Coal Mining

Industry in which many African Americans worked in the colonial era and early years of the United States. The coal mining industry in the United States peaked around World War I, but some of the first mines were worked by African American slave labor in Virginia around the time of the American Revolution some 140 years earlier.

Historians have uncovered records of a slave named “Nathaniel Pope's Davy,” who worked the deep-pit mines in Henrico County, near Richmond, Virginia, in the late eighteenth century. Some 500 African Americans were employed at the Dover Pits mines, also near Richmond, in 1796.

From 1788 to about 1820, skilled slaves constituted the majority of the 170 workers at Virginia's Black Heath Pits, a mine that employed freed slaves after it was sold to the Chesterfield Coal and Iron Mining Company, a British firm, in 1836. That same year, 45 black miners lost their lives working there. Another Virginia mine, the Midlothian Mining Company, chartered in 1836, employed about 150 African Americans, mostly slaves lured from nearby plantations. By 1860, half of Midlothian's workforce of 200 were slaves who belonged to the company, which hired freed slaves after the Civil War.

The coal-rich western counties of Virginia seceded in 1863 to join the Union as the state of West Virginia, an area that today remains a significant coal-producing region. African American educator Booker T. Washington reported having had an “unpleasant coal mine experience” in this area, where slave miners generally earned 75 cents a day compared to $4 for white miners. In West Virginia, the Kanawha Cannel Coal Mining Company used cheap slave labor as a cost-saving device, often flogging the slaves or denying them their suppers if they did not achieve their quotas.

Coal mining began in earnest in Alabama in 1840, using the inefficient trench method in which coal was extracted from pits dug into the sides of veins of coalbearing ore near the surface. When the Civil War broke out, the Confederate government exempted from combat any coal operator who contracted to mine coal with at least twenty slaves. After the war, Alabama and other states in the Deep South made use of black convict labor in their mines, a system that was not abolished in Alabama until 1928. In 1910, African Americans represented 85 percent of convict miners in Tennessee.

During the unionization battles of the early 1900s, coal companies frequently hired African Americans as nonunion (“scab”) workers to try to divide miners along racial lines. Still, many African American miners joined the fledgling United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which encouraged an integrated membership, although its ruling hierarchy remained overwhelmingly white. The UMWA officially barred members of the Ku Klux Klan from joining its union. As black miners from the South migrated north beginning in the 1920s, racial frictions developed, with some white miners refusing to work with African Americans.

Few African Americans worked the anthracite coal regions in eastern Pennsylvania, which attracted mostly immigrant miners from Wales, Ireland, and Eastern Europe. In 1957, Edgar C. Patience, an African American sculptor from the anthracite coal region, was commissioned by King's College, a Roman Catholic school in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to carve an altar for its chapel from a solid block of coal [Page 201]weighing several tons. The altar was designed to affirm the college's mission of being a resource for the “sons of coal miners.” For decades, Patience and his father, also a coal sculptor, had extracted beauty from the very mineral that had brought suffering and deprivation to so many other African American miners in the United States.

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