African American Miners and Migrants: THE EASTERN KENTUCKY SOCIAL CLUB

Afterword: Values, Spoken and Unspoken

Afterword: Values, Spoken and Unspoken William H. Turner “What did you think of this fighter?” heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis was asked at the end of his famous bout against Max Schmeling in front of seventy thousand fans at Yankee Stadium in 1938. Joe, known as the Brown Bomber, replied in his own unique way: “I ain’t nevah hit nobody dat hard, dat many times and he didn’t go down. If he hadnt’a fell after I hit him with dat las’ uppercut, I was gonna go ’round back a’ him, to see jes’ what wuz holdin’ him up!”1 In the late 1930s it could be accurately declared that African American miners and migrants in the coal camps of Harlan County, Kentucky —in Benham,Black Mountain,Cumberland,Evarts,Harlan,and Lynch—had much in common with Joe Louis. They, too, were fighters . Louis was then the heavyweight champion of the world (which meant he was the greatest man in the world). The African American miners and migrants described by Tom Wagner and Phil Obermiller were workers and residents—fighting to maintain jobs and their human dignity—in a region where the vast majority of people was often misunderstood and victimized by exploitation from the outsiders who controlled the coal business in corporate-owned coal towns.They were workers,fighters in an unpredictable industry,an enterprise that made many outsiders wealthy but more often than not rendered residents victims of long-term economic distress and dislocation. Even so, the African American miners and migrants discussed and heard from in this book lived and worked in some of the world’s most productive coalfields and in some of its greatest coal towns. By the time the Brown Bomber pounded the Aryan celebrity,knock- afterword 122 ing him to the canvas three times, thousands of coal miners had lived in Lynch,Kentucky,for almost half a century.And although their highly capitalized coal town was isolated from the main currents of American life and culture, it was among the most self-contained and prosperous coal camps in the world.Lynch rightfully claimed as its own “the largest coal tipple in the world.” Who could tell those who lived in Lynch that it was not the greatest coal camp in the world or that they were not a special breed of people—a great people—among the people of the earth? But in the words of Langston Hughes, one of Joe Louis’s contemporaries , life for African American miners and migrants in the coal camps of Kentucky was “no crystal stair.” They were hit many times by the bust-and-boom cycle of the coal industry. They clashed with social and economic forces that were unique and distinctive perhaps only to Appalachia. More often than most other Americans—red, white, or yellow—or their fellow black citizens elsewhere, blacks in Appalachian coal camps, places most of their fellow citizens had never heard of, endured and triumphed over the hits on them. The title of James Baldwin’s book about black southern migrants to Harlem, Nobody Knows My Name, was evocative and representational of that life then. Nobody knew the names of the subjects of this book, and few recognized the names of where they lived.Even now,at the dawn of the twenty-first century when Appalachian coal towns such as Lynch are but remnants of their former selves, today’s generation, the offspring and descendants of African American miners and migrants, still live virtually invisible lives. Appalachia is still perceived as a region where one does not expect to find people of African descent.2 Starting there—when looked at as members of a detested racial minority who came to live amid a subpopulation who themselves were beyond the pale of the white American mainstream—the first blows were struck in the fight waged by blacks in Appalachia’s coal camps. That battle in and of itself was special. In the coal mines of Harlan County,Kentucky,the stereotypical black southerner (Sambo) met the matchless and hapless white Appalachian (Lil’ Abner)—also pigeonholed in the fabrications and myths concocted by scholars, researchers , and varied media types over the years. That had to make for some afterword 123 spellbinding scenarios for blacks who went to work in the mines and sought to hew lives of hope from beneath the mountains of despair that enclosed eastern Kentucky’s coal...