American Epistles

The West Virginia Mine Wars were violent conflicts between mine workers and mine owners, that took place between 1912 and 1922. In all there were five armed battles over that 10-year period. This first episode in a three-part series focuses on the history of the mining industry, and the conditions and events that led up to the Mine Wars.

John Robert Lewis was born on February 21, 1940, in Pike County, Alabama. As he learned during a filming of Finding Your Roots, his great-great-grandfather Tobias Carter, registered to voted in 1867, 2 years after the abolition of slavery.  But almost 100 years later, Lewis, his sharecropper parents, and thousands of other descendants of enslaved people were prevented from voting.

Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Montgomery bus boycott, Lewis organized non-violent protests such as sit-ins, and joined the 1961 Freedom Rides. Lewis assumed leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1963.  In '64, SNCC and other civil rights groups led an effort to educate African Americans in Mississippi, and register them to vote.

The Civil War was supposed to mean the end of slavery and the beginning of freedom, franchise, and full citizenship for African Americans. And in the decades after the war, many blacks did make legislative, educational, and financial gains.  But as we learned in the first episode of American Epistles, many more formerly enslaved people and their children faced limited economic opportunity and the constant threat of violence.

During the Revolutionary War, enslaved American James Armistead acted as a double agent and provided valuable information to French general Marquis de Lafayette. Five years after the war, Armistead was granted his freedom and added "Lafayette" to his name.

For enslaved Americans, literacy was a path to freedom.

Those who could write forged the “tickets” that both enslaved and free blacks needed to move about. Some of these tickets took enslaved people all the way to free states, and even to Canada.

Literacy provided spiritual freedom. It enabled people in bondage to read the whole Bible, and not just the sections that enslavers quoted. The Bible represented liberation, both on earth and in eternity. Enslaved Christians identified with the Israelites, whom Moses led out of Egypt and into the Promised Land.

And in sharing their stories, people who had escaped slavery hoped to awaken sympathy in their fellow Americans and achieve freedom for all enslaved people.

Throughout the South, it was illegal for white people to teach black people--enslaved and sometimes free--how to read.  Some whites taught blacks anyway: at times motivated by kindness, other times by self-interest.  But even without the assistance of white people, enslaved Americans learned to read and to write.  Facing the threat of whippings and worse, they learned under cover of night, and in "pit schools" in the woods.  They hid books in their dresses and under their hats so they would be ready for a lesson at any moment.

Anti-literacy laws prevented millions of enslaved Americans from learning to read and write, and from chronicling their lives on paper. Thanks to oral history projects, however, not all of the stories of the enslaved are lost. And, thanks to their ingenuity and determination, some Americans in bondage did learn to write their own stories. This series on slave narratives and the pursuit of literacy begins with the memoir of Bethany Veney, also known as Aunty Betty.

In 1964, most Americans were unaware that black people were literally dying for trying to vote in Mississippi. Bob Moses and other "SNCCs" hoped that Freedom Summer would change that. In the very first days of the program, three volunteers--two of them white--disappeared.  It made national headlines.

That summer, America was also introduced to Fannie Lou Hamer, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention. Sympathetic calls flooded the White House. And President Lyndon Johnson feared for his re-election chances.

The organizers of the Mississippi Summer Project aimed to bring national attention to the violent suppression of African Americans’ civil rights in the Magnolia State. Later called Freedom Summer, the project included Freedom Schools, community centers known as Freedom Houses, a voter registration drive, and an effort to seat delegates at Democratic National Convention, which would be held in August. The summer of ’64 did not mark the beginning of civil rights work in Mississippi. But it was a turning point for the state, and for the nation.

When the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) arrived in France, they were faced with phone lines that had been battered by three years of war. There was also the language barrier to overcome. Bell Telephone helped solve the first problem; the "Hello Girls" solved the second.