and five of his ribs were broken. Visit us and take a step back in time to learn more about how Harlan County helped build a nation at Portal 31 Exhibition Mine tour or come experience the delight of . Harry Caudill, attorney and author of Night Comes to the Cumberlands, will not be able to join us in Harlan because of legal business. All during the day they worked in shifts, trying to penetrate to the point where the explosion occurred. Our delegation arrives on time at the Eastover office in Brookside. But you must remember I am an immoral man. I've read that in its heyday, the Blackjoe coal camp consisted of 60 or so houses. It has assets worth $2.5 billion. by Ron Soodalter. Here, too, are some of the richest natural resources in the countryand some of the poorest people. Fifty miners and their wives have at one time or another been held in contempt of this order. It is thought that Middleton was assassinated for backing troops who were present in the County to protect the miners. Whitfield recalls working in his father's coal mines during the first years of commercial mining in Harlan County, and he describes the conditions. Copy with citation. "We could lay down, fight the police, or let them scabs go to work. "They don't want miners havin' any say in safety." This was thirteen percent of the workers showing up for their scheduled work times. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. When a miner complains, Jerry Johnson says, the foreman says, "If you don't like it, you can always get your bucket," meaning pick up your lunch bucket and get out. "Dreiser, Woman Indicted," one headline reads.
Harlan County War - Wikipedia The Brookside mine is capable of producing only about a half-million tons of the 15 million tons of coal Duke uses each year. And always there is a murky roadside stream, beech and sycamore trees lining its banks. I'm standing at 2800 feet above sea level. 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. ", What about federal inspection? "I've had the foreman to tell me to set timbers or something until the inspector got gone. The most memorable of those are 1964, 1966, 1969 (The West Virginia Black Lung strike that the miners won) 1971, and the 1974 Strikes. Does the Association hire for all the mines in the county? We hope that our hearings will help hold down violence. We first hear from a number of the striking miners about safety conditions in the Brookside mine. Freda Armes says, "I take a cloth and strain the water to cook with.
No Neutrals: The Harlan County Miner's Strike of 1931 When McQueen was hurt, his foreman drove him to the hospital and left him there, and he was two hours hitchhiking home. Several folk singers and other artists toured the United States to raise money during the strikes. We huddle before breaking up. Before this war was over it is not known exactly how many miners, coal operators, deputies, and bosses would be killed. Sadly, the state and federal troops would occupy the county several times. Barbara Kopple 's Academy Award-winning Harlan County USA unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners' strike in a small Kentucky town. In the year of "the energy crisis," Coal is King again at $30 a ton. Harlan County Coal Miners Deaths 1940-1949 1940 1940 Hayes, Petry - Harlan Central Coal Company Totz No. Why haven't the car bodies been removed from the highway and the streets? Other clippings detail the earlier bloodshed and misery in Harlan County. Harlan County in eastern Kentucky, which has been brought out into the spotlight this summer by the violence with which the local Coal Operators' Association has carried on this attack, is, as far as I can find out, a pretty good medium exhibit of the entire industry: living conditions are better than in Alabama and perhaps a little worse . 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. They have probably helped keep their own men from exploding too. They are merely a service organization, Yarborough says. Blair made it clear that he was on the side of the mine operators and the people of the county lost any illusion that the law enforcement would be impartial in this strike. The miners and the coal owners were still having disputes. Early accounts of the Harlan County mine wars place the inability of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) to establish a permanent foothold in the county, first at the feet of the Harlan County Coal Operators Association (HCCOA) and secondly at the worn work boots of miners who, when work was plentiful, saw little or no need for a union.