Black is the Color

James Wyatt. who write that song last year, knew what the words were all about but it was hard for him to sing them, because black lungs were about all he had left after 40 years in West Virginia's mines. But he sang the song anyway, at a rally in Charleston, and people listened. It was high time to listen to coal miners.

For the most part people in this country don't think about coal miners much, nor for that matter about coal. If they think about it at all they figure that coal must be on the way out. After all, you don't run trains with it any more. You don't heat houses with it. Who needs it?

The answer is that the steel mills need it and the power plants need it and more of it is being mined now than ever before: and the Federal Bureau of Mines predicts that consumption of coal will be doubled in the next generation. In West Virginia, mines are being opened with hundred-year life expectancies.

It used to be that men mined coal with picks and shovels-half a million men. But after World War II, when mechanization came to the mines. machines began replacing the men. Coalmine employment in Appalachia dropped from 475,000 in 1950 to 119,000 last year-but now, according to the Burean of Mines, the decline has about dropped, and over the next several years the number of men working in the mines will increase again. Right now there are 96.00 men working underground, producing the bulk of the 50,000.000 tons of coal produced annually in the United States.

You can look at that statistic more than one way. One way is to figure that 96,000 men out of a U. S. population of 200,000.000 just isn't that many-why worry about them? But you can look at it another way: this country is relying on fewer than 100,000 men to produce the raw resource for the steel and electric power without which the United States wouldn't function for five minutes. When you look at it that way, the rest of us owe a lot to the coal miner. Pretty important man. Couldn't get along without him.

If that's the case we certainly haven't shown much gratitude. Coal mining is the most dangerous occupation: 12 to 20 times as dangerous as driving a truck, for instance. The Associated Press reports that "a man who spends his life working in the mines faces one chance in 12 of being killed in an accident, at least one chance in five of suffering lung disease. He also can figure on suffering three or four injuries severe enough to keep him off the job. An airplane pilot can get insurance at standard rates; a coal miner cannot."

Coal mines have been killing miners at a rate that works out to an average of 100 per month for the past 100 years. Sometimes they die in explosions and fire like the Mannington disaster of 1968 that killed 78 (and Monongah, 1907. 307 dead: Centralia. 1947. 111 dead: West Frankfort, 1951, 119 dead: or Benwood, 1924, 119 dead: or Eccles, 1914. 183 dead-and on and on).

But fire and explosion and roof falls kill fewer men than the slow stifling black lung disease-coal workers' pneumoconiosis, in proper medical terminology. "Black lung" is just that: a lung so clogged with the steady accumulation of coal particles that it no longer functions. When both of a miner's lungs are coal-black and completely clogged, they stop functioning, and he dies. The process, being cumulative, is slow and agonizing. The U. S. Public Health Service estimates that 125,000 miners-active and retired-are afflicted with black lung: and admits that the figure may be conservative, because reports vary in accuracy from state to state.

The reports vary because until very recently the states Weren't taking the trouble to compensate men for black lung. Until 1969 only three states recognized the disease in their Workmen's Compensation statutes, and only one state. Pennsylvania, was actually systematic about diagnosing black lung and compensating for it. Pennsylvania reports that about 1100 miners are dying of the disease every year. That's one state. There are 23,000 working miners in Pennsylvania: nearly twice that many in West Virginia, which is the nation's leading coal-mining state and which, until 1969, operated under Workmen's Compensation laws so rigid and restrictive that only four awards had ever been made for black lung.

What was the excuse? It wasn't that the disease wasn't known about. Although the Public Health Service didn't begin research on black lung until 1963. British doctors had identified the disease as far back as 1813. It wasn't that the disease was declining thanks to automation. On the contrary, the disease was on the increase. Automated machinery creates much more coal dust than picks and shovels ever did, and coal machinery operators breathe more dust on every shift than men working half a century ago breathed in a week.

And no one could say there weren't ways to prevent or control the disease. The British began paying compensation for black lung in 1943, and ten years later, faced with staggering compensation payments, began putting dust-control techniques into effect, he result was quantifiable: 4,000 British miners suffering from black lung in 195?: 740 in 1967. That works out to ?.8 cases of black lung for every 1,000 miners.

Here? by comparison, the Public Health Service figures that one out of every ten active miners has black lung to a debilitating degree, and one out of every five retired miners. In Eastern Ken?u?ky, plagued by every kind of trouble known to men in poverty, the government recently estimated that 27,000 men have the disease. The irony is great. Most of Eastern Ken?ucky's mines are played out: the coal is gone; the men, unwanted, are on welfare: but black lung stays with them....

Who was doing anything about it? The United Mine Workers were so cooperative that the president of U. S. Steel's mining division thanked them for helping to fight "government interference and unreasonable safety regulations." The union spent its time buying a bank and using dues to make low-interest loans to coal companies and Congressmen: its three top officers set up a secret pension fund and put $1.5 million into it for themselves. But retired union miners had to settle for pension benefits of $??5 per month-when they could get it. so many of them were excluded, for technical and arbitrary reasons (and denied the right of appeal) that they finally banded together in 1967 and hired a lawyer to fight the union for them.

And about that same time the miners of West Virginia figured they'd had enough. They finally had a spokesman?a tough old doctor named I. F. B?ff, who lived in Charleston and liked to talk to coal miners. Whenever he could get them together, he talked, and they listened:

Tell me, you there, brother, how much longer do you think you're going to live? You got the black lung! You can't walk ten steps without resting. You can't breathe. You spit up black juice. But the company says you just got compensationitis! You're dying! And the killing will go on until you tell them to grant you compensation and clean up the miners or there won't be any coal coming out of West Virginia!"

The miners went to the union and pleaded for leadership. There wasn't any. The dust was thick in the mines: nobody seemed to care. Then, in May, 1968, 25 men were trapped for ten days in a mine at Hominy Falls: Four died. The rest came out, in a spectacular resence heavily covered by the national press. Suddenly people were aware ? a little-of hard times in the mines. And West Virginia miners were getting together to form the Black Lung Association. They covered the state, working with Dr. Buff and building up organizational strength.

And then there was Mannington-at 5:30 in the morning on November 20, 1968, when one of the world's largest mines, belonging to the world's largest coal company, blew up: 78 men died. The TV cameras came back to West Virginia. What they recorded, millions of people saw: the widows: the old miners, gasping with black lung; the union president. Tony Boyle, praising Consolidation Coal Company: the governor of West Virginia, surmising that disasters were inevitable in coal mining... it was too much to swallow, and people who had never thought once about coal mining thought twice about it now, and the uproar was heard throughout the country.

In West Virginia, two crusading doctors. Don Rasmussen and Hawey Wells, joined Dr. Buff to form the Physicians' Committee for Miners' Health and Safety, and began crisscrossing the coal states drumming up support for reform. The Black Lung Association set its sights on the West Virginia legislature, demanding that black lung be made a compensable disease and that outmoded diagnostic restrictions be discarded. The BLA saw its legislation as a first step in a crusade to force coal companies to treat their employees as human b?ings and to make their mines safe places to work. But the industry, hypocritically accusing the miners of "emotionalism" and "unfair pressure tactics." succeeded in bottling up the legislation in committee.

Finally the miners fought back. In mid-February, 1969. Raleigh County miners walked out of their mines and vowed not to go back until a new law had been passed. The picket signs were simple: "No law, no work." Editorials condemned the miners: union spokesmen said the wild?a? strike was being led by "men who haven't mined coal in 20 years" and told the coal operators not to worry: "the boys'll be back on the job tomorrow." Tomorrow came and went and the boys stayed home, more of them every day, until the strike was statewide. Thousands of men marched on the capitol: Governor Arch Moore told them not to worry-he'd introduce special legislation later. "No!" they yelled back, shouting him down. "Now! Now! Now!" And a few days later every mine in West Virginia was down. Forty thousand miners were striking for their health. The coal operators, be wailing losses alleged to be $1.1 million a day, went to the courts for an injunction, and were refused. Finally, on the last day of the legislative session, the legislature cleared a bill. Three days later. Moore signed it into law: and the miners, in triumph, went back to work. "This time." said an awestruck Charleston TV news analyst. "the pros were outmaneuvered by the amateurs. And I say, good for the miners. I just wish more average citizens would become amateur lobbyists..."

The new West Virginia law wasn't ideal. It did, for the first time, make black lung compensable, but it left administration in the hands of a state Workmen's Compensation Board so hopelessly bureaucratic and inadequate that it has two completely separate medical boards, no central medical administrative facility, no clinical staff and no research program. The bill could have been much better-but to improve it takes massive effort in a state dominated by giant coal and chemical companies allied with "medieval-minded, industry-oriented state senators and their medical counterparts." as Black Lung Association president Charles Brooks puts it. Thousands of claims have been filed with the Workmen's Compensation Board under the new law, but, thanks to the Board's bureaucracy and basic orientation, only one man has received an award so far.

Meanwhile the Black Lung Association is getting ready for another g?-round, and the outcome is uncertain. The job of making coal mining ??? and healthier has really just begun-even with the help of new federal legislation passed at the-??? of 1969 and the BLA, which ??? things moving in the first place, faces a bigger ??? than ever. Black lung may be at the core of the problem: but the problem is also a state that will not move into the 20th century without radical prodding: a union ??? ??? to its wallet to be counted on for help: a country no longer very much concerned with coal miners, now that the last spec??? ??? disaster is a year and a half behind us. For the coal miners of West Virginia there is nothing much in the future to count on: except the slow death of dust in the mines.