Hillbillies as Union Leaders
While the stereotype of a hillbilly is someone living off the land, shiftless and underemployed, coal mining was a big industry in “hillbilly” country and employed many of the people in the Appalachian region. Although there was big money in coal mining, little of it trickled to the people actually working in the mines, digging it out of the earth. Conditions were deadly. Mine explosions were a constant threat. Workers started unionizing in the early 1900s. Employers fought that effort with all their might. In the 1920s, coals miners in West Virginia built unions active to this day. Professor (and descendant of labor leader Frank Keeney) Chuck Keeney, who wrote about the 1921 Blair Mountain miner’s strike, told the New York Times, “You can embrace the term ‘redneck’ as what it meant to the miners. Reach back into our radical roots, our resistance roots. That’s who we really are.”