Most impressive perhaps was that West Virginia never passed a law requiring racially segregated seating of passengers on trains traveling through the state, something many southern states quickly did following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 1896 in the case known as Plessy v. Ferguson. The railroads found the preservation of the rights of black passengers inconvenient, since it meant that trains originating in or passing through Virginia or Kentucky had to include a “Jim Crow” car (usually an old, substandard piece of equipment always located immediately behind the coal tender and locomotive, all the better to have coal dust and fly ash blow in through the open windows in warm weather), which would be empty during passage through the Mountain State. State Democrats proposed outlawing integrated seating in 1908, but no such legislation was ever enacted. June Glover of Williamson in Mingo County recalled in an interview that whenever she boarded a Norfolk & Western train eastbound for Bluefield, the conductor would routinely ask if she wanted to go forward to “the car.” She always declined, indicating that her destination was the last stop before the train entered Virginia (Glover 2005). A member of Lionel Hampton’s band, trumpeter Joe Wilder, remembered traveling on a train in 1942 that had originated in New York and passed through Virginia. At its first stop in West Virginia, he was amazed to see all of the occupants of the Jim Crow car immediately stand up, pick up their luggage, and move to other locations on the train. One white passenger, upon seeing the African Americans seated among whites, was heard to ask, “What are all these niggers doing here?” Someone responded that they would leave once the train got to Kentucky (Wilder 2008).
Two actions by the state legislature provide further testimony of the political clout of black Mountaineers in the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1919, a law declared it illegal “to advertise, exhibit, display, or show any picture or theatrical act in any theater or other place of public amusement or entertainment within this state which shall in any manner injuriously reflect upon the proper and rightful progress, status, attainment or endeavor of any race or class of citizens against any other race or class of people.” The immediate target of this law was D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Challenged by the manager of the Rialto Theatre in Charleston who had attempted to show the movie, the law was upheld by the State Supreme Court of Appeals (Posey 1934, 70–71). Two years later at the behest of two black legislators, McDowell County delegate Hugh J. Capehart and Kanawha County delegate T. G. Nutter, Governor William Conley signed what came to be known as the Capehart Anti-Lynch law. It held that if someone charged with a crime and in legal custody was lynched, the county in which this occurred was required to pay five thousand dollars to the family or the deceased’s estate. Moreover, action to compel payment could be brought in any state court, not necessarily in the county where the crime had occurred. This would be tested in 1931 following the lynching of two blacks in Greenbrier County and was also upheld by the State Supreme Court of Appeals (Posey 1934, 78–79). In sum, beyond its obvious economic advantages, West Virginia provided a relatively welcoming social and political environment for its African American citizens.
West Virginia’s Black Middle Class: Key to the Culture of Big Band Jazz in the Mountain State
As coal miners and railroad workers, the vast majority of African American males in the Mountain State were part of its working class, but there was also a small but important black middle class. Owners of small businesses, doctors, lawyers, and clergymen resided in Beckley, Bluefield, Charleston, Fairmont, Logan, Welch, and Williamson (all but Bluefield the seats of their respective counties). One member of this group was Hugh J. Capehart, the driving force behind the state’s anti-lynching bill, a leader in Democratic politics in McDowell County, and owner of several businesses in Welch, the county seat, including a hotel catering to black travelers among whom were members of touring dance bands.
Undoubtedly the largest cohort of black middle-class Mountaineers were the teachers employed in the black primary and secondary schools of the state, one of whom was Edward LeRoy Morton. Beyond his own accomplishments, he merits attention as the father of a key figure in the business of big band jazz in the Mountain State, George E. Morton, who arranged engagements for many of the black name bands during the second half of the 1930s. Edward Morton, one of seven children born to former slaves Calvin and Harriet Scott Morton, completed his high school education in 1895 and a year later began a teaching career in Buckhannon, West Virginia. Later, as a principal he presided over black high schools in various parts of the state and organized the black Teachers Association of Northern West Virginia. His final appointment, in 1916, was as principal of Stratton High School in Beckley, Raleigh County, which during his tenure grew from two teachers and 57 students to seven teachers and 262 students by the early 1920s. In addition to his work as an educator, Morton owned and operated a drug store in Beckley’s black community for many years. He and his wife Mary Jordon Morton, an alumna of Fisk University, had three children, all of whom would graduate from West Virginia State College (Flippen 2005). Taken together, Morton’s profession along with his social and political activities—he was an active Republican—place him squarely within the black middle class of the early twentieth century.
Morton’s career as a public educator draws attention to another incentive for black immigration to West Virginia: the availability of both primary and secondary education. Ray E. Williams, a longtime resident of Welch, recalled that his father left the sharecropper’s life in Newberry, South Carolina, in the early 1920s and moved to the coal town of Wilder in southwestern Virginia to work in a mine. When it shut down, he chose to take his family to Gary, West Virginia, because “he heard there were five high schools for black children in McDowell County” (Cranford 2008).9
As will be demonstrated in subsequent chapters, middle-class black Mountaineers played an essential role in promoting big band jazz and dance music in the state. While many resided in the county seats and other larger towns where dances usually took place, others who lived in smaller communities, among them teachers, knew which high school gymnasia could accommodate large crowds and, equally important, which principals would allow this use of their facilities. Also important were the professional contacts among educators, members of the business community, and alumni of the same college that fostered networks of men interested in booking bands, in part for the entertainment they would provide and in part for the additional income the local booker might earn. Beginning in the mid-1930s, such networks repeatedly organized sequences of one-night engagements that took black bands of national reputation across the state within a matter of a few days during the course of tours of far larger geographical range. At each venue waited a member of one of these statewide groups who was responsible for promoting the dance as well as staging it.
Simply put, members of the black middle class in West Virginia brought the bands to the state’s dance venues while the working class of miners, railroad workers, and others constituted the majority of those in attendance, thus providing the revenue to underwrite those engagements. None of this would have been possible but for economic policies that the Roosevelt administration initiated in its first one hundred days in office in 1933, policies that led to a rising level of prosperity for many black Mountaineers.
The Impact of the National Industrial Recovery Act upon the West Virginia Coal Industry
A brief history of West Virginia’s mining industry, from 1910 up to passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in the first one hundred days of the New Deal, will explain its significance. In that period, West Virginia’s coal industry was subject to a range of extraordinary social and economic forces. What had been forecast to be an ever-expanding market in the late nineteenth century proved otherwise when various forces capped its growth, ranging from the introduction of more fuel-efficient boilers and steam engines to campaigns against air pollution and the end of railroad expansion. Despite these inescapable realities, more coal was mined than could be profitably s
old. Historian John Alexander Williams summarized the consequences: “Producers sought to offset lower profits with lower wages; the fledgling United Mine Workers of America sought to defend wage levels while working politically for federal intervention into the industry’s stormy relations. The result was an almost continuous crisis in the coalfields after 1910, interrupted only by booms during and following World Wars I and II” (Williams 2002, 253).
The most dramatic evidence of those “stormy relations” were four “mine wars” between 1912 and 1927 in West Virginia that pitted members of the United Mine Workers of America against mine owners unanimous in their resistance to the labor union. The term “war” is only a slightly exaggerated characterization of the bloody conflicts that on different occasions pitted miners and their allies against company mine guards, private detectives from the (in)famous Baldwin-Felts agency based in Bluefield, local police, the state police, the National Guard, and even the United States Army. Companies not only refused to recognize the union as their workers’ bargaining agent but obtained injunctions prohibiting union organizers from seeking members. Where possible, they imported strikebreakers, evicted families of striking miners from company houses, and in several instances fired on tent communities set up by the UMWA for those evicted from nearby coal camps. African American miners were in the thick of the conflicts, for they too were members of the UMWA and sided with their white co-workers against black strikebreakers. (Williams 2002, 266–72; Lewis 1987, 140).
If the 1910s and 1920s were a time of gradual deterioration of the industry’s fortunes and those of its employees, the onset of the Great Depression in the fall of 1929 represented the nadir. The contraction of the nation’s industrial output shrank the market for coal. After 1929 the number of active mines dropped by 10 percent, and production fell 42 percent. Unemployment rose by 19 percent. By 1932, in-state coal production had dropped to 83.3 million tons from a high of 147 million in 1927. In that same year, of 1,900 mining operations filing returns with the Internal Revenue Service, only 16 percent reported a net income (Baratz 1955, 48). Coal operators cut production, prices, wages, and the size of their workforces in an effort to stay in business. Thirty-three thousand mine industry jobs vanished. While some mines in West Virginia’s southern coalfields paid $4.80 for an eight-hour shift, others cut wages to $2.80 for a ten-hour shift (Tams 1963, 70). Black miners suffered especially, and many appear to have been the first let go. The state’s Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics made the extraordinary claim that black miners could tolerate unemployment more easily than their white counterparts because they had known hard times in the past (Bureau of Negro Welfare and Statistics 1933, 5). The core problem was summarized by Jerry Bruce Thomas: “Despite the Depression’s persistence in the face of the painful readjustments, businessmen and government officials tended to insist on unrealistic policies. The prime example was the nearly universal adherence to the idea of the balanced budget and strict economy in expenditures” (Thomas 1998, 28).
Clearly, another strategy had to be devised to extricate the coal industry from the boom-and-bust cycles of strong and weak markets accompanied by virtually no job security for miners. A solution would not present itself until the summer of 1933 when passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act established the National Recovery Administration (NRA), suspended antitrust agreements for those businesses willing to abide by policies intended to govern the industries of which they were a part, established minimum wages and maximum work hours, guaranteed collective bargaining for workers, and initiated the Public Works Administration and the associated creation of publicly funded jobs for the unemployed. Policies to govern the coal industry were contained within the Bituminous Coal Code, for which agreement was hammered out in September 1933 between the UMWA and the coal operators.
As soon as the NIRA legislation was signed by President Roosevelt on June 16, 1933, and before the Coal Code had been approved, the union acted with dispatch to organize West Virginia’s miners. On June 23, Van Amberg Bittner, president of Local 17 in Charleston, reported to John L. Lewis, the president of the UMWA, that “The entire Northern Field as well as the New River, Kanawha field, Mingo, and Logan are all completely organized. We will finish up McDowell, Mercer, and Wyoming counties this week” (Dubovsky and Van Tine 1977, 185). When those three counties were “finished up,” the state’s entire coal industry was unionized.
The advantage of union representation for miners was demonstrated by the fact that the Code stipulated that, though it had established minimum wages for “inside work” and a maximum number of work hours by day, week, and month, where any union-negotiated contract resulted in wages higher than those minimums, “the contract rates shall govern” (Bituminous Coal Code 1933, Article 4). The Code’s advantages for the mine owners lay in the fact that it provided the means to establish a fair-market price for various grades of coal based on a consensus of two-thirds of the coal producers in each of fifteen districts. Anyone selling coal at less than the fair-market price would be confronted with “prima facie presumption that such person is engaged in destructive price cutting and unfair competition” (Bituminous Coal Code 1933, Article 6, sec. 1). This dramatically reduced the threat to mine owners of being undersold by a competitor, a chronic problem in the past, though what the Code did not address was the fundamental overcapacity of the industry. When small operations started up after the price of coal had been set at a higher level than in the past, they increased employment but also added to the already unwanted surplus of coal (Thomas 1999, 99).
With the Code in place, the union and the coal operators quickly negotiated a contract known as the Appalachian Agreement that governed approximately 70 percent of the industry spread over all or parts of six eastern states (the Alabama field was excluded). It provided for an eight-hour day, a forty-hour week, and gave the miners the right to select the “checkweighman”: the person who weighed each mine car and credited the individual who had mined the coal. It freed miners from the requirement that they live in company towns, trade at company stores, or receive their wages in scrip as opposed to cash. Finally, it set a minimum age of seventeen for any mine employee. As evidence of the fact that the UMWA neither excluded nor discriminated against black miners, one of the contract’s terms guaranteed equal pay for equal work, thus preventing discriminatory wage scales. As they too were union members, the checkweighmen also had an interest in preserving this standard for both their white and black co-workers (Thomas 1999, 98).
The impact of the Bituminous Coal Code and the resulting Appalachian Agreement was dramatic. Comparing employment, wages, and production in 1932, the last year of Herbert Hoover’s Presidency, with those of 1935, the year in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional, one notes significant improvements. By 1935, mining jobs in the nation increased by 85,000, of which 24,000 (28 percent) were created in the Mountain State. Wages in the same period jumped by 75 percent from $677 per year to $1,096. Tons of coal mined rose from 86.1 million to 99.8 million. Not surprisingly, as a consequence retail sales in 1935 were 35 percent higher, including a 41 percent increase in groceries purchased (Thomas 1998, 99).
In the short term, the NRA and the Coal Code were welcomed by both labor and management. The most compelling evidence of this is the federal legislative record following the Supreme Court’s verdict in 1935 that the NRA was unconstitutional. Whereas other industrial leaders welcomed the end of government regulation, the mine owners sought to preserve many of the features of the Coal Code through new legislation, particularly in the area of price regulation and production quotas. In exchange, they were willing to continue to negotiate with the union, accept standards regarding the workplace, and even provide assistance to unemployed miners. The first such legislation was known as the Guffey-Snyder Act of 1936. When declared unconstitutional, the next year it was followed by a revised version known as the Guffey-Vinson Act, which established the National Bituminous Coal Commission to regulate the industry. Whe
n in 1937 it established what major consumers regarded as unacceptably high minimum prices for coal, the industry took the initiative to set prices regionally (Thomas 1998, 106–8).
Whatever its limitations nationally, the NRA was welcomed in the Mountain State. By stabilizing and regulating the industry, it resulted in higher incomes for miners. Higher incomes increased the workers’ discretion concerning how to spend their money. The growth in retail sales cited earlier is one piece of evidence of their increased spending; their support of a culture of big band jazz and dance music was another.
Taken together, the combination of economic and political conditions established within the Mountain State was unique in the mid-Atlantic region. It also explains how the state could become an inviting destination for touring black dance bands in the 1930s and early 1940s. The link between the miners’ labor and their support of big bands is the topic of the next chapter.
PART ONE
The Economic Foundation of Big Band Dance Music in the Mountain State
CHAPTER ONE
From the Coal Face to the Dance Floor:
Black Miners as Patrons of Big Bands
Understanding the connections between the work of coal miners, the major audience for jazz and dance music, and the big bands that played the music that meant so much to them during the 1930s and early 1940s is key to understanding the economic foundation of this musical culture. This chapter follows the money from the coal seam to the dance venue and from there to the band providing the music—and then, in many instances, to the New York–based corporation that managed that band, paid it a part of the proceeds of each engagement, but kept the majority of the earnings.
The black population of the coalfields was not concentrated in any one place. Mining operations depended on the creation at each mine of communities in which miners and their families resided. The reason for this was succinctly explained by William Purvience Tams Jr., (1883–1977), one of the pioneering mine owners in the state and a major force in the coal industry in southern West Virginia during the first half of the twentieth century—a coal baron, in other words. In the early 1960s Tams published a memoir entitled The Smokeless Coal Fields of West Virginia: A Brief History (Tams 1963), a no-nonsense, businesslike discussion of coal mining from the perspective of an owner that explained the necessity of constructing coal company towns: “The mining of coal requires miners; miners require houses. Since most mines were opened in virtually unsettled areas, there was no existing housing. Thus new houses had to be built, and the operators were the only ones with the capital and organization to do the job. Since the almost complete absence of all-weather roads made it necessary for the miner to live close to his work, small villages (often called [coal] ‘camps’) were built close to each mine” (Tams 1963, 51).
Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia Page 5
