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3 Civil Rights in the New Machine Age As quick as they could, the company was moving in loaders, roof bolting machines, cutting machines, and new motors, and they mined as much coal with 100 men as they had with 300 or 400 before. And just about everyone on them machines was white. Willie Collins, Raleigh County coal miner No matter where you are, it’s all South: New York is up South; West Virginia, middle South; and Mississippi, down South. Billy Scott, research chemist, Carbide Technical Center During the 1950s, “the politics of consensus” prevailed, and groups that did not share in the bounty, including the residents of Appalachia, generally suffered in silence. The civil rights movement, however, challenged the consensus and provided one of the great dynamics of American society. From the 1950s and on into the 1960s, it was the era of Brown v Board of Education, “massive resistance,” Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King’s ringing oratory , NAACP, CORE, SNCC, lunch counter sit-ins, street demonstrations , the Civil Rights Act, voting rights struggles, and Birmingham fire hoses and burned-out Freedom Rider buses. As the focus shifted from the South to urban ghettoes of the North in the 1960s, black youths turned from the peaceful methods of the early movement to the confrontation and rebellion of Black Power.1 West Virginia’s story of this time reflects the national one but has its own unique features. The issues of race and civil rights cannot be separated from the broader themesof West Virginia and Appalachian history, including the impact of technological change in the postWorld War II era. As machines manufactured by companies with 86 Civil Rights in the New Machine Age names like Jeffrey and Joy transformed coal mining and coal miners lost their jobs, African Americans got the pink slips first. As the state’s population declined, the rate of black decline tripled the rate of white decline, and substantial numbers of African Americans joined the Appalachian Great Migration.2 Just as the civil rights movement nationally would develop methods used by others seeking social justice, African Americans who stayed behind developed grassroots leadership that showed the way for others in the Appalachian reawakening of the 1960s. African Americans in West Virginia: Balancing Two Segregationist Parties Because it needed to bring in immigrant and African American workers as its coalfields and other industries developed, West Virginia grew more ethnically diverse than the rest of the Appalachian region as pockets of foreign-born populations and African Americans resided in some of the industrial areas of the state.3 The African American population never exceeded seven percent of the state’s total, but because it tended to be concentrated in a few coal-mining counties, it developed a substantial sense of community. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, as historian Joe William Trotter has shown, many black workers came from agricultural areas of the South to work in the burgeoning coalfields of West Virginia. They concentrated in the southern mining counties where a lively black culture developed. Jefferson, an Eastern Panhandle agricultural county , already had a substantial black population that descended from antebellum slavery. Though West Virginia (like sixteen other states) segregated its schools by law, race did not have the same profound impact and domineering hold on the psyche of West Virginians as it did on Southerners of the former Confederacy. In the years before the Great Depression, blacks in Republican-controlled West Virginia endured racial discrimination and segregation, but not the disfranchisement typical of southern states controlled by the Democratic Party. Blacks in West Virginia continued to have the right to vote and often gave the Republican Party the margin it needed to retain control of the state through the first three decades of the twentieth century. Because black votes could determine the political balance 87 Civil Rights in the New Machine Age of power between Democrats and Republicans, the leadership of the small black minority in West Virginia received patronage and wielded some political influence. Their white allies, mostly Republican, saw to the expansion of state-supported black institutions, the curbing of lynching, and increased legal protections for blacks.4 TABLE 1: AFRICAN AMERICAN AND TOTAL POPULATION OF WEST VIRGINIA, 1880–19705 Year Black Population Percent Increase (Decrease) Total Population Percent Increase (Decrease) Blacks as Percent of Total 1880 25,886 …… 618,347 … 4.2 1890 32,690 26.3 762,794 23.3 4.3 1900...

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