Uneven Ground (25 page)

Some of the most bitter and enduring struggles, however, challenged the power of the coal industry over the economy, health, and lives of coal country people and struck at the heart of systemic problems such as land use, taxation, and the hidden human costs of an extractive, single-industry economy. It was here that local fights against powerful special interests evolved into regional battles around issues that defined a larger Appalachian identity. Even those areas of Appalachia that had never experienced coal mining came to identify with the loss of independence, devastation of the land, and threat to cultural traditions dramatized by events in the coalfields.

Changes in the coal industry had been at the core of central Appalachia's economic distress since World War II. The introduction of new technologies had given rise to massive unemployment in the underground mines and to the emergence of surface mining practices that left the landscape scarred and degraded. Rural families could see the truckloads of coal that poured from expanding strip mine operations while their sons and daughters were forced to migrate out of state for jobs and while those who remained struggled to survive on charity and government handouts.

When the UMWA announced in the summer of 1962 that it could no longer honor the health cards of some eastern Kentucky miners and
was closing ten UMWA hospitals in central Appalachia, roving bands of retired and unemployed miners attempted to shut down small mines that had refused to pay royalties into the union's Health and Retirement Funds. Spontaneous demonstrations blocked roads and shut down nonunion mines, and company tipples, bridges, and equipment were bombed in the middle of the night. After Governor Bert Combs intervened to quell the violence, leaders of the roving pickets organized the Appalachian Committee for Full Employment and in 1964 prepared to join the promised War on Poverty as a legitimate CAA. The unemployed miners' committee never received OEO money, which eventually flowed through the hands of local government officials, but the anger and determination to confront the industry survived in local families and reemerged in other battles over strip mine regulation, coal mine health and safety legislation, and union reform.

Indeed, out of the same communities that produced the roving pickets movement emerged one of the most famous grassroots organizations in the mountains, the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People (AGSLP). Established after “Uncle” Dan Gibson faced down strip miners on Clear Creek in Knott County, Kentucky, in May 1965, the group came to exemplify the frustration and dissatisfaction that ran deep in the region. Gibson, an eighty-one-year-old Baptist preacher, was hauled off to the county jail after he used a squirrel rifle to stop bulldozer operators from stripping the land of his stepson, who was fighting in Vietnam. Armed neighbors rallied in the town of Hindman, where Gibson was incarcerated, and dozens of friends stood off the strip miners again the day after the elderly preacher was released. A few weeks later, more than 125 people assembled in Hindman to form the AGSLP, dedicated to stopping strip mining in eastern Kentucky.
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Opposition to strip mining in Kentucky had begun as early as the 1950s, but it was not until the TVA signed a contract in 1961 with two local men to provide the agency with cheap, surface-mined coal that grassroots opposition began to mobilize. The Kentucky General Assembly enacted a weak strip mine control act in 1954, but Governor Happy Chandler abolished the enforcement agency created by the act four years later. Governor Bert Combs reestablished the bureau, but its director, a former strip mine operator, was reluctant to enforce even minor controls. Harry Caudill introduced a bill to abolish strip mining
in the 1960 legislature, but it failed for lack of support. By the mid-1960s, hundreds of eastern Kentucky residents had voiced their opposition to the new mining procedure that tore away the topsoil on the hillsides to get at the coal underneath and in the process rolled stones, trees, and mine waste onto the private lands and creeks below. Even the usually moderate CSM decried the practice.
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When Perry County coal operators Bill Sturgill and Richard Kelley began mining in the Clear Fork Valley utilizing large-scale surface mining equipment, including a seven-foot auger, area residents were shocked. They were appalled not only at the level of destruction to their fields and streams from mudslides and acid drainage but at the apparent disregard for private property rights by the companies that owned the mineral deposits below their land. Most strip miners utilized their legal privilege to access the minerals beneath the surface through turn-of-the-century broad form deeds that the Kentucky courts had validated over the rights of surface landowners. The movement of bulldozers onto small mountain farms threatened not only the land and environment but the little security that remained for hard-hit families. Leadership of the AGSLP therefore included middle-class environmentalists, several area politicians, and elderly men and women whose land was immediately threatened by development.

Within weeks of Gibson's arrest, a caravan of fifty cars from eastern Kentucky descended on Frankfort to pressure Governor Ned Breathitt to end surface mining in the commonwealth. After being presented with petitions bearing over three thousand signatures in support of abolition, the governor responded in a manner unusual for Kentucky leaders. He promised to tour the affected Appalachian counties and later announced that his administration would implement new policies to regulate auger and contour mining. Breathitt also proposed to intervene as a friend of the court on behalf of landowners in cases involving the broad form deed and to recommend permanent legislation to control surface mining in the 1966 General Assembly. Breathitt's position nonetheless favored regulating the industry over abolishing strip mining practices, a stand that was disappointing to landowners and environmental activists in the mountains.
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Before hearings could be held on the proposed legislation, however, another poignant confrontation on Clear Creek dramatized the resolve
of strip mine opponents. Early in November 1965, several AGSLP members were arrested for violating an injunction issued by an area circuit judge that prohibited interference with the mining operations of Sturgill and Kelley's Caperton Coal Company in the Clear Creek Valley. Several local families had been gathering for weeks along a ridge in the Hardburly section of the valley to prevent the strip miners that had threatened Gibson's farm from crossing the mountain into their community. Among the group was sixty-one-year-old Ollie Combs, a recent widow who had joined the organization at Gibson's advice when mining equipment began to advance on Honey Gap, just above her home.
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Combs, who lived in a four-room, tarpaper-covered cabin with her five sons, feared not only that debris from the mining operations would ruin her twenty-acre homestead but that boulders loosed by the blasting on the steep hillsides might come crashing through her house, endangering the lives of her family. When the strip miners started through the gap on the morning of November 23, 1965, Combs climbed the ridge and sat down on a rock in front of the approaching bulldozer. She and two of her sons were arrested by the county sheriff and two highway patrol officers for violating the judge's injunction and hauled off to the county jail on the day before Thanksgiving. The spectacular image of Combs being carried off her own land by two law enforcement officers—a picture snapped by a
Louisville Courier-Journal
photographer, who was also arrested—appeared the next day in newspapers across the country.

Embarrassed by this and other photographs showing the elderly woman from Fisty, Kentucky, eating her Thanksgiving meal in jail, Governor Breathitt called on the coal industry to stop insisting on legal enforcement of the broad form deeds until the courts could rule on the matter. “I am on their side,” the governor declared of Combs and her neighbors. He immediately implemented more stringent emergency strip mine regulations and ordered the state police not to enforce injunctions in cases involving the broad form deed. The following January, Combs testified before the Kentucky legislature, demanding that the body do something to stop the coal companies from destroying people's homes and land in the mountains. Harry Caudill and other advocates of the eradication of strip mining on mountainsides were
unable to get an abolition bill introduced, however, and the governor's more lenient regulatory bill passed overwhelmingly. The new legislation required miners to restore hillsides to their approximate original contours, prescribed maximum slope angles for mining, and established a division of reclamation with the powers to levy fines and suspend mining permits. The law provided for only a handful of inspectors and a very limited enforcement budget.

In addition, the new strip mine regulations did nothing to ban the broad form deed and therefore failed to address one of the primary concerns of mountain activists, who feared a new round of invasions of family homesteads by the coal companies. Members of the AGSLP turned to the courts to challenge the right of strip miners to destroy the property of surface owners, but their case dragged on in the Kentucky courts through 1966 and 1967. In the meantime, they continued to monitor mining operations and to recruit new members. Among the hundreds of eastern Kentuckians who joined the group were more militant antipoverty activists, who were eager to carry the fight against the coal companies to other communities.

As the number of acres permitted for mining continued to grow, opposition to surface mining became a key organizing issue for citizens' groups throughout the coalfields. Chapters of the AGSLP sprang up in Perry, Harlan, Leslie, Floyd, and other eastern Kentucky counties, and AGSLP pamphlets, newsletters, and other materials on strip mining were printed by the AV and distributed widely to antipoverty groups in the region. One AV pamphlet listed the profits of the forty largest coal corporations and holding companies in central Appalachia, labeling the inventory “Appalachia's forty thieves.”
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Although AGSLP leaders continued to advocate peaceful resistance to strip mining while the legal challenge wound its way through the courts, some residents took more militant stands to stop the strippers. In the spring of 1967, saboteurs dynamited mining equipment in Knott and Perry counties, and gunfire was exchanged between protesters and miners in several communities. One “conservation group” formed a mountain gun club to assist surface landowners “who feared that a strip operation would move in on their land by leasing the surface for $1 and setting up a firing range.”
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Among the AV organizers to join the AGSLP at this time was Joe Mulloy. The son of Louisville, Kentucky, working-class parents, Mulloy was determined to establish a chapter of the anti–strip mining group in Pike County, where he had come to work with VISTA and other poverty warriors at Poor Bottom on Marrowbone Creek, in the southern end of the county. Poor Bottom was one of the most depressed communities in eastern Kentucky. Mulloy soon met and befriended Alan and Margaret McSurely, two recently arrived volunteers with the SCEF, and together they began meeting with neighbors and holding community discussions concerning the volatile surface mining issue. Margaret had worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the southern civil rights movement before coming to Kentucky, and Alan had been engaged in antipoverty work in northern Virginia. He was hired in the spring of 1967 as an organizer for the AV but lasted only four weeks with the organization before he was deemed too controversial and was fired. He stayed on in eastern Kentucky under the auspices of the SCEF's Southern Mountain Project.

The three organizers not only began to support the efforts of a group of local landowners opposed to strip mining on the creek but openly connected the destructive land practice to the systematic exploitation of the region by the coal industry. “It was obvious,” argued Mulloy, “that in Appalachia the cause of poverty and unemployment was unequal distribution of the tremendous coal wealth and absentee ownership of 90 percent of the valuable mineral rights.” The abolition of strip mining would be a giant step toward “controlling the entire multi-billion dollar industry that flourishes in the midst of some of America's cruelest poverty and hardship.” Confronting the bulldozers on the mountain in Poor Bottom, he believed, could launch “a movement to reclaim the wealth of the region for the benefit of the people.”
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Such assertions were by no means uncommon in the mountains in the late 1960s, but in Pike County they fueled the suspicions of reactionary local power brokers, who perceived the entire War on Poverty as a threat to their status and control. As in nearby Mingo County, West Virginia, a cadre of coal operators, merchants, bankers, police, and other public officials ran the Pike County government and most local institutions according to the command of King Coal. One local Republican politician, Thomas Ratliff, hoped to use the populous
mountain county as a springboard for his statewide campaign for the office of lieutenant governor, and he saw the organizing efforts on Marrowbone Creek as mounting evidence of class insurrection, similar to the activities of civil rights activists and antiwar protestors in urban parts of the state. One of fifty millionaires in the town of Pikeville and a founder of the National Independent Coal Operators' Association, Ratliff then served as commonwealth attorney for Pike County. He believed that the AVs and VISTA volunteers were part of a larger effort by Communist sympathizers to undermine and destroy the status quo in the mountains.

In September, Ratliff and his associates seized the occasion of another well-publicized clash over strip mining to finally rid Pike County of the troublesome AVs. On June 29, 1967, elderly farmer Jink Ray and some of his neighbors, including Joe Mulloy and his wife Karen, blocked Puritan Coal Company bulldozers that were about to strip Ray's Island Creek farm. The company obtained a court injunction against the group, but the old man returned each morning to sit in front of the bulldozer to protect the land he had farmed for forty-six years. Finally the governor intervened and revoked the mining company's permit, but the incident was enough to cause Pike County coal and government officials to act against the young outsiders who they believed were responsible for stirring up local people. When subtle acts of intimidation failed to convince the outside organizers to move on, the courthouse crowd tried more direct methods.