Members of the Red Neck Army of West Virginia coal miners and their supporters surrendered their weapons to the U.S. Army in September 1921 after the largest armed labor uprising in American history. While the battle stayed alive in miners’ families, the stories being “passed down around kitchen tables and on front porches,” it has largely been forgotten in collective memory, writes Kenzie New Walker. 

For most people, the memory of the largest armed labor uprising in American history is unknown, buried beneath the dirt of West Virginia’s Blair Mountain. In coal miners’ families, the stories stayed alive, passed down around kitchen tables and on front porches. But until the 21st century, there were no monuments, museums or markers of the West Virginia mine wars, a seminal American story of how labor unions came to be.

In late August 1921, some 15,000 mine workers and allies banded together across racial, gender, religious and ethnic lines and marched south from the town of Marmet, W.Va. They were determined to free jailed miners who, for decades, had been trying to unionize the southern West Virginia coalfields. Some marchers dressed in military uniforms — many were World War I veterans — while others wore blue-jean overalls. All tied red bandanas around their necks. Known as the “Red Neck Army,” they were highly organized and armed to the teeth.

The miners never reached their intended destination. Instead, beginning on Aug. 31, they clashed with coal company deputies, mine guards and the state militia over five and half days of combat at Blair Mountain. It was the largest armed uprising since the Civil War — and it ended only when the U.S. Army intervened. It was the second time in American history the government planned to bomb its own citizens — only three months after the first, Oklahoma’s Tulsa Race Massacre.

Those five and a half days were a generation in coming. The majority of West Virginians had gone from living and working on their own land to being dependent on out-of-state coal mining companies, who controlled and owned entire towns. The work was unrelenting and exploitative: Coal companies often paid miners in “scrip” — a currency only redeemable at the company store — and conditions underground subjected workers to roof falls and gas explosions. The companies became landlords, employers and overseers.

Companies housed workers in segregated communities, intending to prevent unionization. But their strategies backfired. Unionization efforts, including the Red Neck Army, broke those barriers. Striking workers moved into desegregated canvas tent colonies after being evicted from their company-owned homes.

By 1921, the United Mine Workers of America had organized many of the coalfields in West Virginia. However, in the southern counties of the Mountain State, such as the areas around Blair Mountain, coal mine operators and hired guards and employed harsh tactics to keep miners from unionizing, including the killings of union-supporting police Chief Sid Hatfield and his deputy, Ed Chambers. Hatfield and Chambers’ killings in early August sparked pro-union rallies, which ultimately led to the Red Neck Army’s armed march.

After the physical battle, a legal battle put over 500 miners on trial for charges, including murder and treason, and crippled the union. Mineworkers in southern West Virginia would have to wait to join until the right to organize was written into federal law as part of the New Deal. In the mid-1930s, they finally gained the better wages, safer working conditions, and other benefits and protections they fought for decades to achieve.

Blair Mountain faded in West Virginians’ and Americans’ collective memory. Politicians strategized to stamp it out of textbooks and public discourse, while miners — many of whom had been on trial — swore themselves to secrecy for fear of retribution. In 2013, a ragtag group of Appalachians — mineworkers, educators, townspeople, activists and descendants of Red Neck Army members — gathered, determined to ensure that this history would be celebrated and shared for generations to come.

This was the first board meeting of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, which opened two years later in downtown Matewan. I started work at the Mine Wars Museum as its first part-time executive director in 2018. As the daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of union mineworkers, it is an honor to preserve and share the history and legacy of my ancestors and those who stood with them for labor justice.

One of the museum’s key initiatives is to bring visibility to the sites of the West Virginia Mine Wars. With funding from Philadelphia’s Monument Lab, this year we launched Courage in the Hollers: Mapping the Miners’ Struggle for a Union, an effort to hold community meetings along the miners’ 50-mile route to resurface the stories of the Mine Wars.

This Labor Day, steel silhouettes of 10 men and women, marching toward Blair Mountain, are being erected in Marmet, where the Red Neck Army’s route began, and in Clothier, just 12 miles from where the battle raged. The silhouettes are not of the original miners but of local community members. As much as it pays homage to the past, it’s a vision for the future.

We held our Courage in the Hollers kickoff meeting in Clothier. One attendee wondered about Monument Lab’s backing: “Why does someone in Philadelphia care so much about coal miners?”

The simple question struck me. Local residents know this history has been ignored. But they haven’t forgotten. Neither have the local archeologists who have spent decades unearthing and preserving artifacts, and the miners’ descendants, more of whom are sharing their stories publicly.

Meanwhile, many people are still fighting for the rights and standards the Red Neck Army marched in support of — from miners in Alabama entering their 17th month on strike to unionizing workers at Starbucks and Amazon. Though the history of those who fought at Blair Mountain is now 101 years old, it is as alive as ever.

Kenzie New-Walker is director of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. This was written for Zócalo Public Square.