July 6, 2009 · The latest in a series of escalating encounters between mining supporters and environmentalists took place at a Fourth of July celebration on Kayford Mountain.
A video of the event posted on YouTube shows about 20 possibly intoxicated mining supporters crashing the family-friendly Mountain Keepers Music Festival.
Most wore shirts with orange mining stripes, but the video’s star is a large shirtless man. Throughout the video, he yells expletives at festival attendees.
The festival was held at the Kayford Mountain homeplace of Larry Gibson, a long-time activist fighting mountaintop removal. Gibson says he received threats that the annual celebration would be disturbed, but he was unable to get protection from law enforcement.
In the video, mining supporters, especially the large shirtless man, tried to goad people into fighting. At one point in the video he appears to yell expletives at a child as he draws a finger across his throat in a threatening gesture.
The shirtless man wasn’t the only person yelling expletives at festival-goers. Still, at several points in the video other mining supporters appear to be holding him back to keep him from lunging at the environmentalists.
During the disturbance, the festivities and music continued. Gibson says there was no violence from his side.
“Some of my older people who are used to fighting back over the years, it was very hard to keep them down and hold them back,” he said. “But still, it’s what we’ll do.
“We’ll hold stead and we’ll hold back and the violence will not come from the keepers of the mountains and the people who live in them, we will win this war. We fought a battle this weekend and we won because they didn’t get any violence from us.”
But Gibson says many at the family event, including children, were scared by the threats. He says this seemed to be the point.
“But if you notice one thing in the film, no one ever said anything to me,” he said. “They’d walk around me, they wouldn’t say anything to me; they’d never even mention my name. The whole intent of this thing was to intimidate the people who came to my place and the fact that if they intimidate them, they won’t come back and support what I’m trying to do here.”
Gibson has been actively fighting mountaintop removal since it came to his family’s homeplace on Kayford Mountain in 1986. He says he doesn’t think those who disrupted Saturday’s celebration are representative of all coal supporters.
“I really don’t think this is a mindset at all of people who work in the mining industry as far as working people,” he said. “I think it’s just a handful of rogue miners who refuse to understand that there’s a better way to do this.”
According to the Charleston Gazette, the West Virginia State Police showed up after the incident and no arrests were made.
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