The Public i Honors Workers Who Sacrificed Thier Lives For Corporate Profits

An explosion in a coal mine in the mountains of West Virginia
killed 29 miners on the morning of April 5, 2010.
The Upper Big Branch mine was owned and operated by
Massey Energy, which had been cited for numerous violations.
In a 2006 lawsuit against the company, a memo was
exposed from Massey CEO Don Blankenship that instructed
superintendents: “If any of you have been asked by your
group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone
else to do anything other than run coal (i.e. build overcasts,
do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore
them and run coal. This memo is necessary only because
we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills.”The
drive to “run coal” has now cost the lives of 29 men.
Carl Accord, 52
Jason Atkins, 25
Christopher Bell, 33
Gregory Steven Brock, 47
Kenneth Allan Chapman, 53
Robert Clark, 41
Charles Timothy Davis, 51
Cory Davis, 20
Michael Lee Elswick, 56
William I. Griffith, 54
Steven Harrah, 40
Edward Dean Jones, 50
Richard K. Lane, 45
William Roosevelt Lynch, 59
Nicholas Darrell McCroskey, 26
Joe Marcum, 57
Ronald Lee Maynor, 31
James E. Mooney, 50
Adam Keith Morgan, 21
Rex L. Mullins, 50
Joshua S. Napper, 25
Howard D. Payne, 53
Dillard Earl Persinger, 32
Joel R. Price, 55
Deward Scott, 58
Gary Quarles, 33
Grover Dale Skeens, 57
Benny Willingham, 61
Ricky Workman, 50
FIRE IN THE HOLE
By Hazel Dickens
You can tell them in the country, tell them in the town
Miners down in Mingo laid their shovels down
we won’t pull another pillar, load another ton
or lift another finger until the union we have won
Stand up boys, let the bosses know
Turn your buckets over, turn your lanterns low
There’s fire in our hearts and fire in our soul
but there ain’t gonna be no fire in the hole
Daddy died a miner and grandpa he did too,
I’ll bet this coal will kill me before my working days
is through
And a hole this dark and dirty an early grave I find
And I plan to make a union for the ones I leave behind
Stand up boys, let the bosses know
Turn you buckets over, turn your lanterns low
There’s fire in our hearts and fire in our soul
but there ain’t gonna be no fire in the hole
There ain’t gonna be no fire in the hole