This photo appeared in the Daily Worker of December 5, 1931, when Dreiser was heading a committee investigating conditions of striking miners.
PHOTO CAPTION:
“Aunt Mollie” Jackson, miner’s wife, nurse, midwife, and folk singer of the eastern Kentucky coal fields, is here shown with Theodore Dreiser, famous novelist, before whom she sang her “Kentucky Miners’ Wives Raggedy Hungry Blues,” when he and other writers of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners investigated starvation and terror among the miners. Aunt Mollie is now in New York City, where she will share the platform with Dreiser. [John] Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson. Waldo Frank. Lewis Mumford and other celebrated writers at the “Harlan Terror Protest Meeting” to be held … Sunday, December 6th, at 2:30 p. m.
At this meeting Aunt Mollie will tell of the events that led up to the indictment of 47 miners on false charges of murder and of 60 miners on charges of criminal syndicalism for fighting starvation wages in the Harlan County coal fields. The writers of the Dreiser Committee were all indicted by the Harlan Grand Jury after an open hearing [held by the Dreiser Committee] in the heart of the strike zone.
Aunt Molly Jackson (1880-1960) was an influential American folk singer and union activist.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
June 2021
Roger W. Smith's Theodore Dreiser site 