King Coal (Drexler Films, Cottage M, Fishbowl Films, Requisite Media, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” KPBS showed a P.O.V. (as in “Point of View,” a long-running series of independently made documentaries) program called King Coal, essentially an autobiographical meditation on the social, political, economic, psychological and even spiritual power of coal. The film’s director, co-producer and co-writer was Elaine McMillion-Sheldon, and instead of a straightforward presentation of the history of coal mining in general and its importance to the Appalachians – which range from Newfoundland in Canada to Alabama, but are mainly concentrated in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and McMillion-Sheldon’s home state, West Virginia – in particular. It’s a fascinating program but also an odd one that cuts back and forth between scenes of a teenage girl – I wasn’t sure whether these were actual home movies of McMillion-Shelton as a girl or re-enactments with a modern-day teen actress playing her in scenes re-creating her childhood – and more standard documentary footage. The discovery of coal in West Virginia is usually attributed to British explorer John Peter Salley – who’s such a legendary figure in West Virginia history he’s referred to simply as “John” in the documentary. In 1742 he was exploring the Allegheny Mountains in West Virginia when he came upon a river, then known as the “New River” (even though, according to this film, it’s the second oldest river in the world), and noticed an outcropping of coal. He renamed it “Coal River” (though today it’s called the Kanawha) and it became the centerpiece of West Virginia’s coal economy.

Much of the film consists of McMillion-Sheldon’s interviews with veteran miners who remember the glory days of the region in the 1930’s and 1940’s, when coal from West Virginia, Pennsylvania and other states in the Appalachian and Allegheny regions was being shipped out steadily to power America’s industrial revolution. Just about all the major products of the industrial age were ultimately manufactured with the energy derived from coal. Coal fired the great steel mills that produced the girders that built the skyscrapers and the metal that became the raw material from which cars were made. Coal acquired such a quasi-mystical image that it was referred to as “King Coal,” and if you said anything bad about coal – either the pollution it caused or the sheer toll it took, both short- and long-term, on the health and welfare of the people who mined it – you were socially ostracized. Among the weirder segments (at least to a life-long Californian who’s never lived in coal country) were a high-school beauty contest to crown a teenage girl as “Queen of Coal” (one contestant does a spectacular dance number she says is a tribute to those who have lost their lives in the mines), an odd recitation in which a former coal miner leads a high-school class in a recitation of the lyrics to Merle Travis’s song “Sixteen Tons” (including the song’s most cynical line, recalled by Travis as something his coal-miner father had often said: “Tell St. Peter I can’t go/I owe my soul to the company store”), and a rather bedraggled procession by members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain.

The Battle of Blair Mountain took place over five days in August and September 1921 and involved an attempt by mine owners in Logan and Mingo Counties in West Virginia to keep the UMWA from organizing their mines. The mine owners hired a private security firm called Baldwin-Felts to keep out the union and summarily fired any miners who joined the UMW. An historical marker on the site of the Blair Mountain catastrophe sums up the story: “BATTLE OF BLAIR MT. In August of 1921, 7000 striking miners led by Bill Blizzard met at Marmet for a march on Logan to organize the southern coalfields for the UMWA. Reaching Blair Mt. on August 31, they were repelled by deputies and mine guards, under Sheriff Don Chafin, waiting in fortified positions. The five-day battle ended with the arrival of U.S. Army and Air Corps. UMWA organizing efforts in southern WV were halted until 1933.” Eventually the Great Depression, the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as President in 1932 and the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 took the federal government (at least temporarily) out of the union-busting business, and the local UMWA officials pointed out (correctly) that their struggle led to the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and successful struggles to form unions in the auto, rubber, textile and steel industries as well. Then there’s the sad story of an older Black woman who recalls how her grandfather was driven from the coal mines by an accident that occurred just six months before his 20th anniversary, which would have qualified him for a pension. “And so he just just left the mines, and there was, you know, no other options for him, as far as getting a retirement,” she said. “There was no one out there to help him fight for it. It's sad to say the union didn't fight for Black miners like they did white miners.”

King Coal has an elegiac tone, as the growing awareness of coal’s environmental costs led to a decrease in demand for its use and sapped much of the coal region’s economic importance. There’s a fascinating postscript to this program in which the locals in a West Virginia town stage a mock “funeral” for King Coal, featuring a Black woman who turns in a stunning performance of a song heralding and mourning the death of King Coal. It was ironic that I watched this right after an MS-NBC interview conducted by Stephanie Ruehl at a political conference in Aspen, Colorado with U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (I-West Virginia), the man who along with fellow Senator Krysten Sinema (I-Arizona) hamstrung much of President Biden’s agenda. Watching King Coal, Manchin’s quirky politics made more sense – especially since, before he left the Democratic Party, he was the one Democrat left in statewide office in West Virginia, which went from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican as the rise in environmental concern among national Democrats led them to policies promoting renewable energy sources instead of fossil fuels, including coal. Manchin had won his first election to the U.S. Senate largely from a TV spot in which he took the text of a legislative bill to create a “green economy,” tied it to a tree, took a rifle and literally shot at the bill, blasting it to smithereens. Those of us in relatively liberal states like modern-day California make blithe assertions that the workers of West Virginia could be retrained for jobs in more environmentally benign energy sectors – but the reality Elaine McMillion-Sheldon shows us in King Coal is that the people in West Virginia and other Appalachian states derive so much of their identity, both as individuals and as a culture, from coal that getting them out of the coal business is virtually impossible.