Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

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