"Everybody Was Black Down There": Race and Industrial Change in the Alabama Coalfields.

"Everybody Was Black Down There": Race and Industrial Change in the Alabama Coalfields. By Robert H. Woodrum. Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2007. Pp. [xvi], 304. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-2879-9; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-2739-6.)

Southern labor history has come full circle. A field that emerged to trace the rise of such New South industries as steel and textiles now recounts their eclipse and demise. A similar process is at work in the history of employment discrimination. Originally absorbed with describing black efforts to break into white occupations, the field is now concerned with the disproportionate absence of blacks as those jobs and industries disappear. The shift in focus of these two genres is captured well in Robert H. Woodrum's book about the rise and fall of the Alabama coal industry and of the black miners who worked in it.

Woodrum is not the first to investigate the Birmingham District coalfields. The anomaly of an interracial and pro-union workforce in the segregated and anti-labor South has attracted a great deal of attention from historians. Much of this literature concerns the heyday of the Alabama coal industry from the Progressive era through the New Deal. During this period the Birmingham District coalfields went through the normal cycles of boom and bust, as did the fortunes of coal miners' unionism. Woodrum's book includes these familiar markers but has the added virtue of taking us beyond them to the present.

In 1920, 26,000 miners worked in the Birmingham District coal mines. But technological improvements reduced the demand for labor, and local operators lost markets to cheaper imported coal as well as to strip mines in the West. By 2001, only 3,043 coal miners were left in Alabama. Walker County, formerly the heart of the coal district, now included only one underground mine and a few small strip-mine operators. Coal mines previously bustling with sweat, noise, and dust were closed, and coal communities that had been lively with children, cooking, and garden farming were empty. Like a miner in the last stages of black lung disease, the Birmingham coal district was drawing its last wizened breath.

While the decline of the coal industry afflicted all miners, Woodrum contends it was especially devastating for black miners and their families. As fast as the workforce was being reduced, the number of black miners was contracting even faster; as the workforce got smaller, it became whiter. This occurred just at the moment when the remaining jobs were improving in terms of compensation. Woodrum attributes the particularly unfortunate circumstances of black miners to a combination of union indifference and employer connivance. According to Woodrum, the unskilled jobs to which blacks had been consigned were rendered obsolete by new technologies, and the lack of company seniority prevented black miners from bidding for the more skilled positions that remained.

All of this is handled competently, and the narrative has pace. The book ends with a fascinating discussion of United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) district president William Mitch, who was "at the center of this storm" in how the UMWA "dealt with the issue of race" in the South (p. 225). Mitch, according to Woodrum, represents what was best and worst about the UMWA: he and the union stood for the principle of interracial unionism but were also willing to compromise it when union security was threatened. But the ambiguity that Mitch embodied was a result of trying to negotiate between the values of the UMWA and the unpleasant facts it encountered in the South. Despite the limited ability of the UMWA to curtail either the power of coal operators to hire and fire or the power of the forces that were demolishing the industry, Woodrum is surprisingly ambivalent about Mitch's ambivalence. Given the gap that Mitch had to contend with between what could and should be--which Woodrum does such a fine job describing--Mitch deserves a more generous final judgment than he receives here.

ALAN DRAPER

St. Lawrence University