Policing the "Negro Eden": Racial paternalism in the Alabama coalfields, 1908-1921 part two

IF, AS KENNETH STAMPP HAS WRITTEN, the status of black workers during the Jim Crow era hung somewhere in the "twilight zone between slavery and freedom," the company towns and coal camps of Alabama's mineral district provided fertile ground for the easy transfer of plantation-style discipline. Before the turn of the century, this transfer was facilitated by the involvement of planters as owners and managers of mining operations.1 Well into the twentieth century, proper methods for managing (contemporary writers used the term "handling") African American workers remained a subject of intense debate and discussion among Birmingham District operators. "The 'boss' who can get the best work from a crew of southern darkies must be a man of unusual natural gifts," one report explained. Detailing the accomplishments of an "ideal southern mine boss" in making "his gang of five hundred negroes as efficient as any equal number of whites could be," a correspondent for the Birmingham Age-Herald lauded Sloss superintendent John Hanby as "generous, bluff, convivial, one minute knocking a negro down for disobedience and the next minute picking him up." The reporter reckoned that the District's "labor problem" could be easily solved if all mine bosses would emulate Hanby's "rough-and-ready" style. Decades of such experience led operators to the conclusion-here articulated by one of the District's leading managers-that "there is no superior to the negro as a willing[,] loyal, reasonable and obedient laborer."2

Company welfare programs did little to alter the plantation atmosphere of some Alabama mining camps. For example in 1921-a decade after the Knowles report was published-a Piper superintendent told federal investigators that he housed his workforce within sight of the company store "so the tenants can be watched." Moreover, he "consider [ed] the fact that there [was] an independent. . . town adjacent a matter for regret."3 Perhaps the most graphic illustration of the enduring brutality of labor relations in the coal industry was the region's continued dependence on convict labor. Although TCI was forced to abandon the convict lease system in 1911, other operators continued to rely on convict labor-and the harsh methods it required-until the system was scrapped in 1928. The fatal explosion at Pratt Consolidated's Banner Mines in 1911, for example, killed 132 miners, including 123 convicts, all but eight of whom were black.4

Thus the early application of company paternalism in the Birmingham District was notable for its unevenness. The geographical isolation of the mining camps, the continuous availability of a large pool of cheap black labor, and the weakness of union organization after 1908 afforded mine owners wide latitude in setting wages and conditions. Many enjoyed the fruits of extended labor peace without extending the costly benefits of company welfare to their employees.

More striking was the gap between the rhetoric of enlightened management and the reality of life in those camps that most enthusiastically embraced welfare capitalism. The TCI and DeBardeleben mines won at least as much notoriety for their extravagant antiunion precautions as they did praise for their employee benefits. They frequently deputized armed guards to keep out organizers. National UMW organizers sent to survey the Alabama fields in 1913 reported an atmosphere of "fear bordering on terror," where "if it becomes known that [miners] have met or talked with any of our representatives they are immediately discharged."5 Milton Fies, superintendent at DeBardeleben's Sipsey Mines, reported that he "question [ed] all who desire employment. . very closely, to avoid hiring any men with union sympathies." When he discovered that the UMW had made substantial inroads among his workforce in early 1914, Fies discharged a section foreman suspected of harboring union sympathies.6 He also rejected a qualified candidate for the post of company physician on the grounds that previous service in the UMW "hotbed" of Townley had left him "more or less tainted with unionism, and therefore a doubtful quantity as to desirability as a doctor."7

The most common objection to unionism by Birmingham District coal operators was that recognition of the UMW would needlessly introduce an "outside party" into relations with their employees. As a hedge against union organization, area operators developed a variety of structures for settling day-to-day disputes between management and labor. At TCI the process was formalized through the setting up of a "Mutuality Department" to arbitrate grievances, though the obvious partiality of these organizations compromised them in the eyes of employees. "Woe to the man who takes his case to the Mutuality Department," one disgruntled ex-manager complained. The majority of TCI managers "refuse [d] to bow to Mutuality," and those workers bold enough to take their grievances before it were "always. . . put on a black list in [the] employment office marked 'NG' [`No Good']."8 Elsewhere the procedure was less formal, though hardly more satisfactory to employees. Although many individual owners and superintendents took a personal hand in settling grievances, their pledges that they were "always open to the lowest-paid worker in the mines" may not have reassured miners that they could speak freely without risking victimization.9

Even when company-sponsored social welfare provided real material benefits, workers frequently found the conditions attached to the paternalist arrangement unbearable. For many workers in the model mining camps, the extension of company authority into the most intimate aspects of their lives frequently outweighed the benefits they received. Welfare workers stressed personal responsibility, sobriety, and loyalty to the employer as the keys to individual advancement, rejecting any suggestion that hardship in the camps was related to low wages or harsh working or living conditions. When the TCI welfare department circulated an article on "Teaching Thrift in Spending Wages," the Labor Advocate reasoned that the company was calculating that "if men can be taught to live more economically they can be forced to work for lower wages."10

Company officials often gave the keynote speeches at meetings of the welfare associations. They were frequently accompanied by camp preachers and by religious and business figures from Birmingham who could be depended upon to uphold company policy. Many ministers active in welfare work-particularly those in the black communitywere financially dependent upon the operators, and their sermons seldom deviated from the innocuous themes palatable to management.11 One black miner complained, for example, that their preachers were "nothing more than stool-pigeons for the coal companies" and that "instead of preaching the Gospel of the Son of God" they were preaching "the doctrine of union hatred."12

Exceptions to the clergy's pro-employer disposition were rare. One white Methodist minister argued that mining camp pastors should spurn financial help from the operators and "buy a miner's suit, cap and lamp, and go inside the mine where their people worked"; otherwise, miners would "count. . . the preacher as one of the company."13 But most miners believed that the coal companies "would rather pay fat salaries to these ministers than to recognize that labor has any rights to a decent pay for a day's work."14 Consequently, churches in the mining communities often drew the bulk of their congregations from "among school teachers, company officials, and adjacent farmers" rather than actual miners, who "preferred not to worship with mine officials or office men in the same congregations."15

Welfare work among miners of both races was animated by the same general objective: the cultivation of a stable, skilled, and efficient workforce whose allegiance to the employers would neutralize the UMW's effort to organize the District. But as the proportion of blacks in the mining workforce increased, and operators increasingly pinned their hopes for stability on the loyalty of their black employees, welfare work among black miners grew in importance. Indeed, the work of the black welfare associations was exceptional both for its broad scope and the urgency with which it was taken up. Operators believed that educational and recreational facilities would improve the work discipline and industrial skill of blacks recently recruited from the Black Belt. In a 1915 speech, the head of TCI's Health Department, Dr. Lloyd Nolan, complained that although "the negro is easily taught and usually obeys advice and instruction. . . he is usually lazy and often will not work unless in actual need of food and clothing."16 Although unable to undertake large-scale remedial work, smaller operators no doubt concurred with TCI's conclusions that their most pressing problem was the lack of "steady, trustworthy labor" and that the "ignorance. . . and poor educational facilities of Negro workers" represented a significant obstacle to full development of the District.17

Nevertheless, the disadvantages associated with black labor were offset by the protection it offered against unionization. Welfare work therefore included ongoing, systematic efforts to cultivate African Americans as a "bulwark" against agitation. Individual operators pledged that they would guarantee blacks a "square deal" and protect them from racial outrages on the part of white miners or low-level managers, and company officials often intervened when the rights of blacks had been flagrantly violated. Blacks who had demonstrated long-term loyalty might, in exceptional circumstances, go to their employers for a loan or for help in extricating themselves from brushes with the law.18 In the context of pervasive racial hostility, the importance of such seemingly minor gestures in securing the goodwill of black miners should not be underestimated.

The most important mechanism for binding black miners to their employers, however, was the cadre of black welfare workers employed in the camps. Here Birmingham employers enjoyed a unique asset: the unparalleled hegemony of Booker T. Washington's accommodationist philosophy among the city's black middle class, an approach which dovetailed perfectly with the role earmarked for black miners by area coal operators. Washington, whose hostility to trade unionism had won him friends among southern industrialists, was a frequent visitor to the city and wielded considerable influence among Birmingham's black establishment.19 "Local leaders with like ideals" were "numerous," recalled a white city official approvingly. Consequently, he wrote, the "Birmingham negro, guided by [such] wise leaders, has found his groove and quietly moves within it." NAACP officials sent south to organize branches in 1914 found Alabama "utterly Booker-T-Washington-ized . . . and therefore not kindly disposed toward us."20 The Birmingham District's unique constellation of powerful industrial interests, the largest concentration of black industrial workers in the nation, and a cohesive black middle class made for the most systematic application of Washington's formula for labor relations anywhere in the United States.21

Historian Neil McMillen has appropriately insisted that "the study of black protest in the period before World War II" must begin with "an appreciation of feasible limits."22 No balanced assessment of accommodationism in the early twentieth-century South can ignore the narrow constraints imposed on black politics during the period described by historian Rayford Logan as the nadir of African American history. The rejection of interracial unionism as a solution to the problems of black workers by the black middle class, articulated most forcefully by Washington, was in part a pragmatic response to the weakness of such an alternative in the South and the less-than-exemplary record of the national labor movement in relation to black workers.23 But their hostility toward the UMW in northern Alabama, where opposition centered on the union's commitment to racial egalitarianism, and the petit bourgeois content of their program of racial uplift, suggests that their attitude reflected distinct class interests as well.24

Spurning trade unionism as a vehicle for racial advancement, Washington's followers admonished black workers to place their hopes in sound relations with the "better class of white men" and loyalty to those who paid their wages. The "uplift" of the race would be secured not through protest or agitation but through accommodation to the institutions of the Jim Crow South and demonstrated service to those at the top of society. Graduates of the Tuskegee Institute played a prominent role in the black welfare associations, which they viewed as pursuing "the same ends as those which Tuskegee and Hampton and the whole system of education they represent are striving for."25 A number of black-owned newspapers, including H. C. Smith's Southern-Industrial Fraternal Review, the Reverend William McGill's Hot Shots, Rameau's Workmen's Chronicle and the influential Birmingham Reporter, published by Oscar Adams, aimed a steady barrage of antiunionism at black miners and enjoyed the generous patronage of major coal employers. Each combined an appeal to black racial pride with hostility to trade unionism. For example, during the 1908 strike Hot Shots lauded the "colored workmen" who worked through the strike and "remained loyal to the company" and condemned strikers as "good-fornothing indolent vagabond [s]" who by their disloyalty had brought "disgrace [upon] the race."26

The other major agencies for projecting the influence of the black middle class into the camps were the black fraternal orders, which, though immensely popular among black miners (and their wives), were typically directed by prominent "race leaders" from Birmingham and further afield. The orders served a number of practical purposes, including the payment of sickness and death benefits, which appealed to black workers lacking any other financial protection. A camp physician noted, however, that the major attraction of the black fraternal orders was their espousal of racial pride and autonomy. These organizations, he argued, offered "the negro his best opportunity for exercising self-government. There is no excuse for hiding the sins of a brother for fear of too harsh treatment at the hands of a jury of another race.... [M] any offenses against the State statutes are never carried into court; but these are invariably. . . taken up within the lodge." Because of their independence, these organizations were distrusted by many whites, who thought "that this banding together is for offensive rather than defensive purposes."27

Black miners' conditional embrace of "racial uplift" reflected both the appeal and limitations of a doctrine that championed the racial integrity of African Americans but emphatically rejected any attempt to link their conditions in the camps to exploitation by the coal operators. Few black miners would have parted company with McGill or Adams when they editorialized against lynching, the abuses of the fee system, or discrimination on Birmingham street cars. Less palatable, however, was their ceaseless eulogizing of the District's leading coal operators or their frequent admonitions that black miners stop their "[constant] grumbling about the white people not paying us for what we do."28 Ambivalence toward such "race leaders" naturally became more acute during periods of labor agitation, when interracial cooperation against the operators became a viable option for black miners.

At times these tensions threatened to pull race organizations apart. During the 1908 strike Grand Master Henry Claxton Binford of the Colored Masons warned UMW supporters in his organization that he "consider[ed] every Mason in the Birmingham District connected with these unions . . . a murderer" and vowed that he would deny death benefits to "any Mason killed while affiliating to these unions." His diatribe provoked a sharp response from a black UMW member, who replied that he "cannot swallow every camel that Binford. . . tries to force down my throat. He is not the whole cheese so far as colored Masons are concerned." The letter ended with the telling assertion that "the miners' union has done more for us than all the secret orders combined, and Binford thrown in."29

More frequently, black miners embraced the various elements of racial uplift selectively. A Republic miner wrote in 1916 that although P. C. Rameau was "loved by the rank and file of the Negro miners" in the District as a "leader of his race," black miners were "not at all satisfied with conditions" in the camps and recognized "almost to a man . . . that they should be organized and that the union would mean much to them."" Similarly, a group of black miners from the Bessie and Palos mines declared they were "tired of being absolutely slaves for the operators" and maintained that the "Alabama coal fields are nothing more than a hell for every man white and black." They acknowledged that "the Negro miners are simply wild about this Raymeau [sic]," but they still believed that "we must have a union at any cost" and urged District 20 officials to "get in touch with that fellow [Rameau] and prove to him that his people will get a square deal at the hands of the UMWA."31

To the extent that black welfare workers had identified themselves with the interests of the coal companies, these tensions were inherent in their relationship with their constituency in the camps. The operators' bottom line set the boundaries on their tolerance of black self-assertion. Although minor matters were sometimes amenable to adjustment, the exploitation of black miners-so central to profitability in the Birmingham District-was not. Racial paternalism did not alter the disparity in wages, working conditions, housing, or education between black and white miners.32 Blacks continued to make up the overwhelming majority of convicts sent to the mines and were subject to many indignities that white miners did not face.33 Most notorious was the company "shackrouster" in the African American camps, who "rides from sunrise until the going down of the same with his billy and his revolver hanging to his saddle, going from house to house beating up negro men and using their women to suit his fancy."34 A veteran white miner acknowledged that although "the white miner is treated bad enough [in Alabama] . . . the Negro as a general thing simply catches 'hell' in the big way." He condemned the hiring of "low inhuman white [men]" as shackrousters.35

Such mistreatment was not limited to the backward camps that had rejected company-sponsored social welfare. Milton Fies, one of the most outspoken advocates of racial paternalism, enforced strict limits on insubordination at mines run by the DeBardeleben Coal Company. In his memoirs Fies recalled fondly a number of "unusual" "Negro [es] of the old school" who had served him with loyalty, diligence, and respect, but he displayed less tolerance for those who stepped out of line. When one of his bosses killed an "impertinent" black miner for failing to show up for night work in October of 1914, blacks at Sipsey became "considerably wrought up" over the incident until Fies brought in a deputy from nearby Jasper and discharged "some five or six negroes, who were particularly impertinent and trouble-seeking." On another occasion he discharged a black employee who allegedly insulted the wife of a company agent "in such a way . . . as to warrant our hanging the negro upon a limb and shooting him full of holes."36

The operators, embrace of racial paternalism therefore in no way represented a break from white supremacy, popular racial prejudice, or segregation. Indeed, the camps of leading operators like TCI and the DeBardelebens appear to have been more strictly segregated than operations that were less heavily capitalized, if only because smaller companies could not afford to build separate housing clusters for blacks and whites. Despite TCI's reputation for embracing a bold policy that removed the restrictions on black advancement, the company maintained strict segregation inside its mines, barred whites from unskilled positions as coal loaders, and restricted blacks from skilled work.37 Although the physical separation of black and white workers conformed to contemporary racial custom throughout the South-and no doubt received the tacit approval of white miners-the operators seem to have appreciated its value in hindering interracial cooperation. The fixing of the "social line" between the races was crucial, wrote an ACOA-paid journalist, for keeping black miners "exempt from the false teachings and domineering influence of bad white men."38

Racial paternalism never delivered on its promise to provide a refuge from the poverty and despotism of Black Belt agriculture. There was work to be had-plenty of it-in Birmingham District coal mines but only under terms that kept most black miners and their families in poverty and under a regime that reproduced the racism and brutality so familiar to those fleeing the cotton fields. No system bearing such serious flaws could succeed in holding the permanent allegiance of black miners, and by early 1916 the disaffection of blacks from the paternalist arrangement was becoming obvious.

Its demise was accelerated by a number of developments peculiar to the Birmingham District. The failure of the black-owned Alabama Penny Savings Bank-long touted by accommodationists as a model for racial progress-and the collapse of a number of black fraternal organizations after a series of financial scandals injected a sense of deep malaise into welfare work, undermining the authority of middle-class race leaders among rank-and-file miners.39 The sense of crisis pervaded the pages of the Reporter, which attributed the decline of the Colored Odd Fellows, formerly twenty-thousand strong, to "right down meanness, ignorance, personal graft and high way robbery." "What is the matter?" its editors asked. "Leaders are dying, banks are falling, institutions of pride, church organizations, fraternal organizations, are splitting, many of which cease to exist.... [C] onfidence in the Negro to handle large sums of money is shaken, while the gambler, the alarmist and the unholy agitator go on with seeming prosperity."40

The crisis of Birmingham's black middle class coincided with national developments that not only widened the gulf between black miners and race leaders but seriously undermined the "peculiar control" that area coal operators had enjoyed since 1908. Increased industrial demand brought on by the war presented Alabama blacks and whites, for the first time, with prospects of industrial employment beyond the mines and mills of Birmingham and complicated employers' plans for holding their labor force to prewar arrangements. "It has been necessary for us to offer inducements to our miners," Fies informed a Selma client in December of 1916, "to prevent more of them from migrating northward, where manufacturers . . . no longer able to procure foreign labor

. . are making very attractive offers to southern labor."41 Two years later, Sloss-Sheffield would report to its stockholders that it had never experienced "a more unsatisfactory condition of labor as to its scarcity, its wage and its efficiency."42 When wage increases failed to hold laborers, area operators often resorted to physical coercion, directed disproportionately against black miners. "Southern banks refused to cash checks written by northerners. . . to finance `the darky's joyride,"' recalled one TCI official. "Shut the barn door before all the horses get out!" urged a regional trade journal, and a number of operators seem to have implemented the directive enthusiastically, keeping a particularly close watch on railroad traffic. In June 1917 the Labor Advocate related an incident that, its editors believed, explained the growing exodus of blacks out of the District. At one mine located just outside city limits, "many of the colored population had put on their best Sunday clothes and had gathered at the depot intending to come to Birmingham to a big baptizing. Just before the arrival of the train the superintendent and shack rouster appeared upon the scene and forced all the negroes, without allowing them time to go home and put on their mining clothes, to go into the mines to work." Given such "intolerance," it was no wonder that "the colored people . . . enter their protests in the way they have."43 "The fear of the employing class," explained a white miner, "is that [the negro] will not return.... [Until now], they have depended upon fleecing the negro, getting the negro's labor for a song, and making the negro sing it. The negro, having gotten tired of this way of doing things and having heard of better conditions in the north. . . is anxious for the free ride."44

Predictably, race leaders denounced the "disgrace" of black emigration as a product of black "ignorance" and warned that it would "put a stain, a suspicion on Negro labor that has never been on it before." "How can we expect the decent consideration of influential honest white citizens when we so deport ourselves?" asked the Reporter.45 By this time, however, the black-middle-class project of racial solidarity was badly frayed, and attempts to stem the "northern fever" only fueled the alienation of black workers. "Negro leaders and papers can no more keep Negroes here than they can fly to heaven backwards," remarked one Birmingham minister. Black workers' disenchantment with the subservience of race leaders to District employers is evident in the bitter parting shot of one of those headed North: "The Negro papers which you subsidize and the Negro leaders whom you pay, cannot hold [us]. Two are [sic] three years ago you promised us schools; you have not given them to us. The only thing you have offered us is an old Jail for our children."46

The temporary breakdown of racial paternalism removed one of the most effective props to employer hegemony in the coalfields. The labor shortage produced by the exodus of blacks and whites out of the South and increased demand for coal during the war strengthened the bargaining power of those who remained in the District. Together these developments removed the ground from under the system of labor relations that had been built up since 1908 and laid the basis for the reemergence of interracial unionism. One notable feature of the UMW's resurrection was the withdrawal of miners from company welfare work. A vexed TCI official complained that members of the company's brass band "were not willing to practice any more unless we would pay for the time they had spent in rehearsal."47 Testifying before the Kilby Commission in 1921, operator Ben Roden recalled disparagingly that he and his wife had lived at Marvel since 1911 and had played a direct role in organizing welfare work, but "when the union was organized there in 1916 all of that work stopped." Attendance at company-run first-aid meetings dropped from 130 to twenty-five. "Even the church work was confined to just a few men that would continue to come. [The union] seemed to take the place of religions and everything else; that was just their God."48

The innate loyalty that operators had long ascribed to black miners was largely a delusion of their own wishful thinking. Certainly any experienced Birmingham operator had seen much to contradict the notion that blacks were innately hostile to unionism. Even Henry E DeBardeleben, the architect of the Negro Eden, had expressed his bewilderment that an "unexpected" feature of the 1894 strike had been the "stubbornness and unity" of black miners, who seemed "as determined in their purpose as the white." A union official complained during the same conflict that whereas "the colored [men] in and about Pratt City" were "true and noble," the "mean scrubs of white men" were making themselves the "enemies" of the union by their scabbing. Black militancy also featured prominently in the hardfought 1908 strike: DeBardeleben was again stunned when, on that occasion, his Negro Eden at Blue Creek affiliated with the UMW and "carried their tools out of the mine." After UMW members ambushed a trainload of strikebreakers, Maj. G. B. Seals of the Alabama National Guard warned that black unionists were "armed to the teeth and seem to be directed by white men, although the negroes are everywhere in predominance." District 20 president Kennamer confirmed Seals's impression, lauding blacks for standing by the union. "There are no better strikers in the history of the UMW . . . than the colored men of Alabama," he said after the strike was defeated. "They struck, and struck hard, they fought for their rights and fought manfully."49

The operators' response to the developing crisis after 1916 seems to have been spurred not only by the reemergence of the UMW but by consternation over its powerful appeal among blacks. When, in the fall of 1917, Mrs. G. H. Mathis conducted a speaking tour aimed at boosting war production in the mines, she claimed to have detected "a very considerable German influence at work in the mining districts of Alabama." "In some instances," she reported, "it appears to be getting a hold on the negroes," who were "acting with a show of threat towards the white people." Significantly, the "Propaganda" seemed to Mathis to be "using the miners' Union as a channel for reaching the mining class" in the Birmingham District.50

Local authorities appeared not only to share Mathis's fears of racial strife but to endorse her conflation of racial and industrial militancy. Six months after the memorandums mentioned at the outset of part one of this article (see Alabama Review 51 [July 1998]: 163) had been sent to Washington, Sheriff J. C. Hartsfield of Jefferson County wrote Gov. Thomas Kilby with a request for mounted machine guns that could be used to prevent "labor strikes, race riots, . . . insurrections, etc." Hartsfield warned that the situation in the mining camps had become "intolerable." The "negroes are heavily armed and well equipped with pistols, guns and ammunition," he cautioned, raising the specter of having to face "negro mobs of six hundred or eight hundred."51

The most remarkable aspect of the postwar crisis in the Alabama coalfields is that when, after tireless provocation, tensions did eventually erupt, they took the form not of race riots but of the "bitterest strike that Alabama ha[d] ever known,"52 a strike that united black and white miners across the District against the formidable power of the operators and Alabama's intractable ruling class. In this altered situation the philanthropic pretensions with which racial paternalism had adorned itself gave way to undisguised racism. All that remained of the foundations of paternalism was the assumption that blacks were incapable of independent thought. The operators attributed the UMW's success to the fact that "about 80% of the miners were southern negroes who are easily misled, especially when given a prominent and official place in an organization in which both races are members."53 "You gentlemen," pleaded an ACOA official before Kilby's Strike Commission, "are bound to know how child-like the Negro is.... They are happy and contented, but you let a Yankee negro get in amongst them, and no matter how well they are doing, it doesn't take them long to get the other cue."54

As in 1908, the operators viewed the 1920 strike as a challenge to both the racial and industrial order; the centrality of black labor to the region's prosperity meant that it could not have been otherwise. So long as "the salvation of the South depends upon its industrial welfare, and the chief factor in our industrial welfare is the negro," Milton Fies testified, "it would be a terrible mistake to deliver our negroes into the hands of the [UMW]."55 Ben Roden complained that the union "promised [blacks] equal vote and equal marriage laws." Others complained that along with the union "came a band of northern negroes and northern whites, who went from camp to camp . . . speaking from the same platform, to mixed audiences, men, women and children, negroes and whites, arousing passions and inflaming feelings."56 The ACOA charged that black UMW vice president Joe Sorsby had been observed "giving orders and directing affairs" and "very often [dictating] to the white stenographer with his hat on his head, and with a cigar in his mouth."

Scandalously, white UMW members had been overheard "address[ing] the negro as `Mr. Sorsby!"'57 When the UMW's efforts were swamped by the forces of reaction in Alabama in 1920, the loss was clearly not due to black hostility to the union; as before, blacks were in the forefront of the struggle and suffered disproportionately for their efforts.58

In their fight against the operators, black and white miners put forward a different vision of an earthly Eden, one that contrasted sharply with the one constructed by Alabama coal operators. The collapse of racial paternalism manifested itself in many ways: genuine solidarity across the racial divide; disruption of the link between black miners and middle-class race leaders; the operators' resort to Klan-style vigilantism in the coalfields. But the most dramatic illustration of the decline of the operators' hegemony was the action of a small group of black miners at Dora. There, a group of black strikers established a permanent community, building "their own shacks, often-time using abandoned or waste building materials" after being ejected from company housing. "Oldtimers around Dora still call it Uniontown," recollected a white UMW retiree in 1977, "because black union men . . . went in there and built their own crude houses so they would never again have to live in company houses that they could be thrown out of."59

1 See W. David Lewis, "The Emergence of Birmingham as a Case Study of Continuity Between the Antebellum Planter Class and Industrialization in the `New South,"' Agricultural History 68 (Spring 1994): 73-77.

2 Kenneth Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (New York, 1965), 80; Bingham Age-Herald, January 28, 1907; Milton H. Fies, "Industrial Alabama and the Negro: Speech Before the Alabama Mining Institute," October 31, 1922, p. 44, Alabama Coal Operators Association/Alabama Mining Institute Records, 1908-1984 (hereafter ACOA/AMI Records), Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Birmingham Public Library (hereafter D.AI-BPL).

3 Little Cahaba Mine, Piper, Ala.; "Mining Community 'A' Schedules with Camp Ratings, 1922-3"; Records of the Living Conditions Section, Records of the United States Coal Commission, 1896-1927, Record Group 68 (RG 68), National Archives, Washington, D.C. (NA). 4 See Wayne Flynt, Poor But Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites (Tuscaloosa, 1989), 136; and Robert David Ward and William Warren Rogers, Concts, Coal, and the Banner Mine Tragedy (Tuscaloosa, 1987).

5James S. Moran, Paul J. Paulson, and E. T. Fitzgibbons, "Report of the Committee on Conditions in the Alabama Coal Mines," 1913, cited in Philip Taft, Organizing Dixie: Alabama Workers in the Industrial Era, rev. and ed. Gary M. Fink (Westport, Conn., 1981), 190, n. 5. See also "Report on District 20 14th Annual Convention," June 12, 1911, in Philip Taft Research Notes on Alabama Labor History, DAM-BPL. 6 Milton H. Fies to Henry T. DeBardeleben, c. 1920, "Milton H. Fies File," DeBardeleben Coal Company Records (hereafter DeBardeleben Records), DAM-BPL.

7 Fies to DeBardeleben, February 23, 1914; DeBardeleben to Fies, October 4, 1922, "Fies File," DeBardeleben Records.

8J. L. Westwood to Gov. Thomas Kilby, March 9, 1921, Gov. Thomas Kilby, March 9,1921, Gov. Thomas E. Kilby Administrative Files, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery. 9 "The DeBardeleben Oasis: Unionism's Last Frontier," Alabama: News Magazine of the Deep South, March 29,1937,10.

lo Birmingham Labor Advocate, July 3, 1914.

Il George R. Leighton, Five Cities: The Story of Their Youth and Old Age (New York, 1939), 125; "ACOA Minutes," January 31, 1917, p. 254, ACOA/AMI Records. 2 United Mine Workers'Journal (hereafter UMWJ), June 1, 1916. 13 Wayne Flynt, "Alabama White Protestantism and Labor, 1900-1914," Alabama REview 25 (July 1972): 207; Rev. S. R. Emerson, in the Alabama Christian Advocate, April 28, 1910, quoted in ibid.

14 Birmingham Labor Advocate, April 5, 1919.

15 Flynt, "White Protestantism," 206, 208. Flynt's study is based on white mining camp congregations, although observers reported similar disaffection among black miners for company-sponsored services. See also "The Alabama Mining Camp," New York Independent, October 3, 1907, 791.

ts Lloyd Noland, M.D., "'elfare Work of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company: Address Given Before the Annual Dinner of the American Iron and Steel Institute," May 28, 1915, Yearbook of the American Iron and Steel Institute, 1915 (New York, 1916), 272-73.

17 Ida N. Tarbell, The Life of Elbert H. Gary: The Story of Steel (New York, 1925), 310; Arundel Cotter, United States Steel.' A Corporation with a Soul (Garden City, N.Y., 1921), 171, cited in Horace Mann Bond, Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel (New York, 1969), 241.

ie DeBardeleben to Fies, June 18, 1914; Fies to DeBardeleben, October 29, 1914, "Fies File," DeBardeleben Records; Birmingham Labor Advocate, January 13, 1911.

See "The Negro and His Relation to the Economic Progress of the South," October 12, 1899, in E. Davidson Washington, ed., Selected Speeches of Booker T. Washington (Garden City, N. Y., 1932), 81-82. For a discussion of Washington's relations with industrial employers, see C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), 358-59. Kevin K. Gaines has recently pointed out that "Black elites seldom realized that in their alliance with white elites they were pitting themselves not only against racist white workers, but black workers as well"; see Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1996), 95.

20 John R. Hornady, The Book of Birmingham (New York, 1921), 69; "Address of Miss Kath,,nm M. Johnson to the Sixth Annual Conference of the NAACP," May 1914, in Papers of the NAACP: Part 1, 1909 1950, Meetings of the Board of Directors, Records of Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and Special Reports (Frederick, Md., 1981 ), microfilm ed., reel 8, frame 223. Over the next several years, NAACP organizers succeeded in building branches in both Selma and Montgomery, but none had been formed in Birmingham as late as 1918. See "Branches Organized During the Year of 1918," Papers of the NAACP: Part 1, reel 13, frame 126.

21 Bobby M. Wilson, "Structural Imperatives Behind Racial Change in Birmingham, Alabama," Antipode 24 (1982): 172-73.

22 Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Massissippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana, Ill., 1982), 287; see also Woodward, Origins of the New South, 356.

23 The NAACP, whose distance from accommodationism in this period has been exaggerated, could be equally harsh when assessing the deep racism in the labor movement, although some of its members distinguished between the racial policy of the AFL and that of the UMW or the Industrial Workers of the World (IAW), which, one of its spokespeople claimed, had not only "invited Negroes to join [but] have gone out and got them.' Eugene K. Jones, "The Negro in Labor and Industry: Address to the Tenth Annual NAACP Convention," 1919, Papers of the NAACP: Part 1, reel 14, frame 548. 24 See August Meier, "Negro Class Structure and Ideology in the Age of Booker T. Washington," Phylon 23 (Fall 1962): 266; Horace R. Cayton and George S. Mitchell, Black Workers and the New Unions (1939; reprint Westport, Conn., 1970), 379; and Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., "Aristocrats of Color: South and North. The Black Elite, 1880-1920,"Journal of Southern History 54 (February 1988): 3.

25 Carl V. Harris, Political Power in Birmingham: 1871-1921 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1977), 36465. On the relation of Tuskegee and Hampton to welfare work, see also F. Ray Marshall, Labor in the South (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 74; Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (1931; reprint Port Washington, N.Y., 1966), 364-66; Judith Stein, "'Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others': The Political Economy of Racism in the United States," Science tN Society 38 (Winter 1974-75): 447-48.

26 Birmingham Hot Shots, October 24, 1908; August 26, 1908. 27 "Alabama Mining Camp, 791.

28 Birmingham Hot Shots, July 23, 1908.

29 Ibid., August 26, 1908; Birmingham Labor Advocate, September 4, 1908.

30 Birmingham Labor Advocate, July 1, 1916. 31 Ibid.,June 17,1916.

32 Ronald L. Lewis, Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1781980 (Lexington, Ky., 1987), 47; "Mining Community 'A' Schedules," RG 68; "Labor Conditions in Coal Mining Industry in Alabama,' 1920, ACOA/AMI Records. 33 Lewis, Black Coal Miners, 27. 34 UMWf June 1,1916.

35 Birmingham Labor Advocate, August 15, 1916.

3 Milton H, Fies, The Man with the Light on His Cap (Jasper, Ala., 1960), 11-13; Fies to DeBardeleben, October 1, 1914; Fies to G. M. Bowers, January 26, 1915, "Fies File," DeBardeleben Records.

37 Otis Dismuke, The Other Side: The Story of Birmingham 's Black Community (Birmingham, ), 3; "Inteniew with TCI Section Foreman W. H. Walker," Oral Histor Collection, Samford University Special Collections, Birmingham.

38 Frank Evans, in the Birmingham Age-Herald, August 22, 1908. In September 1908, Evans was paid five hundred dollars by the ACOA "for services rendered as newspaper correspondent during the recent strike" and was later employed for a three-year term as an "auditor" and "to perform such other work as may be assigned to him from time to time." "ACOA Minutes," September 24, 1908, p. 25; April 30, 1913, p. 150, ACOA/AMI Records.

39 Birmingham Reporter, February 26, 1916; October 28, 1916. 40 Ibid., December 23, 1916; January 22, 1916.

41 Fies to F. L. Davidson, December 21,1916, "Fies File," DeBardeleben Records. 42 "President's Report to the Stockholders," March 1919, Sheffield Steel and Iron Company Records, DAM-BPL.

43 Birmingham Labor Advocate, June 21, 1917. 44 Ibid., October 7, 1916. 45 Birmingham Reporter, October 6, 1917.

46 "Early Surveys: Migration Study: Birmingham Summary," n. d., pp. 6-7, Series 6, Box 86, Papers of the Urban League, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 47 Robert J. Norrell,James Bowron: The Autobiography of a New South Industrialist (Chapel Hill, 1991), 233.

48 B. F. Roden, `"Testimony Before the Kilby Commission," March 4, 1921, ACOA/AMI Records. See also Norrell, James Bowron, 233.

49 Robert D. Ward and William Warren Rogers, Labor Revolt in Alabama: The Great Strike of 1894 (Tuscaloosa, 1965), 73; UMWJ,June 7, 1894; Lewis, Black Coal Miners, 49, 50, 56. For a useful documentary record of black miners' involvement in the 1908 strike, see Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis, eds., The Black Worker: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present (Philadelphia, 1978), 5:156-98.

so Birmingham Age-Herald, September 3, 1917.

51J. C. Hartsfield to Kilby, September 13, 1919, Kilby Administrative Files. 52 Hywel Davies, "Confidential Memorandum on the Salient Facts Developed in the Alabama Coal Strike," c. March 1921, p. 4, Dispute Case Files, 1913-48, Records of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, 1913-69, Record Group 280, NA.

53 "Brief of the Alabama Mining Institute Before the U.S. Coal Commission," August 31, 1923, in Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 360. 54 Borden Burr, "Testimony Before the Kilby Commission," March 4, 1921, ACOA/AMI Records.

55 Milton Fies, "Testimony Before the Kilby Commission," March 4, 1921, ACOA/AMI Records.

56 "Statement of the Operators' Committee to Board of Investigators," February 28, 1921, ACOA/AMI Records.

57 Burr, "Testimony Before the Kilby Commission," ACOA/AMI Records; "Affidavit," February 12, 1921, Kilby Administrative Files.

59 For a sound logistical account of the 1920 strike, see Richard A. Straw, "The United Mine Workers of America and the 1920 Coal Strike in Alabama," Alabama Review 28 (April 1975): 104-28. For evidence of the especially harsh treatment of black strikers, see the letters from rank-and-file miners collected in the Van Bittner Papers, West Virginia Regional History Collection, University of West Virginia, Morgantown. 59 Autobiography of William T. Minor, Walker County, as told to Carl Elliot, Sr., vol. 1 of Alabama Coal Miners (Jasper, 1977), 24.

Editor's Note: The first part of this two-part article appeared in the July 1998 issue Brian Kelly is a visiting assistant professor at Florida International University.

Copyright University of Alabama Press Oct 1998
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