In the last year, West Virginia has taken quite a few hits in the media. A journalist friend described it as a "target-rich environment."
The hits I'm thinking about now are images hurtling through the Web and airwaves portraying us as racist and xenophobic. Obviously, West Virginia, like other places, has its share of racists and bigots - and quite a few of them wound up talking to the press.
But I get upset when people paint the whole state and its history with that brush. West Virginia has a pretty interesting past in terms of race relations. Even before statehood, there were tensions between western mountaineers and the slaveholding elite that dominated Virginia politics.
Speaking of what would become West Virginia, John Brown believed: "These mountains are the basis of my plan. ... God has given the strength of the hills to freedom; they were placed here for emancipation of the negro race. ..." While his plans didn't work out as intended (or then again, maybe they did), West Virginia did secede from the secessionists and played an important if contested role in a certain sectional dustup in the 1860s.
It is fitting that the site of Brown's raid was the place of the first public meeting of the Niagara Movement in 1906, which was founded by W.E.B. DuBois, William Monroe Trotter and others and called for full civil rights for African-Americans. It is widely viewed as a forerunner of the NAACP. DuBois later said that "here on the scene of John Brown's martyrdom. ... We reconsecrated ourselves, our honor, our property, to the final emancipation of the race which John Brown died to make free."
Writing of the birth of the state during the Civil War, John Alexander Williams said, "Few of the 25,000 black people who found themselves living in West Virginia after the Civil War are likely to have wept for the loss of the Old Dominion. What was Virginia irridenta for some of their former masters became a haven of freedom for ex-slaves. Some blacks served as spies or couriers for Union troops operating in the Shenandoah region; others followed the soldiers northward to freedom."
West Virginia played a role in the lives of two men central to the making and preserving of black history. After the Civil War, Booker T. Washington made the long trek over the mountains from Virginia to work at a salt furnace in Malden. Conditions were harsh, but it was there that he began his education together with other former slaves.
Washington described that time thus:
"This experience of a whole race beginning to go to school for the first time, presents one of the most interesting studies that has ever occurred in connection with the development of any race. Few people who were not right in the midst of the scenes can form any exact idea of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for an education. As I have stated, it was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn. ... The great ambition of the older people was to try to learn to read the Bible before they died. With this end in view, men and women who were fifty or seventy-five years old would often be found in the night-school. Sunday-schools were formed soon after freedom, but the principal book studied in the Sunday-school was the spelling-book. Day-school, night-school, Sunday-school, were always crowded, and often many had to be turned away for want of room."
Another African-American who came here to work and stayed to learn and teach was Carter G. Woodson, widely regarded as "the father of black history." As a young man, he enjoyed listening as friends read from newspapers and books and discussed current events. He said, "In this circle the history of the race was discussed frequently, and my interest in penetrating the past of my people was deepened and intensified."
Woodson graduated from and later served as principal at Douglass High School in Huntington, later serving as Dean of the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, now West Virginia State University. In addition to being the first son of slaves to earn a Ph. D. from Harvard, he devoted his life to preserving black history and struggling for justice. In his book The Mis-Education of the Negro, he wrote:
"When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary."
One could argue that the problem of mis-education today is not confined to any one group.
Interestingly, Woodson's passion for preserving African-American history was shared by a contemporary scholar and native West Virginian, Henry Louis Gates Jr., who among other things edited with Kwame Anthony Appiah the Encyclopedia Africana.
In the arena of labor, there are many examples of interracial cooperation and solidarity in the history of United Mine Workers, a union which has played a large part in our history. The UMWA also have given birth to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s, which created interracial and multiethnic industrial unions on a large scale across the country.
The labor movement helped bring many marginalized workers into the mainstream of American life. Many labor activists, such as West Virginia's own Walter Reuther, were strong supporters of the civil rights movement. Workers here also united across racial lines in the black lung movement and in pushing for coal mine and occupational safety.
Space doesn't allow me to do more than mention the contributions of Charleston native Leon Sullivan and many others with West Virginia connections, black and white, who have worked for the common good.
Perplexing as the present is, there are good things in our past to build upon as we move ahead. Sometimes the world forgets these things - and sometimes we do too.
(Note: this appeared as an op-ed of mine in the June 29 Charleston WV Sunday Gazette-Mail. For more check out The Goat Rope).