Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004300416
SECTION: THUNDER IN THE COALFIELDS PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Dwayne Yancey
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The next morning, April 25, even kids were talking about the arrests.
At Clintwood High School, 15-year-old Carmen Mullins and some friends were waiting for homeroom. About half the kids at school were wearing camouflage. Now the group with Carmen started talking about the arrests. Someone suggested a protest.
They started down the hall. The kids told teachers they were walking out to protest the troopers' treatment of the miners.
The next thing anyone knew, 150 students - about half the school - had walked out. They marched to the courthouse, where miners' wives were waiting for their husbands to get out of jail.
When the women saw the camouflage-clad group of kids, "it was so amazing," Carmen remembers. "They started clapping and cheering."
A few hours later, students at Dickenson County's other two high schools - Haysi and Ervinton - followed.
Adults applauding kids playing hookey, law-and-order citizens howling at police brutality and vowing to go to jail - in the Virginia coalfields, the world was turning upside down.
\ CLINTWOOD HIGH PRINCIPAL BUD PHILLIPS had heard rumors about walkouts for some time. He wasn't surprised. "It was a very emotional time," he remembers.
Now he walked to the courthouse to retrieve his students. If they didn't return, they'd be hit with a three- to 10-day suspension. The kids didn't seem to mind. "They felt like they had to get a message across," Phillips says. "Their parents were out on the picket line every day. They needed some way to show their loyalty and their support for their families."
Some kids stayed at the courthouse, staging their own demonstration, until 8 p.m. "We stood up," says Angie Mullins, a 16-year-old at Ervinton High School. "We made a difference in the strike, a big difference, I think."
Across the mountains in Russell County, another teen-ager was having a more difficult experience.
\ WHEN THE FOG BURNED OFF THAT TUESDAY MORNING, 400 to 500 picketers were massed outside Moss 3 - slightly more than the 10 allowed under Judge McGlothlin's order.
Most of the morning, the picketers stood by, shouting and shaking thumbs-down to replacement truckers as they hauled coal to the prep plant, where most of Pittston's coal is washed, cleaned, treated and sorted for shipment by rail to the ports at Hampton Roads.
At 11:30 a.m., the sitdowns started. When a convoy neared, a Vance Security van in the lead, miners blocked the entrance.
"All right, listen up," John Cox, one of Hudson's lieutenants, barked through a loudspeaker. "This is strictly peaceful. Do not resist if you are arrested."
There was no "if." Police began dragging or carrying the men across the road to four buses.
The anger on the picket lines was hard to subdue. "They're here to kill our husbands," one miner's wife snapped. "We're hillbillies but we're not stupid. I know what a gun and a club is for."
Buford Mullins, one of the miners who'd been through public relations training, turned out to be a natural, tossing out one-liners that reporters were sure to scribble down. "They talk about the violence and all, but look who's getting hurt," he said.
As soon as one group of men was arrested, another took its place at the gate. Police took only 10 minutes to fill the four buses with strikers. When some of the men inside started rocking the buses, District 28 President Jackie Stump warned them to stop. They complied.
In the afternoon, women joined the men in blocking the entrance. The troopers avoided the women and picked up the men first. The women pushed their way to the front of the line to be arrested. They were smiling and singing. One was Ruby Dishman. She was Richard Dishman's wife and Kim Dishman's mother.
\ THE NIGHT BEFORE, WHEN RICHARD DISHMAN had gotten home from blocking the road at Fremont, he and Ruby talked. They'd never been in trouble with the law before. But now they decided to get arrested on Tuesday.
They told their 18-year-old daughter, Kim, to bring them cigarettes for the long bus ride to jail.
When Kim arrived that Tuesday afternoon, she found her mother on a bus. She passed the cigarettes through the window and went off to look for her father.
He was in the road, waiting to be arrested.
He never got his cigarettes.
Kim was about 30 feet away when a trooper asked if she was a reporter. She stood out because she wasn't wearing camouflage. When she said no, the trooper grabbed her and started taking her to the van.
"I tried to explain I wasn't there to be arrested," she says. "He said I was blocking the entrance. He continued pulling at me. I lost my temper, kind of."
Kim screamed; four other troopers rushed in. She says the troopers grabbed her by her pressure points and pinched her leg. Kim flailed around, elbowing one trooper in the eye and knocking off another's hat.
Richard Dishman recognized his daughter's scream.
He jumped up from his sitdown position to see what was happening.
Jackie Stump, who was supervising the demonstrators, shouted for him to sit down.
Dishman reluctantly sat back down.
But his daughter's cries for help continued.
Dishman couldn't help himself. He was a father. He had to help. He rose up again.
"I really got mad," he testified later. "I was going to unloosen her. I was going to get some of them off of her anyway I could, too."
Stump got in Dishman's face and hollered like he'd never hollered at anybody on the picket line before. "The tone of voice," Dishman remembers, "it rung in my head, and I just happened to look back behind me and I see what was happening and I sat back down."
The rest of the men in his group had gotten up, ready to go with him.
Dishman felt fear shoot through him. He was a tough man who'd worked tough jobs all his life. But, he testified, "this was the most hazardous thing I ever done in my life."
He knew he could single-handedly start a riot.
He slumped back down, while his daughter kept screaming.
The troopers pushed Kim into the van. "Bastards!" she shouted. "You f------ bastards!" One trooper patted another on the back.
Inside the bus, Kim was hysterical. "I was crying," Kim remembers. "I was scared to death. Other people on the bus were saying, `Let her go, let her go.'"
Soon another trooper told her to get off, that she was free. He drove her to her car.
The next morning, a picture of the troopers carrying Kim made the Kingsport Times-Herald. "I was so embarrassed," she says. Except for the bruises on her legs, though, she thought the episode was over.
But 16 days later, an officer served her with four warrants - blocking the roadway, resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer and cursing and abusing a police officer. She was taken to jail and freed on a $2,000 bond.
In July, she was sentenced to 120 days in jail, with 60 days suspended, a $100 fine and two years' probation. She appealed. The prosecution offered a deal - she could plead guilty to blocking the roadway and be sentenced to two weeks of community service. She'd never blocked the roadway, she insisted.
But she accepted. "I was scared of what a jury might do," she says. She spent two weeks answering telephones and washing cars at the sheriff's office.
"I'd say the hardest thing," Ruby Dishman says, "was that Kim had to get up in front of the judge and tell a lie, that she was sitting in the passage and she was guilty of all that when she was not. Now that's not right, now is it?"
\ IN ALL, 457 PEOPLE WERE ARRESTED FOR SITTING in the road at Moss 3 that Tuesday.
One of them was Jackie Stump, whose strong lungs and stern countenance probably had prevented a riot.
"No violence. Keep the faith," Stump shouted as he was carried aboard the bus. "I'm depending on you boys to keep the peace."
by CNB