One Saturday in March 2024, a few of us from Pittsburgh Union Progress attended an Ohio conference that brought together a diverse group of people outraged by the damage inflicted on working-class communities by Norfolk Southern’s derailed toxic train in 2023. We joined other union folks, environmentalists, activists, journalists and academics in standing side-by-side with devastated and angry residents.
Everyone put aside their political and cultural differences to discuss how they could join forces to push back against powerful corporations and hold to account government agencies who were supposed to be protecting the public.
Some of those attending from West Virginia wore red bandanas around their necks. This was, they explained, their way of honoring workers who participated in the largest labor uprising in this nation’s history — the West Virginia Mine War of 1920-21. Coal miners of that era were fed up. They risked their health for wages that kept their families in poverty. They were abused by large corporations, corrupt politicians and a government that didn’t care about them. No one with power seemed concerned about their plight, so the miners started a movement that would eventually give rise to the middle class.
What do the bandanas have to do with it? Well, the miners wore red bandanas while waging a guerrilla war against heavily armed mercenaries and militias doing the bidding of coal companies. The term “redneck” originated as an expression of working-class solidarity crossing ethnic and racial line, because the militant “redneck” miners of the early 1920s coal wars were a mix of white and African American workers and immigrants.
It turns out there’s a lot we don’t know about this uprising. (It involved as many as 15,000 miners and their allies.) In fact, there’s a lot we don’t know about working-class history in general. Working people have real power in this country, but stories about ordinary folks banding together to fight powerful and wealthy interests don’t get much traction. Do you remember any high school lessons about Mother Jones or the autoworkers who staged the 1936-37 Flint sit-down strike in Michigan? We certainly don’t. But those working-class people are part of a movement that gave us weekends off, sick days, safe workplaces, benefits and job protections.
Suppression of these stories has been intentional, says Mackenzie New-Walker, executive director of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, West Virginia. She points out efforts by the state’s Depression-era governor to exclude stories about the 1921 miners march and other labor stories in a West Virginia history publication produced by the Works Progress Administration.
Why would the governor want to bury stories that show his constituents fiercely fighting for the well-being of themselves and their families? Who benefits from a population that sees itself only as supine in the face of abusive corporations and corrupt government entities? Certainly not the people themselves.
“I think having knowledge of labor history really puts people in a better position,” New-Walker said. “It puts them in a better position in the workplace. It puts them in a better position to be an active citizen of this country.”
On the afternoon of May 20, 1920, private security forces arrived in town and began evicting striking union miners. This didn’t set well with miners, Matewan Mayor Cabell Testerman or police Chief Sid Hatfield. A gunfight in the town’s streets left 10 dead — seven security agents, two miners and Testerman. The next year, Hatfield, a staunch defender of miners, and his friend Ed Chambers were ambushed by gunmen on the steps the McDowell County Courthouse. It was a brutal display of power by the coal operators. The gunmen assassinated Hatfield and Chambers in broad daylight before several witnesses and then walked away free.
Thousands of miners, furious over the killings, poured from the hills and valleys of southern West Virginia and marched to Mingo County to support the strikers and unionize the county’s coal fields. Wearing red bandanas around their necks, this “redneck army” in late September 1921 neared Logan County, where a sheriff, paid by coal companies, formed an army to stop them. The Battle of Blair Mountain raged for four days and ended only when President Warren Harding dispatched four regiments of the U.S. Army to the scene.
West Virginia’s power structure went after the workers with a vengeance, indicting hundreds on charges ranging from murder to treason. Sympathetic juries acquitted most, although some spent up to four years in prison. The workers lost that battle, but their fight brought national attention to the horrific working conditions faced by miners and showed workers they could wield incredible power by unifying. The battle contributed to the establishment of New Deal labor protections a decade later.
The Mine Wars Museum focuses on bringing this overlooked story to public consciousness, and it recently received some help in doing so. Grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities will allow the museum to enter phase two of a public history project called “Courage in the Hollers: Mapping the Miners’ Struggle to Form a Union.”
The project creates permanent monuments and historic markers along the 50-mile route of the miners march. Phase one laid the groundwork with monuments in the towns of Marmet and Clothier. The next stage adds six more.
One goal of the project is to generate public conversations about the mine wars. “What does this mean for us as West Virginians?” New-Walker said. “This history is a big point of pride for us as Appalachians. When West Virginia gets talked about, it’s often talked about as a coal state, an extraction state. Fewer people talk about the coal miners and how they helped build the American labor movement into what it was, especially at its height in the midcentury.”
Coal mining runs deep in New-Walker’s family — her father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all union miners. Union history, she said, is in her DNA.
“No one sat me down and said, ‘This is the importance of having a union,’” she said. “It was just something that I grew up knowing. I think if you don’t grow up in a household like that, you’re likely to miss it. In school, we’re taught about the robber barons, about George Washington and the founding fathers. That’s important stuff to know. But there’s also this people’s history that is often left out in the classroom. Having this knowledge of labor education really puts people at a better position. It puts them in a better position in the workplace. It puts them in a better position to be an active citizen of this country.”
The story of New-Walker’s father is an example of the very practical ways in which union membership can benefit workers. He spent 10 years working an underground mine, then was laid off two decades ago. He realized he’d need a new line of work, so he attended classes at a community college — the United Mine Workers of America paid for his tuition, his mileage and his books. Today he works as a registered nurse.
His time in the mine came at a price, however. Doctors recently found a node on one of his lungs – a node the physician thinks may be linked to black lung, a disease that has haunted generations of coal miners. Cases of black lung and silicosis, another respiratory disease hitting miners, have surged in the past few decades, as miners cut deeper to reach hard-to-access coal seams. This is especially troubling when you consider the Trump administration’s cuts to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, which screens miners for the disease and provides those showing signs of black the legal right to transfer to less dusty work areas.
A memorial honoring workers who’ve died of black lung disease stands in Whitesburg, Kentucky. It’s one of several memorials around the country dedicated to people killed while trying to earn money so they could pay bills and support themselves and their families. Several such memorials can be found in Western Pennsylvania — there’s one in Lawrenceville, for example, calling attention to the girls and young women killed at the Allegheny Arsenal during an explosion in 1863, and another in Van Meter honoring the 239 miners who died in the 1907 Darr Mine explosion.
Monuments recognizing the miners march are different in that they recognize workers realizing their collective power.
“When we look around at monuments to workers in this country, most of them are memorials to people who have died at work,” New-Walker said. “I think that’s a good thing we do — put up monuments to remember these disasters that have happened, and then take some action to make sure that these don’t happen again. But I also think there’s something about celebrating labor and recognizing that there’s power in the labor movement before someone has to shed blood for a labor law to pass.”
Steve is a photojournalist and writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he is currently on strike and working as a Union Progress co-editor. Reach him at smellon@unionprogress.com.