Florida 1968/West Virginia 2018

/ February 24, 2018

BY HANK REICHMAN

This is a big year for 50th anniversaries, especially in higher education.  In fact, 1968 was such an extraordinary year that it’s difficult to keep up.  Earlier this month, for instance, I missed the 50th anniversary of the Orangeburg Massacre at South Carolina State University, an HBCU. This was a critical event in the development of the African American student movement and the broader student unrest of 1968.  It happened on February 8, 1968, when state Highway Patrolmen fired into a crowd of student protesters. Three students were killed and at least 28 were injured. Nine patrolmen were acquitted of all charges in the case, but SNCC activist Cleveland Sellers was imprisoned for inciting to riot, serving seven months but ultimately gaining a pardon some 25 years later.  He would later become Director of the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina and president of Voorhees College.  William Hine, who taught history at South Carolina State for many years, recounts what happened in 1968, how it’s too often been forgotten, and why it’s important here.

Another nearly forgotten event from February 1968 with present-day resonance took place in Florida and was recalled last week by reporter Theresa Vargas in the Washington Post.  On Friday, February 16, 1968, teachers across Florida left goodbye messages to their students on classroom blackboards and cleared their desks.  The following Monday nearly 40 percent of the state’s teachers didn’t show up.  They were on strike, although because strikes by public employees were illegal in the state, they all were considered to have resigned.

Florida teachers with protest signs during the 1968 walkout. (State Archives of Florida)

“Half of Florida Teachers Resign Over School Aid,” read a front-page Washington Post story at the time.  It cited estimates that between 25,000 and 35,000 of the state’s 61,000 educators didn’t show up for class.  The walkout would last weeks.  “It would appear at this time that the teachers of Florida have successfully made their point,” Phil Constans Jr., executive secretary of the Florida Education Association, which led the strike, said in a February 19, 1968, news release.  “We regret having to close schools, but it proved to be the only course left to the profession after the politicians of this state failed to meet their responsibilities to the children.”

Reflecting recently on the strike to the Washington Post, Gary Cornwell, who was a junior at Titusville High School at the time, recalled a former Army drill sergeant teaching one of his classes.  On the morning students were planning a walkout in a show of solidarity with the teachers, the substitute tried to convince them to stay in class, Cornwell told the Post.  “If you walk out now you’re throwing away your education,” he recalled the scab teacher saying.  In the front row sat a quiet girl whose name he didn’t know even then.  “This little mousy girl stood up and said, ‘That’s bull—-. We’re getting the f— out of here.’ So, we all got up and left.”  Cornwell is now 65 and a retired university librarian who runs camps for children with diabetes.

The strike finally ended on March 9 after the state agreed to a small increase, $10.2 million, in school aid.  It also pushed Florida to grant collective bargaining rights to public employees and empowered students.  The only arrests were of students who had walked out in support of their teachers.

It’s worth recalling these events because right now in West Virginia history is repeating itself.  Teachers across the state walked off the job on Thursday.  All 55 counties in the state closed schools during during the work stoppage, according to the state’s Department of Education.  West Virginia’s 680 public schools employ 19,488 classroom teachers, said Alyssa Keedy, a spokeswoman for the state’s education department. There are 277,137 students enrolled.

In 2016, West Virginia ranked 48th in average teacher salaries. Only Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Dakota sat below it in the rankings, which included 50 states and the District of Columbia.  With starting salaries set at $31,000 a year, union leaders say that after deducting for health care costs, many teachers in the state make less than $15 an hour.

An estimated 5,000 demonstrators flooded the state Capitol on Thursday.  Lines snaked around the building, with some people waiting more than two hours to get in. The crowd was mostly comprised of teachers, but included parents and students.  “They are packing the chambers,” said Kym Randolph, the communications director for the West Virginia Education Association. “The ones that got there early talked to legislators.”

Here’s a video of the teachers rallying at the Capitol:

The American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia, the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) and the West Virginia School Service Personnel Association organized the walkout.

The strike came a day after Gov. James C. Justice, a Republican, signed legislation that would provide teachers and school service personnel a 2 percent raise starting in July, part of an increase in salaries for some state employees.  Teachers and service personnel are scheduled to get an additional 1 percent raise in the 2020 fiscal year, and teachers will get another 1 percent raise in 2021.  But the raises will not cover cost-of-living increases.  Teachers’ salaries have stagnated for years, and the lack of state contributions to the health care plan mean that inflation costs have been borne by the employees, who are struggling under higher deductibles, premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.  While the board of the Public Employees Insurance Agency, which administers the health care plan for state employees, has agreed to freeze rates in 2019, the teachers want a more permanent solution.

“It’s scary. I worry constantly about how I am going to afford my medicine” said 20-year teaching veteran Jackie Shriner who already pays $500 a month just to afford her insulin.

“We have great schools.  We’re right at 90 percent graduation rate, and for a rural state that is exceptional,” said Dale Lee of the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA).  To him, legislators’ complaints about spending are disingenuous—the state is paying for past underfunding of retirement benefits and counting those dollars as education spending.  Because West Virginia’s population is quite spread out, that also means that transporting students costs more than it would in more densely populated states—more dollars that aren’t going to the classroom but are still necessary to spend.

Meanwhile the state has a shortage of certified teachers because it’s hard to convince people to enter a job when starting salaries for people with advanced degrees are still in the $30–35,000 range. “You’re sold the idea of, hey, go to college, get a degree, get an advanced degree, and then you still really can’t make ends meet,” one teacher said. “Obviously we do it because we like the kids, but I also like to be able to pay my bills and not have $8 to last me six days until payday.”

As in Florida a half-century ago, teachers in West Virginia do not have the right to strike.  With collective bargaining banned for West Virginia teachers and public-sector workers, unions are voluntary associations—meaning that teachers at any given school might be members of the WVEA or the American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia (AFT-WV), or neither.  Without collective bargaining mostly the associations fight to get work issues that unions might bargain over—like duty-free lunches and planning periods—written into state law.  But schools across the state already suffer from a deficit of educators, and experienced teachers have left, so there is leverage.

West Virginia, often considered the heart of “Trump country,” enacted “right-to-work” legislation in 2016.  But support for the teachers among the public remains strong in the once union stronghold.  On the picket line outside of Bridge Street Elementary, The Guardian reported, cars drove by honking and yelling in support of the strikers.

“Out of the last three hours, we have only gotten one middle finger,” said Bridge Street Elementary teacher Lindsay Armmirante. “The rest has been all honks, thumbs up, fist bumps, smiles, it’s actually been a lot of fun”

Horns blared as Sub Express shop owner Perry Wade stopped his car to get out and thank the teachers. “It’s not much, but it’s more than they are giving you in Charleston,” joked Wade as he handed them cards for free six-inch subs.  “It’s been really neat to see a state come together with the way like we have because there are so many areas that we are divided as a state, but this seems like one thing where we have a lot of support,” said Armmirante.

During the two-day shutdown, state food banks helped feed students who depend on school meals, and supplemental child care centers were set up, according to local news reports.

As Sarah Jaffe reported in Dissent,

Leah Clay Stone is a second-generation member of the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA)—she walked picket lines with her mother during a 1990 teacher strike.  Her father was a coal miner through the 1980s.  West Virginia is a state with a proud labor history that gets lost in the “Trump Country” profiles.  Many of the teachers in today’s fight have personal experiences like Stone’s.  It was not lost on anyone I spoke with that the first teachers to stop work were from coal country, from Mingo and Logan Counties, the sites of the great mine wars.

Stone also recalls, as a teenager, going to party with friends on top of the infamous Blair Mountain, the site of what historian Elizabeth Catte, in her new book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, calls “the largest show of armed resistance in the United States since the Civil War—and the most significant labor uprising in the United States.”  Immortalized in part in the 1987 movie Matewan and in memorable labor ballads, the Battle of Blair Mountain pitted workers and their allies—like venerable labor agitator Mary Harris “Mother” Jones—against a “private army” that would later be praised by the National Rifle Association (yes, the same one that currently wants to arm teachers against school shooters).  It is a stark reminder that West Virginians died to organize the unions that the state’s officials are currently bad-mouthing in the press.

Today’s action is the first statewide walkout of teachers in almost thirty years.  “If you look at what teachers and their allies are posting on social media, you can see that they are connecting the upcoming action to the state’s important history of labor uprising, from Blair Mountain to Widen,” Elizabeth Catte told me via email.  She pointed to a tweet from Richard Ojeda, a candidate for Congress from the state, who posted a photograph of himself in a red bandanna with the caption, “The term redneck started when WV coal miners tied red bandanas around their necks during the bloody battle of Blair mountain to unionize.  Today, our teachers channeled their history. #UnionStrong”

On Friday, organizers announced that the action would continue on Monday.  Christine Campbell, president of the American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia, said the strike could last beyond Monday if necessary. Teachers across the state, she added, “have made their voice clear.”

“They believe that not enough has been done,” she said.

“Our state is not providing the resources for our students,” Cindy Nester, 44, a kindergarten teacher at Augusta Elementary School, told the New York Times. “Generally, in a year, I probably pay anywhere from $1,000 to $1,500 out of my own paycheck, and those are just for miscellaneous supplies.”

“I live 40 miles from Virginia, 40 miles form Maryland,” she added.  “All we have to do is cross those lines and we can make $12,000 or $15,000 more, plus those benefits.”  Nester said the walkout seemed to have a lot of support from members of her community, adding that she was demonstrating in support of all state workers, not just educators.

“I think it’s very possible it could go on for a while,” she said. “I think we need to fight for this.”

These teachers recall that there were no laws protecting the mine workers in the 1920s either.  As one teacher said, “West Virginians have a long background of doing what’s expected until it gets to be too much, and then we make sure we do what’s right, and we really want our legislators to do what’s right instead of what’s expected.”

As the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to attack public employees’ union rights, the justices would do well to consider what is happening in West Virginia.  They should look back as well at Florida fifty years earlier.  And as the ignoramus bigot in the White House babbles on about giving teachers guns, he might want to think twice about educators’ true strength: their solidarity and the support of their students and their communities.

Here’s coverage from TYT Politics:

And here are some tweets from the front lines:

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