“Everybody Was Black Down There”: Race and Industrial Change in the Alabama Coalfields (review)

American coal mines have always been ethnically and racially heterogeneous work spaces, as suggested by the expression, “Everybody was black down there.” In this fine study, Robert Woodrum, who teaches at Clark Atlanta University, focuses on race relations in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) from the perspective of the union’s district office.

The decline of the Alabama coalfields reflects the cross-trends of increased mechanization on the one hand, and a devastating decline in employment on the other. From its founding of the industry in the nineteenth century, African Americans made up a large majority of the coal miners in Alabama. However, by the turn of the twenty-first century, their numbers had plummeted to less than 15 percent of a mine force of approximately 10,000. Most of this decline came after World War II. Although it is a slight exaggeration to claim that “historians have rarely examined” (2) the causes behind this decline, there is no question that the issue begs for closer examination, and this study makes a significant contribution toward that end.

Woodrum analyzes the catch-22 confronting the UMWA in the South. The UMWA had to organize black miners in order to operate in Alabama, but its interracial policies also placed it on a collision course with southern custom and Jim Crow law. Woodrum examines this issue within the larger historical discourse on whether labor unions reinforced white supremacy or served as a venue for interracial cooperation. The UMWA did support African American rights on occasion, but racists within the ranks, most obviously Ku Klux Klansmen, resisted these efforts. To confront them directly would have cost the union white support. The UMWA’s formula for dealing with its racial dilemma was compromise; locals and meetings were interracial, for example, but whites occupied positions of public leadership while blacks filled secondary roles. Woodrum demonstrates that the union’s compromises with southern racial norms left African American miners vulnerable, and the union was slow to respond to economic insecurity which technological change heaped upon its African American members.

Blacks bore the brunt of mechanizing the mines in Alabama, and the responsibility lay at the feet of both the operators, who reserved machine jobs for whites, and the UMWA which negotiated for seniority based on job classification rather than length of employment. Consequently, whites gained a lock on the new machine jobs while the mostly black manual labor force was being eliminated. By the late twentieth century the Birmingham steel industry, as well as their captive mines, fell victim to global competition. Electric utility companies were now the primary users of coal, and they could import it more cheaply from the western strip mines, or from abroad. In the globalized marketplace the UMWA lost much of its clout; by then black miners represented a fraction of the workforce.

This is an intriguing account of the disappearing black coal miner during the post-World War II era, and welcome addition to the growing body of historical studies on race and organized labor.