They were the sounds of coal raining from a conveyer, of a coal car running down the track, of an RC Cola rattling in a miners lunch pail, the sound dampened by a MoonPie underneath. (Johnson didnt learn how to read and write until he was forty years old.) He worked in dog hole (or low vein) mines, hauled and sold liquor for bootleggers, and built fires at four A.M. to heat the local schools. Tragically, one of them died. And I imagined the blankets Johnsons grandmother made with patterns of blocks and bright stars, tucked around generations of Harlans children whose parents prayed for their safety and their futures. Display a Gravatar image next to my comments. Johnson and some friends eventually hitchhiked to Scottsburg, Indiana, where canneries were hiring for harvest season. Just before this contract ran out in 1973, Brookside miners voted to join the UMWA. He officially went to work in the coal mines when he was thirteen years old because his stepfather couldnt dig enough coal to feed the family.. My Howard grandmothers ancestors were among the first white settlers in Harlan. Greenewho I learned is related to me through my grandmothers familyserved as tour guide as we walked down empty sidewalks. Your papaw was a man of the truth and theres not a bit of truth in that film.. If you have questions, please contact [emailprotected]. Im home where I want to die at, in these mountains here, he says. Workmans scene falls immediately after a close-up of the Eastover office front porch, a filmic gesture implying that we are zeroing in on a specific strike in a specific place. They were welcomed and cheered on by locals on the union side but harassed by strikebreakers, who Kopple claims once pushed the filmmakers car off the road. I asked if he meant by the union or the company. Jackie Stump says: There may not be a real fighting union again in his lifetime. I could survive in those hills. Their jail sentences lasted just long enough to force them to lose their jobs. 12. My mother long had a photograph of that porch on her dresser: a portrait of my grandfather and his uncle and cousin. But Harlan is also an emblem of the hard times that have fallen on coal country. Soon, he was building support for the UMWA among his fellow Brookside miners. Basil Collins; Did you know. Today, she lives in the same Atlanta suburb where I grew up, in a small tract home full of her own silk-upholstered antiques. They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there, Florence Reece sings. The filmmaker obliged. There was no truth in that movie, Henry said over the phone, reacting as though I had passed a rattlesnake through the line when I said I was a fan of Harlan County, USA. In his 2016 State of the Union address, President Obama called for new investment in communities reliant on fossil fuels. Oops, we were unable to send the email. Eastern Kentucky has been especially hard-hit: The number of miners employed in Harlan County fell from more than 3,000 in 1988 to fewer than 1,000 in 2014. Fighting for my right to have the UMWA, for safety in the mines. Jones was well liked, young, and had a 16-year-old wife, and a baby. Now 75, Chester has endured his share of losses. . The people in the movie didnt work at Brookside. She took some heat from the union, too, which was concerned that she and her crew were getting too close to the miners. Or that lament No one ever gets Harlan right, the one I had dubbed The Ballad of Harlan County. The lost songs I imagined were altogether different. I knew I would be wracked with grief, whether I stood with these kin or against them. I was thrilled by its real-life drama and intimate portrayal of the miners lives. Check out the rest of Oxford Americans Southern film issue, or, better yet, go down to the newsstand and buy a copy with a DVD of rare and amazing clips.). Johnsons other childhood line of employment was plowing gardens. Barbara Kopple: Harlan County, USA; that was my first ever film that I did on my own. Marcy, and said: You made it out of Harlan alive! Johnson, a retired UMWA Brookside miner (and the ex-husband of filmmaker Anne Lewis), was riffing on Darrell Scotts song, Youll Never Leave Harlan Alive., Even after the strikes successful completion, Johnson felt that the system was stacked against him and his fellow picketers. In 2006, the Chicago Tribune declared that there have been few better movies about labor struggles before or since.. Harlan would have likely remained sparsely populated if some of the countrys richest seams of bituminous coalalso known as steam coal, which is medium grade and full of a tar-like substancehad not been discovered in its hills. In another scene, a woman talks about how all her life she has considered the company as the enemy, and how her grandfather suffered from black lung. Resthaven is where I went the first time I came to Harlan, when I was nineteen, for my great-uncle General Edwin B. Howards funeral. You might describe it as the difference between daylight and dark, said Nolan. They didnt want to make a lot of enemies because you might have to marry into their families., The real story is people coming in here and stirring up controversy. Subscribe to the free In These Times weekly newsletter: Jeff Kelly Lowenstein is a writer and investigative reporter who has been traveling to Cranks Creek, Ky., since 1989. He is easygoing for a security guard and handsome in a salt-of-the-earth way. "[12], In a 2015 interview with Variety, Kopple was asked if she was in danger while working on this film. I don't think we'd have won it without the film crew. Most residents havent been so lucky. I dont know if there really is a name for the kind of country that the Harlan of Kopples movie is. During my week in Harlan, I pieced together that this locals-versus-outsiders disconnect is more than a knee-jerk reaction. When my parents divorced, I had to pick sides, and I chose my mothers, as most children do. More than 75 witnesses have been called and about 800 photographs, reports . This is definitely on the list! Its unfortunate because the movies takeaway, so widely celebrated elsewhere, is immediately lost on some of the people with close connections to the storypeople that it might otherwise reach. what happened to basil collins harlan county. The striking miners travel to North Carolina and New York City to picket Wall Street, encouraging investors to Dump Duke. The utterly fearless Lois Scott leads their charismatic wives to keep the cause going back home. These tunes were made from the last breaths of miners crushed by a mine roof collapse and the deathly rattle of black lung. california traffic ticket fines list 2020 san diego surf development academy. But since the 2012 election, he says, work has been uneven at best. I know every weed in the mountains, even here. But I also see now why the film is so upsetting to my family. All photos uploaded successfully, click on the Done button to see the photos in the gallery. Because of how the film is edited, one believes that she is referring to the prior owners of Brooksidewhich means she is talking about my family. That was just to razz me in good fun, a show of Harlan Countys enduring frontier spirit. Brittle vines covered the old office building, the commissary, and the beer hall, which looked as though they could double as a movie set for a Wild West ghost town. Eastover president Norman Yarborough steadfastly refuses to sign the UMWA national contract, coming across as stubborn as wood. He agreed to take my call because he worked for and loved my grandfather. I thought again of Johnsons story about my grandfathers cousin Jack. Subscribe to the Oxford American. Jerry Johnson, one of the striking Eastover miners, attributes the conclusion of the strike to the presence of Kopple and her film crew: "The cameras probably saved a bunch of shooting. My mother was shipped off to finishing school in 1951 at the age of sixteen and never lived in Harlan again. Heres a deliciously bubbly drink thats calling your name (and ours too): the Basil Collins! But a different storyline and song emerged. That was more than coal miners was making., The family lived without running water or electricity because Johnsons stepfather didnt want to pay any rent. But this practice was primarily limited to anthracite coal mines in PennsylvaniaHarlans mines contain a softer grade of coal. All Rights Reserved. Learn how your comment data is processed. Last edited on 27 December 2022, at 06:42, Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. All weve got down here is grocery stores and restaurants.. Harlan County, Kentucky: Basil Collins miner foreman and leader/manager of the scabs confronts picketers with a 45 in his right pocket. Thats the way it was gonna go down.. As of January 1, 2015, theres not a single union coal mine left in the state of Kentucky. She came to the door to greet me. Every so often, in a sweet and wistful state of mind, he would show them to me. Chester found work in a gear factory, but home beckoned a dozen years later when one of his children died just three days after being born. This presents young people with a hard choice. Harlan County is a symbol, said Greene. It quickly began to seem as though a labor war reminiscent of that of the 1930s was about to get under way. I met many people who were on the Brookside picket line, and they would swear on a Bible to the films accuracythough some do note how the sequencing of certain events was changed, which allowed for the creation of a story arc. They all hollered If you hadnt of talked me into it I wouldnt of done it. As for his non-striking coworkers, men like Nolan who were wary of getting involved, they said we was trying to push the UMWA down their throats. Kopple came to town because UMWA organizer Houston Elmore invited her, hoping that the cameras would help quell the violence. Learn more about merges. Thats right.. Translation on Find a Grave is an ongoing project. Some of the politicians say theyll bring the coal back, but the coal will never be back., Bobby Simpson, 79, has been blind for more than a half-century, but still managed to shovel coal. These camps were private propertynot public towns, according to Harlan historian Dr. James Greene III. Bazel Collins. I felt a crushing sorrow as I talked to Ferguson, who more than once came to tears. Angrier; forty years ago! There we was, out in the cold with no job or nothing. He worked in logging for a while and eventually had to go outside the county to find mining work, which he did until his accident. Johnson hightailed it out of Harlan and moved to Ohio to work at North American Coal. It was enough to feed the Fergusons and their four kids, ages two to thirteen, until a van concealing a machine gun pulled up to his brother Tommys house and opened fire, shooting sixteen holes into the slide of a swing-set Tommy and his wife had just purchased for their children; nine holes into the house; and one into the babys swing. Meanwhile, the striking miners, many of whom are living in squalid conditions without utilities or running water, were offered a 4% pay increase, at a time when the estimated cost of living increase was 7% for that same year. He struck me as being like a lot of the men in my familymen whom novelist Tom Franklin describes as the sensitive guys at the dogfight.. I thought about Elizabeth and her familys efforts to improve Harlans economy by starting a new business. For example, when the strike breakers and others hired by the company show up early in the filmthe strikers call them "gun thugs"the company people tried to keep their guns hidden from the camera. When confronted a striker who told people not to talk to her, she was told: "Girl, you gotta tell people here what you're doin'."[3]. Were just barely getting by on that, he says. And jobs in the industry have been vanishing since the 1980s, thanks to mechanization. Please reset your password. AFL-CIO's all communist.what's gonna happen to the country when the unions get in?" - Basil Collins, Mine Foreman, while armed . I dont know the miners name. He went out on strike with the Brookside miners. (My relatives were also guilty of practicing this system.) He was unmoved. Danny Stewart, 30, is a fifth-generation miner who began working in the industry shortly after graduating from high school in 2004. Lewis described Workman as being expressive of the region as a whole and explained that this kind of generalizing is not unusual in documentary. During the 1930s, union suppression and strikes led to violence that went both ways and became known as the Harlan County Wars. As I traveled a ribbon of road across northeastern Tennessee, fields and rolling hills spread before me, dotted with barns adorned with quilts. This post is archived, some links or media may be broken. He roofed housing projects across the state of Georgiaprojects where he often went to live, and where my mother, brother, and I sometimes spent weekends. But that doesnt quite get at it, either. I kept thinking about being alone at Kitts Creek with just Elizabeth and a handful of employees. That strike was about Brookside, but most of the movie was filmed at Highsplint and over in West Virginia, said one man. They also inspired a series of vengeance killings, creating a nearly biblical succession of murders in what was already a violent place. My mother was so proud, but at the time I looked at the marble carvings on the tombstones of my relatives, including my great-grandmothermy grandmothers mother, the woman for whom I was named (and who took her own life)as little more than monuments to the wealth that separated them from me. But for each gain the union made, the owner-operators worked harder to drive them out. Duke Power didnt want that to be filmed, he said. Perhaps thats why Johnsons story about Jack haunted me. We aint all dumb down here, Henry said, as if only a fool would fall for Kopples movie. Oral History Interview with Daniel H. Pollitt, April 17, 1991. Now the trains arent even running anymore. Youll want to extract some of the cucumber juice, so you can give it a little more elbow grease. All this turmoil happened in Harlan County in the early seventies, and right now theres some people who are just beginning to speak to me, he said. Though I vowed to keep an open mind, I resisted these words with every fiber of my being. My father, the only college graduate among his nine siblings (as I am the only one among my parents four children), had eventually grown tired of being poor and left the church to go into business as a roofing contractor. Kopple felt it was important to continue filming (or pretend to, even when they were out of film) because the presence of the crew and staff support seemed to help keep the violence down. The nearest interstates were about sixty-five miles away in opposite directions, adding to the mines aura of isolation. what happened to basil collins harlan county. Their stories were often told through the songs. Try again later. Theres no telling how many guns were out there. People on the picket lines were not allowed to have them, but guns abounded on both sides. The documentary is a bracing, dramatic David-and-Goliath story about coal miners pitted against Duke Power. Then you had the fact that everybody carried guns. Fergusons wife, Mary Louwhose long brown hair and bangs gave her an elderly girlishnesshad stood on the picket line with him. What I mean is that Harlan County isnt South or North or part of any other big bloc of states ruled by civilized crooks in big cities, Southern or Northern. He sent money home to his family. Me and them that worked up at Highsplint was good buddies, Ferguson continued, but after that strike nobody of them would never speak to each other, never look at each other, nothing else. Simpson spent 37 years in the mines to support his wife and 14 children. They also included the unwritten murder ballads by all the countys vengeance killers, including the one who murdered my great-grandfather Howard. All the same, Im positive that theyre not Southern. Try again later. I aint been back, he says of Chicago. There was an error deleting this problem. Its tart and bubbly, with fresh herbs and cucumber. Harlan remained a rough frontier well into the early twentieth century. You can always change this later in your Account settings. cemeteries found within kilometers of your location will be saved to your photo volunteer list. But the injunction did not apply to the miners wives. A coal country Atlantis. The company men have names, the organizers have names. We mourn with the family of Basil Collins for this great loss. Lifelong Harlan County resident Priscilla Stephens, 66, recalls the death of her father, Charlie Simpson, from black lung disease in 1966. Usery Jr. summoned Eastover president Norman Yarborough and Duke Powers board chairman to Washington, D.C., where they signed the UMWA contract at last. June 10, 2022 Elizabeth and I are the same age and share the same given name. The family of eight children had little money, but Chester was happy and didnt think of himself as poor. This is ours., Johnson sounded as though he had walked straight out of a Woody Guthrie song. There was a problem getting your location. Cameron. Next comes Nimrod Workman, the miner and singer whose story and song make for an incredibly affecting moment. 1939 - 1945 World War II - Ages: 29 - 24 years. Its Appalachian. The UMWA spent more than $1.5 million on the Brookside strike, the equivalent of $8.6 million in todays dollars. But when Eastover took over the mine from my family, the workers didnt get to choose which union represented themEastover opened with the company-friendly Southern Labor Union in place. Please received our heartfelt . Some, like Danny Stewart, an unemployed fifth-generation miner, are placing their hopes in a Donald Trump presidency to revive the moribund coal industry. Thats not to suggest that the mood was tense or unfriendly; it felt like changing shifts. This account already exists, but the email address still needs to be confirmed. 34 farmstead lane, farmington, ct; what happened to basil collins harlan county. In its 1889 coverage of a notoriously cold-blooded feud concerning the Turner and Howard families (both of whom happen to be my ancestors), the New York Times wrote: The country is wild, and the whistle of a locomotive has never been heard by many of the inhabitants. At the time, the county had a population of about six thousand. 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