On this day in 1891, armed Tennessee Coal Miners freed hundreds of prisoners who were being used as strikebreaking convict labor. The raid took place in the context of the "Coal Creek War", a militant labor uprising in the early 1890s.

The Coal Creek War took place primarily, but not exclusively, in Anderson County, Tennessee. This labor conflict ignited in 1891 when coal mine owners in the Coal Creek watershed began to remove and replace their company-employed, private coal miners then on the payroll with convict laborers leased out by the Tennessee state prison system, used in this case as strikebreakers.

Coal workers at the Tennessee Coal Mining Company (TCMC) went on strike on April 1st, 1891, demanding to be paid in cash, not scrip (currency only usable at company stores) and to be allowed to check the weight of their haul (they were paid by weight, but not allowed to check the company's measurement).

Workers initiated a series of raids against the TCMC - on July 14th, armed miners surrounded the stockades where leased convicts were held and sent them by train out of the city. On October 31st, 1891, the miners burned company stockades to the ground and freed hundreds of convicts being held there. On Nov. 2nd, another band attacked stockades in a different location and freed those prisoners as well. From those two events alone, at least 453 convicts were set free.

The strike was forcibly put down by state militia, ending with the arrest of hundreds of miners. All but one were either acquitted or merely fined. Tennessee ended its policy of leasing convict labor, using convicts to work in state-owned mines instead.

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  • SerLava [he/him]M
    ·
    1 year ago

    religion is fundamentally a bad thing for queer people

    It obviously can be but that's far too broad a brush. We have religious queer people here. Support for inclusive religious movements.

    • artificialset [she/her, fae/faer]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      who cares, it actively kills queer people. I have zero support for any religious movement

      also if you removed my comment, i should be able to express how i feel as a queer person. come on now

      please restore my comment and don't tone police queer people

      • SerLava [he/him]M
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        No, it's not tone, it's content. You've been very clear that you aren't generalizing, you're talking very intentionally about all religions. That's just not true. A pretty big majority of the people here are atheist, agnostic, irreligious and so on, but this really isn't the place for New Atheism, stuff you'd hear from Sam Harris or whoever.

        To give an illustrative example, growing up I learned about the role of trans people in religious practices across Polynesia. In Hawai'i and Tahiti they're called mahu, in NZ they're whakawahine, in Samoa fa'afafine and fa'afatama, in Tonga and some other areas they say fakafafine. Very similar concepts in all those areas. In precolonial Hawai'i mahu were very important to religious practice especially as healers, and as teachers or kumu, who also hold a sort of spiritual reverence in general. These are real, modern religions practiced very seriously by many native Hawai'ians. They give devotion to deities considered by some practicers to be genderfluid, like the god/goddess of hula and fertility. I know they have a similar trans deity in the Philippines. When Christian missionaries came they did their best to stamp all of that shit out, especially anything to do with gender fluidity or same sex partners, and within a few decades they turned "mahu" into a slur, which survives today as queer Hawai'ians, including religious leaders, try to push back on it.

        That's just one area of the world that I particularly know about, this is true of a lot of other indigenous people because they've resisted conversion to Abrahamic religions, which are generally considered textually cisheteronormative, and other major religions that also lend themselves to that.

        Explicitly calling all of them fundamentally bad for queer people and refusing to differentiate between head-on-a-pike zealots and the people whose culture they're stamping out is a western-centric position of neutrality. And neutrality always favors the oppressor. On top of that, it's foreclosing on the concept of any superstition that people might use to push away some existential dread that doesn't include a clause about hating queer people. This type of rhetoric is regularly used to provide cover from liberals for various imperialist causes, and it's putting a slander on people who've had no such habit like the bible thumpers and witch burners.

        • artificialset [she/her, fae/faer]
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          who cares, it actively kills queer people. I have zero support for any religious movement

          i will never think positively of religion, it's actively set humanity back and caused immense suffering

          you're telling someone queer not to speak about their perspective on something that directly impacts their life

            • artificialset [she/her, fae/faer]
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              i have a special perspective of being queer and facing bullshit from religion throughout my life and you keep talking over it. you're not going to get me to change my mind. you're being rude as hell

              • SerLava [he/him]M
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                Yeah I'm steamed. This is some weird kind of western chauvinism or something. You expressing yourself ends at expressing made up shit about minority religions. Literally on the code of conduct. I don't know how you can see all that shit about Hawai'ian culture and respond with basically nah, tldr, they're fuckin stupid, they talked about people in the sky so they hated queer people, can't possibly be much better than Catholicism or whatever.

                If I'm not going to change your mind, read these. If they can't change your mind, you might have a sincerely held religious belief

                https://kalikianokalei.medium.com/hawaiian-sexuality-and-the-mahu-tradition-b235a76066c6

                https://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2000to2004/2004-sexual-behavior-in-pre-contact-hawaii.html

                https://www.honolulumagazine.com/portraits-of-gender-and-sexual-identities-in-the-hawaiian-community/

                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_aik%C4%81ne

                https://gayety.co/a-brief-history-of-hawaiis-ancient-gay-culture

                https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26966855/

                https://www.them.us/story/mahu-hawaii-activism-movement-kumu-hina