(pittsburghlive.com) “My family has miners going back five generations, back to our slave ancestors,” said Gina Jones, Penn State Fayette, the Eberly Campus instructor. “There is not too much out there about this part of African-American history. It’s up to us to do that.”
Penn State Fayette and the state Historical and Museum Commission took a major step in that direction with a recent two-day conference, “Living Together, Working Together: African-American Miners and the Coal Culture of Southwestern Pennsylvania, 1870-1970.”
The conference, the first of its kind in the nation, brought together scholars, workers and genealogists to begin creating a portrait of black miners’ contributions to the region’s history.
Early history
“African Americans have been part of Southwest Pennsylvania since 1750,” PSU professor emerita Evelyn Hovanec said. At that time, the region was part of the Virginia colony. Virginia allowed slavery. The first blacks here were slaves.
When borders changed in 1786, Fayette, Greene and Westmoreland counties became part of Pennsylvania, which passed an act for the general abolition of slavery in 1780.
…blacks have always been part of the area’s mining culture. Their contributions have not always been recognized, but by the 1880s, when a great many European immigrants entered the mines, blacks were often listed as “Americans” on mine fatality reports, to distinguish them from immigrants. (more…)
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