African American Miners and Migrants: The Eastern Kentucky Social Club.

African American Miners and Migrants: The Eastern Kentucky Social Club. By Thomas E. Wagner and Phillip J. Obermiller. Afterword by William H. Turner. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 2004. Pp. xiv, 158. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 0-252-07164-6; cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-252-02896-1.)

This brief study of an African American social organization, created by migrants from the eastern Kentucky coal fields, deals mostly with life and labor in two model coal towns--Benham and Lynch. The authors describe the development of these planned communities in the context of twentieth-century southern Appalachian coal mining and its often harsh living and working conditions. They argue that despite racial discrimination and segregation, dangerous occupations, and geographic isolation, African American coal miners lived relatively good lives in Benham and Lynch from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Thomas E. Wagner and Phillip J. Obermiller provide a good narrative of the development of Benham and Lynch. They emphasize the significance of the planning for these model towns by two giant industrial firms that entered the eastern Kentucky coal region around World War I: International Harvester (Benham) and U.S. Steel (Lynch). With the financial resources to build entire communities as well as large mining operations, these corporations designed company towns with housing, social centers and recreational facilities, schools, churches, stores, and hotels from carefully prepared blueprints. Wagner and Obermiller make it clear that control over miners' lives on and off the job was fundamental to the development of these model towns. But they also claim that living conditions there were better than in most other coalmining communities and that miners sought out and enjoyed the benefits of such conditions.

African American coal miners realized these benefits, despite residential and community segregation and job discrimination. The authors argue that African Americans viewed their conditions in the model towns as progress over both rural and urban standards of life in the Deep South, concluding that "ambiguity" best defines the coal-town experience (p. 117). Despite the disadvantages they faced, these miners took away basically positive memories of the community life in coal towns when they migrated to northern cities during the 1950s and 1960s and founded the Eastern Kentucky Social Club (EKSC) to sustain the close ties they had developed in the coal fields. The authors rely on published studies, archival records, and oral histories of former Benham and Lynch residents to support their analysis.

There is good reason for Wagner and Obermiller to distinguish model coal towns from the coal communities that developed without the well-financed, comprehensive planning that these Harlan County towns featured. The authors demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the scholarly literature on southern Appalachian coal mining, communities, and labor relations. But their general argument has several weaknesses.

Would African American migrants from non-model coal communities show less inclination to form social clubs based on their places of origin? Would such organizations be quite different from the EKSC? The authors briefly discuss social clubs of black and white Appalachian migrants, but they do not examine them for differences that could explain the bonds among EKSC members. This gap in their argument shows up particularly when we learn that EKSC members also came from several other coal communities that were not model towns, not just from Benham and Lynch. The authors also fail to compare coal communities in southern Appalachia systematically, leaving their analysis without enough evidence to support their argument. Was the African American experience in the two model towns really that different from life in the poorer and less-planned coal camps? If so, exactly how was it different, and how did those differences affect residents who later moved away?

The authors may be right about the reasons migrants from Benham and Lynch formed the EKSC, but they do not help us understand why those reasons are important. The problem with African American Miners and Migrants comes down to the fact that many southern black migrants joined social organizations in northern cities that were based on migrants' places of origins. They did so to perpetuate bonds of kinship and friendship, whether or not they recalled their southern communities fondly. If the African American migrants from Benham and Lynch were different from southern black migrants generally, Wagner and Obermiller need to probe their community lives, families, and work histories more deeply and show with more data that these former coal-field residents had distinctive experiences.

PETER GOTTLIEB

Wisconsin Historical Society