Two Pictures of My Father

Two Pictures of My Father
By Thomas H. Graves

   Until the end of his life, my father, Allen Graves, kept two pictures hanging on the wall of his home office, one of himself with Virginia Governor John Battle and the other of himself with Martin Luther King, Jr. Battle was a genteel and sophisticated man, but an ardent segregationist nonetheless, while King was the key leader of the civil rights movement in our nation. Why did my father keep both of those pictures, and no others, placed together where he would see them every day?

   My father’s story begins in 1915 in Rector, Arkansas, where he was born, the third child of five born to Henry and Joyce Graves. Two years later in 1917 the family moved to Herrin, Illinois. Herrin is located in southern Illinois near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Southern Illinois really is southern. When I was a child and we would travel from Louisville, Kentucky, to Herrin, we would travel to the south as much as to the west. My mother grew up in that same region in the town of Eldorado and no one would ever guess from her slow southern drawl that she came from Illinois.

   More than geography, my father’s early life was shaped by the poverty of the region and the scarce resources of his family. They lived on a 40-acre farm while my grandfather worked in a deep pit coal mine located on land adjacent to their property. In the 1920s, work was not always available in the mines due to sporadic unionization battles as well as an economic slowdown preceding the Great Depression. The family had a secondhand Model T then a Ford truck; but before long, they had to give them up because they could not afford the upkeep. The family was so embarrassed to have to ride their horse-drawn buggy that they walked as often as possible to school, to church, and to town.

   In 1922, events in Herrin took a frightful turn for the worse giving the county where they lived the dreadful nickname of “Bloody Williamson”. The United Mine Workers went on strike that year and one of the mine operators near Herrin attempted to keep his strip mine operating by using nonunion labor. The mine owner claimed his workers were members of a steam shovelers union, but it was all a sham. Anticipating problems, the owner of the mine hired armed guards to protect the mine and its equipment. In a confrontation on June 21, the guards killed three coal miners who were protesting the use of nonunion labor or “scabs.” The next day, union miners from all over southern Illinois showed up and confronted the scabs that had been brought in from Chicago. The nonunion laborers were given a brief head start before the armed and angry mob of union men started firing. In what came to be known as the Herrin Massacre, 20 men were killed that day and many others wounded as the scabs were chased through the countryside with several of them being corralled in the Herrin Cemetery where they were brutally executed.