Customer Reviews

Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-32 (Blacks in the New World)

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Between 1910 and 1930, one million people moved into the coal fields of central Appalachia. The biggest concentration of the half of them who were African Americans moved into West Virginia's southwestern counties, especially McDowell county where my mother was born a Black miner's daughter. Yet, when folk think of West Virginia and the Appalachians, these Black folk are ignored or forgotten. When people think of the battles of the coal miner's union, they neglect the question of Black folk. Likewise, to understand African American history properly, it is important to understand the struggles and life experience of such significant sections of the black proletariat like these Black miners, the Black autoworkers of Detroit, or the Black steel workers of Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Chicago.

Trotter provides an exhaustive study of the whole process of Black proletarians moving to West Virginia's coal fields, the construction of Black communities, and the lives of African Americans in the mining camps and mining towns. He presents a very good picture of the conflicting forces involved including the mine owners and the state and local governments they controlled, white American and immigrant miners, the bureaucrats who ran the UMWA, as well as the black middle class that grew up in West Virginia.

What interests me is the way he shows that the mine companies increased segregation and racism in West Virginia in an attempt to stem the unity of Black miners with white miners in the many battles that took place over unionization. He is also quite good at showing that the rising African American middle class came to serve the interests of the mine owners and the white ruling class in attempting to dampen the militancy of Black miners on both the working class and black rights fronts.

What is interesting is the glimpses Trotter gives of the potential power of Black miners in West Virgnia. He gives one instance where an African American was lynched were hundreds of Black miners marched on the coal camp where the lynching took place.

It is unfortunate that his study ends in 1930 so he does not cover the successful battles in the 1930s by the UMWA that organized many of these miners and provided one of the basis for the mass organizing campaigns of the CIO.