by Nick Mullins, from Thoughts of a Coal Miner
In his article, former coal miner, lecturer, and writer Nick Mullins offers his unique perspective on the rise of racial inequality in coal country.
And he draws an unexpected conclusion.
Civil Rights and the All Mighty Economy
When I attended Clintwood High School throughout the mid-90s, there was an amazing lack of ethnic diversity. Our school was 99.8% white.
It goes without saying that we had a very limited understanding of diversity. What little we did know came in the form of 80’s and 90’s whitewashed television programming pulled in with our 10-foot diameter c-band satellite dishes perched on the hillside.
According to some, I should be racist. I was from the South, I was raised in a predominantly white area, and my hometown had even been renamed after Henry Clinton Wood, a Major in the Confederate army. So why ain’t I? Why do I stand in solidarity with people of color against injustice and the institutionalized racism of our nation?
It’s because our parents and the United Mine Workers taught us differently.
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(image by Builder Levy)
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The few people of color in our county lived in the small town of Clinchco, Virginia, an old coal camp built by Clinchfield Coal Company. Like the rest of us, they were coal mining families. Their grandparents and great-grandparents had moved from the deep south searching for a better life.
Though still wrought with oppression thanks to company-owned towns and the mine guard system, many people saw coal mining to be more preferable than sharecropping in the Jim Crow south.
While racism was still unavoidable in certain places throughout Appalachia, the United Mine Workers gave everyone rights as laborers They gave everyone justice when facing the greed and oppression meant to subjugate us all to the will of the wealthy coal barons.
What racism did occur was often brought on by the coal companies themselves and the local elites who sought to divide the workforce and prevent unionization. They segregated the housing, churches, and bathhouses, doing what they could to socially and racially stratify us.
But the union wouldn’t stand for racism and segregation. As my dad once said, “It doesn’t matter what color your skin is when you go into the mine, we all come out the same color, and so do our lungs.” This was the understanding of equality that was passed to me and my brother.
It was this sense of equality that held us all together, keeping our union and our communities close-knit and strong. It was this same understanding that led Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Appalachian coalfields in his work on the Poor People’s campaign. He had long known that the issues of racism have been rooted in classism and that classism has always been rooted in economics.
In the years since the union fell, the belief in equality that once bound our communities together has faded. Each calculated move by the industry has seen to the demise of our solidarity, starving us out during each strike, shutting down union operations, and even corrupting union leadership.
In the absence of our once mighty union, the industry has guided us once again towards classism among the poor and middle class, classism that gives way to prejudice and racism.
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(image by Builder Levy) |
What we need now are voices that call out clearly across the divide of populist politics, voices that cannot be easily drowned by the money of industry and philanthropies alike. We need voices that unite us all, from the coal mines to the inner cities, from the fields of migrant workers to the sweatshops of Bangladesh.
If we are ever to find true justice in this world, we must stop letting money speak louder than our own voices of reason and equality.
“It is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he should lift himself up by his own bootstraps. It is even worse to tell a man to lift himself up by his own bootstraps when somebody is standing on the boot.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
This article was originally published on the blog, Thoughts of a Coal Miner and is reprinted according to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Images by Builder Levy through a grant from Alicia Patterson Foundation Program.
Response:
When it comes to racial equality and unions, it's worth taking a closer look at history. It was a man whom the modern conservatives consider the most elite (and socialist) president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed into law the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. This gave workers to the right to form unions (including the right to strike).At the time, less than 1% of all union members were black (Frymer 2008). Less than 40 years later, no group would be more overrepresented in labor unions than African-Americans, at least in the private sector.
According to an academic study from 2012:
African-American men flooded into the labor movement as existing racial barriers against the entrance of nonwhite men began crumbling and enjoyed a few decades of steady membership gains prior to organized labor’s decline.
African-American unionization rates would peak just as private-sector unionization rates began to plummet, suggesting that de-unionization has contributed to racial inequality in recent decades.To restate that, at the point in which black Americans were about to benefit from unions, workers in the private sector began to opt out. This could be due, in large part, to a highly successful "right to work" campaign that swept the nation on a state by state basis.
That effort was financed by Big Business and allied conservative lawmakers through special interest organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Right to Work Committee.
ALEC, for example, has been fighting unions by promoting so-called “right to work” laws since at least 1979, just before the time wage stagnation really began to kick in.
The revisionist view- which has become the unchallenged opinion- is that unions primarily benefited the white worker and were, in fact, racially protectionist. The evidence, however, tells a different story.
The same study found that:
the labor movement as a remarkably inclusive institution vital for its economic support of African-American men and women. The crumbling of this institution carries important ramifications for economic inequality in the United States and points to the need to move beyond class-based discussions of union decline to an understanding of the gendered role unions played in mitigating racial inequality.
According to that research, the decline of unions seems to have played a critical role in two main socio-economic problems in the US today: the resurgence in racism and the widening gap of income inequality.
So, Mullin's assessment that unions once kept racism in check seems to be supported by some pretty hard evidence. The problem is that division is the name of the game when it comes to exploiting workers.
And, sadly, racial division is the most effective tool in the political toolbox.
And, sadly, racial division is the most effective tool in the political toolbox.
The Reason for Liberal Condescension
In the article, Mr. Mullins explains:
Year after year, the rest of the nation has watched in dismay as voters in coal country continue to elect (and re-elect) people who present themselves as friends of coal miners. In truth, these politicians are friends of the Big Coal, a dying industry that has exploited the miners for decades.
For example, Mitch McConnell was first elected to the Senate in 1984. Back when Reagan was the president! Astonishingly, McConnell has been re-elected five times since then. (Six in total.) His record at protecting coal miners is dismal, especially when it comes to mine worker safety. (That includes his wife's record as Secretary of Labor under George Bush.)
The woman who ran against McConnell in 2014, Alison Lundergan Grimes, pointed this out and that didn't seem to phase voters a bit. In the end, McConnell trounced Grimes.
"We are caught between multimillion-dollar misinformation campaigns aimed at our continued exploitation, and the condescension afforded us by a liberal elite who believe us too stupid, too far gone, to help ourselves."If there is a condescension among liberals, it is probably due to the fact that coal workers, year after year continue to vote against their own interest. By now, shouldn't coal miners have understood how they have been exploited and how that exploitation has led to so much economic hardship and racial intolerance?
Year after year, the rest of the nation has watched in dismay as voters in coal country continue to elect (and re-elect) people who present themselves as friends of coal miners. In truth, these politicians are friends of the Big Coal, a dying industry that has exploited the miners for decades.
For example, Mitch McConnell was first elected to the Senate in 1984. Back when Reagan was the president! Astonishingly, McConnell has been re-elected five times since then. (Six in total.) His record at protecting coal miners is dismal, especially when it comes to mine worker safety. (That includes his wife's record as Secretary of Labor under George Bush.)
The woman who ran against McConnell in 2014, Alison Lundergan Grimes, pointed this out and that didn't seem to phase voters a bit. In the end, McConnell trounced Grimes.
As if to rub salt into the wounds, in his victory speech, McConnell had the nerve to say:
“Tonight, Kentucky said we can have real change in Washington. And that’s just what I intend to deliver.”
And voters in Kentucky didn't see any irony in that.
So, it's natural that the so-called liberal elite would wonder whether voters in the Blue Grass state up to the task of defending their own interests at the ballot box.