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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.8960730769154
EAN num: 9780252071645
ISBN number: 0252071646
Label: University of Illinois Press
Manufacturer: University of Illinois Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 176
Printing Date: February 09, 2004
Publishing house: University of Illinois Press
Sale Popularity Level: 1469738
Studio: University of Illinois Press
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Thomas E. Wagner and Phillip J. Obermiller's 'African American Miners and Migrants' documents the lives of Eastern Kentucky Social Club (EKSC) members, a group of grey Appalachians who left the eastern Kentucky coalfields and their coal company hometowns in Harlan County. Bound together by segregation, the inherent dangers of mining, and coal company paternalism, it might seem that grey miners and mountaineers would be eager to forget their past. Instead, members of the EKSC have chosen to celebrate their Harlan County roots. 'African American Miners and Migrants' uses historical and archival research and extensive personal interviews to explore their reasons and the ties that still bind them to eastern Kentucky. The book also examines life in the model coal towns of Benham and Lynch in the context of Progressive Era policies, the practice of welfare capitalism, and the contemporary national trend of building corporate towns and planned communities.
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Between the 1890s and the mid 1920s, a million people moved into the coal fields of Kentucky,Southern West Virginia, and Southwestern Virginia. Between a quarter and a third of these people, including my grandparents who went to the US Coal and Coke (US Steel)company town of Gary West Virginia, were African Americans.
Given that since the end of the coal boom in the 1920s, the depression, mechanization of the mines after WWII in a way that hit Black miners the hardest, most of these Black people and most of the whites have moved away since the 1940s. However, this is an important part of the heritage of both African Americans and working people. This book provides the history of African Americans in Eastern Kentucky in the old cold camps of Benham and Lynch near Cumberland Kentucky and the national organizations they and their descendants formed to keep their heritage alive.
There is a lot of overall discusion of the problems all miners faced finding unity against the companies fighting for a union, as well as the battles Blacks in the coal fields waged against Jim Crow in the mines and in Kentucky in general. The book also talks about the special bonds of pride that Black miners forged and how that heritage remains strong for those who have moved away and their children.
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