Strip Mining Black History Month

As schools, communities and politicians across the country celebrate Black History Month in February, they will be remiss if their lessons don\'t include the coal fields of Fayette County, West Virginia. There, in the 1890s, a teenage African American followed his brothers into the coal mines, serving what Carter Woodson called his \"six-year apprenticeship.\" In the evenings, the young Woodson would gather with other black coal miners, read the newspaper, and listen to their extraordinary stories of life underground, and their struggles during the Civil War and Reconstruction Era.

The daily history lessons among African Americans in Appalachia were not lost on Woodson. He later wrote that his \"interest in penetrating the past of my people was deepened and intensified\" during these sessions among coal miners in Fayette County. Woodson managed to return to high school in Huntington, West Virginia -- the access to education for African Americans being one of the reasons his family had chosen to come to Appalachia -- and earned his diploma in two years. He moved on to earn a degree at Berea College, which had been founded in the hills of eastern Kentucky by abolitionists in 1855, the University of Chicago and then a Ph.D. in history at Harvard University.

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