Coal, Class and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-32. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1993 by Walter Licht

The locus of scholarly attention in African-American history has shifted successively in the last decades: from slavery to Reconstruction and now to the Great Migration. Joe Trotter has played a leading role in recent studies of the mass migrations of blacks out of the South after World War I to the North and West. In his influential first book, Black Milwaukee, he suggested an approach: that the migration from the South be understood foremost in the context of the passage of African-Americans into wage labor and industrial employment ("proletarianization" in short). Trotter also devoted great effort to peering inside newly formed black communities, noting internal divisions, and particularly class divides as a black bourgeoisie emerged to provide services to the ghettoized arrivals.(1) Trotter's latest study is of a different migration--not of blacks to the urban north, but to rural southern West Virginia where they sought jobs in the bituminous coal mines of the region; his method, however, remains the same.

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, upwards of 80,000 African Americans migrated to the southern counties of West Virginia largely from neighboring southern states. Coal company recruiters lured them and deteriorating economic circumstances in growing cotton under shares drove them from their homes. In West Virginia, they encountered familiar conditions: hostility from whites, only the worst jobs made available, segregated public accommodations, and segregated and inferior housing and schools. But, the migrants did find a better life overall: they received relatively high wages, and, in some instances, union protections at work; they labored in the mines generally under loose surveillance; physical violence toward blacks never reached the heights experienced elsewhere in the South; and most important, disenfranchisement never occurred in West Virginia. African Americans could organize politically to protect and advance their position.

The core of Trotter's study centers on the formation of a black community in the region and the role of an emergent middle class. Segregation in effect presented opportunities. Trotter provides details on the growth in the numbers of black lawyers, doctors, ministers, merchants, artisans, school teachers, and even small-scale mine operators, who provided goods, services and jobs to their fellow newcomers. This group was instrumental in creating local newspapers and an array of fraternal orders and churches that further served the community. They also formed so-called colored branches of the Republican Party and affected a political mobilization. Blacks in southern West Virginia during the 1920s thereby elected local black sheriffs, aldermen and even state legislators who sought public services for black neighborhoods, protested infringements on civil rights, and championed such reforms as workmen's compensation.

Racism coalesced the black community and presented opportunities for internal leadership, but Trotter also highlights divisions. He briefly notes fractures between men and women and also lighter and darker-skinned members of the community. Class divides get greater emphasis. Middle-class blacks often collaborated with mine operators to encourage greater loyalty and discipline among mine workers; they also tended to move conservatively on political issues. While elites sought change through the Republican Party, Trotter indicates that workers were drawn more to the movement of Marcus Garvey and the then militant NAACP. The elites themselves broke into factions which also made for tension within the community.

Trotter hints that racism, segregation and the declining economic fortunes of the region as the market for coal gave way with competition from other fossil fuels and the depression of the 1930s set in, kept the black community more together than divided. The matter remains unclear. A full evaluation is made difficult because the author surprisingly focuses so little attention on the mine workers. Only a few pages are devoted to their work, none to their family and neighborhood lives. There is only a short treatment of trade unionism and the extraordinary strikes that marked the region in the 1920s (readers will be better served by David Corbin's Life, Work and Rebellion in the Coal Fields).(2) Trotter here judiciously sidesteps a recent heated debate among scholars as to whether racism or interracial harmony characterized the history of the United Mine Workers in the early twentieth century (he mainly provides examples of worker cooperation across racial lines).(3) Without coverage of workers equivalent to that for the black bourgeoisie, it is hard to grapple with the whole issue of "class and color." Also brought into question is Trotter's challenging notion of "proletarianization" as an organizing principle for migration studies.

Walter Licht University of Pennsylvania

ENDNOTES

1. Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-1945 (Urbana, III., 1985); Trotter is also editor of the recent collection, The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: News Dimensions of Race, Class and Gender (Bloomington, IN, 1991).