yes!! an example of the literal class war, the Battle of Blair Mountain is one of the most important anti-capitalist events in US history
this link has books at the end https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/blair-mountain-ends/
this goes from historical to contemporary https://qz.com/1167671/the-100-year-capitalist-experiment-that-keeps-appalachia-poor-sick-and-stuck-on-coal/
info on the actual battlefield https://tclf.org/battle-blair-mountain-still-being-waged
radical rednecks http://appalachianmagazine.com/2016/05/23/west-virginia-coalfield-battle-origin-of-the-term-redneck/
good article with further links in https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/14/redneck-pride-west-virginia-protests-strikes
Great list!! Gonna add (an accidental wall of text) on with:
Highlander Center. “ We are a catalyst for grassroots organizing and movement building in Appalachia and the South. We work with people fighting for justice, equality and sustainability, supporting their efforts to take collective action to shape their own destiny. “
Wikipedia says: “The Highlander Research and Education Center, formerly known as the Highlander Folk School, is a social justice leadership training school and cultural center in New Market, Tennessee. Founded in 1932 by activist Myles Horton, educator Don West, and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski, it was originally located in the community of Summerfield in Grundy County, Tennessee, between Monteagle and Tracy City. It was featured in the 1985 documentary film, You Got to Move. Much of the history was documented in the book Or We’ll All Hang Separately: The Highlander Idea by Thomas Bledsoe.
Highlander provides training and education for emerging and existing movement leaders throughout the South, Appalachia, and the world. Some of Highlander’s earliest contributions were during the labor movement in Appalachia and throughout the Southern United States. During the 1950s, it played a critical role in the American Civil Rights Movement. It trained civil rights leader Rosa Parks prior to her historic role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as well as providing training for many other movement activists, including members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Septima Clark, Anne Braden, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Bevel, Hollis Watkins, Bernard Lafayette, Ralph Abernathy and John Lewis in the mid- and-late 1950s. Backlash against the school’s involvement with the Civil Rights Movement led to the school’s closure by the state of Tennessee in 1961. Staff reorganized and moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where they rechartered Highlander under the name “Highlander Research and Education Center.” Highlander has been in its current (and longest consecutive) home in New Market, Tennessee, since 1971. Highlander’s archives reside at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Louis Round Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”
Please note that last year an arsonist tried their hardest to burn the entire place down. A lot was lost; this work is still dangerous. There’s lots of info at their webpage + a book shop.
West Virginia University Press - their bookshop has a TON of good stuff, like Working Class Radicals: The Socialist Party in West Virginia, They’ll Cut Off Your Project, A Strike Like No Other Strike: Law and Resistance during the Pittston Coal Strike of 1989–1990 etc.
And Elizabeth Catte, her stuff is awesome. She’s an all around Appalachian Historian, not strictly a labor historian though. Her work is published over at Belt Publishing, which mostly covers rust belt and midwest areas, but they have a ton of non-Appalachian stuff that looks really interesting as well.
Child labor in a Southern cotton mill.
NCpedia on the textile workers of the South protesting:”Mill owners across the South responded to the strike by combining “armed self-defense with calls for military intervention.” (p. 332) The governor of South Carolina mobilized the National Guard, as did the governors of North Carolina and Georgia. Manufacturers also tried to undercut millhands’ unity by paying employees to cross the picket lines. At the national level, Franklin Roosevelt and his administration were slow to lend support to Southern workers. The President depended on the votes of conservative Southern Democrats in Congress to pass important New Deal legislation, and he could not afford to alienate them by confronting the textile manufacturers, many of whom were leaders of the Democratic party in the South.
Millhands and the United Textile Workers union were no match for those odds. After three weeks, workers began returning to the mills, forced to give up the strike by force and financial necessity. On September 22, the UTW called off the protest. Workers who had participated in the strike were often fired and evicted from mill villages after the General Strike ended. Many found themselves blacklisted and unable to find factory employment anywhere in the region.
“The General Strike, whatever else it may have been, was a moment in history that laid bare longings and antagonisms ordinarily silenced, distorted, or repressed. Cotton mill people in the 1930s may not have subscribed to an abstract, universalistic notion of class solidarity. If nothing else, deep racial divisions militated against such perceptions. But mill folk did see themselves as a people apart, exploited by men with interests opposed to their own and denied opportunities for progress that had seemed within their grasp. Their militancy sprang in part from a defense of traditional values and in part from a desire to exert control over their changing place in a new, more expansive world – and it must be understood on its own terms and in its own historical moment.” (p. 353)”
Unlike coal, no one talks about the textile mills or the workers any more, they’re 99% gone thanks to globalization. But the South and Southern Appalachia used to be covered in them. Helping to organize and observing these textile strikers was listed as a notable event in the life of Myles Horton, who went on to found the Highlander Center mentioned above.
Wikipedia - “ The textile workers’ strike of 1934 was the largest strike in the labor history of the United States at the time, involving 400,000 textile workers from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the U.S. Southern states, lasting twenty-two days. “
