Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004300435
SECTION: THUNDER IN THE COALFIELDS PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Dwayne Yancey
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The son and grandson of union miners, Kilgore grew up to become a lawyer. But in a community where courthouses are stuffed with lawsuits and countersuits involving the intricacies of mineral leases and labor law, Kilgore refuses to represent coal companies, except in rare circumstances. That's not something a lot of coalfield lawyers can say, he says. Kilgore has done some document work for small operators. But out of honor to his grandfather, he says he's never taken a coal company case against a landowner or employee.
Soon after the union started its civil disobedience campaign, a fund called Justice for Pittston Miners was set up to pay strikers' legal fees. And it wasn't surprising who the strikers asked to represent them - Kilgore and his partner, Scott Mullins, from St. Paul.
Mullins guessed they'd handle 10 or 15 cases. Kilgore estimated 50 to 100. They wound up with more than 2,500 - so many they had to spend all summer on strike cases.
Their goal was to keep the court record of the strikers clean so they could go back to work. They didn't do badly, Kilgore says. Of roughly 1,500 workers they represented, only five may be fired for strike-related criminal convictions.
After one of the first mass demonstrations, Kilgore and Mullins got the charges against 425 protesters thrown out because the arresting officer was at another location and didn't see the offense. Special prosecutor Bob Dietrick of Bristol bet he had set a record for losing the most cases in one day.
But while the individual misdemeanor cases were clogging the courts, more important legal dramas were being played out in coalfield courtrooms.
In Lebanon, Circuit Judge Donald McGlothlin Jr. was increasing his fines against the union for refusing to limit the strikers on the picket line. On June 2, McGlothlin fined the union $3 million and threatened to bankrupt the UMW if miners continued to ignore his order.
Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board had won a federal court order prohibiting strikers from blocking Pittston operations. When strikers defied that order as well, U.S. Judge Glen Williams was not pleased. He ordered three union leaders to be in his courtroom in Abingdon June 5 to show why they shouldn't be held in contempt.
Marty Hudson was solemn as he emerged from McGlothlin's court after the fines were announced that Friday afternoon, knowing he'd have to face another judge Monday morning.
"If they send me to jail for what I've done, I'll sleep at night," Hudson said.
It was a promise the judge would give him a chance to keep.
\ GLEN WILLIAMS WAS NO MAN TO BE MESSED WITH, as many a lawyer who came before him found out.
Williams was a fighter, a politician schooled in the rough-and-tumble ways of Southwest Virginia. Williams was still in law school when he ran for commonwealth's attorney of his native Lee County - and became the first Republican elected to the job in 24 years. He went to the state Senate and eventually ended up with a federal judgeship. He took his fighting instincts to the bench, where he often made it plain that he had little use for lawyers who tried to impress with long-winded, legal mumbo-jumbo. Williams prized straight talk.
On May 24, the NLRB asked Williams to order the strikers to stop blocking Pittston's gates. It also asked him to prohibit the strikers' latest trick - forming slow-moving convoys of cars and trucks to hold up Pittston's trucks. Williams issued the order.
The union ignored it.
Williams was furious, and he didn't waste time waiting for more motions and legal arguments. He also didn't want to waste time fining a union with $170 million in assets, as McGlothlin was doing in state court.
Williams decided it was time to arrest people.
He called a meeting with the state police and U.S. Marshal Wayne Beaman. "I told them . . . `One way or the other, my order is going to be obeyed . . .' "
The result: Federal marshals joined with state police and arrested more than 300 people.
On June 5, Williams hauled Hudson, District 28 President Jackie Stump and C.A. Phillips, a strike coordinator, to court. When they offered no explanation and invoked their right not to incriminate themselves, Williams packed them off to jail "until you show me in concrete ways how you're going to comply with my order."
Hudson, Stump and Phillips were handcuffed, shackled with leg irons and taken to jail in Roanoke.
\ THE UNION WOMEN KNEW WHAT TO DO. Overnight, they moved the strike to Roanoke.
The women had kept a vigil at virtually all court hearings. Now they followed the three strike leaders to Southwest Virginia's largest city, some three hours away.
Ten women arrived at the Roanoke City Jail just after midnight June 6 and sat outside all night, singing and holding a candlelight prayer service. Another 13 arrived just after dawn.
By midmorning, the sidewalk was jammed with a flag-waving, hymn-singing crowd of union women, Roanoke labor leaders and two Episcopal priests. If Polish labor leader Lech Walesa were jailed, the United States would be outraged, said Jim Leaman of the Communication Workers of America. Where was the outrage at U.S. labor leaders being thrown in jail?
From jail, Hudson sent word that he, Stump and Phillips would refuse to eat unless the food was brought to them by a rank-and-file coal miner. Roanoke's sheriff said that was against the jail rules. So whether the trio intended to be or not, they suddenly were on a hunger strike.
Whenever he was allowed to, Hudson called the Roanoke Times & World-News. He worried aloud that with him in jail, the strike might turn violent. "No matter what happens from this point on - God forbid there'll be any bloodshed - but it won't be on my hands," Hudson said.
Indeed, a federal judge had done what hundreds of troopers had been fearful to do - remove the strike leaders who had been preaching non-violence to what historically had been one of the nation's most violent unions.
Despite Hudson's efforts, there had been sporadic vandalism since the day the Pittston miners walked out. Now the violence picked up.
Two days after the three union leaders were jailed, gunshots blasted five coal trucks in Russell County; no one was hurt. A sniper took aim at a Pittston supervisor on the way home, but missed. More strikers took to the roads in "rolling roadblocks." On one narrow mountain road in Russell County, a convoy of strikers going down the mountain met a Pittston truck coming the other way. Neither would let the other pass. When the truck driver tried to ease around the strikers' vehicles, he slipped off the shoulder. The truck flipped, spilling its load. Again, no one was hurt. But each call was getting closer.
Pittston Coal President Mike Odom talked with his replacement workers, warning them not to antagonize the strikers.
Union leaders were just as worried. "The next week to 10 days, we were very concerned," recalls Eddie Burke, the union's regional director. "It was a real crucial time. Everybody grew up real quickly."
\ MEANWHILE, THE JAILHOUSE VIGIL IN ROANOKE was becoming a spiritual event for the union women. Some went to the library to look up Martin Luther King's famous letter from the Birmingham jail and passed around a copy. Later, Hudson wrote his own letter - expressing his commitment to non-violence even though it had put him behind bars - that the women reverently passed around.
But the three men's commitment to their hunger strike wavered.
When they learned they could use their own money to buy snack food from the jail canteen, they eagerly emptied their pockets of change - and filled up on junk food. The men spent $50 stocking up on Moon Pies, Snickers bars and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.
In the coalfields, gunshots rang out daily, missing truck drivers but disabling their radiators. "We have, every night, instances of employees being harassed at their homes with windows being shot out or tires being cut," Odom protested. And sometimes worse.
One night in Clinchco, Jimmy Ray Baker, a non-union miner who worked at a non-union mine that supplied Pittston with coal, was jolted awake by a loud bang. He reached for one of five loaded guns he had placed throughout his mobile home when the strike started, and peered out the window. He didn't see anything. Baker went back to bed, but had trouble sleeping. Before dawn, he flipped on a floodlight and walked outside to check his pickup truck. On the ground lay three sticks of dynamite. The noise he had heard earlier was the blasting cap misfiring.
Baker's job was to set dynamite charges. If this cap had gone off properly, he knew, the explosion would have destroyed his truck and turned the gas tank into a fireball that could have engulfed his home - with him, his wife and 6-year-old daughter inside.
Meanwhile, the strike was turning more explosive in another way.
On Sunday, June 11, more than 15,000 miners rallied in Charleston, W.Va., to support the strikers. Several hundred marched six days through southern West Virginia to Charleston, re-creating the 1921 march that ended in the Battle of Blair Mountain. That bloody confrontation with federal troops marked the beginning of the union's success in organizing the coalfields.
Now UMW leaders claimed the Pittston strike was a life-or-death struggle for the entire union, and perhaps other unions as well.
In Charleston, Trumka called on miners to "rise up and fight back." He wouldn't elaborate on what would happen next in the strike, but "there's no doubt in my mind that it's going to expand."
The next day, 10,000 union miners in West Virginia walked off the job. By Friday, the wildcat strike had spread to six states, with more than 20,000 miners walking picket lines in sympathy with the Pittston strikers - and more union locals around the country threatening to join them.
It was far from clear who was "winning" and "losing" the strike. But the UMW had succeeded in doing at least one thing: It had taken a local strike in Southwest Virginia and stirred up a national ruckus.
\ ON MONDAY, JUNE 19, WILLIAMS LET HUDSON, STUMP AND PHILLIPS GO.
After two weeks in jail - and two weeks of eating only junk food - the three strike leaders had had enough.
They promised Williams they wouldn't intentionally disobey court orders or encourage others to do so.
Their decision meant the three were used up as strike leaders. But the union had other people - and other ways - to fight Pittston.
The wildcat strikes were spreading. Before long, they'd idle 46,000 miners in 10 states. Plus, the miners' annual summer vacation was drawing near, giving practically every union miner in the country time off. And sometimes it seemed as if all of them were headed for Virginia - and a place that wasn't on any maps but was soon in every union member's heart.
Camp Solidarity.
Strike leader Eddie Burke recalls the birth of the tent city: "It was literally on a Thursday, someone came to see me and said Jack Bartee, union member, has a plot of land. I went down on Friday in a drizzle and looked at the place. Weeds were everywhere, the roof was leaking. And on Sunday there were 400 to 500 people sleeping there at Camp Solidarity."
Bartee had run a tennis and swim club in the hard-to-find hollow of Carterton for 13 years, but had closed it three years earlier when the liability insurance had become too expensive. One day he got a phone call from the UMW district office. "Did I still have the land where the campground was?" he remembers the man asking. "I let 'em have it for $1 for as long as they needed it. I even put the dollar back in the relief fund, so I came out at zero on the deal."
First the wildcat strikers poured into camp in convoys hundreds of cars long. Soon just about every union in the country was sending a delegation to lend support. Sometimes there'd be Eastern Airlines pilots in their crisp blue uniforms, other times Ohio paper mill workers eager to adopt the coal miners' camouflage fatigues.
Camp Solidarity became the heart of the strike. This was where the men went, to fraternize with the out-of-towners coming to show their support. And this is where the women went, to cook for all the visitors.
The strike was now four months old. People were tired. But seeing all the folks at Camp Solidarity, people from all over the country with different accents and different license plates, gave the miners and their families renewed determination. "They spent their own money to come in here and help us," recalls Cosby Totten, a former miner from Tazewell. "Could we let them down?"
The union started holding rallies every Wednesday night on the St. Paul ball field (later shifted to Thursday night after complaints from the preachers who saw the congregations at Wednesday night prayer services dwindling). The rallies were borrowed directly from the nightly rallies Martin Luther King conducted during the Montgomery bus boycott. Burke says the rallies gave families something to look forward to - an old-fashioned revival with hell-fire and brimstone speeches from whatever labor delegations happened to be visiting.
Burke has his own favorite description for the camp: "It was like a hillbilly Woodstock." On summer evenings, as the heat soaked into the hills, the smell of burning charcoal and the twang of banjos drifted across the field. Kids chased a stray dog named Jackrock. A garbage-bag effigy of Judge Williams swung from a branch. An Alabama coal miner brought his bride on their honeymoon. The angry mood on the picket line seemed a long way away.
Always, there was the sense that this was not a strike but a crusade. "We never eat ne'er a bite over there before we had prayer," recalls the Rev. Harry Whittaker, a retired miner from Dante. "We got some people out there who don't know the Lord. [But] none of God's children ever lost a victory when they looked to him for guidance."
Eddie Burke looks back on June 1989 with a sense of satisfaction - and also a sense of a crisis defused. It began with the strike leaders thrown in jail and negotiations broken off, and ended with the entire U.S. labor movement rallying behind the UMW. The union seemed to have a knack for taking a reverse and turning it to the union's advantage.
But there was still Judge Williams.
And he still wasn't pleased.
\ THE WILDCAT STRIKERS MAY HAVE SPENT THEIR EVENINGS IN CAMP SOLIDARITY. But they spent their days joy-riding over the roads of Southwest Virginia. "Tourists" they called themselves, and they evidently enjoyed the scenery, because they drove slowly to take it all in. Very slowly.
The "rolling roadblocks" picked up strength each day. Pittston protested that the roadblocks were cutting the amount of coal being hauled into the Moss 3 prep plant by at least a third.
On June 23, Williams ordered UMW Vice President Cecil Roberts and strike coordinator John Cox to court and demanded to know why they shouldn't be jailed for directing the road-blocking scheme.
They denied having anything to do with the slow-moving convoys.
Williams commandeered a helicopter to inspect the jammed-up roads. But the roads were empty. "Do you think it's strange that I go over there today and there's not a single car on the road?" Williams asked. "You don't expect me to be dumb enough to believe a thing like that, do you, Mr. Cox? Do you think I'm that dumb?"
"No sir, I don't," Cox answered.
But Williams didn't believe it.
On June 26, Williams fined the UMW $200,000 and Roberts and Cox each $20,000.
The rolling roadblocks continued.
On July 5, Williams fined the UMW $880,000. And two days later, Williams was back in court, trying the cases of five miners charged with violating his order.
The first man up was Roy Glovier, ticketed for going 15 mph in front of a dozen or more coal trucks. Glovier protested that 15 mph was the normal speed for a tricky mountain road.
Besides, Glovier said, he didn't know anything about Williams' order not to slow down Pittston trucks.
Other miners said the same thing.
Williams called their testimony "bare-faced lies." He found Glovier guilty. He also announced he intended to make an example of Glovier - and sentenced him to three months in jail.
Just like with Hudson, Stump and Phillips, the women followed. They set up a vigil outside the Bristol jail. Bristol being closer than Roanoke, more people showed up. Within a few nights, 300 people rallied to show support for Glovier. Hudson, Stump and Phillips had been forced to keep a low profile after promising they wouldn't encourage anyone to break the law. But Stump couldn't help himself that night. "You know, Southwest Virginia is a good place to tour, for tourists," Stump told the crowd.
Glovier's imprisonment didn't stop the rolling roadblocks.
"So that's what really prompted me to take the position of trying to get them back to the table again," Williams says.
Pittston and the UMW hadn't talked for more than a month. Williams' wife and his secretary had suggested that he use his influence to get them back together, but Williams felt the union wouldn't trust him.
Another federal judge, Dennis Knapp in West Virginia, was calling Williams practically every day. Knapp had been ordering sympathy strikers there back to work, but the miners were ignoring him, too. Knapp urged Williams to take the lead. Knapp said it was his impression that while rank-and-file miners might see Williams as an enemy, the union leaders knew better.
"So that's when I wrote the letter," Williams says.
\ "FRANKLY, I DO NOT REALLY KNOW WHAT ISSUES ACTUALLY DIVIDE PITTSTON AND THE UNION; the general public does not know; and the press does not know, or if they do, they do not do a very good job of expressing it," Williams wrote Pittston Chairman Paul Douglas and UMW President Richard Trumka. "But I do know that the court on which I sit has become totally consumed with side issues in this dispute . . . "
And he was tired of it.
Williams wrote that he would be at the Ramada Inn at Duffield on July 18. He asked that both Douglas and Trumka send someone with authority to speak for them. "If only one side shows up," Williams wrote, "then the public and I will know who is refusing to talk."
Both sides not only showed up, they showed up in force.
"I didn't know till I walked in that day that both sides would be there, and I certainly didn't expect the top people," Williams recalls. "First thing I did, I had prayer. I said, `Let's pray.' You never know about something like that, whether you're going to offend somebody or be deemed to be showboating. But later on . . . we had lunch, and Cecil Roberts prayed at the lunch."
Williams was just as outspoken in private as he was in public. At one point, Pittston's executive vice president for coal, Joe Farrell, pounded the table and declared "we can talk until doomsday but we will never, never, never, never go into that health fund again. That is over."
Williams replied he hoped neither side would say "never" about anything, that he hoped everything was negotiable.
"If you say you've laid all your cards on the table," Williams told both sides, "I'd say you're a liar. I know you haven't."
But Williams says he was convinced both sides seriously wanted a settlement. "During the whole time I was in there, I never heard an unkind word spoken from one side to the other," he recalls. "I was impressed by the caliber of men from both sides . . . and you could tell there was a sincerity about them. It wasn't feigned."
When they emerged, Williams had an agreement of sorts.
The two sides would resume negotiations. But they'd stay in separate rooms, with a federal mediator shuttling notes between them.
It wasn't perfect. And Trumka made it clear the union and company were a long way away from coming to terms.
But almost 18 months after the old contract expired and almost four months into the strike, for the two sides simply to be negotiating again was a breakthrough.
by CNB