In West Virginia, the teachers’ strike made new space for Eucharistic living
A church on my street fed food-insecure kids while schools were closed. The work of justice flowed outward from the table.
Earlier this year 37,000 teachers went on strike in West Virginia. For nine school days they marched on our capitol and lined the streets of cities and towns, standing in snow and rain to protest injustices they could no longer tolerate. Elected officials tried to cajole and shame the teachers, making it clear that tax breaks for extractive industries—a major cause of the crisis in school funding—were nonnegotiable.
When the strike was finally resolved, media observers struggled to make sense of it. A wildcat strike, after decades of organized labor’s decline? And in Trump country, no less? From the start of the 2016 presidential race, West Virginia was deemed ground zero for the archetypal put-upon Trump supporter—the disaffected hillbilly who votes against her own interests seemingly out of spite.
This tidy telling is undercut by even a basic understanding of labor history in West Virginia (the Battle of Matewan, anyone?). And it exempts those who embrace it—including many Appalachians—from the paternalism that has long disdained the region’s poor while simultaneously trying to impose self-improvement programs on them. None of this has gone to the root of the inequities that have made coal barons rich and the rest of the country relieved they don’t live here.
