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The March on Blair Mountain: A Protest to Protect Our Jobs and Our Mountains
This week an important protest is taking place in the coalfields of West Virginia. The March on Blair Mountain began on Monday as several hundred people embarked on a five-day journey retracing the steps of over 10,000 miners who 90 years ago staged the largest armed insurrection after the American Civil War. Today's march is a protest against both the attack of the union movement in America and the demolition of the Appalachian mountains.
For over 50 years, American unions have served to counterbalance the ascendancy of unsheathed corporate power that threatens now to overwhelm American Democracy. In the past year, the union movement's final redoubt -- the public service unions -- have been vilified and emasculated in traditional union states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa.
Now one of the biggest union busters in American history, Massey Energy, is launching a final assault on the icon of America's union movement, Blair Mountain.
Blair Mountain's storied history dates back to West Virginia in the 1920s, when the entire state was a company town. Big Coal dominated every aspect of economic life. The industry owned the shops, the homes, of course the mines -- and made sure there was virtually no other source of employment in the state. Working conditions were horrendous: men and their sons worked 12 to 16 grueling hours in dark, dangerous mines dying from a notorious plague of subsurface explosions, cave-ins and black lung.
The companies used local sheriffs to enforce their system of feudal serfdom. When a miner was injured and his family needed to be evicted from their home, the sheriff did the dirty deed. When union organizers appeared, the sheriff arrested, jailed, and routinely beat them, before escorting them to the county line. One sheriff refused to tow the company line: Sid Hatfield, of Hatfield and McCoy lore.
Not only did Hatfield refuse to do the industry's bidding, but he jailed mine operators for mistreating their workers. In the infamous Matewan gun battle, Hatfield helped kill seven mine company private investigators who had evicted union families from their homes.
Hatfield was never convicted for the Matewan shootings, but the mine operators took their revenge and on August 1, 1921 when industry thugs executed Hatfield in broad daylight on the McDowell county court-house steps.
Hatfield's assassination triggered one of the biggest labor demonstrations in American history. Ten thousand miners from the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia marched for six days, converging on Blair Mountain to confront their industry bosses. They were met by King Coal's powerful army of thugs and mowed down by Gatling guns.
President Warren Harding, a so-called "friend of coal," like most of the leading politicians of the Gilded Age, authorized the U.S. army to drop bombs and poison gas on the marching miners -- the only time in American History when our military deliberately bombed U.S. citizens. These military measures broke the demonstration but outraged the public, and gave vital traction to the United Mine Workers and the American labor movement.
Over the next 60 years unions became the critical counterweight to corporate power and the principal platform for the growth of the American middle class, which gave our Democracy its wealth, prosperity, and sense of justice as a core value.
Now, as the union movement finds itself battered, beleaguered, and under assault by a legion of corporate toadies in state governor's office from every director to chamber of commerce. Tea Party, talk radio, Fox News and the tsunami of corporate money released by the Citizens United case, Massey Energy has recently announced that it intends to blow up Blair Mountain, the Gettysburg of America's union-based Democracy, to mine it for coal.
For the first time in decades, environmentalists including the NRDC, Sierra Club, Waterkeeper Alliance and local groups have declared common cause with unions in staging a six-day march to retrace the steps of the 1921 Blair Mountain miners. The march convenes Saturday morning June 11 with a final climb up Blair Mountain. Marchers hope to save this historic mountain from Massey by securing its status as a historic landmark.
West Virginia is today's epicenter of one of America's greatest civil disobedience movements. More than 200 people have been arrested protesting mountaintop removal coal mining in the past 18 months. The protesters include college students and local West Virginia marines, former miners, housewives, and an 82-year-old grandmother who was arrested in her wheelchair. They are all calling for an end to mountaintop removal, the extreme form of coal mining that has flattened 500 mountains in Appalachia, illegally buried 2,000 miles of streams, destroyed one million acres of forest, and devastated numerous communities, lives, and towns in the region.
Union busting corporations have commoditized not just the workforce, but the historic landscapes of West Virginia, using great machines and dynamite to eliminate mining jobs. While production has more than doubled in 10 years, industry employment is one-tenth of it what was when my father warned me about strip mining as a 14-year-old boy.
It is time for Americans to march in the footsteps of our union ancestors of 90 years ago to protect our jobs, and save our national patriarchy, the purple mountains majesty, the individual rights and community based values that make our country of the envy of free people.
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20 Comments so far
Show Alldon't people think Mr. Kennedy should go to better source than Huffington Post, who is now a for profit corporation ? How about writing for CD directly !!. After all he is associated with Waterkeeper Alliance & NRDC, both appear to be Non Profit organization.
Don't you think that Mr Kennedy should go to any site he damn well pleases trying to get this message out? Who made you king?
he sure could, but its kind of self-defeating. Most of his work is against corporation and big money and I like it, read and heard him earlier, still remember his quote "you give me a corporation and I'll give a polluter", but going to same -big corp/money- to improve doesn't going to solve, then again its my opinion.
To 8thAvatar
Your opinion is most WELCOME.
No one made the commenter a "king" but he has a point. A good point.
Here I go Again (stupid me).
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a typical liberal democrat deceiver.
His criticism requires that you do not see to the role of his favored corrupt party.
No one is a bigger supporter of King Coal than are the democrats in the U.S. Senate, especially Dimwit Durbin.
Kennedy would have us focus primarily on the jobs and (as he prefers) the "national patriarchy" (as if THAT is a good thing) when we should be focussed
on the much more difficult truth of the complicity and hypocrisy of the "american way of life" (the big lie).
If the rule of law applied to Massey energy that fatass bastard Don blankenship would be in jail.
Profits over people, the environment, even the damn mountain itself.
If any person committed the crimes massey energy did we'd be locked up for years -
'my family's story has vanished, no trace i could find- cause they even tore the mountain down my grandad used to mine' vince herman
Love Robert Kennedy! Who is a more dedicated defender of our natural world and works very hard for it- with the right priorities? He is giving this issue national attention and deserves our thanks. Raping the earth is not his agenda though it may be said of others.
Bravo. Probably not pleased with the Obama administration. As we all know, there are Democrats who don’t work for the people and may they lose, lose, lose as the posers they are.
RFK Jr. - for president! You have the courage and the dedication (and good works to prove it) to represent our people.
I don't think that would happen. The requirement to get into Congress is to sell your soul. He does better work here,
I'd love to see kennedy say I Quit in regards to the democratic party. That would create a powerful message. In fact it's well past time for these icons that still supposedly stand for Justice to walk the walk and not just give a great speech and then cash the dividend check from their family trust account.
Just as MLK stood up and said the usa was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world while a democrat was president I'd like to see a mainstream guy like Kennedy actually call out these corporatists that now controll both main Parties.
When that happens i'll believe kennedy is serious.
When MLK was alive the Southern Democrats which made up nearly half of the party (and which LBJ was a member) were racists holding back the Civil Rights Movement. The Republicans (80-20%) actually had a significantly higher percentage of the vote in passage than did the Democrats (63-37%). I'm not sure that correlation is equatable to current events.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
This is great stuff. I hope the energy of these marchers becomes contagious and inspirational. It certainly seems to have that potential. I only hope there's adequate media coverage.
Another famous "march" - from Wikipedia:
>>The Salt Satyagraha, which began with the "Dandi March" on March 12, 1930, was an important part of the Indian independence movement. It was a campaign of nonviolent protest against the British salt monopoly in colonial India, and triggered the wider Civil Disobedience Movement. This was the most significant organized challenge to British authority since the Non-cooperation movement of 1920–22, and directly followed the Purna Swaraj declaration of independence by the Indian National Congress on January 26, 1930.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (commonly called Mahatma Gandhi) led the Dandi march from his base, Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad, to the sea coast near the village of Dandi. As he continued on this 24 day, 240 mile (390 km) march to produce salt without paying the tax, growing numbers of Indians joined him along the way. When Gandhi broke the salt laws at 6:30 am on April 6, 1930, it sparked large scale acts of civil disobedience against the British Raj salt laws by millions of Indians. The campaign had a significant effect on changing world and British attitudes toward Indian independence and caused large numbers of Indians to join the fight for the first time.<<
[Sorry to repost from the other story on the same topic].
May the ghosts of the countless victims of BIG COAL sleep easier tonight....they will know that millions of us are waking up...we WILL stop MTR and the other planet raping practices... or Mother Earth will...Remember, she bats last!!!!
What It Means When We Must March to Save the Mountains
My lungs will fill with the darkness
my breath will be short with fear
my city will burn with the thunder
of the last mountain falling the last mountain
falling into the sea into the rivers into my house into
my town into my green
green field my feet will take me
up the steep grade my songs will be rained upon
the real blood of my inheritance the roots and seed
wrapped in the hems of my coat
brought from the farms the ancestors of these same thieves
stole away in the Old Country, stole away from a memory of me,
the ways I mixed the corn the ways I hulled the beans and wheat
the way the chrysanthemums and lilies, the rhubarb and ram’s horn
gathered and grew in wet valleys at my children’s feet…
the mountains rumble their own carnage of complaint the mountains
that were scraped and pushed up by Pangaea’s wrestling
the waters that fall and mold the tobacco fields and the great green Piedmonts
I walk to the mouths of caves to the cathedrals of limestone and the bells
of the subterranean arteries of the heart of the earth oh
West Virginia!
Center of the place where
all the continents conferred and all the continents
were born again! What does it mean when we must climb the mountains
to save them? Who are these bosses that assume the cataclysm of the hammers
of Thor the thunderplows of their hypocrite gods? What blessings
will they bestow upon us should we grant them an end
to the stories of our lives in these green ribs and lungs of the land?
What does it mean when the land
and all its forms and miracles and waterways and storms
must be saved from the people who arose from its valleys?
How can we save ourselves from these viral siblings
who point and squeal, are hungry only for money and plant their bombs
in the side of the rocky highlands
just to bring them down?
This poem has been beating in my brain for as long
as I first heard of the rumbles of a mountain falling and still
if feels unfulfilled, unequal, to the immense fires
that put these ridges and canyons on our maps and all that lives
in their shadows and light, in their storms and deep reprieves
of the quiet secrets of the ways of the world.
I drove the old trunk line through the state of West Virginia
and along the curves and switchbacks I had
a dream of mountains un crossable, of Shawnee and Cherokee
of landless Scots-Irish immigrants, of slaves, of Matewan’s blood and still
I thought the mountains would prevail
but no, those robber barons would have a rubbled flatlands
where there was a torrent in spring, a weedy barrens
where there was ginseng and the other old growth medicines
the healing blooms and tubers, the bear and the coyote.
They would blow out the sides of the oldest rocks on earth
to fill their ledgers with nothing that will survive
their terrorism of the planet's gifts.
What does it mean when we have to march to save the mountains?
An unanswerable query.
And who will tell the story of the mountains
when they have been gone long enough to be the stuff of legend or dreams?
After rain, after I rafted the Cheat,
I looked out from one bare rock, one of the faces of
how our hearts belong in the world that we named god,
slicked and shouting “I am here, thunderous,” from the heights
out of the humid trees,
brother to a stone in Africa, sister to the source of the Nile’s swollen stream,
and there it was, the valley of my dream,
and when I am gone and it is blasted and leveled and filled
whose dream will it be?
Thank you bobv. Did you write this? I hope someone puts it to music.
I did. Thanks. Music? Interesting thought.
Beautiful poem. But I think it's best to leave the music to Hazel Dickens.
If Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was real...
1) Kennedy's book would be updated, and retitled "Crimes Against Nature: How **Barack H. Obama** and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy"... note: Democrat Obama's EPA "studied" the environmental impact of mountaintop removals and quickly concluded on 9/11/2009 (yet, another 9/11) that it would be "sustainable economic development" while Democrats regulate it, and then MovedOn to proceed with the process of permitting 79 more mountaintop removals... and it's Democrat Obama's Department of "Justice" that is persecuting Tim deChristopher.
2) Kennedy wouldn't be doing legal work for the extraction industry money founded NRDC that is promoting MovingOn to shale gas to maintain fossil fuel dependence, which requires the use of Halliburton's chemical fracking abuse of water, air and soil.
3) Kennedy wouldn't be opposed to farming wind for energy in his backyard.
4) Kennedy wouldn't be a Democrat.
Whenever a Democrat appears to be helping a movement all they're actually doing is co-opting it into service of the greater evil Democrat faction of the corporate party. What Kennedy is genuinely interested in is keeping unions in the weak and powerless condition that Democrats put them in.
For some unembedded history of what Democrats do, see:
The Violence of “"Nonviolence”"
www.chenangogreens.org