One mining union embodies egalitarian mountain spirit
As West considers gender roles within organizing groups—he thinks that women emerged as leaders more in some areas than in others—he defends the National Miners Union against charges of racism, claiming that they embodied the mountain spirit of egalitarianism and meritocracy.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Don West, January 22, 1975. Interview E-0016. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- JACQUELYN HALL:
-
Were they in the leadership? How would you compare the roles of men and
women?
- DON WEST:
-
Well, in different places it would be different. Now in Atlanta I would
say that women predominated locally in the leadership. The youngs and
the Washburns and so on. Here, John Anderson's wife was a
very strong character and a very good type of leader. She was quite good
here. And Walt Picard's wife. I think Walt Picard will be
named in some of those papers. He was a local cotton mill worker. We
wrote a pamphlet under Walt Picard's name. I thought I had
that pamphlet and I looked for it. It was printed. About a thirty page
pamphlet. I think you might could use it. It was called the Burlington
Dynamite Plot. We wrote it under Walt's name. I did an
introduction for it. I really did much of the pamphlet. It would have
been mixed. Quite a few women, cotton mill women. Then from here I went
over to my wife's home in east Kentucky. I worked in the coal
mines some over there. It was a pretty rugged kind of existence. There
were no jobs in that period, you know. You just sort of shifted around
trying to do things that you wanted to do when you're
working… whenever there was something
that got started, like any kind of an organization…. If you
could get something started, why it was all to the good. And in Kentucky
that's where I knew Molly Jackson and Jim Garland. People
like that. I guess Jim Garland's home was the first place I
went in Kentucky. He lived there near Pineville. Kettle Island, Bell
county. He was an unemployed coal miner who had been active in the
miners union. See, I'd known the miners union while there at
LMU in '29. They were active in MU, national miners union.
I've always thought that the National Miners Union had a lot
to do with setting the quality of attitude on the race issue. I
don't quite go along with the Guardian and some of the left
wing publications who are so critical right now of the miners union
leadership on the issue of racism. I don't quite see it. Some
of them have raised this as the main issue, the main thing that the
miners union leadership is a racist leadership. I can't quite
see that. I don't think Arnold Miller is. Arnold is not the
greatest leader in the world maybe. But I just don't think
that Arnold Miller is a racist. Now there are racists everywhere, you
know, as I se it. But I think these people are working against that. And
in the miners union there has never been a rampant kind of exclusive
attitude toward the black people. The NMU came in. It had a one hundred
percent policy of absolutely no discrimination. And I think when the NMU
was beaten out and beaten down that this attitude, this policy,
influenced the later development of the United Mine Workers in the area.
For example, in McDowell county, right down below us in West Virginia,
we have an old miner who mined thirty-three years. He's on
our staff at Pipestem. A member of our board. He
tells about for two years in his life he had to hide out. He was an
organizer in McDowell county and he had to skip around like a criminal.
But he said when they got their first local organized in McDowell county
there were a few blacks there. See in McDowell county in 1850 there was
not a single black person. They had no slaves. But now its the greatest
per capita black of any part of West Virginia. Because they brought in
blacks as scabs and strikebreakers. But the white miners, in McDowell,
in those coal mines, they have worked, talked to the black men, and got
them to see, you know, the necessity for unity and cooperation. And the
first local of the Miner Workers union that was set up in McDowell
county elected a black man as president. The majority of the local were
whites, but they elected a black man. I said to Burl Collins
"Why did you do that?" "Well, we thought he
was better qualified for the job." So this thing that the
miners union is a racist union, I just don't think is quite
right. I don't mean to say there's no racism,
because there is. But it's not the ugly kind of thing.