BLACK VALLEY, PENNSYLVANIA, 1917 
BLACK VALLEY, PENNSYLVANIA, 1917
When Lewis Hicks could not hire enough local strikebreakers, he went south, offering jobs to people who didn’t know what it was like in the Black Valley. Black sharecroppers, cotton pickers, and miners making even lower wages in Alabama jumped at the chance. They boarded a train in Birmingham, and the guards locked the doors of the cars to keep union organizers from getting to them. Hicks didn’t tell the eager-for-work men that he paid low wages. He didn’t tell them about the strike. And he didn’t tell them that people in the Alle-Kiski Valley might try to kill them for taking their jobs.
Union men bunched together outside the mine. They had heard about the train carrying scabs and were ready to face down the strikebreakers. If they didn’t stop these Southerners from working the mines, the strike would fail. The union would be crushed again.
But Fannie had a plan. She waited at a railroad signal outside town where the train would slow and maybe stop. If she could speak to the men on the train, she hoped to convince them to join the union.
Early-1900s Pennsylvania railroad locomotive, similar to the one that Fannie Sellins intersected as it carried strikebreakers to Lewis Hicks’s mine in the Alle-Kiski Valley.
She had succeeded in St. Louis. She had succeeded in West Virginia. But the mine operators in Black Valley seemed more dangerous. Men with guns guarded the train whenever it stopped, the same men who had threatened to kill her.
Still, when the train came into view, steam engine hissing, pistons hammering, Fannie picked up her skirts and ran alongside the train cars, shouting at the men inside.
They stared at the woman scrambling over the rugged ground with her hairpins falling out, and opened the windows to hear what she was hollering about. “Don’t break the strike!” she called to them. “Support the union.”
Could it be true, they wondered? Had they traveled all this way to help bust a union?
“Why else have they locked us in here?” one said.
“That’s right. No other reason for it,” said another.
More windows came down. Men inside the locked cars pounded on the doors. “We can’t get out!”
Fannie shouted, “Workers, unite! Power to the union!”
One man climbed out a train window and dropped to the ground. Those left behind cheered. Up and down the track, men climbed from the windows and jumped to the ground.
Fannie shook the hand of every man who fled the train and then marched with them down the tracks. One hundred men from Alabama crossed a bridge and paraded into town, where union families lined the street, clapping and cheering. If a man wanted to go home, the union gave him a ticket on the next train back. Those workers who wanted to join the strike were welcomed into the union.
The strikers held fast at Hicks’s mines, but world events intervened. On April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I. To support the country’s war effort, the striking miners gave up many of their demands and went back to work. Under new wartime regulations, the United States government brokered a wage deal with coal-mine operators across the nation, and Lewis Hicks agreed to give miners a 50 percent pay raise.
Coal miners’ and steel workers’ efforts produced war materials like these three-inch shells at a Bethlehem Steel Company factory. To free up men to fight the war, women were trained to manufacture munitions. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, c. 1918.
The war ended in November 1918, and soon after, the mine operators nixed their end of the contract, in which they had recognized the United Mine Workers Union. Miners in Western Pennsylvania lost what little leverage they had gained and any hope of a new pay increase to cover the spike in prices over the last few years.
By the following summer, Fannie had committed the full force of her personality to buck up the UMWA in Black Valley. In late July 1919, miners walked out at Allegheny Coal & Coke in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, demanding the company recognize the union. Strikers picketed on public roads near the mine. The sheriff swore in extra deputies, passed out rifles, and sent the men to patrol company boundaries. These were not impartial law enforcement officers. They were thugs and riffraff, deputized at the whim of industrial corporations in the valley.
A tense peace lasted five weeks until an argument broke out between deputies and striking coal miners. On the afternoon of August 26, Fannie arrived in the neighborhood of Abe Roth’s grocery shop in Natrona, just a short walk from the mine entrance in Brackenridge. She hoped to convince miners coming off shift to join the strike.
The grocery store was where women gathered to socialize, and children came along hoping for a few pennies for a treat. That muggy summer afternoon, the strikers and deputies exchanged insults, sparking gunfire along the route from the store to the mine. A woman in the crowd suggested that the miners arm themselves for protection.
Fannie disagreed. “We don’t want our people carrying,” she said. Seven-year-old Stanley F. Rafalko noticed the commotion as he left Abe Roth’s store with cigarettes for his father and ran to watch. He saw deputies fire their handguns and between shots, one of them beat retired miner Joseph Starzeleski with a club.
“For God’s sake, don’t kill him!” Fannie shouted. But they ignored her. One of the deputies aimed at Starzeleski and fired five shots into his back.
Then a man came out of a nearby Allegheny Coal & Coke first-aid shack, carrying an armload of rifles. The man handed them out to the officers as Fannie continued to rebuke them. One of the deputies aimed a kick at Fannie, and she jumped back, falling to one knee. She struggled toward safety behind the Rafalko family’s backyard fence, herding children with her, but the deputy pursued her, swinging his club and hitting Fannie in the head. Then more officers turned on her and fired, hammering her to the ground.
Two of the sheriff’s deputies at the scene of Fannie’s death. According to eyewitnesses, Deputy John Pearson (left) fired the shots that killed Sellins. Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, August 1919.
At the scene where Fannie was shot, nine bullets struck the fence and gate. Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, August 1919.
The deputies moved on to attack another worker, not noticing Stanley. His parents and grandpap were calling for him in Polish, but he ignored them. “I was just a curious kid,” he said later.
Stanley ran to Fannie. Despite the blows to her head, Fannie’s straw hat remained pinned to her hair. Stanley lifted the brim and saw that she was dead.
Shocked, he ran away, but continued to watch from a distance. The sheriff’s officers dragged the bodies to a car, Fannie by her feet and Joseph Starzeleski by his collar, and stacked them into the trunk to haul them away.
That night the justice of the peace charged ten deputies with murder. But the local sheriff’s department did not arrest them. Autopsies showed Fannie died of a crushed skull and suffered three gunshots, two to the side of the head and one in her back. Five point-blank gunshots killed Starzeleski. Seven other men were shot but survived.
Three days after Fannie’s death, grieving people lined the streets before dawn, waiting for her casket to pass by. Mourners crowded into the little wooden church in New Kensington, where Fannie had lived, a few miles downriver from Natrona. In the largest funeral procession in the town’s history, thousands paid their respects as Fannie’s and Starzeleski’s bodies were borne from St. Peter’s Catholic Church to the Union Cemetery.
The New York Times reported on the trial of the three men indicted in Fannie Sellins’s death. The United Mine Workers of America petitioned for a special prosecutor in an effort to insure an unbiased prosecution, dateline: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 7, 1923.
These women were among the thousands of mourners who attended Fannie Sellins’s funeral in St. Peter’s Church, the largest such service in the history of New Kensington, Pennsylvania, August 29, 1919.
The coroner’s jury verdict found that Fannie Sellens [sic] died from a gunshot wound to the left temple. The document also commended the local sheriff for his prompt and successful action to protect property and persons in the vicinity and for his judgment in selecting his deputies.
A month later, the Allegheny County coroner’s jury convened in Pittsburgh to examine the evidence. The officers who shot Fannie insisted she was leading a riot and that union sympathizers had attacked them with rocks and sticks. The press reported that Fannie Sellins was killed while on picket duty. The jury disregarded the testimony of some sixty eyewitnesses who gave sworn statements that the attack by the deputies was unprovoked.
The jury decided the killings of Fannie and Joseph Starzeleski were justifiable homicide, saying, “There were no innocent bystanders,” and “Everyone in the crowd was guilty of rioting.”
The crowd of people who witnessed Fannie’s death believed she was shot down in cold blood. UMWA leaders fired off telegraphs to President Wilson demanding a federal investigation. One of the deputies accused of shooting Fannie had been heard earlier threatening “to get her.” After the shooting, another was heard saying that Fannie Sellins had finally gotten what she deserved.
A Federal Department of Labor investigation languished amid prevailing American fears that labor unions harbored communists. Since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, steel companies had incited this xenophobia and painted strikers as wanting to overthrow the government. This prejudice figured strongly in the attitudes of the coroner’s jury that saw union families as a mob of rioters and ruled that the deputies killed Fannie in self-defense.
Under pressure from Fannie’s family and the UMWA, a grand jury was called to hear all the evidence. In June 1923, three deputies were indicted for murder and the case went to trial. One of them, the deputy who eyewitnesses claimed shot and killed Fannie, had disappeared. The other two were acquitted of all charges.
Today, both Fannie Sellins’s death and her passion for the welfare and rights of working people have been largely forgotten. But her name remains hallowed among union people in Western Pennsylvania, and her spirit lives on whenever someone stands up for the American ideals of equality and justice for all.
