KFTC Blog

Elizabeth Wooten, a KFTC member who helped lead the campaign in the 1980s to do away with the broad form deed, died on Monday. She was 91.

Elizabeth and her family fought for many years to protect their land from the strip mining that was rampant in Perry County. The book Making History: The First Ten Years of KFTC, included the following description:

On December 3, 1983, dozens of KFTC members rallied near Bulan at the farm of Perry County widow Elizabeth Wooten … to express their opposition to broad form deeds and their resolve to fight as long as necessary to end their abuses. The Wooten farm lay like a near island, almost surrounded by oceans of strip-mined land. The family had been fighting in court for months to keep Marandco Coal, holder of a broad form deed, off the property, where Elizabeth’s husband was buried. “Before my husband died, he asked [the family] not to let them come on here and strip mine,” Wooten said. “And we’re going to honor that promise. What kind of people would we be if we didn’t?”

With Wooten among the movement’s leaders, KFTC members helped passed a law in the 1984 General Assembly that outlawed the abuses of the broad form deed (these were deeds signed in the late 1800s / early 1900s that severed the ownership of the minerals under the land from the ownership of the land itself; in the 1950s the Kentucky courts interpreted these deeds to allow the mineral owner to strip mine the land without the permission of the surface land owner, and with no obligation to compensate for the damages done).

I grew up on Air Force bases, crisscrossing this country like a new pair of shoelaces on an old pair of shoes – Tacoma, Washington; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, and Hampton, Virginia, just to name a few.

No matter where we were in the world, whenever we went somewhere on a base, my father, a Flight Line Instructor and a gregarious man who never met a stranger, would strike up a conversation with a young airman, and before you knew it the young man was coming home with us for dinner. 

It used to drive me insane. One moment I am minding my own business in the commissary, trying to convince my dad to deviate from my mom’s stringent shopping list, to avoid the sensible oatmeal in exchange for the latest sugary cereal with coveted prizes swaddled somewhere, covertly, between the middle and the bottom of the box. Salivating, I could practically imagine the decadence my deprived taste buds would experience the following morning. The next moment, Dad, with his brown eagle eyes and easy inviting smile, was adding 25 to 45 minutes to our “quick” shopping trip because some guy was homesick, and he knew my mom would make room for this stranger at our dinner table.

Lexington Fayette County Urban Government is considering raising the minimum wage and the Central Kentucky KFTC Chapter has been hard at work moving the campaign forward. 

The ordinance being considered would raise the minimum wage to $10.10 for hourly employees and $3.09 for tipped workers. Both rates of pay would be increased over a period of three years. 

After three years, the minimum wage rate would be tied to inflation. 

Members from Jefferson County, Northern Kentucky, and Central Kentucky recently traveled to Washington D.C. to participate in Populism 2015, a conference organized by National People’s Action (NPA), Campaign for America’s Future, Alliance for a Just Society, and USAction. The conference was a gathering of grassroots organizers, activists, and leaders “committed to building a new, multiracial populist movement to transform our country.”