Jeff Biggers has a great article this week at Huffington Post tracing the roots of Black History Month to Fayette County, West Virginia (hat tip to reader M for recommending this article),
As schools, communities and politicians across the country celebrate Black History Month in February, they will be remiss if their lessons don't include the coal fields of Fayette County, West Virginia. There, in the 1890s, a teenage African American followed his brothers into the coal mines, serving what Carter Woodson called his "six-year apprenticeship." In the evenings, the young Woodson would gather with other black coal miners, read the newspaper, and listen to their extraordinary stories of life underground, and their struggles during the Civil War and Reconstruction Era.
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A century after Woodson's tenure in the coal mines in West Virginia, another "first" took place in Fayette County. In 1970, the first mountaintop removal operation was launched on Cannelton Hollow in area once called Bullpush Mountain. Thirty-eight years later, mountaintop removal practices--the process of literally blowing up mountains, and dumping the waste into waterways and valleys, in order to cheaply remove coal--have destroyed over 450 mountains and neighboring communities, displaced miners, and stripmined the cultural landscape in the Appalachian region.
This catastrophic form of coal mining has robbed Appalachia of too much of its history in the process. If anything, it should remind the nation that the neglect and degradation of a region and its history have always mirrored the neglect and abuse of the land.
In a speech at Hampton Institute in Virginia, Woodson once reminded the audience: "We have a wonderful history behind us....If you are unable to demonstrate to the world that you have this record, the world will say to you, "You are not worthy to enjoy the blessings of democracy or anything else.' They will say to you, 'Who are you anyway?'"
Appalachians understand this bitter historical reality more than any other citizens in the United States. Black Appalachians, especially.
[snip]
Did you know that four months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955, she took a seat at the Highlander Folk School in the backwoods of Tennessee, where she attended strategy session on social action led by so-called "radical hillbillies." That the first desegregated school to graduate a black student in the South was in the mountains of Tennessee?
And did you know that the United Mine Workers have always been an integrated union? Coal miners and coal mining communities in Appalachia and around the country should be celebrated during Black History Month, not dismissed or forgotten.
