Setting the Stage
Risk Takers/Change Makers in the Great Appalachian War of Extraction
Join us on a journey through more than a century of struggles as depicted by coal mining artifacts, oral histories, pictures, art, quotes and verse from the coalfields of Northeast Tennessee, Eastern Kentucky, Southwest Virginia and West Virginia. Here are the suppressed stories of heroic people, who in their struggles for economic and social justice on the front lines of Appalachia, forever positively impacted not only the region but the entire country.
We begin in East Tennessee where a violent fight erupted to stop the leasing of prisoners as strikebreakers. We will then move on to explore primitive mining conditions and the travails of living, working and organizing in coal camps–particularly from the viewpoint of women.
Over the ensuing decades we won many battles, including improved wages, 40-hour work weeks, an end to child labor, better safety and health care, and not least, the right to organize. With widespread mechanization in the 1950s and the emergence of strip-mining that morphed into outright mountaintop removal, we must ask if we lost the war. Union employment has plummeted and tens of thousands have left our mountain homes for northern employment. Once thriving communities and the ecosystems that supported them are no more.
We have woven many threads of resistance into the fabric of this museum, which depicts where we once were…and now are.
We challenge you to see the past for what it was and to participate in the pursuit of a candid understanding and telling of Our Story. We must each find our own individual roles in creating a better future…not just for our Appalachian brothers and sisters, but for all of us around the globe.
Contextual Essay
On the back of an envelope mailed to me on February 19, 2008, Wess Harris hand wrote, “Danger! Contains Ideas!” This witty, apt warning epitomizes Wess’s character and approach to life. Over the almost two decades I’ve known Wess, I have witnessed his enduring, relentless commitment to share the peoples’ stories, “Our” stories of the Central Appalachian coalfields stretching from the historical to the contemporary. Whether his audience is college students working in Appalachia on an alternative spring break trip, West Virginia elected or appointed officials, or Applachian Studies Association colleagues, Wess determinedly tells the truth, even when some don’t want to hear it.
To strengthen the stories, he has accumulated a wealth of artifacts that contribute to audience members’ tactile experience of history. His relationship with William C. Blizzard, son of the famous Bill Blizzard, UMWA leader extensively involved in the Battle of Blair Mountain, aided in Wess’s campaign when he helped Mr. Blizzard in 2004 publish his account of the Battle in “When Miners March: The Story of Coalminers in West Virginia”. In addition to acquiring Mr. Blizzard’s archives before he died, Wess obtained many important historical objects, including the “One Pounder”, the cannon used against striking miners in the early 1920s. Clearly, Mr. Blizzard placed his confidence in Wess to not only continue telling miners’ stories that he recorded but to contribute his own as he expanded Mr. Blizzard’s important research. Both “When Miners March” and “Written in Blood: Courage and Corruption in the Appalachian War of Extraction”, edited by Wess in 2017, include memorable, often heart wrenching, photographs of mining life over the decades. Visitors to this exhibit will see many of these.
Wess’s relationship with the Whipple Company Store owners in Fayette County, WV, led to their interview with Michael and Carrie Kline, which was first pubished in “Appalachian Heritage” in Summer 2011 and republished in “Written in Blood”. Readers will find exhumed stories, thought to be forever buried by mine owners, that shed light on the brutality and abuse of power rendered by the owners and their gun thugs. These poignant displays, after all, are central to Wess’s mission. In the final paragraph of Wess’s Introduction to “Written in Blood”, he extends an invitation to readers, and now to you viewers: “In the spirit of searching for truth, we ask you to join us in this commitment to take back our story and the cultural institutions now in the service of extractive industries. Together we can lift the dark veil smothering the truth, authenticity, and humanity of our past. It is time to speak truth to power. It is time to speak truth to our children.” This exhibit contributes mightily to lifting that dark veil. Will you join the effort?
Theresa L. Burriss, Ph.D.
Appalachian Scholar and Activist
Don West – Walt Whitman in Overalls
Don West was born in 1906, the son of a Georgia sharecropper. His family did not cotton to the slavery of the flatlands and instilled in him a deep reservoir of caring for those of the lower classes, no matter what their stripe. At the Berry School for indigent students he was expelled for organizing a protest condemning Birth of a Nation, a film which glorified the Ku Klux Klan.
He found his way to Lincoln Memorial University where he befriended James Still and Jesse Stuart who went on to be two of the most influential writers in Kentucky. While at LMU he met his wife Connie. They would prove to be a powerful couple who generated change and controversy wherever they landed. West, Still, and Stuart all went on to Vanderbilt, but tellingly West studied religion, not English. Later he was closely associated with and impacted by the social justice professors of the Union Theological Seminary in New York City.
In 1932 the Wests and Hortons (Myles and Zelphia), influenced by Danish folk schools, started the Highlander Center, in Monteagle, TN. Named by Connie, Highlander brought together Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Julian Bond, and a host of critically important civil rights leaders. The most famous social change song in the world, “We Shall Overcome”, was cultivated by Zelphia Horton and Guy Carawan there, and was later popularized by Pete Seeger.
Eventually West disavowed his youthful allegiance to the Communist Party which for a time to him had posed a seemingly viable alternative to the broken capitalist system that had spawned the Great Depression. But it was too late. For the next 30 years the Wests would be harassed, harangued, investigated, persecuted, attacked, fired from jobs, and run out of town.
In 1946 West’s poetry book, Clods of Southern Earth, was published to mostly critical acclaim despite, or perhaps because of, its unadorned style and accessibility to the common man. Like Langston Hughes, West’s words were about substance and song, not style. As critic Cary Nelson wrote in his 2006 essay, Modern American Poetry, “…poetry became a credible form of revolutionary action”.
By 1958, exhausted by KKK cross burnings, the McCarthy hearings, and threats to their lives, the Wests relocated to Baltimore where they were able to save enough money to purchase a 600-acre farm in West Virginia. For decades it became an educational, cultural, and environmental intersection that fused old and new radicals, musicians, artists, writers, and community organizers.
In the mid ‘70s Don taught, along with William C. Blizzard, at Antioch Appalachia where he inspired the Soupbean Poets and helped spawn the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative. Don died in 1992, two years after his wife Connie’s death. But the themes of his poetry, and the heart he brought to his writing, continue to shape the evolution of our Appalachian consciousness.
Away with pious references
To patriotism and to prayer,
As the naked child is born,
Let the truth lie cold and bare!If there is a thing to tell
Make it brief and write it plain.
Words were meant to shed a light,
Not to cover it up again!Don West, 1950
Connie West – Portraits of Time and Place
The faces of Appalachia on display here are often overlooked in Our Story. They are but a tiny fraction of the many activists who should herein be honored.
Connie was raised in an orphanage in Harrogate, TN. She received a scholarship to attend Lincoln Memorial University where she met her husband, Don West. In 1932 the Wests and the Hortons and a small group of committed educators founded a folk school in Monteagle, Tennessee. To this day it bears her imprint. Connie advocated for the school to adopt “Highlander” as its name in recognition of our mountain culture. Highlander would go on to lead labor, civil rights, environmental and peace advocacy efforts throughout the century.
In the mid-1950s Connie began focusing on painting portraits of people important to their own place and time. After several years in Baltimore, the Wests purchased a mountaintop farm in Pipestem, West Virginia. In 1965 they founded the Appalachian South Folklife Center, which, like Highlander, became a center for homegrown advocacy education. Connnie continued to paint and plans were in the works for her own gallery. Tragically, a fire destroyed many of her major works and scuttled the planned gallery. By the time of her death in 1990, Connie’s work had fallen into obscurity.
More than a decade passed before Wess Harris, long an admirer of the Wests, began to collect and digitize the images seen here. A special thanks to Connie’s daughter Ann (West) Williams for loaning many of the originals and also to Mike Clark for sharing slides of several of the originals that were destroyed by the fire.
Pete Seeger was photographed by William C.Blizzard at the Folklife Center’s music festival in 1982. When Pete learned of the project to preserve and share Connie’s work, he sent the kind note and check on display here.
This exhibit is Our Story. These are our people, rare and yet ever so common–willing to take risks so that our land, our people, and our culture might survive the ravages of economic exploitation. We stand on their shoulders.
The spring of 2022 marks 100 years after Blizzard’s trial and we look forward to being in Charles Town with the OUR STORY TRAVELING MUSEUM. Plan to join us to visit and see the artifacts upon which our Union was built.
Dec 2 of 1859 John Brown was executed. He was trying to free the slaves. When Bill Blizzard was asked in 1922 how he felt about being tried in the same court as Brown, he replied that he too was trying to free slaves.
This portrait of John Brown was done mid- 20th Century by Connie West. She and husband Don were front line advocates/heroes for civil rights and Union workers for more than half of the last century. Connie painted about 100 portraits of Appalachians important to their own time and place.
The OUR STORY TRAVELING MUSEUM is honored to make prints of Connie’s works available. Please PM if you have requests. Prices vary but will be as low as possible. We are dedicated to teaching, not raising money.
The spring of 2022 marks 100 years after Blizzard’s trial and we look forward to being in Charles Town with the OUR STORY TRAVELING MUSEUM. Plan to join us to visit and see the artifacts upon which our Union was built.
Pete Seeger
Threads….This week the artifact of the week from the OUR STORY TRAVELING MUSEUM has a personal flavor from yours truly, the curator. The pic of Pete was taken back in ‘82 at Pipestem by William C. Blizzard and is among the first artifacts in our collection.
Pete taught Hedy West to play banjo and kindly autographed the back of the pic for my daughter.
The check was received unsolicited in support of my efforts to locate and digitize the Appalachian portraits painted by Connie West —Don’s wife. I thanked Pete and assured him I was no way no how going to cash it! Too cool! So the check, photo, and notes are now telling the story in the TRAVELING MUSEUM.
Connie West’s daughter, Ann, is still going strong and helping to integrate her mom’s work with the museum. Even now we are tying threads together— making connections between people, events, organizations, and movements!!!
If there is a thing to tell
Make it brief and write it plain.
Words were meant to shed a light,
Not to cover up again!
Don West, 1950
Painting by Connie West, Don’s wife
The OUR STORY TRAVELING MUSEUM was featured by the Clarence Brown Theatre, the University of Tennessee in the Fall of 2019. We displayed our “usual” artifacts along with a very special collection of eight Connie West prints. Had a great time and got a fantastic reception at UT.
Thumbnail #47 is Hedy West, Connie’s daughter. Hedy was taught to play banjo by Pete Seeger and later composed and recorded the legendary folk song, 500 Miles.
This page and the previous page are images of Connie West’s portraits of Appalachians who were important to their time and place. The original portraits are scattered across the globe, but these prints are archived at the Our Story Traveling Museum.