Allen v. United Mine Workers of America

• Decision Date: 26 June 1963
• Docket Number: No. 15108,15109.,15108
• Citation: 319 F.2d 594
• Parties: Joe R. ALLEN, and Margaret S. Allen, d/b/a Allen Trucking Company, Kyle E. Duncan, Walter Melhorn, Jr. and Henry Melhorn, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. UNITED MINE WORKERS OF AMERICA, Defendant-Appellant. Lyle F. KENNEDY, d/b/a Lyle's Coal Company, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. UNITED MINE WORKERS OF AMERICA, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

319 F.2d 594 (1963)

Joe R. ALLEN, and Margaret S. Allen, d/b/a Allen Trucking Company, Kyle E. Duncan, Walter Melhorn, Jr. and Henry Melhorn, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. UNITED MINE WORKERS OF AMERICA, Defendant-Appellant.

Lyle F. KENNEDY, d/b/a Lyle's Coal Company, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. UNITED MINE WORKERS OF AMERICA, Defendant-Appellant.

Nos. 15108, 15109.

United States Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit.

June 26, 1963.

E.H. Rayson and R.R. Kramer, Knoxville, Tenn., for defendant-appellant, and Willard P. Owens, Washington, D.C., on the brief.

Robert S. Young, Jr., Howard H. Baker, Jr., Knoxville, Tenn., for plaintiffs-appellees.

Before CECIL, Chief Judge, WEICK, Circuit Judge, and McALLISTER, Senior Circuit Judge.

McALLISTER, Senior Circuit Judge.

The above cases, embracing four parties plaintiff, were tried together and verdicts, including compensatory and punitive damages, were returned by the jury. Prior to trial, plaintiff Duncan consented to his dismissal from the suit. The controversy grew out of the claimed destruction of plaintiffs' businesses and property during the course of labor conflicts in the coal-mining districts of Anderson County, Tennessee, in which the United Mine Workers of America, hereafter referred to as UMW, was alleged to have wrongfully caused the damage.

The incidents involved in this suit took place in the New River-Oliver Springs area, a somewhat remote valley in the northern part of Anderson County, Tennessee. It is bounded on either side by mountains; on the west by Petros Mountain, and on the east by Ligia's Fork. A stream, the New River, runs from Petros Mountain through the valley, and is paralleled by State Highway 116. The New River area contains a number of coal mines. Its principal settlements are, from west to east, Fork Mountain, Bufdalo, Moore's Camp, Devonia, and Rosedale — all mining camps and mining towns.

In 1958, appellee Lyle Kennedy obtained a coal lease of some eighteen hundred acres in New River, and commenced strip-mining operations there in January, 1959. Appellee Allen was a trucker, engaged in hauling coal, as were the other appellees, the Melhorns. For several years prior to 1959, most of the deep mines in the New River area of Anderson County had been worked out; and scattered strip-mining operations had largely occupied the territory. Appellee Kennedy was near the upper end of the valley and had the coal field closest to Kingston. The purchaser of Kennedy's coal was the Kingston Steam Plant, operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The purchaser, being a governmental agency, operated under the Walsh Healy Act, requiring the payment of a minimum wage scale for mining of coal in that area of $2.74½ per hour.

Appellee Kennedy had previously been engaged in strip-mining operations in Virginia. In New River, his employees, from seven to ten in number, did not belong to a union; and Kennedy operated on a non-union basis.

It appears that in the Fall of 1958, the UMW amended its national agreement and a number of mining operators in District 19, embracing the State of Tennessee, executed the amended agreement. However, some hundreds of operators in the District did not execute the new agreement, and letters of termination of the existing collective bargaining agreement were, accordingly, sent to them by the UMW. None of this directly affected appellee Kennedy who had never been operating on a union basis. At the end of the sixty-day notice of termination of the collective bargaining agreement, many of the operators of the union mines continued in their refusal to modify the existing agreement; and, as a consequence, their employees went out on strike.

On May 30, 1959, a motorcade, led by Field Representative Ed Ross of District 19 of the UMW, came through New River. That afternoon, on the road leading from appellees' mine to the Kingston Steam Plant, there followed picketing of the coal-carrying trucks by forty or fifty men. Threats were made by the pickets that the truck drivers "better get the hell out of there if we didn't want our trucks tore up." The truckers were ordered to dump their loads of coal, which they did. The pickets remained there night and day for at least a week, with the purpose, in the words of their leader, Floyd Blankenship, of "trying to find out who was union coal and who wasn't union coal." Blankenship had been a member of the UMW and had retired from mining on February 27, 1959. In April and May, 1959, he was a salaried deputy sheriff in New River. The pickets stopped the trucks and checked the tickets to see where the coal was coming from. Of all the strip-mining operators, only one, who had signed the UMW contract, was allowed to have his coal pass the pickets. They threatened appellee Henry Melhorn that they would throw him into a fire they had burning near the road if he undertook to haul any more nonunion coal. On April 1, another motorcade, led by Floyd Blankenship and John Siebers, originated in the Fork Mountain community of New River and of Petros Mountain, and was composed of men gathered from both places. Siebers was a constable who was also president of the local UMW Union in 1959. When one of the Melhorns started to get out of his truck to see why his brother's truck had been stopped, Siebers "pulled a gun out and told him not to get out of the truck." On May 11, appellee Kennedy was arrested by Floyd Blankenship for carrying arms on the public highway. It appears that two days after appellee Kennedy was arrested and had his firearms taken from him, one of the trucks carrying his coal was hit by two shotgun blasts and two rifle bullets, and sticks of dynamite had also been thrown on the bed of the same truck. When Blankenship arrested appellee Kennedy, he told him he could eliminate some of "these...