Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (3 page)

This “renegade status” of its citizens has been reclaimed at various moments in Appalachia's history, often with coal at the center of the storm. The biggest squall happened in West Virginia during the turbulent 1920s. Simmering tensions between miners and company men over unionization resulted in the largest armed uprising in American history aside from the Civil War.
³³

The mine wars of the 1930s in Harlan County, Kentucky, continued Appalachians' legacy of fighting back. Again, the battle
was over the right to organize. Following the miners' decision to strike in March 1931, coal operators hired gun thugs who terrorized striking miners and their families. The violence culminated in the notorious Battle of Evarts in May 1932, which left at least four dead and gave “Bloody Harlan” its nickname. Eventually, nine years of battles would result in eleven dead, twenty wounded, and the unionization of Eastern Kentucky miners.
³⁴

Music was a driving force in this social revolution.

“Solidarity Forever,” a song written by Ralph Chapin during a West Virginia strike in 1915, is, Jeff Biggers has noted, “possibly the first labor anthem to be disseminated on a national level.”
³⁵

The Harlan County strikes inspired Florence Reece, the wife of a striking miner, to compose one of the most powerful and enduring protest songs ever written, “Which Side Are You On?”
³⁶
In the 1930s, Aunt Molly Jackson, a midwife and songwriter living in squalid conditions in a Bell County, Kentucky, coal camp emerged as “one of the more famous folksingers of the radical thirties.”
³⁷
Jackson traveled throughout the country spreading the word about conditions in the mining camps and was eventually banned from reentering Kentucky by politicians who were in the pocket of the coal industry.
³⁸

In 1932, partly as a response to the chaos occurring in Appalachia, Myles Horton and Don West founded the Highlander Folk School in New Market, Tennessee.
³⁹
According to author John M. Glen, “its educational approach reflected Horton's conviction that a new social order could be created by bringing ordinary people together to share their experiences in addressing common problems.”
⁴⁰
Ever since its founding, Highlander has been active in Appalachian issues and organizing resistance to oppression across the South, including becoming a major force in the civil rights movement.

Despite advancements, tensions reemerged in Harlan County during the 1970s when more than 180 miners at Brookside went on strike to protest unsafe working conditions and the companies' insistence on including a no-strike clause in their contract. Immortalized
in the Academy Award–winning documentary
Harlan County USA
, the miners eventually reached an agreement with the companies, but not before one miner, Lawrence Jones, was killed in the early morning hours on the picket line.
⁴¹
The success of the strike was due in large part to the women in the community. This reflected a broader trend across the region, according to Carol Giesen in
Coal Mining Wives:
“Women picketed, marched in demonstrations, lay down in front of trucks, wrote letters, and supported in other ways the workers' and mining union's efforts to change conditions in the mines.”
⁴²

Nearly a decade before the Harlan County strike, the story of the Widow Combs caused such national outrage that it prompted then-Governor Ned Breathitt of Kentucky to introduce more stringent legislation regarding strip mining. Although Breathitt also called for a close examination by the courts of the mineral rights practice known as the broad-form deed, it took two decades for the practice to be declared unconstitutional.
⁴³

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, land agents from the northeast trekked across Appalachia seeking mineral rights to the land. With big talk and hefty payments—typically twenty-five to thirty cents an acre—they convinced many Appalachians to sell their mineral rights. With the advent of strip mining in the late 1950s, the sellers' descendants were often taken by surprise when a coal company showed up with a piece of paper that authorized them to mine coal by removing the entire surface of their land.
⁴⁴

These landowners had no immediate recourse in the legal system; Kentucky courts, for instance, repeatedly sided with the coal companies. Citizens groups began to form to protest the practice across Appalachia. In Eastern Kentucky, a group of disgruntled residents formed the Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition, later to become Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC). KFTC members began lobbying the state legislature in the early 1980s, and in 1987, in a split decision by the Kentucky Supreme Court, the law was struck down. One final avenue of recourse for the protesters
at the state level remained: amending the Kentucky Constitution. Thousands signed petitions to protest the court ruling and to call for an amendment. At a rally in Frankfort, KFTC member Mary Jane Adams addressed the crowd: “The Constitution says that the government is the servant of the people. It doesn't say the government is the servant of the coal industry. It's time to speak out.”
⁴⁵

Their voices were finally heard in November 1988. By a margin of four to one, Kentuckians voted in favor of the Homestead Amendment, which restricted strip mining by the mineral rights owner without the consent of the landowner. Five years later, the Kentucky Court of Appeals upheld its constitutionality.
⁴⁶

In neighboring West Virginia, citizens were fighting their own battle in the courts. One hundred twenty-five lives were lost and more than 4,000 people were injured and displaced when a poorly maintained dam at Buffalo Creek—used to filter massive amounts of coal slurry from a nearby plant—broke only four days after passing inspection. The disaster wiped out a valley of coal mining towns spanning seventeen miles, completely leveling the town of Saunders. Six hundred twenty-five survivors filed suit for $64 million against the Pittston Coal Company; two years later they settled for $13.5 million.
⁴⁷
“We did some good,” writes Gerald Stern, one of the attorneys for the survivors. “We made the company pay, and pay well. Maybe the cost of our settlement will make them a little more careful in the future.”
⁴⁸

Other individuals in the mountains were hopeful that their actions would have the same effect. The late Hazel King is a prime example of these activists. After retiring from the military, King returned to her native Harlan County and began a tireless fight for the passage of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. Then, in 1977 she filed a complaint that resulted in the first act of enforcement under the legislation and earned her the moniker of the “law's chief citizen enforcer.”

In her later years, King became an outspoken opponent of mountaintop removal. When her beloved Black Mountain—

Kentucky's highest peak—was endangered, she hired a helicopter numerous times at more than $1,000 a trip so people could view and photograph the mountain. Her work paid off; the coal companies relented.
⁴⁹

King had some young friends as allies in her fight to save Black Mountain. In 1997, students in Judith Hensley's seventh-grade class at Wallins Creek Elementary School in Harlan County heard about the proposed mining and chose to protest through a class project. Hensley's students began writing letters, prompting other classes at the school to join in. Other schools took up the cause as word spread across the region. Citizens groups joined the fight. After the students traveled to Middlesboro to protest outside of the Office of Surface Mining and appeared before the Legislative Research Commission in Frankfort, the state legislature intervened. A resolution was passed that compensated the coal and timber companies for their lost profits and protected nearly 12,000 acres of the mountain from being mined and logged.
⁵⁰
National media outlets soon picked up the story, and the students appeared on ABC-TV's
Nightline
. On the show, one boy said, “It feels like we fought a war and won.”
⁵¹

But the war rages on.

The two of us come to this book as the children of that war and the children of Appalachia. One reason we decided to do this book together was that our family histories are so similar. We come from coal mining families that were able to rise up out of poverty in large part due to many of our family members working in the mines. To put our own stake in the issue of mountaintop removal in the proper perspective, we briefly offer our own stories.

Silas House:
My grandfather, Johney Shepherd, worked for more than thirty years in the Leslie County, Kentucky, coal mines. After ten years in, he lost his leg during a roof collapse. After the accident, he was conscious the entire time until he was knocked out by doctors for the amputation. He spent a fidgeting six months recuperating and then went right back into the mines that had
claimed part of him. That's how much he loved being a coal miner. Up until his dying day he spoke of his fellow miners as if they were his blood brothers.

My maternal uncle, Sam Hoskins, still wears the coal tattoo he was marked with when a rock fell from a mine ceiling, leaving a three-inch gash across his right cheekbone. I was always fascinated by this mark of survival. I grew up around men who couldn't wash the coal dust from their eyelashes so that they looked as if they were always wearing eyeliner, who came in from work with only the whites of their eyes and their teeth shining, who sat and told stories about the coal-mining life while they took supper.

There is plenty of coal-mining pride in my family. But there is another side to living within a place that has to sacrifice itself for the rest of the nation, and to survive.

I grew up with an active coal mine as a neighbor. My childhood was marked by the blasting, the dust, the constant groan of machinery, the monotonous shifting of gears as coal trucks raced up and down the road, carrying out their spoils. The hillside was flattened, and everything on it was gone forever. This was a place where I had watched lightning bugs rise up in summer twilights, where my father and I had gathered walnuts in the fall, where my best friend and I had ridden sleighs, had hunted crawdads in the mossy-banked creek. Suddenly it was blasted off the face of the earth, never to return. The mining company pulled out after a shoddy reclamation and the land has still not recovered; almost thirty years later, it is unable to support hardwood trees. Not much more than sawgrass grows there now.

Around the same time, my father's family homeplace at Happy Holler, Kentucky, was strip-mined, erasing our heritage and causing my aunt's grave to be pushed over into the creek and buried some fifty feet below piles of unwanted topsoil, clay, and low-grade coal—overburden, as the industry calls it. One of my earliest memories is of standing on a ridge overlooking the place that had once been the family burial ground while my father and a couple of his brothers stood nearby, silent except for the coins
they rattled in their pockets. And they were never silent—never not telling tales—when they were together. My family bore witness to the way coal mining can lay waste to the land.

Jason Howard:
I grew up next to the railroad tracks in Dorton Branch, a former coal camp, in Bell County, Kentucky. Some of my earliest memories are of trains rumbling by, rattling our windows, cars loaded down with coal. I spent hours walking those oily tracks with my father and grandmother, collecting pieces of coal dropped by the trains, hemmed in by the surrounding mountains. In the summertime, I placed pennies on the tracks with my friends, eagerly awaiting the distant sound of the train whistle.

I also listened to my family's stories about the rough side of the coal industry. My great-grandfather, McClellan “Clell” Howard, is the first name listed on the Kentucky Coal Miners' Memorial at Benham. He was murdered while in the mines because of a union dispute. His death is testimony to what fighting back could get a miner in the early union wars. My maternal great-grandfather, Garrett Garrison, went into the mines when he was only nine years old, driving a mule team, and worked there most of his life. As an adult, he worked in the Harlan County mines during the bloody strikes of the 1930s, and instilled in our family the belief that unionizing was the saving grace for a miner. He died an excruciating death by way of black lung. In their conversations, my family bore witness to the way coal mining can destroy a body. These stories marked my childhood as much as the coal miners I grew up around, as well as the boisterous stories they told of their workdays.

Being part of a coal economy is a complicated, conflicting thing. While proud of our coal-mining heritage, we both became keenly aware at an early age of the price that had to be paid for giving energy to the nation and the world.

We both know about the love-hate relationship many Appalachians feel about coal mining. We've not only seen it, we've lived
it. When we first saw mountaintop removal, however, there was no love in the equation. After carefully examining the issue and learning as much as possible about this form of coal mining, we knew it was wrong. And even more than that, we knew we had to do something about it. This book is our way of fighting back.

While working on this book, we have been forever changed by the stories, images, people, places, and facts we have encountered.

We have seen communities devastated by the practice of mountaintop removal, abandoned by their representatives and their neighbors. We have met people whose faces bear the grief they have endured, grief not only for a lost mountain but also for a lost way of life. We've walked on years-old mountaintop removal sites, left behind after companies filed bankruptcy and were therefore not held accountable to properly reclaim the land before they moved on and filed permits under another company name. We have encountered evidence that caused us to question our own government and to shake our heads in wonder at how greed can distort and alter the landscape of a people and the integrity of an entire nation.