A hero in his homeland, the 10,000-strong crowd at London’s ExCel Centre, awash with red, white and blue tricolour flags of France, chanted his name in the sort of reception usually reserved for pop stars.

via Judo: Incredible Riner sends French fans delirious | Reuters.

via Judo: Incredible Riner sends French fans delirious | Reuters.

Life is short and summers on Martha’s Vineyard are even shorter. But a group of African-American men and women called the “Polar Bears” are finding ways to prolong both. In fact, they’ve been doing so for more than fifty years.

via Read more.

When Lee Wesley Gibson began his new job as a coach attendant with Union Pacific Railroad in 1936, the country was in the grips of the Great Depression.

Millions of Americans were out of work. Like so many others around the country, Gibson moved from Texas to California in search of new opportunities. Within a year he landed a job with the railroad in his new hometown, Los Angeles.

It was the beginning of a 38-year journey, during which he traveled the country and ultimately landed a much-coveted job as a Pullman porter, one of the uniformed railway men who served first-class passengers traveling in luxurious sleeping cars.

“I was very happy,” Gibson said. “It helped me feed my family … take care of them.”

Like thousands of other African Americans of his era, Gibson had found a job that provided steady work and helped elevate his family’s socioeconomic status. He was able to buy a car and a brand new home.

“For African Americans, it was a middle-class job,” said Lyn Hughes, founder of the A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum in Chicago, which celebrates the contribution of African Americans to the nation’s labor history. “It represented a sort of freedom, flexibility and education all in one bundle.”

The Pullman Palace Car Co. was founded by George Pullman in 1867 and was most famous for the development of the railroad sleeping car, which featured plush upholstery, marble-topped wash basins and lavishly decorated interiors. In the beginning, the company hired only African American attendants.

In 1925, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters became the country’s first all-black labor union and helped pave the way for equal employment benefits; it later played a role in the civil rights movement.

Today, at 100, Gibson is the oldest surviving Pullman porter, according to records kept by the Randolph museum. There are fewer than 50 of the railroad men surviving.

“It was hard,” Gibson said of his work. “But it was fun.”

On May 21, the centenarian celebrated his birthday with more than 200 of his friends and family, which includes three daughters, six grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren, 13 great-great-grandchildren and one great-great-great-grandchild.

President Obama, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, the Union Pacific Black Employees Network and the USA Retirement Railway Board all sent cards, certificates of recognition or gifts.

Born in Keatchie, La., Gibson was the second of two children raised by a single mother. The family later moved to Marshall, Texas. When Gibson graduated from high school, he wanted to enroll in tailoring school, but the family couldn’t afford it.

Instead, he worked at odd jobs and started a cleaning and pressing service, before moving to Los Angeles in 1935 in search of a better life. He lived with a friend, earning his keep making sandwiches at a local tavern and at one time doing cleaning for a food production company.

Then one day in 1936, a deacon at his church who worked for the Union Pacific Railroad as a coach attendant asked Gibson’s wife, Beatrice, if her husband would be interested in a job with the railroad. Gibson jumped at the opportunity.

“He took me to the superintendent,” Gibson said, “and they hired me on the spot.”

In the late 1960s, Gibson graduated to the position of Pullman porter. His first trip in this new role was to Promontory, Utah — famous for the summit where the country’s first Transcontinental Railroad was officially completed in 1869. Soon he was rubbing shoulders with celebrities such as composer, pianist and big band leader Duke Ellington, jazz singer Cab Calloway, and jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who Gibson recalled was always friendly and willing to talk.

“He played Vegas and would catch my train from Vegas many times,” Gibson said. “He was quite interesting.”

Being a Pullman porter “was desirous by most African Americans,” said Hughes, who has written a book on the subject. “But not everyone could do that job. You had to be a certain type of person. You had to have natural elegance, stature … and the ability to interact with people at all levels.”

Porters sometimes also had to endure humiliation and racism as well as the caprice of some passengers and white railway employees. The black union would help to protect workers from some of these abuses.

Gibson says he was always treated with respect.

The Pullman Co. ended operation of sleeping cars in 1968, according to Aaron Hunt, a spokesman for Union Pacific. At that point, the various railroads took over the function, and Pullman porters were transferred to such companies as Union Pacific and later Amtrak.

Gibson, who retired in 1974, joked that the long periods away from home helped to strengthen his marriage.

“It kept the wife from not getting tired of me,” he said.

Despite his age, Gibson remains fit and alert. He takes no medication, doesn’t wear glasses and still likes to drive.

His wife died in 2004, after 76 years of marriage. But he has a lady friend, Evelyn Dotson, 82, and three doting daughters, Gloria Gibson, 65, Barbara Leverette, 76, and Gwendolyn Reed, 78. His firstborn, a son, died in 1958 of Hodgkins disease.

His daughters take turns looking after Gibson, preparing meals, taking him out to dine, making sure he has new clothes.

“He’s the backbone of the family,” Reed said. “At 78 years old, I can holler ‘daddy’ louder than anyone in the world, and he will always say, ‘What do you need?’ — at 100. He’s a role model for all the young men in our family … for all the men in the neighborhood.”

Gibson, a former state employee, gushed as she recalled how her father tailored her first formal dress to attend a junior high ball. He also made his daughters’ flag girl uniforms.

Only middle daughter Leverette was willing to throw a friendly jab at her father.

“My father and I are oil and water,” she said. “He’s so stubborn.”

Gibson didn’t miss a beat.

“And you’re stubborn-er,” he fired back, with a mischievous grin.

In the age of Twitter news travels fast. So when I heard that there were people at the Lexington July 4th Festival selling t-shirts with the slogan, “Yup, I’m a racist” emblazoned on the front, I just had to see for myself. So I jumped in the car with my trusty video camera in hand, and drove down to the festival. It was not long before I found what I was searching for.

In an earlier piece, I took a stand against those who would use patriotism for personal or political gain. The folks in front of the Fayette County Courthouse in Lexington, Kentucky took pimping patriotism a disturbing step farther. Not only were they promoting themselves as defenders of the Constitution, they openly fueled the right-wing paranoia that inches ever closer to violence.

I apologize for the quality of the video. I held the camera in open view at chest level in order to look the people I was speaking to in the eye. The conversations were revealing, some of the video a bit shaky.

“He once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan, what does that mean? I’ll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and hollows from West Virginia. He was trying to get elected. “And maybe he did something he shouldn’t have done come and he spent the rest of his life making it up. And that’s what a good person does. There are no perfect people. There are certainly no perfect politicians,” he added.”

He is one of Byrd “fleeting comments:”

“ I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side… Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds. ”

If you look at many sites Republicans are running with that tired line that Democrats are more racist. White people started the KKK it had no political affiliation, beyond raping, torturing, terrorizing and murdering millions of black people. The clan has killed many more American civilians than Al-Qaeda. Instead of whites examining this sickness at the root of American ideology and how it plays out today they finger point and hurl accusations. I hope that more whites get honest about how they feel and instead of apologizing for their “gaffes.” The leopard has not changed his spots.

He hardly ever speaks during oral arguments, often appearing asleep on the bench. But in his written opinion Monday supporting the right to bear arms, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas roared to life.

Referring to the disarming of blacks during the post-Reconstruction era, Thomas wrote: “It was the ‘duty’ of white citizen ‘patrols to search negro houses and other suspected places for firearms.’ If they found any firearms, the patrols were to take the offending slave or free black ‘to the nearest justice of the peace’ whereupon he would be ‘severely punished.’ ” Never again, Thomas says.

In a scorcher of an opinion that reads like a mix of black history lesson and Black Panther Party manifesto, he goes on to say, “Militias such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, the White Brotherhood, the Pale Faces and the ’76 Association spread terror among blacks. . . . The use of firearms for self-defense was often the only way black citizens could protect themselves from mob violence.”

This was no muttering from an Uncle Tom, as many black people have accused him of being. His advocacy for black self-defense is straight from the heart of Malcolm X. He even cites the slave revolts led by Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner — implying that white America has long wanted to take guns away from black people out of fear that they would seek revenge for centuries of racial oppression.

Of course, Thomas’s references to historic threats posed by white militias might have been dismissed if not for a resurgence of such groups in the year after Barack Obama’s election as the nation’s first black president.

And if their behavior turns as violent as their racist rhetoric often threatens, then Thomas will almost certainly go down in history as the nation’s foremost black radical legal scholar.
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Thomas, the only black justice, sided with the court’s conservative majority in a 5 to 4 vote to give Otis McDonald, a 76-year-old black man from Chicago, the right to buy a handgun. In his lawsuit to repeal Chicago’s restrictive handgun law, McDonald said he needed a gun to protect himself — not from a white mob but from young black “gangbangers” who were terrorizing his suburban Chicago neighborhood.

Thomas agreed with McDonald, concluding that owning a gun is a fundamental part of a package of hard-won rights guaranteed to black people under the 14th Amendment. And just because some hooligans in Chicago or D.C. misuse firearms is no reason to give it up.

“In my view, the record makes plain that the Framers of the Privileges or Immunities Clause and the ratifying-era public understood — just as the Framers of the Second Amendment did — that the right to keep and bear arms was essential to the preservation of liberty,” Thomas wrote. “The record makes equally plain that they deemed this right necessary to include in the minimum baseline of federal rights that the Privileges or Immunities Clause established in the wake of the War over slavery.”

Thomas made no mention of the black loss of life and liberty from handguns being wielded by other blacks. But he has made clear on other occasions that the problem is not that there are too many guns in the black community; the problem is too many criminals.

He dismissed the cogent gun-control arguments of his retiring colleague, John Paul Stevens, conjuring up the abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens instead: “When it was first proposed to free the slaves and arm the blacks, did not half the nation tremble?”

Let ‘em quake, Thomas appears to be saying.

From Frederick Douglass, Thomas writes: ” ‘The black man has never had the right either to keep or bear arms,’ and that, until he does, ‘the work of the Abolitionists was not finished.’ “

Because of his conservative take on affirmative action and prisoners’ rights, he has been cast as an uncouth African American who didn’t understand black history, a dupe for arch conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and a man who couldn’t think for himself.

What Thomas has created, however, is a legal defense of the Second Amendment so thoroughly original and starkly race-based that none of the white justices would even acknowledge it, as if it were some blank sheet crafted by an invisible man.

That ought to be a clue enough for black people that this document is at least worth a look. You may not agree with his conclusion, but there’ll be no mistake about where he’s coming from.

They thought it was about Elvis.

That’s what a focus group of a dozen African-American women concluded about the musical “Memphis” last summer when they were asked to assess the show’s tagline, “The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll.”

But after seeing artwork featuring Felicia, the black R&B singer in the show, and after hearing about the turbulent romance between the character and a white D.J., the women in the focus group said the show was much more up their alley.

With that in mind, the producers changed the “Memphis” tagline before opening on Broadway to: “His Vision, Her Voice. The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll.”

The use of focus groups is one of several diversity strategies, aggressive by theater standards, used not only by “Memphis” but also by another new Broadway musical, “Fela!”; the new play “Race”; and the revival of “Fences” — all shows centered on black characters, who are rarely in the forefront of major plays and musicals.

While the “Memphis” producers estimate that 25 to 30 percent of their audience is black, the producers of “Fela!” and “Race” say that their outreach has resulted in black theatergoers’ making up 40 percent of attendees. “Fences” and its star, Denzel Washington, are also drawing large numbers of black people, though the show began selling out early and has been a tough ticket to obtain, a spokesman said.

Broadway shows about black characters often draw black theatergoers, but the producers of “Memphis” and “Fela!” as well as producers of some coming shows are particularly going after African-Americans, given that Broadway’s overall attendance has been on the decline, down 3 percent for the 2009-10 season. Whether black theatergoers become a larger, reliable part of the Broadway audience remains to be seen, as do the range and quality of the shows that are offered to appeal to them.

Yet producers clearly sense a market that has not been tapped out: This fall’s Broadway lineup already includes two new musicals about black men, “Unchain My Heart: The Ray Charles Musical” and “The Scottsboro Boys,” and possibly the new two-character play “The Mountaintop,” about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., depending on whether the producers can land the stars Samuel L. Jackson and Halle Berry.

Indeed, the producers of “Memphis” credit word of mouth among black people for helping keep the show alive through slow-selling weeks to reach the Tony Award voting season that began in May and ended when “Memphis” won the top award for best new musical this month.

While some theater critics and rival producers have derided “Memphis” as a conventional show and have spurned its story of racial reconciliation as simplistic, the musical’s success at building a black audience is anything but business as usual for Broadway. Yes, some of the marketing strategies were tried before with the 2005 musical adaptation of “The Color Purple,” but that show had a well-known title and Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement going for it.

By contrast, “Memphis” has no stars and an unknown score and story. But its producers believed that their show would become known as memorable entertainment if buzz spread among enough so-called Broadway taste-makers — who, in the case of “Memphis,” were not the usual critics, bloggers and veteran theatergoers, but instead African-American ministers, choir directors and black women.

“Anyone who says that ‘Memphis’ is somehow unoriginal as a piece of musical theater is missing the impact that the show is having on a wide cross section of people who feel that Broadway isn’t usually for them,” said Sue Frost, a lead producer of “Memphis,” who noted with pride that Michelle Obama took her two daughters to a performance of the musical this spring. (The three also caught “The Addams Family.”)

The R&B flavor of the show, and the serious treatment of African-American life in the segregated 1950s, were the selling points of the show for Willie Anderson, a tourist from Atlanta who took a group of 11 relatives and friends to a recent performance. Each paid $94 a ticket.

“We wanted to see something with some African flavor, and what we heard in Atlanta was that ‘Memphis’ was a show worth seeing,” Mr. Anderson said. “The main thing is, you want music that you’ll appreciate and like. I have nothing against ‘Mary Poppins,’ but I don’t see that as a show for us like ‘Memphis’ will be.”

One theater group-sales company that focuses on minorities, Full House Theater Tickets Inc., reported that “Memphis,” “Race,” and “Fela!” had drawn disproportionately large numbers of African-Americans. (Group sales are a cornerstone of commercial success for most shows.) “Fela!,” about the Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, has sent vans emblazoned with the show’s logo and playing Mr. Kuti’s music to racially diverse neighborhoods, where the drivers hand out brochures for the show and talk it up to passers-by.

“Part of the appeal of these shows is that they give black audiences something to talk about,” said Sandie M. Smith, president of Full House. “For ‘Race,’ we went after and got African-American attorneys’ associations, groups that dealt with the justice system and, in some cases, created post-show discussions because there were rich topics to discuss.”

Many of these post-performance conversations have happened at the theater district restaurant B. Smith’s, named for its owner, the black entrepreneur and former television show host.

To expose young people to Broadway and, with luck, spread word about the show to more parents, the “Memphis” producers spent $75,000 on their own program, Inspire Change, that has sent cast members into schools and then students from those schools — nearly 1,000 so far — to the musical. The program began after a fifth-grade teacher at the KIPP Star College Prep Charter School, in Harlem, wrote to the “Memphis” producers after seeing a performance and asked if the musical had an educational outreach component and discount tickets for students.

“A week after we saw it,” said the teacher, Trenton Price, “I introduced the vocabulary word ‘integrate’ in class, and a kid used an example from ‘Memphis’ — about how the white D.J. goes into Felicia’s bar, but the bar wasn’t integrated at that point.”

Felicia, the R&B singer who is the leading lady of the show (played by Montego Glover), has proved to be a draw for African-Americans. The marketing team for “Memphis” played clips of Ms. Glover singing Felicia’s big first-act number, “Colored Woman,” at Harlem street fairs, as well as at beauty salons, churches and community centers in predominantly black neighborhoods in New York City.

The lyrics — “Colored woman with few chances/Has to do what she must do!” — proved captivating to women in particular, according to Ms. Frost, the producer.

Still, Ms. Frost and her main producing partner, Randy Adams, acknowledged that African-American support was not enough to sustain a Broadway show: “Memphis” grossed $835,071 for the week ending June 20, its best box office week so far, but the show has sold unevenly during some weeks and is far away from turning a profit.

“It takes time to reach a tipping-point moment where everyone is talking about your show,” Mr. Adams said. “We just have to keep faith that our fans will continue spreading the word.”

Oprah Winfrey Network and Oprah Winfrey are the victims of a racist spam blog attempt. (And yes, it’s racist.) Someone has put together a set of spam blogs that have served to upset the normal order of search trends.

Now, the term “Oprah riggs contest in favor of african american” is the number one search on Google, and there’s ample evidence to show this has been rigged.

And according to Geekosystem.com, a forum called 4chan.com was used to rigg voting for a contestant in Oprah Winfrey Network’s contest for you to have a chance at your own television show.

The backstory is that Oprah Winfrey hosted a contest for you to have a chance at your own television show. Apparently fans of Zach Anner, a wheelchair bound comedian from Austin, Texas with cerebral palsy wanted him to win so badly, they rigged the voting to favor him.

These Zach Anner fans feared that Doctor Phyllis, an African American contestant with idea of a school-based reality TV show, would win. Oprah Winfrey Network was accused of favoring Doctor Phyllis after a vote spike in that person’s favor and so much so they were accused of rigging the effort. A charge that, in itself, has a racist origin.

Geekosystem reports they received an email from “an anonymous 4channer:”

I didn’t know if you knew this, but zach anner went from 3000 to 2.4m votes in a few hours. Most of his original votes came from 4chan. It’s an anonymous forum. When I saw it, there were 8000 votes. Everybody wanted to genuinely help him, including me… so we rigged a few votes. I have no idea how it came to such a large spike in votes, probably a botnet of some sort was sent to vote on him. There is even a greasemonkey script to vote for him that I personally made for myself… not knowing how big of an issue this whole thing would turn out to be. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/79013

So, apparently the same group of people believed Zack’s was not going to win (even though as of Wednesday he was ahead in the voting) and because of the vote rigging they started, so on Thursday and Friday they’ve have taken to forums like Tipsity.com and blogs to complain using the same term “Oprah riggs contest in favor of african american.” Over and over again.

According to the Google Trends search, five percent of the traffic is from Marietta, GA as of this writing. That’s not a large place, so it’s a fair bet the blog spam work is coming from either that town or nearby. The reason is someone in that town may be managing a spam effort that calls for their group to search for that term to test it.

It’s racist and shows why some people regardless of race or color are so hardwired to think that someone white must be the one to have something good happen to them, that they’ve become mentally ill. Any deviation from that ideal means, to them, something’s wrong. So, maybe someone’s better than Zach Anner? And perhaps that person’s black? And maybe it is Doctor Phyllis. So what?

It must be stressed that none of this is Zach Anner’s fault. He’s quoted as saying that he does not think the Oprah Winfrey Network or Oprah have rigged votes for Doctor Phyllis, and there’s no evidence to suggest he was behind the plot to increase his own votes and to spam blogs and forums with “Oprah riggs contest in favor of african american.” Moreover, Zach Anner comes across as a person who would not have a racist thought in his fiber.

But the Zach Anner plot is one with not a small level of racism involved in it. Geekosystem also posted a one-sheet instruction list that asked people to use it and you can see here. It allegedly contains a macro, which is a kind of program, that will automatically vote for anyone other that, and this is what’s written on it “Dr. Nigger.”

That’s an obvious example of racism. In other words, just because Doctor Phyllis is black and female like Oprah, and has some popularity, the racist sickos who have to see someone white win are all in a lather that a black woman could win.

(Plus, it’s not happenstance that the majority of searches, five percent, were from Marietta, Georgia. I contend this racist plot may have started there. )

I think Oprah should stop the contest and devote a week to the discussion of the rise of racism. There’s a section of people who are being allowed to get away with sick behavior and we’ve got to cap this once and for all. Racism is a mental illness and it’s gone too far in its spread.

Race relations in our country are better that they have been overall but there are people who have not been trained to embrace and understand a multi-racial America. That goes for blacks who are used to seeing someone white in charge and anyone else who has such problems. That can rise to an unhealthy level of neurotic racism. In this case, it has.

It must be stressed that none of this is Zach Anner’s fault. He’s quoted as saying that he does not think the Oprah Winfrey Network or Oprah have rigged votes for Doctor Phyllis, and there’s no evidence to suggest he was behind the plot to increase his own votes and to spam blogs and forums with “Oprah riggs contest in favor of african american.” Moreover, Zach Anner comes across as a person who would not have a racist thought in his fiber.

But the Zach Anner plot is one with not a small level of racism involved in it. Geekosystem also posted a one-sheet instruction list that asked people to use it and you can see here. It allegedly contains a macro, which is a kind of program, that will automatically vote for anyone other that, and this is what’s written on it “Dr. Nigger.”

That’s an obvious example of racism. In other words, just because Doctor Phyllis is black and female like Oprah, and has some popularity, the racist sickos who have to see someone white win are all in a lather that a black woman could win.

(Plus, it’s not happenstance that the majority of searches, five percent, were from Marietta, Georgia. I contend this racist plot may have started there. )

I think Oprah should stop the contest and devote a week to the discussion of the rise of racism. There’s a section of people who are being allowed to get away with sick behavior and we’ve got to cap this once and for all. Racism is a mental illness and it’s gone too far in its spread.

Race relations in our country are better that they have been overall but there are people who have not been trained to embrace and understand a multi-racial America. That goes for blacks who are used to seeing someone white in charge and anyone else who has such problems. That can rise to an unhealthy level of neurotic racism. In this case, it has.

It must be stressed that none of this is Zach Anner’s fault. He’s quoted as saying that he does not think the Oprah Winfrey Network or Oprah have rigged votes for Doctor Phyllis, and there’s no evidence to suggest he was behind the plot to increase his own votes and to spam blogs and forums with “Oprah riggs contest in favor of african american.” Moreover, Zach Anner comes across as a person who would not have a racist thought in his fiber.

But the Zach Anner plot is one with not a small level of racism involved in it. Geekosystem also posted a one-sheet instruction list that asked people to use it and you can see here. It allegedly contains a macro, which is a kind of program, that will automatically vote for anyone other that, and this is what’s written on it “Dr. Nigger.”

That’s an obvious example of racism. In other words, just because Doctor Phyllis is black and female like Oprah, and has some popularity, the racist sickos who have to see someone white win are all in a lather that a black woman could win.

I think Oprah should stop the contest and devote a week to the discussion of the rise of racism. There’s a section of people who are being allowed to get away with sick behavior and we’ve got to cap this once and for all. Racism is a mental illness and it’s gone too far in its spread.

Race relations in our country are better that they have been overall but there are people who have not been trained to embrace and understand a multi-racial America. That goes for blacks who are used to seeing someone white in charge and anyone else who has such problems. That can rise to an unhealthy level of neurotic racism. In this case, it has.

Woman sues church over gay marriage by Tricia Escobedo, CNN.com Senior Producer
Years before the nation’s capital legalized same-sex marriage in March, one church in Washington, D.C., opened its doors to gay couples as part of its mission to establish an “inclusive body of Biblical believers.”

Pastors Christine and Dennis Wiley performed a 2007 commitment ceremony at their altar. That action split the historically black church, prompting half of the congregation to leave.

Yvonne Moore not only left Covenant Baptist, where she had worshipped for nearly 40 years: she filed a lawsuit for her weekly tithes because, as she said, “They didn’t respect the members enough to listen to us.”

Moore said she attended the 2007 commitment ceremony and found it “totally disgusting.”

“I don’t believe in that, I’m southern Baptist,” Moore told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. “The bible speaks against that. You cannot take that in the church.”

So she sued the church for a portion of the estimated $250,000 that she estimates she had paid in weekly donations over the past 37 years.

Moore’s now former pastors believe that gay rights are a natural extension of the black Civil Rights movement.

“I don’t think we as a people have a lock on civil rights,” Pastor Dennis Wiley said.

The struggle for civil rights is something that Moore can relate to: Growing up in Florida, she said she was one of the first blacks to eat at a lunch counter in her hometown.

But she is still on the fence about comparing her situation, as an African-American, to that of the gay community. She said Dennis Wiley asked her to consider the situation of her friend, who is gay.

“Dennis asked me … ‘How do you feel the way you were treated and just think about the way he was treated.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, OK,’” Moore said.

She later dropped her lawsuit, but has not returned to the churchY

Diana Zigler has worked nearly thirty years at a Pineville mine, driving a shuttle car before being sidelined by an injury. She says in 1980 she was a single mother from a mining family, and thought the job was such a blessing that she’s happy to see her daughter go to work at the same mine.

“My daughter, she has a son and I raised her and her brother on the mining job. So she has a son, I let her have the same opportunity that I did.”

Zigler is a member of the United Mine Workers of America, a union that was integrated from the day it was founded in 1890.

She says her father and brothers were known as good workers, and she had few problems in the mine when people realized she could do her job. And she says she went out of her way avoid problems.

“That’s my motto: don’t start nothing, it won’t be nothing.”

Zigler says sometimes being a woman was more of an issue, but again, she was accepted as soon as the other miners realized she could pull her weight. And she says there’s a good deal of support and solidarity among women in the mines.

“With the white women and the African-American women, we were a family. We were there for each other. Cry on each other’s shoulders when things wasn’t right. When one hurt, all of us hurt.”

An event on July 11 at Tamarack in Beckley will commemorate the “Soul of Coal,” including Roosevelt Lynch and Joel Price, who died at Montcoal.

Check out my other block Angry Black Woman Watch