Intersectional Identities of African-American Coal Miners in Mid-Appalachia and Western Kentucky

This presentation examines the intersectional identities of African-American coal miners of the Mid-Appalachian and Western Kentucky regions during the late 1800s and early 1900s. While African-Americans participated in the industry as emancipated laborers, their position remained at the bottom of the American socio-economic hierarchy, though in a manner that illuminates the complex relationships between race and labor mid-Southern coal mining. This presentation seeks to answer the question of how these individuals navigated their lives filled with the dual fear of being part of two suppressed classes before any codification of Civil Rights legislation that curtailed Jim Crow as well as legal protections or progressive safety reform mitigated dangerous practices in American coal mines? Drawing upon the works of Herbert Hill, Ronald L. Lewis, and Joe William Trotter Jr., who apply Labor History and Critical Race Theory to explore the experiences of African-American coal miners in West Virginian Appalachia; this presentation applies the framework of intersectionality to investigate the African American coal miners’ experiences in Kentucky. This presentation argues that there was a distinct differentiation between Eastern and Western Kentucky coal mines, especially in the area of African-American experiences. This boils down to the differences in labor policies and socio-economic realities as older Western mines populated by a large majority White laborers found less of a desire to utilize African-American labor, and acted with violent hostility to their importation. Eastern mines, on the other hand, adopted a “judicious mixture” approach in which companies loosened racial tensions in a system which resembled sharecropping. The experiences and voices of these individuals have been hidden away for far too long, and the history of African-Kentuckians in regions that today have less racial diversity requires unmasking.