Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
In doing this the imperialists were merely carrying<br />
out their general policy on colonial labor, restricting its<br />
role in strategic industries and reserving the best jobs for<br />
Euro-Amerikans in order to ensure the loyalty of settler<br />
society. When most coal mining jobs were brutal handloading<br />
of the coal while working in two feet high tunnels,<br />
there were many jobs for Afrikan labor. But as unionization<br />
and mechanization raised the wages and improved the<br />
work, it became 'too good" for Afrikans, and the companies<br />
and the UMW started pushing Afrikans out.<br />
Denied jobs operating the new machinery, Afrikan<br />
laborers with ten years seniority found themselves being<br />
permanently laid off (in other words, fired) at the same<br />
time as the company would be hiring Euro-Amerikan<br />
teenagers for high-wage jobs on the new equipment. The<br />
other favored tactic was to transfer large numbers of<br />
Afrikan miners into the oldest mines, working them to exhaustion<br />
without investing even a penny in modernization,<br />
and then closing the worked out mine and firing the<br />
Afrikan men. At the same time the same company would<br />
be opening new mines elsewhere with an all-white work<br />
force. The United Mine Workers actively conspired with<br />
all the mine companies in this campaign against Afrikan<br />
labor - it would not have been possible otherwise.<br />
As that Afrikan miner so correctly pointed out in<br />
1921: "A livelihood belongs to every nian and when you<br />
deprive me of it.. .you have almost con~mitted murder to<br />
the whole entire race." Without that economic base, the<br />
Afrikan communities in West Virginia lost 25% of their<br />
total population during 1960-1970, as families were forced<br />
out of the coal areas. This, then, is the bitter fruit of<br />
"Black-white workers unity" over ninety years in the coal<br />
industry.<br />
While such integration was shocking to many settlers,<br />
we cantnow understand why Richard L. Davis was<br />
elected to the UMW National Board in 1896. He was the<br />
chosen "Judas goat", selected to help lure Afrikan miners<br />
into following settler unionism. The UMW Journal<br />
reminded white miners at the same time that with his new<br />
position: "He will in a special way be able to appear before<br />
our colored miners and preach the gospel of trade<br />
unions.. . "<br />
When Afrikan miners in Ohio complained that the<br />
UMW was "A White man's organization', Davis<br />
answered them: "Now, niy dear people, I, as a colored<br />
Today surface mining accounts for over 60Vo of all<br />
coal production, double its percentage just ten years ago.<br />
The growing sector of the industry, it is also the best paid,<br />
safest, cleanest and most mechanized. It should be no surprise<br />
that these jobs are reserved for Euro-Amerikans.<br />
Alabama is traditionally the most heavily Afrikan area in<br />
the coal industry. Yet in 1974, the UMW's district 20 in<br />
Alabama had only ten Afrikan members among the 1500<br />
surface miners - while Afrikans are over 26% of the<br />
area's population.<br />
The "Black-Out" of Afrikan workers in the coal<br />
industry has reached a point where the 198U report on The<br />
American Coal Miner by the President's Coal Commission<br />
(chaired by John D. Rockefeller IV) has an entire chapter<br />
on the Navaho miners who produce 3% of the U.S. coal,<br />
but not even one page on Afrikan miners. In a few<br />
paragraphs, the study praises the UMW as an example of<br />
integration, and notes that past "discrimination" is being<br />
corrected by corporate civil rights programs. It ends these<br />
few words by noting that the coal companies would supposedly<br />
like to hire more Afrikans for these well-paying<br />
jobs, but they can't find any job-seekers: "Coal companies<br />
contend that the major problem in finding Black miners is<br />
that many Black families have migrated to the large urban<br />
centers and that few live in the coalfields." (6)<br />
We can see, then, that the tactical unity of settler<br />
and Afrikan miners can not be understood without examining<br />
the strategy of both groups. Euro-Amerikan labor<br />
used that tactical unity to get Afrikan workers to carry out<br />
the strategy of preserving the settler empire. Some Afrikan<br />
miners received tactical gains from this unity in the form of<br />
higher wages and better working conditions. But in return,<br />
Afrikan miners disorganized themselves, giving themselves<br />
up to the hegemony of settler unionism. Thus disarmed<br />
and disorganized, they soon discovered that the result of<br />
the tactical unity was to take their jobs and drive them out.<br />
There are no tactics without a larger strategy, and in the<br />
U.S. Empire that strategy has a national and class<br />
character.