TRANSCRIPT:

So for example, this is years later when on my way into work I stopped at the corner store that was down at the bottom of the hill leading up to our portal and went into the phone booth. Do people know what phone booths are? The phone booth where the pay phone was that you could make a call if you needed to make a call to somebody. Nobody had cell phones or anything like that, and found a stack of fliers that the Ku Klux Klan had left there for rallies they were organizing in the area against the youth home that the Steeler Mel Blount, was building for children who needed support. He was Black and the youth home was going to be having Black residents and the Ku Klux Klan in the area decided that they were going to organize to prevent that from happening.

So there were a stack of fliers down in that pay phone booth aimed at the miners and asking people to – really racist pictures of them depicting Black people as animals, etc. I saw a stack of fliers. I picked it all up, brought it up to the mine with me to throw in the garbage, and kept a copy to show first to the women, because I knew I was going to make them angry.

That was a safe place to have discussions about things like that. And sure enough, to a person, the women were horrified by that and everybody had the same response. And what I was going to do anyway, I’m going to take this to the union, and the union ended up organizing, being a part of a rally against the Ku Klux Klan, which all of us knew was going to happen. And if it didn’t happen, at least we were going to be there because there had to be mine workers against the Klan and had a presence when people were organizing against the Klan.