5 Recognize Risks

The air is thick as silence, you can cut it with a knife
A man lies in the hospital, draining out his life
The trucks are on the back roads
In the dark their headlights shine
There’s one man dead on the Harlan County line

Anger like a poison is eating at your soul
Your thoughts are loud as gunfire, your face is hard as coal
Bitterness like buckshot explodes inside your mind
There’s one man dead on the Harlan County line

A miner’s life is fragile, it can shatter just like ice
But those who bear the struggle
Have always paid the price
There’s blood upon the contract, like vinegar in wine
There’s one man dead on the Harlan County line

From the river bridge at High Splint
To the Brookside railroad track
You can feel a long strength building
That can never be turned back
The dead go forward with us, not one is left behind
There’s one man dead on the Harlan County line

The night is cold as iron, you can feel it in your bones
It settles like a shroud upon
The grave of Lawrence Jones
The graveyard shift is walking
From the bathhouse to the mine
There’s one man dead on the Harlan County line

Sometime during the late summer of 1973, I stopped off in Pittsburgh, where the United Mine Workers of America were holding their annual convention. My first cousin was on the UMWA staff. I went up to his hotel room to visit for a while.

He was lying on the bed, a wet washcloth covering his eyes, moaning softly.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

He lifted the washcloth and looked at me like I was crazy. “No, I’m not all right. If I was all right, do you think I’d be lying in the bed with a cold washcloth over my head?” He looked like he was going to pass out on the spot. “I’ve got this splitting headache,” he added unnecessarily.

I had figured that out. “Are you sick? Do I need to get you a doctor?”

“It’s not that.” He shook his head painfully. “It’s this strike we’ve got in Harlan County.” He paused. “There’s something I need you to do.”

Now, to most people, the words “Harlan County” conjure up something from the old TV sitcom The Dukes of Hazzard—the real town of Hazard, which is in Perry County, being just a stone’s throw from the town of Harlan, in Harlan County. Maybe, if they’re country music fans from the old days, they might know the song Nine Pound Hammer, first recorded commercially by The Hillbillies in 1927:

It’s a long way to Harlan
It’s a long way to Hazard
Just to get a little brew, boys
Just to get a little brew
Now roll on buddy
Don’t you roll so slow
How can I roll, roll, roll
When the wheels won’t go

But for anyone who knows the Appalachian coalfields, who knows the mountains, who knows coal mining and the UMWA, what comes immediately to mind is the phrase “Bloody Harlan,” bestowed on the county in the 1930s, when strikes were settled by rifles, pistols, and dynamite.

When you’ve got trouble in Harlan County, Kentucky, you’ve got real trouble.

Here’s what caused my cousin’s headache. In the 1930s, under the leadership of Welsh immigrant coal miner John L. Lewis, the UMWA was as powerful and successful as any union in the United States. But by the 1960s, its leadership had grown corrupt and lazy. Thousands of union members were disabled, dying from black lung disease, caused by breathing in coal dust every day. When technology gave the industry faster, more powerful machines to mine the coal, the dust grew finer and thicker. The miners got sicker and sicker, more and more quickly.

But the UMWA leadership, enjoying the good life in Washington, D.C., far from the coalfields, didn’t care and weren’t there. They abandoned their own loyal members, who were spitting up sputum black with coal dust, sleeping upright in armchairs so as not to smother from the weight of their own lungs, coughing themselves and their families awake every night, living on bottled oxygen and borrowed time. These miners may not have known all the medical ins and outs of what was happening to them. But they did know something was deeply wrong, with them and with the system.

More than that, they knew how to organize, how to fight for what they knew was theirs by right. In the old days when the UMWA was being built, what they fought for were higher wages, better working conditions, vacations, pensions, and “portal-to-portal” pay.

Now it was hospital cards, medical care, and compensation so that while they were still barely hanging on to life they’d have at least a little something coming in to support their wives and children, and then to help keep their loved ones going after they’d passed on.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the UMWA was in the forefront of the struggle for justice, fighting with a sense of hope and possibility:

I’m tired of working for nothing
And bad top that’s ready to fall
If we can’t dig this coal without danger
We ain’t gonna dig it at all

And the wind blows hard up the holler
Through the trees with a whistling sound
But the sun’s gonna shine in this old mine
Ain’t no one can turn us around

A lot had changed since the old days. The UMWA leadership should have been leading the fight for safety in the mines and for compensation for those disabled by working conditions underground, as well as for the widows and orphans of those who died from black lung. But they were nowhere to be seen.

So, in this desperate situation, in which those who should have been responsible and responsive just plain weren’t, people throughout the coal camps and former company towns throughout the southern mountains turned to creative community organizing. Starting in West Virginia and eventually spreading throughout the Appalachian coalfields, they stood up and fought back together as the Black Lung Association. Former miners broken down so badly by black lung they could barely stand, widows and orphans of those who had been choked to death by dust from the coal they spent their lives digging, were backed up by their kinfolk, neighbors, rank and file members of the UMWA who were still working, members of other unions, small-business owners, local elected officials, and clergy.

In the coalfields in those days, it seemed like just about everybody who was working in the mines, or who had ever worked in them, was kin to half the county. Sometimes they really were. In these communities, knit tightly by danger and disaster, the old labor motto “An injury to one is an injury to all” was not just history. It was daily life.

What the people of the Black Lung Association did, the strategies and tactics they used to make black lung not just a coalfield but a national issue, how they eventually won a federal black lung benefits program—that’s a history in itself. For the purpose of understanding creative community organizing, what’s important is that in the face of unresponsiveness from the organization that should have represented and fought for them, the UMWA, they built an alternative organization to do what the UMWA should have done in the first place.

That’s one of the core principles of creative community organizing: When an institution that has a responsibility to everyday people fails to do its job, one option is to build another organization to challenge the first one and force it to do the right thing. That principle holds whether the institution being challenged is a union, a corporation, a unit of government—whether tribal, territorial, city, county, state, or federal—or an educational or religious institution.

The other option is not only to build an alternative organization, but then to use it as a base to take over the original one.

That’s just what the people of the Appalachian coalfields did. While the Black Lung Association was organized and led primarily by disabled miners and their families, with support from those who were still working underground, Miners for Democracy was organized and led by working members of the UMWA, with support from members of the Black Lung Association.

The goal of Miners for Democracy was no less than to take over the union that had turned its back on the miners. Eventually, the working miners who led the organization in its fight for union reform—many of whom had also been active in the Black Lung Association—were elected as the new leadership of the UMWA, and they moved into the stately union headquarters in the heart of the nation’s capital.

So this was the United Mine Workers of America in 1973, when in response to my cousin’s request I started working on the Brookside Strike. The UMWA was unusual within the labor movement of that time in that the leadership knew how to apply a creative community organizing approach to union organizing.

As soon as I arrived in Brookside, Kentucky, I noticed that just about everyone in the small community was pitching in to help the striking miners and their families. Local bluegrass bands played at every rally and mass meeting. Even if they didn’t know any of the old labor anthems like Solidarity Forever or Roll the Union On, their presence was strong statement enough.

On a Saturday morning, if you drove down the main highway through what passed for a town, past the entrance to the Brookside mine and the picket line that ran twenty-four hours a day to keep the mine closed, women holding plastic milk jugs stepped directly in front of your vehicle and asked for a contribution to help feed the families of those on strike. If some of that money went to buy ammunition instead of milk, no outsider was the wiser.

When pro-company judges issued restraining orders to keep the striking miners away from the picket line, these same women took over, with a fierceness and determination that was both awe inspiring and, for any strikebreaker, or “scab,” attempting to cross the line, terrifying. The women used iron pipes to bust out the windshields of the cars and trucks the scabs were driving, dragged them out through the broken glass, and chased them down the road, raining blows on them at every opportunity.

The mines stayed closed.

One of the challenges in creative community organizing is knowing when a local fight has to be moved to the next level. If the picket line that kept the Brookside mine closed had been broken, if non-union miners had been able to cross the line in large enough numbers to get the mines working again, the strike would have been lost.

But even if they could keep the mines in Harlan County closed forever, the Brookside miners wouldn’t win a union contract. Those mines accounted for a small percentage of the coal used by Carolina-based Duke Power Company, which had recently bought up the properties of the family-owned Eastover Mining Company, including the Brookside mine. Duke could get as much coal as they wanted through long-term contracts and from the spot market, buying it as they needed it. As far as Duke Power was concerned, their mines in Harlan County could stay closed forever.

The next step, we agreed, was to carry the fight to Duke’s home territory and build a set of organizations there to bring pressure on the company in their own backyard.

My cousin and I had a major fight about how to do it. “What we’re going to do,” he said, “is buy full-page ads that say ‘Fight Duke Power’s Rate Increase’ in every newspaper in the Duke service area.”

“I thought this was supposed to be about helping the folks at Brookside.”

“We’ll have something in the ads that says, ‘Support the Brookside Miners.’ But that’s not what people in North and South Carolina care about. Those are the two least-unionized states in the country. Most people there wouldn’t know a union if they tripped over it, and they could care less. What they’re mad about is that Duke is trying to raise their electric rates by 17 percent. That’s what will get them to act, if anything will.”

That’s a persuasive argument, one that any organizer understands. Although there are some wonderful activists who do “solidarity work,” standing with others to support a struggle in which they have no personal stake beyond their passionate belief in the possibility of justice, most people are motivated primarily by their own immediate self-interest.

“So they’ll read an ad.” I shook my head scornfully. “Then what?”

“We’ll have a coupon that people can send to a post office box in Durham if they want to help. We’ll come with some organizational name that sounds authentically local—‘Carolina Action,’ or something like that.”

“That’s not how you organize.” I was mad now. “That’s just smoke and mirrors. You need to go door-to-door. You’ve got to talk to people one-on-one. You think people are going to take time to fill out a coupon, stick it in an envelope, lick a stamp, and send it to some organization that doesn’t even have a street address? They’re not crazy, you know.”

I was wrong by six thousand people.

“No hard feelings,” my cousin said. “Anyway, now you’ve got six thousand names. You can organize them any way you want.”

I started calling around the country, asking everyone I knew if they’d loan me one good organizer for thirty days. By now the Brookside Strike was getting pretty well known; a lot of people and organizations responded. Within a few weeks, we had at least a dozen organizers working across the Carolinas. Some of them took the six thousand coupons and sorted them into stacks by primary zip codes. The towns with the tallest stacks got organizers.

In Harlan County, in the Carolinas, all around the United States, the UMWA and its allies turned up the heat. Miners in helmets, safety lamps, and kneepads passed out leaflets on Wall Street. The press ate it up. Some of those same miners came to Charlotte, where I now live, and picketed the Duke Power Company’s headquarters during Duke’s annual meeting, to support the resolutions that shareholders all around the country had filed.

When you watch Harlan County U.S.A., Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning documentary about the Brookside Strike, and you come to that scene, look to the right side of the screen. There I am, uncharacteristically wearing a suit and tie, keeping an eye on the picket line while I wait to go inside the shareholder meeting to challenge Duke Power’s president, Carl Horn.

The pressure kept building. Something had to give—and it did. I was back home in the North Georgia mountains when I got the call. It was Barbara Kopple. “Lawrence Jones just got shot on the picket line,” she said, half anger and half grief. “He’s in the hospital. It doesn’t look like he’s going to make it.”

People become organizers because they want to help other people make their lives better. That’s a good way to feel, and a fine thing to do.

But there’s a built-in problem hardly anyone ever talks about. No matter how well we do our work, however conscientiously and carefully, even the best organizers occasionally make people’s lives worse—sometimes for a while, sometimes forever.

Those we challenge—those who hold power over other people’s lives—didn’t get where they are by accident. They’re not interested in losing the wealth and ease of life they enjoy. When they fight, they fight hard, and they fight to win.

When established power is challenged, people can get hurt, sometimes badly. They lose jobs, homes, cars. They’re shunned, banned, blacklisted, run out of town. Their relationships suffer and break up. In some cases (less common in the United States today, at least compared to our past history, but quite the norm in some other countries), they’re beaten, raped, imprisoned, tortured, murdered.

Here’s the hard part. We as organizers bear at least some responsibility for what happens to the people we’ve encouraged to take these risks. It’s easy to say, “It’s the fault of those in power.” But it is the organizer who says, “You don’t need to take this any more. You need to stand up and speak out. You need to challenge injustice, for your own and your children’s sake.”

If people don’t listen and don’t do what organizers ask them to do, the conditions they want to challenge and change might continue for the rest of their lives—but they might not suffer the loss and pain they now have to live with.

I am hardly guilty of Lawrence Jones’s murder. I am not the security guard who aimed the shotgun and pulled the trigger. I am not the company official who retained the security company. I am not the security company supervisor who employed the guard and gave him his instructions, whatever they were.

But I am also completely removed from the fact of Lawrence Jones’s death.

What responsibility, then, do we as creative community organizers have when things go wrong? How do we learn to think about, act on, and live with these moral dilemmas?

I think about this question a lot. Every once in a while I ask myself: Suppose I could go back in time and sit down to a cup of something with each of the people I’ve tried to help organize over the past forty-five years. How many of them would be truly glad to see me, would sit across the table and thank me for being a part of what we’d done together back then?

Would any of them say, “You never should have showed up, Si. You should have left well enough alone. We were better off before you came.”

And what would I do then?

Nearly thirty years after I left Forrest City, I went back for a visit, hoping to meet and talk with some of the amazing people from whom I’d learned so much. Not a one was left. Mervin Barr was long dead and buried. So now was Florence Clay, who had been the first to welcome the SNCC workers to town, who had let us sleep at the funeral home, whose son Jesse had occasionally gotten me to help out in the embalming room.

If there was still a Clay Funeral Home at all, I couldn’t find it. The then almost-new brick building where I’d wandered at night among the open caskets was boarded up and overgrown. It reminded me of the great eastern Kentucky ballad maker Jean Ritchie’s song about the coal camps that had been shut down and abandoned, with “kudzu vines growing up through the doorway.”

The old wooden funeral home, which in the blistering heat of a Mississippi Delta summer we’d turned into the Forrest City Freedom Center, where I’d once found a set of false teeth in a dusty cupboard, was long gone, a weed-filled vacant lot in its place. On guard duty one night (we were nonviolent, we just wanted to be sure the white townspeople stayed nonviolent, too), sleeping on the floor facing the front door with a shotgun by my side, I once almost shot my SNCC coworker Dwight Simmons when he banged hard and loud on the front door at three in the morning. Waking up from a deep sleep, I thought the pounding on the door was the Klan trying to break in.

Long gone, too, was everybody I’d known, every last one of them. Jerry Casey, local leader of the SNCC project, who left town as soon as the Movement was over, just a step behind the Freedom Fighters returning to colleges, homes, and lives up North and out West. The Hicks brothers, Charles and Willie, with their smiles that could melt glass, with courage to match their grace and ease.

Those whose last and even first names I can’t, at the distance of forty-five years, remember: Melvyn who worked at the lumber yard, who always managed to bring us just one more load of the materials we needed to build the Freedom Center, the tables where the local kids came to study the history they weren’t taught in the Forrest City schools, the shelves for the little library to which people around the country sent books. Marie, who had been raped in the back of a police cruiser, who fed the SNCC workers just about every day in her little house across from the Freedom Center, with only the dusty track that passed for a road in the Black part of town between the two. Truman, who made it back from the Korean War to become the first African American to run for the Forrest City council, even though he lived out of town. The Black farmer who sold Truman a tiny sliver off the edge of the lot he owned inside the city limits, so Truman would be a city landowner and eligible for public office. The white union president from the Yale and Townes forklift plant who came secretly to the Freedom Center under cover of darkness, asking for Black support in his race for mayor, as long as everyone kept their mouth shut so none of the other white folks would know what he’d done.

Had they left because they really wanted to, because it seemed so much brighter, so much more hopeful in Birmingham, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit? Had it been made painfully clear to them that Forrest City, where they had been born and raised, gone to school and to work, married or not married, settled down or stayed stirred up, simply no longer had a place for them, now that the Movement had come and gone?

How many of them would tell me today that despite the hardship and suffering it was worth it after all?

So, as creative community organizers, what are we to do? What’s our responsibility to those whose lives and communities we disrupt, however honorable our motives for intervening? How do we figure out when to encourage people, individually and collectively, to take risks—and when to discourage them from doing so?

To start with, we have to develop within ourselves and our organizations an ethics that helps us be both conscious and conscientious in all of our work. It’s not wrong to ask people to risk their jobs, homes, reputations, even their lives.

What’s wrong is to put people in situations where they take risks without fully knowing it. As ethical organizers, we need to be absolutely certain the people we work with truly recognize the risks they’re taking, the things that could go wrong, the losses they might suffer, before they make the decision to act, individually or together.

For the most part, the communities where we organize are not our communities. The people we work with are not our families, our friends, our neighbors. When the organizing campaign is over, whether the battle is won or lost, whether the organization is built or not built, we leave. They stay.

So whatever decisions are made must be theirs, not ours. We have to refuse to push them into taking risks just because we might take them. The more sure we are of ourselves, of our experiences in other communities and campaigns, of our organizing skills, the more we have to struggle to avoid the arrogance of thinking we know what’s right for other people. We need to recognize that when we raise the stakes they sometimes become much higher than we ever thought they would.

What we can and must offer—without promises, without assurances, without guarantees—is a clear choice between what has been, and what could be.