The migration of African Americans to Northern and Western states from the South is well recorded. However, rarely spoken of when referring to black migration is the refugee movement during the latter part of the 19th century. When Southern Reconstruction ended, so did the hopes of the black men, women and children who had recently been freed. Conditions in the South became so intolerable for them that re–enslavement was a valid fear, indeed so deplorable that they started migrating from the South to wherever their resources, however meager, would take them. In April 1879 the Inter Ocean (newspaper) reported that "the affidavits made by the Negro refugees contain a terrible condemnation of the bulldozing policy now pursued by the white people of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana." Numerous refugees went to Kansas and Oklahoma, but an untold number traveled beyond those points looking for a better life. Hundreds of refugees escaped from Southern hostility and poverty as a result of labor problems in Washington's coalmines. Looking for a means to combat the labor unions, mine operators from Roslyn and King County sent recruiters to find black men willing to work in the coalmines. Although Southern Recruits were unfamiliar with the Northwest, the lure of a good job and freedom from Southern hostility was enticement enough to travel to Washington. While white coal miners saw the black arrivals as strikebreakers, troublemakers and tools of the mine operators, the black miners saw, as Carter G. Woodson wrote about black migration, a chance to "flee from bondage and oppression in quest of a land offering asylum to the oppressed and opportunity to the unfortunate." [For more information, contact the presenter at History3@attbi.com].