Opinion: Labor Day lessons from the American union movement’s hidden history – By Kim Kelly (NBC News) / Sept 6 2021
This year, find inspiration in the bravery and sacrifice of generation after generation of workers who had nothing left to give — but still gave everything they had.
Last week marked the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor uprising in U.S. history. In 1921, around 10,000 coal miners in Logan County, West Virginia, who had been trying to unionize with the United Mine Workers of America went to war against about 3,000 coal bosses, state police, private security forces and scabs. For five long, bloody days, those miners in their red bandannas — the Red Neck Army, as they called themselves — held the line, fighting like hell for their futures and their families. Over a million shots were fired, over a dozen people died, the coal bosses dropped bombs and poison gas on mining camps, and the conflict ended only because of federal intervention. Blair Mountain was a pivotal moment in U.S. labor history and a hallowed chapter in the struggle for workers’ rights.
But despite Blair Mountain’s dramatic resolution, it remains a strangely little-known historical footnote.
But despite Blair Mountain’s dramatic resolution, it remains a strangely little-known historical footnote outside of local publications, labor history groups and labor-friendly progressive media outlets. The fact that this centennial passed mostly unmarked is not a coincidence. As Tennessee-based journalist Abby Lee Hood explained in a recent New York Times op-ed, a coal-funded nativist organization called the American Constitutional Association has worked for decades to intentionally obscure the battle’s history, as well as the even longer tradition of militant, interracial labor organizing in the coalfields. The story of Blair Mountain has been repressed by those who would prefer to keep workers in the dark about their own collective power, as have so many other working-class stories.
Even contemporary labor stories are hard to come by in most major media outlets, and labor reporters like me make up a scrappy but still tiny cohort of the media itself. And bosses are able to exploit that lack of attention for their own agendas. For example, have you heard about the 700 St. Vincent Hospital nurses in Worcester, Massachusetts, who have been on what is now the longest-running strike in state history? How about the Nabisco strike, which had exploded to include over 1,000 members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union in five states? And speaking of coal miners, did you know that over 1,100 members of the United Mine Workers are on strike right now in rural Alabama?
