Black Coal and Red Bandanas by Raymond Tyler and Summer McClinton
An Illustrated History of the West Virginia Mine Wars
Title: Black Coal and Red Bandanas: An Illustrated History of the West Virginia Mine Wars
Story: Raymond Tyler
Art: Summer McClinton
Publisher: PM Press
Publication Year: 2024
ISBN: 9798887440590
Rating: 5 stars
If you’ve been here with me for long enough, you know that I am really interested in the West Virginia Mine Wars that took place in the beginning of the 20th century. I’m always excited when a new book is published about them. So, when I saw the crowdfunding website for this book, I was very excited to donate to make it happen. After reading the book, I was even more excited because every once in a while someone will come to me and ask what they should read if they want to know more about the Mine Wars. It’s always hard to find one single recommendation that conveys a good scope and depth of the historical information without being overwhelming to people without a solid background in West Virginia history, but I think this is that book.
This book is a graphic novel and I think the format makes it approachable and appropriate for readers from middle school up to adulthood. It walks readers through the Mine Wars from Mother Jones’s arrival in Cedar Grove, WV in 1901 to the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 and shines a special spotlight on Mother Jones, Frank Keeney, and Sid Hatfield while also briefly highlighting other important Mine Wars figures like Bill Blizzard, Dan Chain (aka “Few Clothes” Johnson), Ed Chambers, Francis “Cesco” Estep, and Eli Kemp. Despite being relatively short and a pretty quick read, I think the book also did a really great job at showing the complexities the miners and union organizers faced at the time: the way the police and government were in bed with the coal barons and the ways capitalists used their sway over the newspapers to turn public opinion against the miners in their struggle. The book also did an excellent job at explaining the role racism played within unions and organizing. Many books focus on how a racially and ethnically diverse group of miners came together to form the unions and fight back against the coal companies, but I feel like a lot of them gloss over the racism that black and immigrant miners had to fight to even be allowed to hear what the union had to say. Even though that truth reflects badly on the miners and the unions at the time, this book is open and up front about it, which I appreciated because I think it’s an important part of the story.
The book also takes a look at the ways Mother Jones and many of the other major leaders of the movement were hesitant to resort to violence. While the violence did happen in the end (instigated by both sides), Mother Jones talks about how the coal companies have the law enforcement (except for Sid Hatfield) and the government in their pockets and how these monoliths were already prejudiced against the unions and the miners. Several leaders wanted to try to fight for the unions and fair working practices without literally fighting. I feel like this is an aspect of this story that often gets overlooked because the violence ended up happening anyway, but I think it’s an important detail to understand to be able to fully grasp how stacked the odds were against these miners and how backed into a corner they were.
The illustrations are done mostly in black and white with a few key images done in red so that they stand out. Generally, I prefer a graphic novel to be in color and I think full color might have given some of the illustrations a little more clarity, but they are still legible throughout and the pops of red against the stark black and white really make them very striking.
In addition to the story, the book also contains a foreword by Gordon Simmons that gives a brief overview of the history of the Mine Wars, how it is history many Americans are never taught, and the past books and films that have told this story. The foreword is followed by an essay by Shaun Slifer about the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum and the role the museum plays in continuing to teach people about this history. Slifer writes, “Beyond a few intrepid teachers, the history of organized labor is hardly taught in American public school at all, because it isn’t really authorized to fit into the national story we’re supposed to understand about the United States. Labor has involved remarkable struggles for basic human rights, for dignity and justice, and it has more often than not involved the work of Communists, socialists, and anarchists, of the multiethnic working class in a brutally race-divided country working together for common benefit” (xiv). That idea is one of the driving forces behind PM Press who published this book and comes through clearly in the story.
I don’t think I had read anything published by PM Press before this book, but it’s a pretty cool little publishing house. It was founded in 2007 and is an “independent, radical publisher.” This book was published in conjunction with Working Class History, a group of worker-activists whose goal is to educate people about labor history. All of their work is crowd funded on their Patreon and they don’t get funding from any organizations so that their agenda isn’t impacted by their funding. I am definitely interested to see more from PM Press and Working Class History.
The only real critique I have about the book is the dearth of women. While Mother Jones is a major character in the book, most of the other important women or efforts by women during the Mine Wars are overlooked here. There are a few depictions of women cussing out Baldwin-Felts agents as they are evicted from their homes or cussing out scabs, or running from bullets coming from the Bull Moose Special, and there is a woman shown shooting during the Matewan Massacre, but for the most part women are just an incidental part of this story. Out of those few women that exist in the background, they all appeared to be white to me (but it is hard to tell for sure in black and white), which erases the contributions of black and immigrant women entirely. Even when they show Sid and Ed getting shot on the courthouse steps, they are alone—they don’t even show Jessie and Sally, their wives, who were right there with them. Like I said, this was a relatively short book, so it is possible that there just wasn’t space, but I was a little disappointed by the female representation.
Otherwise, I think this is a very well done project that is able to communicate the heart of what miners were fighting for during the Mine Wars. This is a great book if you are looking for an introduction to the Mine Wars or labor history, but is also a wonderful read even if you are well versed in these topics. The book ends: “At its core, the revolt was a direct challenge to the inhumane structures of industrial power. There is a hidden history in the US. It is the history of ordinary people standing up to fight the injustice of a capitalist system that is willing to use extraordinary violence to protect profits. These mountains and these folks are beautiful…but if the capitalists could make a dollar off of it, they’d level these hills, and all the people with it" (99-101). As a West Virginia well versed in the ways mountaintop removal mining and the history of extractive industries have literally and figuratively shaped our state, that moved me to tears.