Food was central to labor activism in Appalachia. During strikes, coal miners were evicted from their company-owned homes and cut off from the company store. To survive, striking laborers depended on a mixture of self-reliance, community support, and third-party relief efforts. Food brought the entire community together in struggle, reenforcing social networks and strengthening ties between laborers and their supporters under the banner of solidarity. While covering the Mine Wars of the early 1920s, reporters described miners and their families hunting, fishing, and gathering edible plants for sustenance. Some harvested wild ginseng, shipping the roots to markets in New York to help make ends meet. Large communal gardens were planted next to temporary barracks and tent communities, replacing the backyard gardens that they could no longer access. Women played critical roles gathering, growing, preparing, and distributing food among strikers. All were aware that the strike could only last as long as people could endure. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) provided basic rations to striking workers – typically flour, cornmeal, beans, and bacon. In 1922, religious leaders and reformers founded the West Virginia Miners’ Relief Committee. This committee, along with other labor unions and religious organizations, raised money and for both unemployed and striking coal miners to keep the UMWA from being “starved out” of West Virginia. The American Friends’ Service Committee, a Quaker organization that sent aid to West Virginia’s coal fields, stated: “Economic strife does not justify the starving of innocent peoples. No civil or industrial warfare should ever be allowed to progress to the point where the lives of little children are at stake.”
Text courtesy Jennifer Thornton, Teaching Assistant Professor of Public History, WVU
A hard time we know.
You get up in the morning, all you get eat
Corn bread and water gravy without any meat.
We’re cold and hungry, no shoes on our feet,
Corn bread and wild greens is all we get to eat.
-Aunt Molly Jackson
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