For most people, the memory of the largest armed labor uprising in American history is unknown, buried beneath the dirt of West Virginia’s Blair Mountain alongside bullet casings and relics of coal camp life. In miners’ families, the stories stayed alive, passed down around kitchen tables and on front porches. But until the 21st century, there were no monuments, museums, or markers of the West Virginia mine wars, a seminal American story of how labor unions came to be.

In late August 1921, some 15,000 mineworkers and allies banded together across racial, gender, religious, and ethnic lines and marched south from the town of Marmet, West Virginia. They were determined to free jailed miners who, for decades, had been trying to unionize the southern West Virginia coalfields. Some of the marchers dressed in military uniforms—many were World War I veterans—while others wore blue-jean overalls. All tied red bandanas around their necks to distinguish friend from foe. Known as the “Red Neck Army,” they were highly organized and armed to the teeth.

The miners never reached their intended destination. Instead, beginning on August 31, they clashed with coal company deputies, mine guards, and the state militia over five and half days of combat at Blair Mountain. It was the largest armed uprising since the Civil War—and it ended only when the U.S. Army intervened. While the number of fatalities remains largely unknown (estimates range from 16 to over 100), we do know that it was the second time in American history the government planned to bomb its own citizens—only three months after the first, Oklahoma’s Tulsa Race Massacre.

Those five and a half days were a generation in coming. The majority of West Virginians had gone from living and working on their own land to being totally dependent on out-of-state coal mining companies, who controlled and owned entire towns. The work was unrelenting and exploitative: Coal companies often paid miners in “scrip”—a currency only redeemable at the company store—by the tonnage of coal they hand loaded from the mountains. The conditions underground subjected workers to roof falls and gas explosions, both of which were often catastrophic. For workers and their families, these companies became landlords, employers, and overseers.

In addition to hiring West Virginians displaced from farms, the coal companies recruited immigrants from Europe and African Americans from the South. Companies housed them in tight but segregated communities, aiming to use prejudice and racial barriers to prevent unionization. But their strategies backfired. Unionization efforts, including the Red Neck Army, broke those barriers partly out of necessity and partly as a source of strength. Striking workers moved into desegregated canvas tent colonies after being evicted from their company-owned homes.

By 1921, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which formed in 1890, had organized much of the coalfields in West Virginia and elsewhere with the promise of better working conditions and a better life. However, in the southern counties of the Mountain State, such as the areas around Blair Mountain, the coal operators and hired mine guards employed harsh countertactics to keep the miners from unionizing, including the murders of union-supporting police chief Sid Hatfield and his deputy Ed Chambers. Hatfield and Chambers’ murders in early August sparked pro-union rallies throughout southern West Virginia, which ultimately led to the Red Neck Army’s armed march.

After the end of the physical battle, a legal battle began that put over 500 miners on trial for a variety of charges, including murder and treason, and crippled the UMWA. Mineworkers in southern West Virginia would have to wait to join until the right to organize was written into federal law as part of the New Deal. In the mid-1930s, they finally gained the better wages, safer working conditions, and other benefits and protections they had been fighting for over decades.

Blair Mountain faded in West Virginians’ and Americans’ collective memory. Politicians strategized to stamp it out of textbooks and public discourse, while miners—many of whom had been on trial—swore themselves to secrecy for fear of retribution.

In 2013, a ragtag group of Appalachians—mineworkers, educators, townspeople, activists, and descendants of Red Neck Army members—came together and shared a table at the UMWA Local 1440 hall in Matewan, West Virginia, 47 miles from Blair Mountain. The folks who gathered were determined to ensure that this history would be celebrated, remembered, and shared for generations to come.

This was the first board meeting of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, which opened two years later in downtown Matewan. I started work at the Mine Wars Museum as its first part-time executive director in 2018. As the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of union mineworkers, it is an honor to preserve and share the history and legacy of my ancestors and those who stood with them for labor justice.

One of the exhibits at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. Courtesy of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, photo by Roger May.

One of the museum’s key initiatives is to bring visibility to the sites of the West Virginia Mine Wars. Today, Blair Mountain’s twin-peaked ridge stands tall and quiet. Despite the mountain’s inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, you can drive through the miners’ marching route and over Blair Mountain without realizing you’re there. But that won’t be the case for much longer.

On the heels of the Battle of Blair Mountain Centennial and with funding from Philadelphia’s Monument Lab, in 2022 we launched Courage in the Hollers: Mapping the Miners’ Struggle for a Union. We’re taking the museum beyond its four walls and holding community meetings along the miners’ 50-mile route to resurface the stories of the Mine Wars and working people—past and present—in public.

This Labor Day, steel silhouettes of 10 men and women, shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, marching toward Blair Mountain, are being erected in Marmet, where the Red Neck Army’s route began, and Clothier, just 12 miles from where the battle raged. The silhouettes are not of the original miners but of local community members—honoring the history that fuels our shared hope for the region and working people across America. As much as it pays homage to the past, it’s a vision for the future.

We held our Courage in the Hollers kickoff meeting in Clothier in a small building that started as a school, then became a church, and is now a union hall. One attendee wondered out loud about Monument Lab’s backing: “Why does someone in Philadelphia care so much about coal miners?”

The simple question struck me. Local residents know this history has been ignored—it is absent from the landscape, their textbooks, public records, and gathering places. But they haven’t forgotten.

Neither have the local archeologists who have spent decades unearthing and preserving artifacts, and the miners’ descendants, more and more of whom are sharing their stories publicly. New accounts of the battle are surfacing for the first time as the monuments and markers to labor make their homes in Clothier and Marmet. Meanwhile, many people are still fighting for the rights and standards the Red Neck Army marched in support of—from miners in Alabama entering their 17th month on strike to unionizing workers at Starbucks and Amazon.

Though the history of those who fought at Blair Mountain is now 101 years old, it is also as alive as ever.

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Simmons and a man named Robert Thomas led the conversation, which became somewhat contentious. All of the men in attendance agreed that their children ought to receive a formal education similar to that given to the wealthy white boys and girls across town. Their only disagreement was over how to provide proper instruction to black children when it was against the law to do so.

Some months later, seven of these men formed the Colored School Board of Parkersburg. In December 1862, the men, who came to be known as the “Sumner Seven,” would manage to open one of the earliest and longest-lived schools for black children south of the Mason-Dixon Line. The story has largely been forgotten, but the fight to establish the school deserves a place in American history. It shows the extent to which, even in slave states, black Americans worked to secure a future for their children.

When the group of would-be school founders first began meeting, several counties had already seceded from the state of Virginia in order to stay with the Union. But the state of West Virginia had not been formally recognized. With the war underway, the men understood that if the Union lost, Parkersburg might very well remain part of a slave state.

The potential threat to their freedom loomed large, making it no surprise that they feared leaks of their plan. A loose network of underground instruction had developed in some regions, but education of black Americans in the South remained largely a clandestine activity. Under an 1819 Virginia state law, anyone convicted of teaching reading or writing to “slaves, or free negroes or mulattoes mixing and associating with such slaves at any meeting-house or houses” at any school could be punished with up to 20 lashes from a bullwhip. Extralegal punishments might be worse.

The Sumner Seven met in secret at the home of Robert Thomas, adopting bylaws and a constitution for a school that would be financed, opened, and operated by and for African-Americans. Despite threats from whites, they had a school up and running in less than a year.

The Colored School of Parkersburg’s first schoolmaster was Rev. S. E. Colburn. Sarah Trotter and Pocahontas Simmons served as the primary teachers. Principal Colburn was paid $25 per month for his services and was employed for four years. Initially, the school asked families to contribute $1 a month per child to help fund the expenses of the school and pay its teachers. Families who could not afford the tuition often bartered for their child’s school expenses by providing goods or services.

What the Sumner Seven proposed was a novelty in more than one way. Before this school for black youth opened in Parkersburg, no public schools existed for any area children, black or white. Starting in 1848, some wealthy white boys had begun taking private lessons from a local professor, John Nash, while wealthy white girls would soon attend the DeSales Heights Visitation Academy, beginning in 1864.

The school’s first instructors went door to door to recruit children, and classes were held at a variety of locations during the early years. The curriculum included reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and English grammar. Early enrollment records indicate that in 1865 the school had as many as 47 pupils—25 boys and 22 girls.

The Sumner Seven managed to keep instruction going until public funding became available for educating all area children. After years of reluctance among the general population to collect taxes for public education, Wood County set up a public school system for white children in 1866. The same year, the board voted to incorporate the school for African-American children into the city’s public school system, making education free for all students.

Yet it would take much longer for the school to receive the resources needed to instruct its students. Children often had to make do with secondhand materials from white schools. They would not move into a two-room schoolhouse until 1874, and finally had a custom-built schoolhouse at a permanent location in 1886. In time, the school adopted a new name—Sumner High School—in honor of Massachusetts congressman and abolitionist Charles Sumner.

The high school held its first graduation ceremony in 1877, and its last class graduated in 1955. Facing pressures to begin working, many children who attended the school could not continue their studies long enough to get a high school diploma. Nevertheless, approximately 400 children graduated from Sumner High School. This pioneering institution, the first black school in the state set up with no outside assistance, served as a blueprint for similar schools in Clarksburg, Martinsburg, and Charleston. When desegregation began in the 1950s, students were academically prepared to assimilate into the public school curriculum.

Sumner had elaborate graduations and creative programming for commencement. The school hosted celebrities, including educator Booker T. Washington, Olympic sprinter Jesse Owens, historian Carter G. Woodson, and composer W.C. Handy. Sumner High School was also recognized for the number of its students who pursued higher education or became leaders in the community. Sumner alumni included dentists, physicians, lawyers, and successful entrepreneurs. In some subjects, they may have gotten a more complete education than their white peers, learning about key moments in African-American history as part of their U.S. history lessons.

As a Parkersburg native, I remember friends and family members discussing with great fondness the education they received at Sumner. My uncle James played on four state basketball championship teams while attending the school. My mother, grandmother, uncles, and godfather all attended Sumner. I went on to get my doctorate in education, something I credit to the lessons and inspiration provided by my family. Their stories were the impetus for my curiosity about the origins of the school and personal quest to keep the story of Sumner High School part of our state and national history discussions.

I no longer live in town but have often sat in my car staring up at the last remaining part of the now empty and rundown Sumner building. I wonder what it was like for those students who grew up in a different world, one in which many freedoms were nonexistent. I am profoundly grateful for the courage shown by the Sumner Seven and the school’s first students, who embraced learning for black children before the Emancipation Proclamation had even been issued.

Though Robert Simmons began as a barber, he later became active in politics and was offered an ambassadorship to Haiti by Ulysses S. Grant, which he declined for unknown reasons. If it weren’t for those early discussions in his barbershop and the forethought and courage of Simmons and his collaborators, the school’s first graduation would never have taken place. It might have been years or even decades before education became an option for nonwhites in a small town on the Ohio River. The members of the Sumner Seven—Robert Thomas, Lafayette Wilson, William Sargent, Robert W. Simmons, Charles Hicks, William Smith, and Matthew Thomas—are names we should remember.

The post When Teaching African-Americans to Read in the South Meant Risking 20 Lashes From a Bullwhip appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Exterior of Pitzer’s Book Shop. Courtesy of Ruby Pitzer.

My earliest memories of books as treasure come from preschool visits to our Carnegie Library, a wonderland of opaque glass-brick floors, huge columns, and a spiral metal staircase. I fell in love with Maurice Sendak there. The plain but modern Wood County Library across town replaced it when I was in fourth grade. I would dart downstairs to sneak books from the stacks of adult fiction, running evasion maneuvers to avoid the lone librarian who tried to limit children to kid lit. (Reader, I harried her.)

Meanwhile, my father’s mother had been working at a local bookstore downtown. Not long after my parents split up, she and my grandfather bought the store in the heart of the fading business district and moved it just blocks away into the soaring vault of a former bank lobby. They kept the open ground floor and added a wide staircase with an upper balcony overlooking it on three sides. When they incorporated the place as Pitzer’s Book Shop, I was seven years old.

While my grandparents renovated the building, Gore Vidal’s Burr, a 1973 novel about the third vice president of the United States, had been high on the bestseller lists for more than a year, and Vidal was still making the rounds to support his book. He talked to The Paris Review and lobbed grenades at Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes. Because of our proximity to Burr’s Blennerhassett Island hideaway, Vidal also came to Parkersburg. My grandparents donated the programs for his talk at a local high school and hosted a book signing for him.

Interior of Pitzer’s Book Shop. Courtesy of Ruby Pitzer.

At one point in the 60 Minutes segment, the crosstown high school band inexplicably marches in and performs with a choral group surrounding Vidal. Wallace describes Vidal as a “dilettante anthropologist” who sees himself as “casting his pearls before the provincial folks at home.” Now 93 years old, my grandmother recently recalled the signing—and Vidal’s reputation. “People warned me he might be snotty,” she said. “But really, he was as nice as anything.”

I don’t remember seeing Vidal on his visit, but the same year, my grandparents started feeding me material without any literary pretensions: Nancy Drews, one or two each holiday and birthday. There seemed to be an endless number of them in their marigold-yellow spines, and part of their beauty lay in the fact that there were always more to read.

I continued to pull in a biweekly haul from the library, and even occasionally bought books at the chain store in the local mall. (It didn’t occur to me to think of it as heresy, not realizing what was at stake.) Still, the bulk of my book attention and money were saved for visits to my grandparents’ bookstore. Between the library, family gifts, and whatever I could buy with earned money, I was no longer short of material.

It was the greatest fortune of my childhood that I ended up with all the stories I could devour, not least because my mother remarried. My life went from one in which not much was going on to one in which far too much happened. I learned that there were people in the world who would pick you up by your hair, who would hit you with a belt, or line drive a dish of peas through a windowpane in the middle of dinner without warning. It was surprisingly easy, from a child’s perspective, to suddenly find yourself owning one pair of jeans that had to last two years, living without electricity, and losing a house to bankruptcy.

Through this decade of chaos, there was never a time I couldn’t go into the bookstore. My grandparents had built themselves an apartment on the top level, with interior back steps leading to a rear entrance to the shop. I spent half my family holidays disappearing downstairs to read in the closed store. As long as I took care not to crack the spines, I could stand on the carpet in the streetlight that shone through the plate glass windows and browse anything.

Across the rest of elementary school, I read standard kids’ classics and young adult books: The Chronicles of Narnia, Anne of Green Gables, Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, Bridge to Terabithia, The Outsiders, Robert Louis Stevenson, Twain, Tolkien, L’Engle, fairy tales, Greek myths, and more. I rifled through comics, from Justice League titles to Garfield and Archie.

But I also found meaning in books whose worlds were more adult or explicitly cruel—more like my own. “There’s something in you that’s like biting on tinfoil,” said one character in Stephen King’s The Stand, a line I’ve remembered for the 40 years since I first read it and thought, “Yes, I’m like that, too.”

Collection of Nancy Drew Mystery Stories. Courtesy of Andrea Pitzer.

I devoured grotesque horror novels like Kenneth Mckenney’s Moonchild, about a child monster born on the last day of February during a super leap year, and The Legacy, a novelization of a gothic film starring … Roger Daltrey. Though I would never have been allowed to watch the movie, I still recall the passage in which a young woman drowns as the surface of the pool she’s swimming in suddenly (demonically!) solidifies.

Other books were pure escape. Sometimes I even began to feel the strange pull of art, as surprising structure or language flared in my fevered brain.

Vanishing into the back office to read when the shop was open, I doubt I made any sense to my grandmother, who thrived on the social exchanges at the heart of owning a small business and whose reading interests rarely overlapped with mine. She and I didn’t talk books deeply, and I never spoke to anyone about the violence and misery at home until I was an adult. But she could see that for my own reasons, I loved the place that meant so much to her.

The bookstore sealed what might have been a less likely occupation under other circumstances. But my transformation into a writer was not at all mystical. I remember meeting Allan W. Eckert, the author of Blue Jacket: War Chief of the Shawnees and Incident at Hawk’s Hill, at another signing. Eckert had also written hundreds of episodes of Wild Kingdom, which I watched every Sunday. He was no Gore Vidal, but I thrilled to the idea of one day doing what he did. “That guy writes, and he looks like anybody,” I thought. “I bet I could do that.”

I started composing poems and stories soon after. By the end of 1978, I was a 10-year-old with plans to leave town and become an author.

Pitzer’s Book Shop closed nine years later, a victim of the mall bookstore and a declining downtown. By the time that particular dream ended for my grandparents and for me, I was in my second year of college, living hundreds of miles away.

I was not yet entirely safe, but without my knowing it, the alternate universes I found inside the bookstore had carried me through the worst of my tribulations. You can’t rely on anyone to save you; the odds are good they won’t even realize you’re drowning. But every now and then, someone hands you the means to save yourself.

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