Review of \u3cem\u3eRichard L. Davis and the Color Line in Ohio Coal: A Hocking Valley Mine Labor Organizer, 1862–1900\u3c/em\u3e, by Frans H. Doppen

Much has been written on union organizers\u27 bitter struggle to establish collective bargaining in the coal mines of central and southern Appalachia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mine operators regularly employed deprivation, intimidation, black and white strikebreakers, violence, and murder to enforce their will. Thus, one can imagine the enormity of the challenges facing an African American coal mine labor organizer during this era. Yet, this is the task Richard L. Davis took on among his \u27colored brothers\u27 in the microregion known as the Little Cities of Black Diamonds, located in southeastern Ohio\u27s Hocking River Valley (p. 1). As a founding member of and a delegate representing District 6 of the United Mine Workers (UMW), an organization that Davis believed did more than any other to break the color line, Davis traveled throughout the contested coal-mining regions of southeastern Ohio, southern West Virginia, and Alabama to recruit miners to the group\u27s cause