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I just finished a piece on the major coalminers illegal wildcat of 1974 which i participated in as a communist activist. I am eager to hear from others with an interest in these matters. It is called "The Ambush at Keystone No. 1: Inside the Coal Miners' Great Gas Protest of 1974. It is available here in web format: http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/ambush_at_keystone_coal_miners_protest_kasama_pamphlet.pdf And here as a PDF: http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/ambush_at_keystone_coal_miners_protest_kasama_pamphlet.pdf * * * * * * * * * Ambush at Keystone: Inside the Coalminers? Great Gas Protest of 1974 By Mike Ely Table of Contents: Introduction Part 1: No Gas? No Coal. Speaking Bitterness in the Courthouse Meeting at the Welch Bypass Roving Pickets and Wildcats The Unexpected Color of Pickets Part 2 The First Picket Home, Briefly A Reckless Morning in Eureka Holler Part 3: Injunctions and State Police The Fight Local by Local Imagining Communist Work A Flyer: Controversy Inside and Out The Argument Against Explanations Fishing at Midnight Part 4: Things Start to Crack Bucket or Suitcase! Keystone?s Outlaw History A Darkly Revealing Moment Part 5: Bullets of Hidden Gunmen Waiting in Virginia Ambush from Company Property ?Let Him Die? Springing the Jailhouse Doors Afterward From the Introduction: From the Introduction: Coalminers in Appalachia waged a fierce 10-year movement of illegal walkouts called wildcat strikes, starting in the late 1960s. Tens of thousands of miners repeatedly confronting the federal and state authorities, the courts, the police, the mine owners, the media, and their own top union officials. Most strikes involved individual mines and local grievances ? and lasted a day or two. But especially after 1974, some strikes started to spread from mine to mine, county to county, state to state ? challenging government policies and court repression. The hard fought strikes lasted for weeks. The leadership of these strikes was entirely at the grassroots, among the working miners and sometimes the local elected leaders at their mines. This was one of greatest upsurges of working class struggle in modern U.S. history. And yet it is virtually unknown. And there is a second story here that is also unknown: A small cadre of Maoist activists worked within that wildcat strike movement to promote revolutionary politics among the coal miners. Radical activists had been sent to the coalfields by the Revolutionary Union (RU) to get jobs in the mines and connect with the militant networks among the workers? both to help organize a distinct self-conscious pole of revolutionary struggle among the miners, and to connect them to larger plans for a socialist revolution in the U.S.
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