Kasama

Kasama is publishing a five part series on communist political work in the miners’ strike wave of the 1970s. We will be posting one piece a day over the next few days.

Ambush at Keystone #1:
Inside the Coalminers’ Great Gas Protest of 1974

Part 4: Things Start to Crack

By Mike Ely

By the time the strike was two weeks old, the situation was incredibly tense. The state authorities were determined to simply crush the strike by hitting our picket movement hard. Miners broadly wanted to win, but as the days passed more workers felt desperate to return to work. That gave a new wind to the more conservative, law-abiding, and fearful among the workers.

Bucket or Suitcase!

The Welch papers started highlighting what they called “the bucket or suitcase movement.” They featured a rally held in Keystone where some miners wives were (supposedly) speaking out against the strike, and calling their husbands cowards for being intimidated by “a few radicals.” They showed a picture of someone waving a suitcase – since this supposed “movement” called on women to present their husbands with an ultimatum: take your bucket of food and water (to go to work), or take the suitcase with your clothes in (and get kicked out of the house). Women were encouraged to put a lunch bucket and a suitcase side by side next to the front door.

It was, as you can imagine, hype orchestrated by the mine management at Keystone #1. But the fact that anyone at all felt emboldened to speak out to the press in this way says something about the climate at Keystone.

Behind the scenes, local union officials were encouraging men to confront pickets, saying “our mine” didn’t support the strike, and being prevented from working by “outsiders” (meaning the pickets who were coming to Keystone from outside this little town).

We have to dig into the fact that there was a sharply racial element involved — in ways that were very startling for me and the rest of the communists. We had all learned much of our politics from the civil rights movements and the Black liberation struggles. And so, it was startling for us to have stumbled onto a spot where, for various local reasons, Black people were generally alienated from most visible struggle.

I need to say this clearly: The fact that Black people were not represented among the most active miners, hardly meant that they were not among the most politically advanced in this area. There were, as we are going to discuss, some real, historically specific reasons why the wildcat strike movement was disconnected from the Black communities. But, as we were going to learn when our communist work took up support for liberation struggles in Africa and as we organized to oppose the anti-textbook campaign of the early Religious Right – there was a real audience our revolutionary politics in the Black communities of this area, especially among the youth, and the younger Black miners.

It would take us a while to understand this – and adjust our organizations work to identify and attract the more politically advanced. Certainly, developments within this Great Gas Protest shook some initial preconceptions hard.

Keystone’s Outlaw History

Keystone l#1, like several older mines in McDowell, had opened just as World War 1 stopped immigration from Europe. And so, with the oceans closed, the new coal companies had drawn much of their workforce from the plantation areas of the Deep South.

In other words, there was a strip of mines in McDowell, from Northfork Holler to Gary Holler, that employed African Americans from their beginnings. There was a band of African American coal camps, settled next to the white ones – and the town of Keystone was the largest of them.

Keystone had a raucous and even bawdy history. Some coal company towns had been set up as straight-arrow communities – with company churches and company inspections of housekeeping. But Keystone had emerged as a wide open town of (so-called) vice fueled by the Prohibition-era moonshine. It once boasted of the world’s longest-running poker game and the world-famous Cinder Bottom red light district.

By the time I started work there in 1973, the town of Keystone was just a shadow of its former self. A small housing project had replaced the brothel row of Cinder Bottom. The young boys who had run numbers and done errands for prostitutes now worked as old men alongside me in the main mine. And the remnants of that old town brotherhood dominated our local union – they still imagined a connection to the 1940s world of gangsters and saw themselves as major players in this town. And they didn’t mind speaking their mind – to the press or to young white hell-raisers trying to shut down “their” mine.

There were reasons that the older Black miners weren’t so eager to raise hell over (what they saw as) minor grievances: Eastern Associated Coal was one of the only companies that had ever hired Black miners in significant numbers. They had even promoted a few Black foremen. And Black workers often felt that if they were fired they would not easily find work at most other mines.So, for a number of reasons, that layer of older Black miners at Keystone #1 (and similar groups at the other heavily-Black mines) just didn’t like hot-tempered young rednecks telling them when to work and when to stay home. Meanwhile the younger Black miners, who were often quite influenced by the sixties, never did move to overthrow the old clique – as had happened in so many of the militant mines.

There was, as I mentioned, a real tension building:

The pickets were in danger whenever they went out, and all the local unions were under pressure to require picketing. The more conservative locals started actively encouraging their members to show up at each shift change, and urged them to work if there were no picket lines. And the militants on the bypass were becoming furious over this – and over having trouble with the same few mines over and over.

A Darkly Revealing Moment

It came to a head one night, as we gathered to send out pickets.

Our numbers were dwindling. Some militants had pulled back. Some faced personal injunctions. Some had court dates. Some just thought there should not be any more need for picketing.

As quiet conversations picked over rumors of a “back to work” push, a car squealed up among us. Two men tumbled out, badly beaten. They had been pistol-whipped while picketing at one of the larger U.S. Steel mines in Gary Holler. Three Black miners had confronted them there, pulled guns, hurt them pretty bad… and then just walked in to work. The faces of the pickets were bloody.

A silence fell over the crowd.

And then, suddenly, a voice shouted out: “That’s it. Let’s just go teach those n*ggers a lesson.”

To my horror, a second voice shouted out: “Let’s go down to that joint in Keystone and burn it out. These n*ggers need a lesson.”

The meeting shattered into a dozen conversations. Some, perhaps a quarter of the pickets, were shouting agreement. It included Larry who I knew from work, and had already been in tight spots with.

But quite a few others were muttering in obvious disagreement. One man, over my left shoulder said out loud, “If it goes this way, I’m out.”

What had been a strike meeting had become, in the blink of an eye, a debate over launching a racist attack. The outcome clearly hung in the balance. Everything could come unraveled – and I don’t just mean that strike.
I jumped up on the back of a pickup, and shouted as loud as I could:, “No!”

Everyone’s eyes turned on me, and I suddenly knew what to say: I don’t remember the exact words, but I said that if we allow ourselves to be divided in this way, we had no future and our cause had no justice.”

I said: “I’m going to go down to Keystone, to that poolhall, with anyone who will go with me. We will warn the people there and stand with them.”

Anyone who wanted to attack Cinder Bottom’s beer joint would have to come through us.

With that, the moment passed. The strike leaders stepped up, and started loudly organizing pickets. There was no more talk that night of raiding the Black community.

As soon as the picket meeting broke up, I immediately called my RU leadership. It took a while for us to connect, and discuss the events.

This was obviously a huge development — and one where we communists had a special responsibility to act.

The next day, BT dropped everything and and drove down to with a couple of others from Pinnacle Creek and drove to Keystone. There, at the mouth of Cinder Bottom was the town’s main hangout. I don’t remember why I didn’t go with them that day, but I wasn’t there. They went into the poolhall, explained to everyone there what had happened at the bypass the night before. They convinced a number of the regulars there to come with them, that night to the bypass, to talk these things though and to clear the air. None of the men who came were even miners, and it took obvious courage for them to step into that meeting above Welch.

It helped make that moment pass – but the underlying contradictions were still raw, and intensifying. And in our work, cracks were appearing in the assumption that miners represented some special advanced section of the working class, or that strike militancy was an automatic marker for deeper class consciousness.

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