Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (31 page)

15
. Seeger was an integral figure in the folk music revival of the 1950s and one of Ritchie's closest associates in the business. After a string of hits with his band the Weavers, it was revealed that Seeger was a former member of the Communist Party. As a result, his mainstream success faltered. By the early 1960s, however, he had regained popularity as a singer of protest songs, particularly “We Shall Overcome,” which he is credited as popularizing. Seeger wrote such modern classics as “Turn Turn Turn,” “If I Had a Hammer,” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” His music was introduced to a new generation in 2006 with the release of Bruce Springsteen's
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
.

16
. A large mine near Jeff, in Perry County, Kentucky.

17
.
Singing Family of the Cumberlands
.

18
. The stretch of road named for Ritchie is on Highway 7 between Jeff and Viper, Kentucky.

19
. Governor Ernie Fletcher, a Republican, who served as Kentucky's governor 2003–2007.

20
. Meaning “against” (dialect).

Denise Giardina

Epigraph: H. L. Mencken, “The Coolidge Buncombe,” in
On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe
(Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1956).

1
. Denise Giardina, “Let Us Be Clear: Mountaintop Removal Not about Creating Jobs,”
Charleston, W.Va., Gazette
, May 22, 2007.

2
.
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/1829_ENG_HTM.htm
.

3
. Cecil Roberts is a sixth-generation former West Virginia miner who became president of the United Mine Workers of America in 1995 and still holds that position, making him the second-longest-running standing president after John L. Lewis. Prior to his election, from 1982 Roberts served as vice-president. He gained wider visibility during the campaign for the 2008 presidential election by working closely with Barack Obama. During the campaign, he famously replied to Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's attack on Obama's past as a community organizer by saying, “Jesus was a community organizer.”

4
. According to the West Virginia Office of Miners' Health, Safety, and Training, McDowell has produced more coal than any other county in the state. However, the 2000 census reveals that the per capita income for the county was $10,174, which is the lowest in the state and the twenty-eighth
lowest in the country. About 33.8 percent of families and 37.7 percent of the population in McDowell County were below the poverty line.

5
. A gob pile is “a pile or heap of mine refuse on the surface,” as defined by the Internal Revenue Service's glossary of mining terms, created in relation to the Coal Excise Tax, which may be found at
www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/O,,id-139342,00.html
.

6
. U.S. Steel, now known as USX Corporation, is one of the major steel producers in the world. The corporation owned and operated the town of Gary, West Virginia, until the early 1970s and continued to mine coal there until 1986.

7
. The organization's mission statement reads: “Our mission is to articulate the biblical call to social justice, inspiring hope and building a movement to transform individuals, communities, the church, and the world.”

8
. For information on the land ownership survey, see note 6 in the
next chapter
(on Bev May), below.

9
. One of the founders of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.

10
. Hechler served in the West Virginia Congress 1959–1977 and was known for his support of laws to protect the environment.

11
. Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. According to the U.S. Department of the Interior, this is the primary federal law that regulates the environmental effects of coal mining in the United States. After President Ford refused to sign the bill, saying it would harm the coal industry, President Carter signed it into law in 1977. The act created the Office of Surface Mining.

12
. Larry Gibson is a tireless activist in the fight against mountaintop removal. He frequently gives tours of Kayford Mountain in West Virginia, where he occupies a fifty-acre tract of land surrounded by 12,000 acres that have fallen to mountaintop removal. Gibson has been featured on
CNN Heroes
and the traveling art exhibit Americans Who Tell the Truth, a series of paintings by Robert Shetterly.

13
. Giardina is referring to the events of May 4, 1970, when four students were killed and nine others were wounded by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. The students had been protesting the American invasion of Cambodia.

14
. A German Lutheran pastor who was hanged in 1945—just weeks before the war's end—for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He was very vocal in his opposition to the way Hitler was treating Jews and others. Giardina wrote a critically acclaimed novel about Bonhoeffer entitled
Saints and Villains
, published in 1999.

15
. Wallis, editor-in-chief of
Sojourners
magazine, is the author of influential, best-selling books such as
God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It
(New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).

16
. At the time of this interview, John Edwards was still in the running for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, but he dropped out in February 2008.

Bev May

1
. According to Big Coal, the blasts are from ANFO—ammonium nitrate/fuel oil: “ANCO is a high-tech explosive that is used in big strip mines all over the world, as well as by terrorists such as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh…Coal mines are responsible for about 70 percent of the 2.5 million tons of industrial explosives that are detonated in America each year.”

2
. KRS Sec. 350.610, Designation of lands as unsuitable for surface coal mining, U.S. Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement.

3
. Overburden is a geological term that, according to the American Heritage dictionary, means “material overlying a useful mineral deposit.”

4
. Lee Sexton is a renowned clawhammer banjo player from Knott County, Kentucky.

5
. University of Kentucky.

6
. Patricia Beaver, director of the land ownership study, explained the study in an interview on August 28, 2008: “In 1978 a group of citizens and scholars in the Appalachian region began a major research project on land ownership in Appalachia.” The research, she said, was “concerned with the collection and analysis of data on land ownership patterns and the impacts of these patterns on rural communities. Funded in 1979 by the Appalachian Regional Commission, over sixty researchers collected ownership and tax data from county courthouses in eighty counties in six Appalachian states: West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Alabama, and Kentucky. The study found ownership of land and minerals in rural Appalachia to be highly concentrated among [a] few absentee and corporate owners whose tax burden was low, resulting in little land actually being available or accessible to local communities for economic diversification and housing, and inadequate funds for education, and civic infrastructure.”

7
. Somerset is a small town in southern Kentucky that was one of the organizing centers for KFTC.

8
. Nellie Woolum was a sixty-five-year-old retired postmaster who was killed in a December 18, 1981, sludge slide in the small community of Ages in Harlan County, Kentucky, when the Eastover Mining Company's impoundment on the west fork of Ages Creek broke, releasing about 125,000 cubic yards of saturated coal refuse, which traveled more than 4,400 feet downstream. Three homes were completely destroyed, with
more than thirty badly damaged. Woolum's body was found in the ruins of her home.

9
. In 1968, during Robert F. Kennedy's Poverty Tour, Kennedy was allowed access to a Knott County strip mine owned by Bill Sturgill, a past board member of the Kentucky Coal Association. Photos of the devastated land were widely published.

Carl Shoupe

1
. Filmed during 1973 and 1974,
Harlan County USA
documents the Brookside coal miners' strike against the Eastover Mining Company in Harlan County, Kentucky. The strike began with Eastover's refusal to sign a contract with the miners after their decision to join the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). Directed by Barbara Kopple, the film won an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary for 1976 and was added to the National Film Registry in 1990.

2
. Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, based in Berea, which seeks to create economic alternatives for residents of Eastern and Central Kentucky.

3
. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

4
. Joseph Albert “Jock” Yablonski had lost the 1969 United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) race for president and had asked the U.S. Department of Labor to investigate the election for fraud when he was murdered, along with his wife and daughter, in a hit ordered by his opponent, incumbent UMWA president W. A. “Tony” Boyle. The murders occurred on New Year's Eve 1969, and were discovered five days later. The next day more than 20,000 coal miners walked off their jobs in a one-day strike to signify their conviction that Boyle was involved in the killings. Once Boyle's complicity unfolded, the framework was laid for Arnold Miller, a West Virginia miner, to become the new union president. Boyle was convicted of ordering and funding the murders and was sentenced to three life sentences. He died in prison in 1985. Hazel Dickens wrote and performed a song called “Cold Blooded Murder” (sometimes known as “The Yablonski Murders”), which was featured in the film
Harlan County USA
. A popular HBO movie,
Act of Vengeance
, based on the murders, was released in 1986.

5
. Arnold Miller, who became UMWA president after Boyle, himself suffered from black lung disease and made fighting for better legislation about the disease his top priority. Initially Miller was widely popular, but his term as president ended in mistrust. He died in 1985 and is remembered for his black lung reforms.

6
. Cecil Roberts, President of the United Mine Workers of America.

Kathy Mattea

1
. Judd has lent her support to a CD entitled
Songs for the Mountaintop
, which was produced by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, providing a blurb declaring that the music was “as clear and beautiful as our mountain streams used to be.”

2
. Shortly after this interview, in April 2008, Emmylou Harris hosted a dinner for the Natural Resources Defense Council at her Nashville home that was attended by such music celebrities as Sheryl Crow, Mattea, Big and Rich, Jeff Hanna (of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band), and Matraca Berg, as well as representatives from environmentalists' groups throughout the nation. The featured speaker at the event was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. One of the main topics of discussion was mountaintop removal mining.

3
. Country singer Mary Chapin Carpenter was also active at an early stage in making the issue of HIV/AIDS more visible among the country music industry.

4
. This bill was put forth by LEAF, whose leaders are featured in the chapter on Pat Hudson.

5
. Smithers is located in Fayette County, in southern West Virginia.

6
. The 2006 Academy-Award-winning documentary
An Inconvenient Truth
featured Gore's campaign to acknowledge global warming as a serious problem. Mattea was in the first training class conducted by Gore, in September 2006.

7
. The Hobet Mine, operated by Arch Minerals, is 10,000-plus acres (about 15 square miles) located about 25 miles southwest of Charleston, West Virginia, near the headwaters of the Mud River.

8
. Mari-Lynn Evans, a native of Bulltown, West Virginia, is a documentary filmmaker whose miniseries
The Appalachians
was seen by more than 30 million people when it aired on PBS. During the time she did the flyover with Mattea, Evans was working on a documentary about the history of coal.

9
. Mattea describes Friends of Coal as “a big coal coalition for the industry.” Friends of Coal describes itself this way in its mission statement: “The Friends of Coal is dedicated to informing and educating West Virginia citizens about the coal industry and its vital role in the state's future. Our goal is to provide a united voice for an industry that has been and remains a critical economic contributor to West Virginia.”

10
. Mattea is married to Jon Vezner, a successful Nashville songwriter who has created many hits, including songs for Martina McBride, Faith Hill, Steve Wariner, and Reba McEntire.

Judy Bonds

1
. According to the West Virginia Coal Association, 32,764,140 tons of coal was mined in Boone County during 2006. This amount is nearly 20 million tons above the second highest producer, Logan County. Of the 32.8 million tons from Boone County, 20 million came from surface mining. Information on Boone County poverty is taken from the 2000 U.S. Census.

2
. The Matewan Massacre (also known as the Battle of Matewan) was one of the most famous events in the history of coal mining. It occurred in Matewan, West Virginia, in 1920, when efforts of the miners to unionize resulted in a shootout that led to the death of ten men. The massacre eventually led to the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed insurrection in the United States since the Civil War. Mother Jones was a famous labor organizer, whose involvement in the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek, West Virginia, coal mining strikes led to a federal investigation of conditions in coal mines. John L. Lewis was a revered president of the United Mine Workers; he was president of the UMWA 1920–1960.

3
. Roberts is President of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA); Raney is President of the West Virginia Coal Association; and Caylor is President of the Kentucky Coal Association.