[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Page 12917]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        WEST VIRGINIA DAY, 2008

  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, certain dates on the calendar carry special 
meaning. These are great and glorious days that are given to devoted 
reverence and are a cause for recognition and adoration. Thanksgiving, 
the Fourth of July, and New Year's Eve are a few dates that come 
immediately to mind. Another one that comes to mind is June 20--the day 
we celebrate as West Virginia Day.
  Friday will be June 20. All over the world, it will be June 20, which 
means that all over the world, it will be West Virginia Day. And what a 
great and glorious day it will be.
  It was on June 20, 1863, that West Virginia became the 35th State of 
the Union. The State proudly adopted as its motto the phrase, ``Montani 
semper liberi,'' which means, ``Mountaineers are always free.''
  This was a most appropriate motto for a State born in the middle of 
the greatest struggle for freedom and liberty in American history--the 
Civil War. And West Virginians have always strived to live up to our 
State motto.
  West Virginia workers were in the forefront of the historic labor 
struggles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that sought an end 
to the exploitation and oppression of American workers that had 
accompanied the Industrial Revolution. In 1877, the Nation's first 
general strike began among the railroad workers and citizens of 
Martinsburg, WV, after the railroad tycoons repeatedly lowered wages.
  Seeking to end the industrial autocracy that had engulfed the State 
with the opening of the coal fields in the 1880s, West Virginia coal 
miners engaged in a series of conflicts now recognized as the West 
Virginia Mine Wars, including the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike, the 
Battle of Matewan, and the Miners' March on Logan. These struggles, 
writes coal-field historian David Corbin, must be viewed in the same 
perspective as Americans see Lexington and Gettysburg, not just as 
isolated incidents in the tragic spilling of blood but ``as symbolic 
moment[s] in a larger, broader and continuing historical struggle . . . 
the struggle for freedom and liberty.''
  In his book, ``The West Virginia Mine Wars: An Anthology'', Corbin 
compared the West Virginia miners' struggle for unionization to the 
civil rights movement of the 1960s. ``Both movements,'' he writes, 
``are stories of oppressed, exploited people fighting for dignity, 
self-respect, human rights and freedom.''
  This analogy to the civil rights movement is a good one because West 
Virginia has also played an important role in the quest of African 
Americans for liberty and equality. For one thing, West Virginia has 
been the site of some of the important events in African-American 
history. Prior to the Civil War, John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry 
prefigured West Virginia's breakaway from the slaveholding Confederacy 
into full statehood. Harpers Ferry later served as the setting for the 
second meeting of the Niagara Movement, a meeting that led to the 
formation of the NAACP.
  Individual West Virginians have played important roles in this 
historic struggle. Author and abolitionist Martin Delany, with 
Frederick Douglass, edited the North Star newspaper, the leading 
abolitionist newspaper in the country. J.R.Clifford, along with his 
colleague, W.E.B. DuBois, was one of the founders of the Niagara 
Movement in 1905. Rev. Leon Sullivan was a civil rights activist who 
wrote the Sullivan Principles, a code of conduct for U.S. businesses 
operating in South Africa under apartheid.
  Carter G. Woodson, Booker T. Washington, and John Warren Davis were 
all famous African-American educators who occupy important places in 
American history and culture and played important roles in furthering 
the development of our free society.
  Furthermore, West Virginians have played an important role in the 
American movement toward religious freedom. The most noticeable example 
of this effort came in the historic 1960 Democratic Party Presidential 
primary--the political contest that paved the way for America's first 
Catholic President. In 1960, West Virginia was an overwhelmingly 
Protestant State, and religion became the ``burning issue'' of the 
contest because, if Senator John F. Kennedy, who was Catholic, defeated 
his only opponent, Senator Hubert Humphrey, who was a Protestant, it 
would show that religion was no longer a defeating handicap in a 
Presidential contest. Kennedy won that primary by a substantial margin, 
and, as a result, as Kennedy stated the day after winning the primary, 
the religious issue was ``buried . . . in the soil of West Virginia.''
  Mr. President, I am proud of my State. I love its beauty, its 
culture, and its history. Foremost, I have always appreciated its kind, 
good, and generous people and the way they have retained what I call 
the ``old values''--faith in God, love of country, family, honesty, 
decency, and integrity. And a leading value of the people of West 
Virginia, as I have tried to show, has been our motto, ``Mountaineers 
are always free.''
  Happy birthday West Virginia.
  May God always bless you, and keep you free.

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