You Know What it Means to Have 9,000 Negroes Idle: Rethinking the Great 1908 Alabama Coal Strike

You Know What it Means to Have 9,000 Negroes Idle: Rethinking the Great 1908 Alabama Coal Strike Late in August 1908 Alabama Governor Braxton Bragg (B. B.) Comer ended an epic two-month strike involving some 19,000 coal miners. He ordered the Alabama National Guard to tear down the 1,600 tents and temporary housing the miners had pitched to shelter themselves and an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 family members. To clothe his act in some semblance of humanity, Comer cited sanitation and public health. But when union officials protested, Comer bluntly revealed the real reasoning. “You know what it means to have eight or nine thousand niggers idle in the state of Alabama,” he explained, “and I am not going to stand for it.”1 Comer’s act brought a sudden, decisive, and shocking end to an industrial conflict that, for weeks, had been too close to call. The 1908 coal strike came just a decade after the high tide of Populist revolt in the state of Alabama. The revolt, and the strike itself, represented perhaps the strongest efforts in state history for plain people—black and white—to bury their racial differences and unite in common cause to seek a fair portion of the fruits of their labor and some measure of control over their lives and those of their GLENN FELDMAN Glenn Feldman is a professor in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author or editor of a number of books on politics, religion, race, and economics, and may be reached at gfeldman@uab.edu. The author wishes to thank Wayne Flynt and Allen W. Jones for introducing him to Alabama history. 1 Richard A. Straw, “The Collapse of Biracial Unionism: The Alabama Coal Strike of 1908,” Alabama Historical Quarterly 37 (Summer 1975): 112; Daniel Letwin, “Interracial Unionism, Gender, and ‘Social Equality’ in the Alabama Coalfields, 1878–1908,” Journal of Southern History 61 (August 1995): 551n98; Daniel Letwin, “The Early Years: Alabama Miners Organize, 1878–1908,” 36, in It is Union and Liberty: Alabama Coal Miners and the UMW, ed. Edwin L. Brown and Colin J. Davis (Tuscaloosa, 1999). See also Philip H. Taft, Organizing Dixie: Alabama Workers in the Industrial Era (Westport, CT, 1981), 27; Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908–21 (Urbana, IL, 2001), 23–24. the alabama review 176 children. Both failed, broken apart on the anvil of race by the hammer of wealth. Yet race was not the only factor in the demise of the strike. Religious attitudes, resort to violence, economic realities, and community opinion also played leading roles—often in intimate entwinement with the race issue. Although the power of the state aligned with that of corporate interests ultimately overwhelmed the miners’ ability to resist, race was a huge factor in the strike and in the state’s willingness and propensity to intervene on the side of capital. The strike officially began on July 6, 1908, and, contrary to received wisdom, race was a large and present factor from the beginning. What is more, the ways in which racial concerns played into the strike belie the conventional and standard narrative of simple owner/operator exploitation of racial divisions within the union, and even insecurities among the wider southern white community.2 In fact, the union, its firmest editorial and ideological allies, and other working-class and unionist adherents in the state reacted to early corporate and press race-baiting powerfully and in kind. Some union leaders attempted to go for the racial jugular almost from the start and tried to make race and white supremacy an issue along with (and in direct, early, answer to) Alabama’s mine owners and corporate interests. Perhaps as important as that pertaining to black miners, a subset of racism involving powerful xenophobia against foreigners, outsiders , Slavs, and Bulgarians by both management and labor also played a significant role. Murder, mayhem, violence, and intimidation were also vital parts of the strike story in 1908. While these elements have 2 The foremost accounts of the 1908 coal strike both agree that race was not a prime consideration until late...