Crossing Borders: Immigrants and Their Children at King’s College

By Thomas Mackaman, Ph.D. 

The first incoming class at King’s College established a precedent that echoes down to the present: From its founding on, King’s has served immigrant and ethnic communities. 

That first class was heavily comprised of the sons and grandsons of immigrants. A review of the handwritten registry of incoming students reveals last names of all sorts of ethnicities—Polish, Italian, Irish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Slovak, Ruthenian, Hungarian, Russian—but very few obviously English surnames. We find names such as Kozschek, Mateychick, Bienkowski, Magdelinskas, and Pannarella. Conspicuously absent is the most common of all English origin surnames—Smith. This allowed for some light humor when, in the fall of 1950, The Crown could report that bearers of that last name had finally appeared at King’s a full four years after its founding. “Smiths Finally Get Here,” read the headline in the college newspaper. “In all the college’s short history over one thousand men have passed through the Registration Office and until this year there had never been a Smith. Finally, this fall two students entered bearing that name.” 

The disproportionate number of “ethnic” names found in an early registration book should come as no surprise at a college whose founding mission was to educate the sons of coal miners, that is, to bring a liberal arts education to working class families’ first generation in college. Because, of course, the coal miners and mill workers were themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants. 

“Hard coal,” as anthracite was sometimes called, had been a critical ingredient of the American Industrial Revolution and the major energy for home heating for the century lasting from the Civil War to World War II. In this, the time “when coal was King,” the six-county anthracite region of Pennsylvania drew in many tens of thousands of immigrants from Europe and the Mediterranean, stretching from Donegal in the far Northwest of Ireland to Lebanon in the Levant. They joined the descendants of Old Connecticut Yankees, Scots-Irish frontier people, and Black people, some of whose ancestors arrived via the Underground Railroad in Wilkes-Barre. All this imparted to the region a certain kind of working-class cosmopolitanism, or roughly synonymously, what was known to earlier generations as “pluralism” and to us “diversity.” Viewing the first King’s yearbooks from the late 1940s and early 1950s, we see the faces of many young, white men. But that evident sameness, or what might be called a lack of diversity, conceals cohorts of students whose parents and grandparents came from a score of countries, spoke a dozen or more different languages, and, though majority Catholic, confessed several other faiths as well.  

But while those immigrant folk, dubbed “anthracite people” by the noted social historian John Bodnar, may have been worldly, they were not, as a rule, formally educated. Of course, the coal miners were not meant to be educated. And neither were their children. For long decades most could not attend more than a few years of grammar school education for the simple reason that they had to work to help support their families. During the Progressive Era, some of the most harrowing images of child labor were taken by the famed photographer Lewis Hine, pictures of “breaker boys” during their release from work from the mines for “recess” in the Wilkes-Barre area. These children, their faces covered in carbon dust and their hands in bandages, were the sons of immigrant coal miners from Poland, Italy, and elsewhere. College, for them, would have been a fantastical idea. The fight then was more basic. The children could at best hope that their immigrant fathers might earn enough so that they did not have to sacrifice their youth to the mines. And indeed, their fathers built unions and waged strikes, authoring some of the most noted struggles in all American labor history to build a brighter future for their children. 

To speak of a “college founded in 1946,” put simply in those terms, sounds rather mundane. It takes an act of historical imagination to consider what it really meant for an earlier generation. When we bear in mind those Lewis Hine images, we regain something of the daring, the triumph, even the drama of creating a college dedicated to the education of the sons and grandsons of immigrant breaker boys and mill girls. For within one generation of Hine’s photos, King’s College was founded with that specific intention. In its halls and dorm rooms the immigrant communities of the Wyoming Valley found a college home for their sons. This nurtured a special bond between King’s and its working-class, immigrant communities. 

The connections of King’s to these ethnic communities did not wither over the ensuing decades. But the earlier immigration restriction of the 1920s (the National Origins Act, which ended mass European immigration) meant that as the years passed it became less and less likely that King’s students were the children of immigrants. The anthracite industry itself collapsed after World War II, pushed aside by cheaper natural gas and “soft” bituminous coal. There were now, as longtime United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis put it, “too many miners, too many mines.” By the 1970s and 1980s, King’s students were more likely to be the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrant coal miners. The time separating the college from the days of the coal mines and the silk mills widened, and with it the number of students who were the children and grandchildren of immigrants diminished. 

Yet the mission to bring a liberal arts education to first generation college students remained. Beginning in the 1990s, the sons and daughters of immigrants began to enroll once again in ever-larger numbers, coinciding with the growing Latin American and Caribbean presence in the region, state, and the country. In the words of a special exhibit by the Anthracite Heritage Museum: 

"Today, the region is experiencing another wave of immigration, as people flock to Northeastern Pennsylvania from places like Central and South America as well as the Caribbean Islands. Contemporary immigrants face nearly the same troubles as their counterparts a century before. Steady, safe, well-paying work is difficult to find. Language sometimes presents a barrier. Discrimination and anti-immigrant sentiments persist."

As before, the newcomers have been drawn to the region because of industrial development—in this case, the emergence of transport-related industry along the region’s Interstate transportation system, an important node in Atlantic Seaboard and New York-Chicago commerce. These recent arrivals, like their forbears among the coal miners, are very often families with no history of college education who, society seems to say, are meant only to work. More names are once again “new”—Argueta, Martinez, Rivera, Rodriguez, Vasquez. At present, roughly 25% of the College’s student body is comprised of people of color, and of those some 10%identify as Lantino/a. 

The Anthracite Heritage Museum, located nearby in Scranton, Pennsylvania, has noted King’s role in welcoming the newcomers: 

"King’s College in Wilkes Barre, first established to educate the children of coal miners, is the home of the McGowan Hispanic Outreach Program, which serves the underrepresented Hispanic population in the area through adult language courses, high school mentoring initiatives, and elementary and middle school outreach."

This development at the College—the renewed presence of students of immigrant background—marks therefore both a form of continuity and a renewal of the founding mission. 

Image at Top: The first students at King’s College in 1946.