Labor History Commons^™

Review Of Richard L. Davis And The Color Line In Ohio Coal: A Hocking Valley Mine Labor Organizer, 1862–1900, By Frans H. Doppen, Cicero Fain

History Faculty Research

Much has been written on union organizers' bitter struggle to establish collective bargaining in the coal mines of central and southern Appalachia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mine operators regularly employed deprivation, intimidation, black and white strikebreakers, violence, and murder to enforce their will. Thus, one can imagine the enormity of the challenges facing an African American coal mine labor organizer during this era. Yet, this is the task Richard L. Davis took on "among his 'colored brothers'" in the "microregion known as the Little Cities of Black Diamonds," located in southeastern Ohio's Hocking River Valley (p. …