Red Necks and Red Bandanas: Appalachian Coal Miners and the Coloring of Union Identity, 1912-1936

Western Folklore, Winter 2006 by Huber, Patrick

In response, eastern Kentucky miners spun their own common-sense folk etymologies to explain redneck. One puzzled Harlan County miner, for example, pondering aloud during his speech at a 1931 strike rally, questioned why the coal operators called die miners "rednecks." "My folks have been in Kentucky for five generations," he remarked, "but one of 'em was a red Cherokee Indian. Maybe that's why I'm a Red" (Walker 1932:22). Another miner suggested that the name derived from the fact that "the miners were so diin an' poor that if you stood one of 'em up against the sun you'd see red through him" (Dos Passos 1931:66). The coal operator's flagrant allegations that miners were "reds" and "Bolsheviks" provided "the butt of much humor" at strike rallies, according to one journalist who accompanied Dreiser (Walker 1932:22). In fact, Dreiser's committee discovered that the majority of Harlan and Bell County miners did not know what a Communist was. As Jim Garland, a local miner and NMU organizer, recalled, "People were already calling us names they themselves didn't understand; even some of the working people were calling us die Communist party. If you had at diis time said to a group of average mountain men, Tm a Communist,' they more than likely would have answered, Tm a Baptist' or Tm a Mason'" (Garland 1983:152).

Operators also red-baited Garland's stepsister, Aunt Molly Jackson, a miner's wife, midwife, singer, and balladeer whose composition of such protest songs as "I Am a Union Woman" and "Hungry Ragged Blues" won her acclaim as the "poet laureate" of the "Bloody Harlan" County Strike of 1931-1932. Like many of the local miners, she did not understand the coal operators' epithet redneck, and it was only after she left Kentucky for New York City in December 1931 that she learned what a Communist was. In an autobiographical essay written in 1945, Aunt Molly humorously explained her indifferent response to the slur:

The coal operators in Kentucky began to call me a red, and when I asked them what the word "red" meant, they told me a red was a person that went around thru die coal operators camp here, thar, and yander a pulling the coal miners out on strike with their Russian Redneck Propagander, then I told diem propergander, or propergoose, that for working the coalminers without paying them for the labor dial they had a poor excuse, then I told them, Mr. Coal [operator] call me anything you please blue, green, or red, I aim to see to it diat these Kentucky coalminers will not dig your coal while their litde children are crying and dying for milk and bread (Jackson 1945).47

Aunt Molly Jackson's defiant retort notwithstanding, the union-busting coalfields of northern and central Appalachia seemed unlikely places for cohesive, integrated unions and class solidarity to flourish, given the enormous social and political control wielded by the coal companies, the divisive employment and housing practices they employed to retard labor organizing, and the volatile tensions between miners of various racial and ethnic groups.