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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didn’t fish make some horrendously racist remarks to a japanese developer at a conference during the 2010’s anti jrpg sentiment era
that’s the one that comes to mind immediately for me
iirc he said that modern japanese games suck. here’s the video. i’ve always kinda thought that Phil Fish was more of an asshole than a racist but like certainly i would understand why one might think him to be a racist asshole.
then gamergate decided to target him for some reason and the Single notable shitty thing he did got massively lost amongst the mythos invented by the gamergaters, as per every GG target
e: thinking back, i believe he became a target because precisely the western vs japanese games thing was a big culture war point at the time. GG portrayed japanese games as full of sexy big tiddy women, with True Gamers (men) as the target audience, contrasted with western games that were increasingly cucked by blue haired liberals and sjws getting their hands on the development process and censoring all the hot women or whatever. phil fish got smeared as being virulently racist because he was on the opposing side of GG, not because he was doing some sort of novel racist overgeneralization – the whole games industry was having this discourse at the time.
also he vocally defended zoe quinn. that was probably the main thing.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Oh shit, did he? All I remembered was him losing his cool about usual Gamer “you made your game wrong” comments and becoming sort of a lolcow (hate that word and concept), fans being mad about him calling off Fez 2, and him saying stuff that was seen as ungrateful toward Big Gaming
I had stopped re-examining him after the first allegation of him stealing Fez’s code jogged my memory, but if he said racist shit then that is definitely something he did wrong
