African American Miners and Migrants: THE EASTERN KENTUCKY SOCIAL CLUB

1. "Coming Up on the Rough Side of the Mountain": African Americans and Coal Camps in Appalachia

v v v chapter 1 “Coming Up on the Rough Side of the Mountain”: African Americans and Coal Camps in Appalachia The African American men and women who were recruited to work and live in the coal towns of Benham and Lynch were not the first blacks in Appalachia. African Americans have a long history in the Appalachian mountains. They accompanied the earliest French and Spanish explorers into the region as both freedmen and as slaves.William Turner believes that blacks in Appalachia were some of “America ’s first blacks—appearing almost a century before the landing at Jamestown.”1 Slavery was practiced throughout the southern Appalachian mountains . Nearly a thousand black slaves, for instance, accompanied their Cherokee masters out of the region on the infamous Trail of Tears in 1838.By the outset of the CivilWar,slaves could be found in every county of the region. Early scholars such as Carter G. Woodson acknowledged that but maintained that slavery was never as widely favored or practiced in the mountains as in the plantation South. In Woodson’s view,mountaineers put a high value on personal freedom,equality,and independence,principles often reinforced by their Baptist and Presbyterian religious tenets. Politically, mountaineers favored abolition because of their opposition to the dominance of proslavery elites in state governments,the same elites that hindered development in the upland portions of Appalachian states. Moreover,slavery was not an economically viable option for most of the small farmers, manufacturers, and businesses found across the mountains.2 african american miners and migrants 6 Contemporary researchers such as Wilma Dunaway, however, are much more critical of slaveholding in Appalachia. Dunaway’s research shows that slavery was a common phenomenon throughout the mountain South and was generally more brutal than in other slaveholding areas.In particular,she notes higher rates of forced family breakup and child mortality in the southern mountains than in the plantation South.3 John Inscoe, however, aptly refers to a “quiltlike character of highland racism.” Most modern scholars point out the uneven nature of Appalachian racial practices. In Harlan County,Kentucky,for instance, slave ownership before the Civil War was concentrated among five families that owned 48 percent of the slaves in the county; the largest of the families owned fifty-eight.Historians also point out that racial attitudes were often paradoxical.SomeAppalachian slaveholders fought to preserve the Union, lynching occurred in counties with strong abolitionist legacies, and blacks fled some highland counties whereas their populations grew substantially in others.“White highlanders’ views of AfricanAmericans in theory and treatment of them in practice,” Inscoe concludes, “were for the most part well within the mainstream of attitudes and behavior elsewhere in the South, a mainstream that was in itself by no means monolithic. . . . On either side of the Mason-Dixon line, nineteenthcentury whiteAmerica was racist,varying in degree and form of expression . The same was true of Appalachia.”4 The oppression of blacks in the pre–Civil War South gave rise to the Underground Railroad,which,according toWoodson,ran through and had many stops in Appalachia. Again, contemporary scholarship provides an alternative view: “The whole notion of Appalachia as a center of Underground Railway activity is suspect,” Inscoe maintains. “Most major treatments of the Underground Railroad make no reference to southern Appalachian locales.”5 Nevertheless, it would have been difficult for many men and women fleeing slavery to enter the northern states without crossing portions of what is now known as the central Appalachian subregion,which contains the mountainous counties of southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, and western Virginia. Passage would have required the active participation of at least some mountaineers and the passive cooperation of many others. Racialviolenceratherthanracialharmonywasarealityof Appalachian african americans and coal camps 7 life following the Civil War. In the Appalachian sections of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia , 128 black lynchings occurred between 1880 and 1939. The number of “legal” lynchings in which the law was used to justify racial murder is unknown.The social changes brought about by industrialization also led to mob violence in the mountains.As Robert Stuckert observes,“The use of black workers as strikebreakers was often a bone of contention.It was in the coalfields that racial violence occurred most frequently.”6 After Emancipation, railway construction and mine openings attracted black laborers and their families from the plantation South into the mountains. From the time...