THE UNITED MINE WORKERS OF AMERICA AND THE BLACK WORKER

 When the United Mine Workers of America was founded in 1890, it inherited a significant black membership from Knights of Labor Assembly 135. With over 20,000 black members in 1902, the UMW had more than half the total black membership of the AFL. In Alabama alone, blacks comprised half of the state’s approximately 13,000 coal miners. That the UMW was an industrial union from the outset had much to do with the status it offered Afro-Americans. It was impossible to apply principles of craft unionism when organizing coal miners because of the nature of the work. Moreover, any attempt to organize on a racial basis in an industry which employed so many blacks would have been suicidal. Negroes had worked in Southern coal mines since slavery, and by 1890, they were not only solidly entrenched in this employment, but their numbers were increasing in both northern and southern mines. Furthermore, the UMW constitution specifically prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or nationality, making it one of the most openly democratic unions in the nation.

But blacks did not receive equal treatment with whites even in the UMW. Many complaints surfaced in the union’s paper, the United Mine Workers’ Journal, regarding the inadequate representation of blacks at all levels of leadership. Also, negroes complained that they were discriminated against in the skilled and better paying positions. Promotion was a slow if not impossible process, and they charged that white union officials often ignored their grievances. Moreover, black and white miners frequently were segregated into separate locals, especially in the South. Segregation also extended inside the mines, where the two races worked in separate sections, and often changed clothing in different wash-houses. In most mining communities, housing, education, and other public facilities were segregated as well. Thus, local folkways inevitably found their way into the pits, and into the union itself.

During the 1890s, these grievances flared into a heated public debate in the UMWJ. The most articulate of the black miners was Richard L. Davis. Davis was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1864, where he worked in the tobacco factories. After laboring in the coal mines of West Virginia for a time, he moved to Rendville, a small mining town in southeastern Ohio. A delegate to the founding convention of the UMW in 1890, Davis subsequently served on the Executive Board of District 6 (Ohio), and in 1896 and 1897 he was elected to the international executive board. 

Throughout the 1890s Davis helped organize black miners in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Alabama. In his letters to the UMWJ, Davis warned white miners that if their black brothers were not treated equally, they would provide the operators with a vast industrial army which could enter the pits as strikebreakers. https://temple.manifoldapp.org/read/the-black-worker-a-documentary-history-from-colonial-times-to-the-present-volume-4/section/d89a9315-6511-443a-bc96-93886e4e9cf3