Uneven Ground
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While working as a volunteer on the construction of a community water line, Craig Robinson, a VISTA volunteer from New York, attended meetings of the Association of Disabled Miners and Widows and talked with dozens of miners afflicted with black lung. In 1966 he and another VISTA volunteer, Tennessee-born lawyer Richard Bank, helped to organize the Black Lung Association (BLA). With the assistance of two local physicians, Isadore E. Buff and Donald Rasmussen, the BLA began to lobby the West Virginia Legislature to recognize the disease for compensatory benefits and to regulate the accumulation of coal dust in active mines.47 The BLA quickly developed chapters throughout southern West Virginia and neighboring Kentucky, gathering support from a variety of indigenous leaders. These included disabled union miner Arnold Miller, who would become president of the West Virginia BLA; welfare rights advocate Eula Hall; roving pickets member Granny Hager; strip mine abolitionist Joe Begley; and Bill Worthington, president of the Kentucky BLA.48 This combination of leadership from indigenous mining families, together with the technical and research skills of outside VISTA volunteers and medical professionals, fueled a regional movement that cut across class, race, and culture and established a pattern of issue-based coalition building that would spread to other reform efforts.
The movement to pass mine health and safety legislation reached a crescendo in the winter of 1968–1969, following the tragic explosion of the number 9 mine of the Consolidation Coal Company at Farmington, West Virginia. Seventy-eight miners lost their lives as a result of the accumulation of coal dust and methane gas. The day after the disaster, UMWA president Tony Boyle expressed sympathy for the distraught families but attributed the cause of the explosion to the “inherent danger” of mining. He claimed that the company had a good safety record and a history of cooperation with the union. Infuriated at Boyle’s dispassionate response and the union’s apparent lack of concern for miner safety, dissident miners and members of the BLA denounced the UMWA and began a major drive to reform state workers’ compensation and mine safety laws.
In February 1969, more than forty thousand miners in West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania launched an unauthorized three-week strike that shut down much of the coal industry. BLA members marched on the West Virginia capital, chanting, “No laws, no work.” Former poverty warriors, college students, and health professionals joined the movement, garnering the critical support of nonnative political leaders such as former Marshall University professor Ken Hechler and former VISTA volunteer Jay Rockefeller. The strike ended only after the passage of state legislation that provided for black lung compensation and set new safety standards to control dust levels in underground mines.49
Later that fall, Appalachian black lung activists carried the battle to Washington DC, and, despite coal industry opposition, Congress passed the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, extending black lung benefits to all of the nation’s coal miners. The new bill, however, left the management of benefits to the Social Security Administration, which promptly rejected more than sixty thousand applications in Appalachia alone. After two years of additional protests and the deaths of thirty-eight miners from a coal dust explosion in Hyden, Kentucky, Congress amended the act in 1972, easing the path for disabled miners and widows to receive disability benefits. The “black lung paycheck,” as Harry Caudill labeled it, provided only a “tittle” of income to poor families in the mountains, but the administration of benefits and the enforcement of mine safety laws remained controversial for decades to come.50
Outrage over UMWA president Boyle’s weak response to the Farmington disaster and the union’s initial opposition to the inclusion of health benefits in the new mine safety act reinforced growing dissent among rank-and-file miners. Challenges to Boyle’s control of the union began to emerge in the spring of 1969, and the success of the black lung movement fueled a grassroots rebellion to democratize the UMWA and purge its leadership of corruption. A one-time ally of Boyle, Pennsylvania district leader Joseph “Jock” Yablonski, challenged the powerful president for control of the union in the fall elections, but Boyle manipulated the vote and utilized union funds to defeat the dissidents. On New Year’s Eve 1969, Yablonski and his wife and daughter were murdered in their Pennsylvania home. Boyle and seven others (including three eastern Kentucky men) would later be convicted of the crime.
For many southern Appalachian miners, the corruption of the union for personal gain, the loss of health benefits for retirees, and feeble progress on wage and safety conditions were evidence of the perverse power of the coal industry in their lives and communities. Regaining control of their union was the first step on the road to better health care, workplace safety, social independence, and economic security. Whereas dissident miners from the North and Midwest were determined to purge union leadership of authoritarianism and corruption, retired and disabled miners from southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southwest Virginia were equally concerned with pensions and health benefits. After the murder of the Yablonskis, members of the BLA, the Association of Disabled Miners and Widows, and dozens of other grassroots organizations joined with northern union insurgents determined to continue the crusade against the Boyle regime. Hundreds of activists, poverty warriors, and former AVs and VISTA volunteers rallied to support the insurgency as a vibrant example of a potential Appalachian “people’s movement.”51
Embodied in the group Miners for Democracy (MFD), the drive to reform the UMWA came to represent, for a time at least, the promise of collective action against the special interests and powerful bureaucracies that controlled mountain life. When the Department of Labor tossed out the results of the 1969 UMWA vote on evidence of fraud and intimidation, the MFD nominated Arnold Ray Miller, a retired miner who had led the West Virginia BLA, as its presidential candidate in the new election. Miller, who hailed from Cabin Creek, had only a ninth-grade education and suffered from black lung, but he represented the plight of thousands of retired and desperate miners in the southern coalfields who hoped that bringing democracy to the union would bring better economic conditions to coal communities.
Miller won the election in December 1972 and successfully returned democratic control to local union districts. He subsequently negotiated new contracts with the industry that improved wages and safety inspections, and he brought honesty to union management. For several years the soft-spoken Miller was a minor celebrity among social activists in the region, and the same spirit of resistance that inspired the MFD fueled a number of strikes in Kentucky and Virginia to organize UMWA mines, including a long and bitter strike at the Brookside Mine in Harlan County, Kentucky, from 1973 to 1974. By the end of the decade, however, Miller’s popularity among the professional labor organizers within the union bureaucracy waned, and even the democratic structure that he had helped to bring to local districts proved to be divisive at the national level. He was forced to resign in 1979, as the union and the number of working miners both entered a long period of decline.52
If the movements for black lung compensation, mine safety, and union reform reflected a growing assertiveness among coal miners to fight for better health care and more responsive, democratic institutions, the drive to abolish strip mining engaged an even larger Appalachian community in the struggle for political and economic change. Nothing quite united Appalachian activists, small landowners, and mountain intellectuals across state borders in the late 1960s and 1970s like the anti–strip mining movement. Few causes touched on a broader range of social issues confronting the region: landownership, taxation, jobs, environmental quality, and even traditional values.
Rooted in the efforts of a few environmentalists to stop the destruction of hillsides and streams in the early 1960s, the movement matured during the War on Poverty as coalitions of elderly landowners and young activists developed grassroots organizations and took direct action to stop the encroachment of bulldozers onto family farms. By 1968 most Appalachian states had passed nominal legislation regulating the industry, but these laws were we
ak and poorly enforced. Surface mine control laws inevitably represented a political compromise between coal operators and citizens who wanted to abolish the practice entirely.53 In fact, the amount of surface-mined land in Kentucky and West Virginia actually increased after the passage of state surface mine control acts, and the rising demand for coal during the energy crisis of the early 1970s spread the practice rapidly in neighboring states.
When lax enforcement failed to prevent destructive mudslides and the drainage of acid waste into local streams, angry activists developed new strategies to draw attention to the need for abolition. Early in 1971, for example, representatives from the Kentucky Conservation Council, the Lexington Garden Club, the CSM, the Sierra Club, and other environmental organizations formed the group Save Our Kentucky (SOK). With funding from an eastern Kentucky deep mine operator who opposed surface mining because it undercut the price of his deep-mined coal, SOK hired a staff and launched a public education campaign to end strip mining.54 The group also proposed more equitable taxation of unmined mineral resources and began to pressure state lawmakers for the passage of a coal severance tax for the development of public infrastructure in coal-producing counties.
Other professionals from a variety of backgrounds also joined the movement. Young lawyers from the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund, established with OEO help during the 1960s to provide legal aid to the poor, offered legal assistance to landowners who were threatened by strip miners, and a few radical activists began to randomly picket strip mine sites to shut them down and garner public support for abolition. On one rainy morning in January 1972, a group of women from the Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization, the AGSLP, and SOK occupied a strip mine site in Knott County and stopped the bulldozers for fifteen hours, until violence and threats drove them from the mountain. Later that spring more than two hundred citizens of Floyd County shut down a strip operation after runoff from the mine damaged homes and gardens during a heavy rain.55
The political battles over abolition in West Virginia were intense as well. In 1971 a coalition of West Virginia citizen groups, unemployed miners, antipoverty activists, and environmental organizations attempted to secure legislation that would ban surface mining in the Mountain State, but as had happened earlier in Kentucky, the coal industry mounted strong resistance. Secretary of State Jay Rockefeller even joined the campaign, making abolition a central theme in his gubernatorial race and personally funding a citizens’ action committee, Citizens Against Strip Mining. Thousands of West Virginians signed petitions, campaigned for abolitionist political candidates, and marched in the streets of Charleston in favor of eradication. Rockefeller, however, lost the election to incumbent Arch Moore, who gathered heavy support from the coal industry and the UMWA, and the legislature abandoned a proposal to phase out surface mining, passing instead a regulatory control bill.
Frustrated by their lack of success at the state level, anti–strip mining activists turned to regional collaboration to raise pressure on Congress for a national abolition bill. Leaders of anti–strip mining organizations from Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia met in Huntington, West Virginia, and formed the Appalachian Coalition to coordinate a regional movement for a federal ban. Representative Ken Hechler introduced the first federal bill to abolish surface coal mining in February 1971, and Congress launched a long series of hearings on the proposal. The Appalachian Coalition rallied regional support for the legislation and coordinated the testimony of mountain residents before congressional subcommittees. The Appalachian group was joined by a number of national environmental groups organized as the National Coalition Against Strip Mining. Both the coal industry and the UMWA opposed the bill on the grounds that it would cripple the nation’s energy supply and increase unemployment in already hard-hit areas, but they favored more limited legislation to strengthen state oversight of mining operations.
Support for a national ban on surface mining reached its height in 1972 following the collapse of a coal waste dam at the head of Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West Virginia. A series of dams had been constructed on the creek by the Buffalo Mining Company, a subsidiary of the Pittston Coal Company, the largest independent coal producer in the United States, but both state and federal mining authorities had ignored the loose “gob pile” dams, which by 1972 had turned the Middle Fork of Buffalo Creek into a series of black pools. On the morning of February 26, 1972, heavy rains caused one of the dams to collapse, sending a thirty-foot wave of water and rocks down the seventeen-mile length of the creek, killing 125 people in a matter of minutes and leaving over 4,000 homeless. Despite its history of poor safety practices and the fact that the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 had outlawed coal impoundments like the ones on Buffalo Creek, Pittston assumed no responsibility for the tragedy. A spokesperson for the company claimed that the flood was simply “an act of God.”56
The Buffalo Creek disaster briefly focused national attention on the consequences of uncontrolled strip mining, but the loss of life and the destruction of fifteen communities in southern West Virginia had little impact on the congressional debate. Four months after the Buffalo Creek massacre, as it would become known in the mountains, nine hundred activists gathered at the National Conference on Strip Mining in Middlesboro, Kentucky, called to draft a statement on surface mining to be presented to the Democratic and Republican conventions that year. The conference, which brought together grassroots activists and environmental leaders from across the nation, adopted a resolution demanding the prohibition of strip mining in the United States. Although the Democratic National Committee later endorsed a general statement opposing strip mining, neither party was willing to accept abolition, and by the end of the summer even the National Coalition Against Strip Mining moved to a position accepting regulation instead of prohibition.57
Congress deliberated for more than six years before finally passing the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. As was the case at the state level, industry and union opposition, combined with the energy crisis of the early 1970s, doomed efforts to abolish surface mining at the national level. Even after national conservation groups abandoned prohibition in favor of federal supervision of mining and reclamation practices, President Gerald Ford vetoed two regulatory measures before President Jimmy Carter signed a weaker bill in the summer of 1977. While Carter favored stronger legislation, he acknowledged that the “watered down bill” would enhance “much needed production of coal” while protecting the “beautiful areas” where coal was produced.58 Appalachian groups, led by the Appalachian Coalition, expressed their opposition to the bill on the grounds that it set up federal guidelines but left enforcement to the states, failed to protect private property and compensate landowners, and allowed mountaintop removal as an approved mining procedure. The legislation did outlaw highwalls, require slopes to be restored to their approximate original contours, and establish the federal Office of Surface Mining to regulate the industry, but it failed to end surface mining itself. The struggle over the environmental and human costs of surface mining would continue in Appalachia for years to come.
The fight for a national abolition bill dramatized the gap between middle-class conservationists who saw surface mining essentially as an aesthetic and moral assault against the environment and Appalachian activists who perceived the practice as part of a larger system of regional exploitation. Conservationists were more willing to compromise in favor of government regulation, but the former poverty warriors and poor people who led the mountain resistance organizations distrusted the ability of institutions to protect their lives and homesteads. At a people’s hearing on strip mining held in Wise, Virginia, on December 4, 1971, more than two hundred activists gathered to hear mountain residents deplore the courts, legislatures, and other “institutionalized channels” that refused to respond to the plight of local people. Joe Begley from Letcher County, Kentucky; Rufus Brooks from Logan County, West Virginia; John Tiller from Brammel, Virginia; Bessie S
mith from Knott County, Kentucky; and dozens of other speakers echoed the words of the Reverend Warren Wright, a Letcher County, Kentucky, farmer and anti–strip mining activist, who urged the crowd to rise up in democratic protest against the “industrial and political conspiracy” that was ruining the mountains and mountain life. The “question of strip mining,” chided Begley, was “more than a question of beauty and trees.” It was also a matter of “the destruction of farms and homes.”59
Regional activists used the struggle against strip mining to expand their networks, to organize new citizen-based organizations, and to foster what they believed was a “regional democratic movement.”60 Regional strategy meetings like those held in Middlesboro, Huntington, and Wise brought together local opponents of surface mining, but they also provided venues for sharing information and ideas on a variety of other issues. New organizations such as Save Our Cumberland Mountains in east Tennessee sprang up to oppose strip mining and to work for landowner rights in their areas. Led by young radicals like Michael Clark of the Church of the Brethren Appalachian Caucus and the Reverend B. Lloyd of the Anglican Appalachian People’s Service Organization, a number of religious organizations, including the Knoxville-based Commission on Religion in Appalachia, joined the crusade. Leaders of SOK, especially its director, James Branscome, and writers Harry Caudill and Jack Weller, spoke widely at college and university rallies throughout the mountains, spreading the idea that Appalachia was an exploited colony within modern America and that surface mining was only one manifestation of a corrupt political and economic system.