Virden, Illinois

History

Virden sits atop a large seam of coal. After the 1850s, when the Chicago and Alton Railroad was completed, it became possible to mine Virden coal and ship it long distances for a profit. Throughout the second half of the 1800s, Virden prospered and grew as a coal-mining town.

A bitter coal strike broke out in 1898. The Chicago-Virden Coal Company, fearing loss of key business in Chicago, refused to allow its Virden mines to be unionized, nor would it pay the nonunionized miners union-scale wages. Instead, the coal company built a timber stockade around its mine head, adjoining the railroad tracks, and hired African Americans from Southern states as coal miners. The Chicago-Virden Company knew that African Americans, who were attempting to escape Jim Crow labor conditions, would not request union-scale wages. Instead, the company promised to pay their new workers by the ton. The new miners were promised only 30 cents per ton of coal mined.

The appearance of the African-American miners infuriated the strikers. They were motivated by racism, by labor solidarity, and by the desire to create decent lives for their own families. Some of the striking coal miners were themselves African-American, and black coal miners who were union members in good standing were apparently accepted by their unionized white comrades. However, this acceptance did not extend to strikebreakers.

From the History section of Virden, Illinois on Wikipedia, under CC BY-SA 4.0.