The Civil Rights Struggle: Early Days in Southern West Virginia (1991)

The Civil Rights Struggle: Early Days in Southern West Virginia Joe W. Trotter Under the impact of World War I, the black population in southern West Virginia increased by nearly 100 percent, from just over 40,000 in 1910 to nearly 80,000 in 1930. At the same time, the black coal-mining working class increased from 11,000 in 1915 to an estimated 20,000 by 1930. Black workers increased from 20 to over 26 percent of the labor force, as immigrants declined from 31 to 12 percent. As the black population increased, racial conflict escalated. On December 15, 1919, a white mob lynched two black coal miners at Chapmanville, Logan County. Ed Whitfield and Earl Whitney, who were employed by the Island Creek Colliery Company, were killed for allegedly murdering a white construction foreman . The iriob took the two men from local deputies, backed them up against a railroad box car, riddled their bodies with bullets, and tossed them into the river. Although the governor wired the local prosecuting attorney, Don Chafin, to arrange a full investigation, and the NAACP vigorously pushed for an investigation , the county prosecuting attorney and judges refused to cooperate. Moreover , the white press downplayed the lynching, printing stories claiming that there was "no evidence warranting indictments ." The lynching of Whitney and Whitfield, the Charleston NAACP concluded , "places West Virginia in the class with other communities who believe in mob rule, the Charleston branch feeling keenly the disgrace." In view of the hostile racial environment of southern West Virginia, blacks in the mountains turned increasingly toward the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The rise of the UNIA, headed by a Jamaica-born editor named Marcus Garvey, highlighted the blacks' growing impatience with racial inequality . A Logan County member of the Garvey movement gave poignant articulation to the pent-up grievances of blacks in the region when he wrote that "imprisonment is primarily designed to limit the activities of the imprisoned. ... So it is with the Negro. The white man dictates his every action. There are only certain kinds of work he is allowed to do. ... He may be hungry and have money for food, but there are thousands of places in this country where he may not eat, because he is black. If he goes to certain places of amusement, he is segregated as if by contact he might contaminate the rest of the patrons.' By the mid-1920s, no less than eight local divisions and chapters of the UNIA had emerged in southern West Virginia. The Garvey movement was especially strong in McDowell, Kanawha, Raleigh, and Fayette counties. Garveyites perceived the limitations of prevailing political strategies, read the founder's newspaper , Negro World, and promoted PanAfrican unity, as a means of affecting black liberation. In August 1925, the Sprague, Raleigh County division of the UNIA reported "a series of interesting meetings at which several prominent local and out-of-town members of the organization were the principal speakers." The division reporter wrote that the unit was not as large as some, "but we are a very determined few and we are growing every day." 61 The militancy of black women also gained expression in the expanding Garvey movement. Serving as secretaries and members of local chapters, some Mountain State black women shared the Universal Negro Improvement Association 's nationalistic ideology of "Race First." At one rally of the Charleston division, women dominated the program of activities. After President Jones opened the proceedings, the chaplain offered prayer and the division sang its song, "From Greenland's Icy Mountains ," women moved to the fore. One woman offered fund-raising suggestions, another read from Volume I of the Philosophy and Opinions ofMarcus Garvey, and a third warned the gathering that "we will make a great mistake if we step out of the path of the Universal Negro West Virginia miners led the fight for civil rights Improvement Association." Yet African Americans in West Virginia worked to adapt the Pan-African theme to the reality of black life in southern West Virginia and America. "There need be no wholesale exodus from our present homelands. Our blood...