Ms. Alberta's Memories and Recipes: 1931 - 1939

1931 – 1939 – The Union and the Mines

The union was trying to get in for better wages, protection of the workers, better working conditions, and better medical. Pop was a union officer; in fact he was a pretty big deal in the union.

The union was trying to get in and called for a miners strike; but there were a few men who didn’t want to strike. The ones who did not want a union and wanted to keep on working were called scabs. The National Guard was called in; they carried machine guns. In fact, there were guns pointing down into the valley on each side of the mountains above me as I grew up. Men fighting the ones in union, and there were ones who didn’t want to battle. My dad wanted the union.

Where the National Guardsmen were staying was in the recreation part of the church. Ms Annalee, my friend who had taught me how to cook, was the cook for those men from the National Guard. I was in 8^th grade and a uniform really looked good to me. I would go by as I went from school, to peel taters, apples, or whatever Ms Annalee needed me to do, to help feed those men in uniform. I guess Pop would have killed me; because I was helping to feed men that were helping to keep the union out of the mines. Most of the time the National Guardsmen worked in shifts day and night; keeping someone at the mine to keep the peace.

Yes, I know Pop would have killed me.

NOTE: Mother is talking about a time in Kentucky History when Harlan got it’s name as Bloody Harlan. The miners were starving, but the mine owners lowered their wages even more. I think that since Pop Shoupe had another way of supplementing the family income, with the grill, service station and garage, they didn’t feel the lowering of the wages as bad as some of the other miners did.

1931 – Battle of Evarts - exerts from “The Kentucky Miners Struggle, The Record of a Year of Lawless Violence. The Only Complete Picture of Events Briefly Told; American Civil Liberties Union May 1932” – it sold for 15 cents

The immediate cause of the miners’ resistance in Harlan County in February 1931 was a wage cut combined with increasingly unbearable conditions of semi-starvation. The men at the Black Mountain coal Company walked out of the pits. Helpless, unorganized, knowing only that they would “rather strike and starve than work and starve” they called upon the United Mine Workers for aid. Meetings were held, and in a short while 3,000 men were organized. The operators (men who managed the mines) began evicting union men and union sympathizers. Others walked out in protest. Sheriff Blair swore in mine guards as special deputies imported others from neighboring counties to tour Harlan in heavily-armed cars, bullying and terrorizing the miners. Thus did the operators hope to break the union and with it the spirit of rebellion.

But the miners continued to go to union “speakins” and they continued to march in protest from one mine to another. By April the bitterness between the miners and the deputies was intense. On several occasions shots were exchanged. Then, on April 17^th, near the town of Evarts, came the first killing. William Burnett, a striking miner, who was fired upon and wounded by Jesse Pace, one of a group of deputies, who accosted Burnett and other strikers as they were sitting on a railroad embankment, returned the fire and killed Pace. He was acquitted on trial.

A few days’ later sixteen vacant houses owned by the Three Point Coal Company were burned. On April 23^rd, and on the two following nights, stores were looted by hungry miners. On April 27^th, the Black Mountain Coal Company, which had been discharging men since early in February for membership in the union, locked out all its employees and evicted their families to make room for strike-breakers. Additional guards were placed on duty at the camps. The tension was becoming unbearable. It broke on the morning of May 5^th in a sudden flurry of pistol shots.

The Evarts Battle

This is how it happened. The miners who had been evicted from the camps met at Evarts, on “independent” ground. There they formed a picket line, turning back strike-breakers who sought to reach the Black Mountain Coal Mines. One day Deputy Sheriff Jim Daniels, head mine-guard at the Black Mountain Coal Company mines, and his men drove through Evarts, with rifles pointing a warning at the striking miners. Soon after he sent word that he was “coming down to clean up the whole damned town.” On May 5^th three carloads of deputies, armed with machine-guns, sawed-off shotguns and rifles, drove into Evarts. The miners were ready. No one knows who fired first. No one saw the armed men who shot at the invading crew from behind the bushes on the hillside. But when the battle was over, Jim Daniels and two of his aides, together with one miner, lay dead in the roadway.

Immediately Harlan County entered upon a state of siege. All the mines in the vicinity of Evarts were shut down. The schools were closed. Many families fled before the terror of the deputies, whose guns became the law in Harlan.

This battle at Evarts resulted in wholesale indictments for murder and conspiracy to murder against miners-none against deputies. They, and an earlier case, are the only cases yet tried in Kentucky as a result of the struggle.