Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004300410
SECTION: THUNDER IN THE COALFIELDS PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Wayne Yancey
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
About 200 strikers blocked the Lambert Fork mine. Another 300 jammed into the road to the McClure mine. And 800 to 1,000 massed outside the Moss 3 preparation plant.
All of Pittston's big operations were shut down.
"We're going to let our rear ends touch the asphalt and we're not going to move," strike leader Marty Hudson declared.
For four hours the strikers blocked the gates, cheering or jeering, depending on who passed by. "No work today, boys," they shouted at replacement workers. "Go back home, scabs." The replacements did.
Finally, state police decided to make their stand at McClure.
At 10:11 a.m., prison buses and vans pulled up and troopers rolled out. They paired off in line formation and marched around the strikers until the group was surrounded.
The law may have been on the troopers' side, but the numbers weren't. A rowdy mob of coal miners - big men with bad reputations - stared and shouted them down. The troopers didn't know what would happen when they tried to haul away the crowd.
And then all at once a melody filled the air. It was the strikers.
We shall not be
We shall not be moved
A police loudspeaker crackled: "This is your one and only opportunity. You must disperse."
The singing began again.
Outwardly defiant, the strikers were inwardly fearful.
"You didn't know what they were gonna do to you," says former Dickenson County Supervisor Bill Patton, a 46-year veteran of the mines. "Yet nobody got up and offered to move."
The troopers moved in. Strikers locked arms, legs and fingers with the men beside them - a mistake, because it meant police had to pry the men apart, often roughly. The first officer grabbed a striker around the neck and yanked him up, then dragged him to the bus. Other troopers paired up and seized the men in the front row, one by one.
Union men in the middle and back rows jumped to their feet.
"We didn't come to play war!" one hollered. "We didn't bring any guns! We're just holding the road down!"
This was Roger Warden's first coal strike and the Roanoke County trooper didn't know what to expect. He and his partner quickly tired after carrying the first strikers to the buses.
"They were all fairly good-sized men," he remembers. "We went over and told the lieutenant we needed to rest. He said, `Well, get back to the end of the line.' We didn't even know there was a line."
The troopers had the arrests organized like an assembly line. "It was just like you were picking corn or something," Warden remembers. "You'd pull off the very next man that was sitting there." Warden says the only force he saw used was what was necessary to pull the men apart.
That's not what videotapes of the arrests show, or what many strikers remember.
Patton saw two troopers zero in on a co-worker, James Gibbs. "Two of the troopers had him pinned down and one took his foot and put it on his chest and mashed down as hard as he could. James started hollering, `I can't breathe like that.' James looked up and that trooper said, `I'd like to put it some place else.'" Gibbs later testified that as one of the troopers pushed him into the van, the officer said: "We are really going to get you."
A trooper collared an older man in the front row, lifting him and dragging him by his neck. The man's hands clawed at his own neck, trying to pull the trooper's hands away. Then the old man raised his hands in surrender and waved them frantically to indicate he was choking.
Patton's turn came soon. It took four troopers to haul the 62-year-old grandfather to the van, dragging him by his feet.
"Hey, that's a county official they've got there," one striker shouted.
\ RICHARD DISHMAN WAS AT LAMBERT FORK. He and other strikers watched troopers whiz down Hazel Mountain - and go right past the crowd at Lambert Fork.
Something must be going on somewhere, the men thought.
Then the word came from the strike captains: Head out. The Lambert Fork strikers scrambled for their trucks and cars, then followed the rugged back roads to avoid the main highway.
They came out at Fremont, between McClure and Clintwood, the Dickenson County seat. There they sat down, 200 of them, in the middle of U.S. 63, the main road from the McClure mine to the county jail.
Dishman had missed the early briefings, so he didn't know anything about the civil disobedience strategy. He came from the old school. "I'd just as soon they said, if a man wanted to take my job, if he could whup me, he could have it," he says. "I was thinking they were crazy."
But it was scary, too. "I wasn't afraid to block the entrance, but when we sat down and blocked the state highway, I knew we could get in big trouble that day," Dishman recalls.
Yet nothing happened.
The strikers let "civilian" traffic through. A senior citizens' bus came by; the old folks hollered, "Way to go! Way to go!"
Troopers arrived and talked to the group's leader, but the standoff continued.
Finally, a little boy walked up the road with a message from the strikers at McClure: Disperse and let the buses and vans through. "He said they were cutting the heaters on in the van and that one man had had a heart attack," Dishman recalls.
Now the men were really scared.
\ BILL PATTON PASSED OUT THREE TIMES ON THE WAY to jail.
"I was in this van. I had claustrophobia from black lung. I started to smother," Patton recalls. He begged the trooper to let him have some air. They hadn't budged from the McClure mine where the arrests were still going on. "He wouldn't even listen. The guys started rocking the van. That made him even madder."
Patton passed out.
When he revived, the trooper allowed Patton to sit up front, where he could stick his nose against a tiny opening in the window. "I passed out again. This time, the guys started telling him I'd had a heart attack, so he reached down and turned the heater up."
Outside, it was balmy, shirt-sleeve weather.
\ WHEN PATTON CAME TO, HE WAS SITTING IN THE VAN behind the county jail. Around him, chaos reigned.
State police, unnerved by all the strikers they'd had to arrest one by one, were befuddled even more about what to do with them all. The jail was too small.
For now, they just let the strikers sit on the buses until the police could figure out what to do.
Carol Deckard, who runs the Odd Shop, a variety store in Clintwood, took pity on the strikers in the hot buses. "I went to the Exxon, he just opened up his pop machine. I had a clothes basket, and filled it two or three times. I handed them through the window of the buses. The men were so thirsty. I went to the Dollar General Stores, they gave me cups. Moore's gave me pop. I took what I had, some potato chips. I went to Pig [the Piggly-Wiggly grocery store], they gave me 16 bags of pop and ice."
Many of the strikers were shouting that Patton and others needed medical attention. June "Granny" Mullins was bleeding from the mouth from where she'd had a run-in with the trooper who'd arrested her.
Patton saw a friend on the street and hollered for him to call the rescue squad. When the ambulance arrived, there was a dispute with troopers over whether it could haul the injured away. Finally, the troopers relented. Patton, Mullins and five others were taken to the emergency room for cuts and bruises.
As the ambulance pulled out, more prison buses were pulling in.
\ DICKENSON COUNTY COMMONWEALTH'S ATTORNEY Gerald Gray was in court prosecuting a drug case. It was a hot spring day, and the air conditioning wasn't working. The windows were open, and soon commotion began to waft in.
"We started hearing horns honking, a tremendous amount of noise out on Main Street," Gray remembers. "It got to the point where it distracted the jury." The judge sent the jury to the jury room. Everyone else in the courtroom flocked to the windows.
A huge crowd was cheering the union men who'd been brought in from McClure. Gray looked down, amazed at the faces he recognized. "I saw many many people I knew, all law-abiding citizens, who had never been in trouble for anything in their lives. They seemed embarrassed at having to go through this."
When the trial resumed, an investigator for the defense team was wearing a UMW button. So were several members of the jury.
\ IN THE COURT CLERK'S OFFICE, CLERK TEDDY BAILEY let people use his counter space to make signs. Signboards and Magic Markers were available for the asking. Even some deputy clerks were helping.
Troopers sent word they didn't appreciate a court official turning his office over to people who sympathized with lawbreakers. Bailey reluctantly moved the sign-making outside. But he and Treasurer Ralph Vanover helped in other ways - by posting bond for many of the strikers, whether they knew them or not.
Finally, strikers were herded into the general district courtroom on the second floor. The processing was tedious. The arrested strikers weren't helping speed things up, either. Many had no identification. When asked who they were, the men answered, "Sons of John L. Lewis," and the women, "Daughters of Mother Jones."
Somewhere, someone found a rope. The open window in the courtroom and the rowdy crowd outside were all the invitation the men needed. Soon, some men slid down the rope, scraping themselves on a hemlock tree, then scrambling to freedom. By some accounts, 80 to 90 escaped. With so much confusion, it was never clear exactly how many people were arrested that first day, but certainly more than 200.
The crowd swelled to 400.
Some strikers found a coal truck, piled into both the cab and the empty bed, and struck off through town. The men in the back beat shovels against the sides. When they spotted the Hardee's still open, they circled the restaurant repeatedly, banging and clamoring, then sped off.
Police still were trying to bring in new busloads of strikers. After seeing how roughly the first group had been treated, these miners simply gave themselves up when troopers came for them and walked to the buses.
By now, though, rumors of the harsh treatment were buzzing through the crowd at the courthouse. People started converging on troopers in their cruisers. Marty Hudson saw trouble. He waded into the crowd and led the people from the jail to an impromptu rally in front of the courthouse.
Hudson was as proud as he'd be during the strike. For weeks, the man who had wanted to be a minister had been preaching civil disobedience. He thought it a tricky message to sell. On one hand, many miners were used to fighting strikes with rocks and nails, not sit-ins. On the other, he knew that this was the Bible Belt, and breaking the law would come hard for people who'd grown up respecting law and order. He'd stressed the morality of the miners' cause and how their faith in that cause might lead them to jail. Still, he says, "that process came slow for those people."
But now he'd gotten the miners to participate in their first big act of civil disobedience - and look what a rousing success it had been.
That afternoon, Hudson bragged to the crowd: "There's not enough cells to hold us!"
But with so many supporters present who hadn't been to all the union meetings, he also took the opportunity to reinforce the union's new message: "It's not criminal to stand up for what you believe in. There's going to be a lot more people in jail because it ain't over."
by CNB