The 1908 Strike, Where Two Things Ended at Once

In July of nineteen oh-eight, the coal miners of the Birmingham district went on strike. What made the strike unusual, even by the standards of its era, was who struck together.

District Twenty of the United Mine Workers organized thousands of miners across the northern Alabama coalfields, out of a coal workforce of about twenty thousand. That membership was interracial, white and Black miners working the same shafts and organized into the same local chapters. Interracial labor unions in the Jim Crow South were not common. This one had existed for more than a decade, and it functioned.

The strike's immediate cause was a wage cut that U.S. Steel, which had just bought the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company, imposed on miners across its Alabama properties. The union declared a strike on July eighth. Mine operators responded by bringing in immigrant strikebreakers and increasing the use of convict leasees. They also lobbied Governor Braxton Bragg Comer to send in state troops.

He did. Thousands of miners and their families who had been evicted from company housing were living in tent colonies by midsummer. In late August, the governor ordered the military to cut down the tents. Without shelter, the strike collapsed.

The defeat was comprehensive. The interracial District Twenty never fully recovered its membership or its power. The coalfields returned to a labor regime that was essentially non-union for decades. Two things ended that August: a strike, and the most viable experiment in interracial labor organizing the Jim Crow South had produced. The combination would shape Birmingham's labor politics for the rest of the century.