CHARLESTON (AP) — One-hundred historians and labor professors are pushing for a permanent park honoring a violent West Virginia chapter of the nation’s labor movement.
The Charleston Gazette says the professors from Dartmouth, Cornell, Marshall and many other universities sent a petition to state legislators to create the park in honor of the Battle of Blair Mountain.
In 1921, some 10,000 coal miners who had been trying to unionize for years marched to Blair and faced down an army of police and hired guns who had homemade bombs and machine guns. At least 16 men died before the miners surrendered to federal troops in what became the nation’s largest armed uprising since the Civil War.
The 1,600-acre battlefield was briefly added to the Register then removed when private property owners objected.
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