Blair Mountain, West Virginia – the site of the largest civil uprising since the civil war.  This uprising is also the only time that the Government of the United States turned its armed forces (they planned to drop bombs on the miners) on its citizens.  That incident occured in 1921.  Today, the battle continues.  The following is a report by Emily Corio of West Virginia Public Radio.  You may hear the original broadcast click: 0325BlairMtn.  For more information on Blair Mountain or how you can help save this important piece of Appalachian/West Virginian History, visit the Friends of Blair Mountain.

March 25, 2010 · In the original Battle at Blair Mountain (1921) Logan County coal miners trying to unionize confronted company detectives and sheriffs deputies, but the present day battle over Blair Mountain pits history buffs and environmentalists against coal companies and state officials.

The history of the mountain and the current day battle were the topic of a labor law forum at West Virginia University’s College of Law Wednesday.

Efforts to get the National Park Service to list Blair Mountain on the National Register of Historic Places have been ongoing for a few decades.

Barbara Rasmussen is the lead historian on the National Register nomination. It’s her objective to see that the site of the largest organized armed civil uprising since the Civil War is recognized and preserved as a significant part of the country’s labor history.

But it’s been a difficult task to try to have Blair Mountain listed on the National Register. The site was on the list for 274 days last year, but the state’s Historic Preservation Office asked that Blair Mountain be removed because the majority of property owners who were affected didn’t want the land listed.

Rasmussen and Appalachian State University Professor Harvard Ayers are now challenging this.

“Far more than 50 percent of property owners in the district do very much support the nomination and the list that had been supplied, we believe is faulty,” Rasmussen said.

“In the meantime, there’s been a grassroots letter writing campaign. We have a Web site. We are looking at asking our Congressional representatives to look into this. It’s very much a moving target. I don’t know what the outcome will be.”

Christopher Williamson is president of the democratic law caucus and a third year law student at WVU. He organized Rasmussen’s discussion on Blair Mountain, because he cares about the history; it’s part of his family’s story.

“I’m from the southern coal fields, had a lot of family who were miners. My great-grandfather was involved in the battle to get unionization in the southern coal fields,” Williamson said. “Not only is it a really important piece of labor history, it’s a very important piece of West Virginia history and a piece of West Virginia history that doesn’t get near the recognition, near the attention, near the appreciation that it deserves.”

Williamson didn’t learn about the Battle of Blair Mountain from text books or history courses in the public schools he attended in Mingo County.

“I had to learn about those things from my grandmother who told me stories about her father who was involved in it and company men would come to their home and he would have to hide under the floor,” Williamson said. “That history does need to be in the classroom.”

With that in mind, Williamson wrote a bill this year as part of a law school course that would have required public schools to teach aspects of the state’s labor history during one week in September.

“They (House members) changed it, took the wording from that, made it into a resolution, and it was adopted in both the House and the Senate this legislative session.”

And thanks to that resolution, West Virginia will recognize labor history week every September. Williamson hopes during that week, more school children learn about Blair Mountain and other labor events in the state’s past.

Always one to admit when I’m wrong (or at least I try), I share this post from the blog Ocean’s Ways, which corrects misinformation about St. Patrick and his driving pagans from Ireland.  I have long believed his driving the “snakes” from Ireland to mean the pagans – i.e., druids, etc.  This however is not correct.  So, I stand corrected and say a hearty Happy, though belated, St. Patrick’s day!

 Let’s get this one settled out here and now.

Thank you. Good night. Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Please skip the green beer. You don’t know where it’s been.

 SOURCE:  Ocean’s Ways

SOURCE:  The Unfinished Lives Project

Washington, DC – Desmond Tutu, emeritus Archbishop of Cape Town, issued a strong protest against African politicians and clerics who are persecuting LGBT people throughout the African continent. In a powerfully worded editorial published in Friday’s Washington Post, the Nobel Peace Prize winner denounced anti-gay laws and policies in Uganda, Malawi, Rwanda, Burundi, Senegal, and Kenya. Since perpetrators of anti-LGBT violence use Christian rhetoric and scripture in support of their crimes against gays and lesbians, The Unfinished Lives Project quotes at length here from the text of the editorial in order to begin to redress the perception that God, Christ, and the Church are in solidarity against LGBT people. It is our hope that religious leaders of conscience throughout the world will join Archbishop Tutu in undercutting religious and spiritual bigotry wherever it arises. The Archbishop writes: “Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people are part of so many families. They are part of the human family. They are part of God’s family. And of course they are part of the African family. But a wave of hate is spreading across my beloved continent. People are again being denied their fundamental rights and freedoms. Men have been falsely charged and imprisoned in Senegal, and health services for these men and their community have suffered. In Malawi, men have been jailed and humiliated for expressing their partnerships with other men. Just this month, mobs in Mtwapa Township, Kenya, attacked men they suspected of being gay. Kenyan religious leaders, I am ashamed to say, threatened an HIV clinic there for providing counseling services to all members of that community, because the clerics wanted gay men excluded.”

“Uganda’s parliament is debating legislation that would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment, and more discriminatory legislation has been debated in Rwanda and Burundi.

“These are terrible backward steps for human rights in Africa.

“Our lesbian and gay brothers and sisters across Africa are living in fear.

“And they are living in hiding — away from care, away from the protection the state should offer to every citizen and away from health care in the AIDS era, when all of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services. That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offense is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said ‘Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones.’ Gay people, too, are made in my God’s image. I would never worship a homophobic God.”

The Archbishop leaves no room for misunderstanding: “Hate,” he writes, “has no place in the house of God.” We at Unfinished Lives could not agree with him more.