Jock Yablonski: Murdered for Reform

On the last day of nineteen sixty-nine, in a house in Washington County not far from here, Joseph Jock Yablonski was murdered, along with his wife Margaret and their daughter Charlotte. Yablonski had spent his career in the United Mine Workers of America, and in nineteen sixty-nine he mounted a reform campaign for the union's presidency against incumbent Tony Boyle, charging the union with corruption and indifference to mine safety. He lost that election in December, then filed a legal challenge.

Weeks later, he and his family were dead. The investigation that followed implicated Boyle himself, who was eventually convicted of ordering the murders. In nineteen seventy-two, reformers won control of the United Mine Workers and began rebuilding the union Yablonski had died trying to fix.