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Gone Home
Gone Home: Race and Roots Through Appalachia | Karida L. Brown
1 post | 2 read | 1 to read
Since the 2016 presidential election, Americans have witnessed countless stories about Appalachia: its changing political leanings, its opioid crisis, its increasing joblessness, and its declining population. These stories, however, largely ignore Black Appalachian lives. Karida L. Brown's Gone Home offers a much-needed corrective to the current whitewashing of Appalachia. In telling the stories of African Americans living and working in Appalachian coal towns, Brown offers a sweeping look at race, identity, changes in politics and policy, and Black migration in the region and beyond. Drawn from over 150 original oral history interviews with former and current residents of Harlan County, Kentucky, Brown shows that as the nation experienced enormous transformation throughout the pre- and post-Civil Rights Era, so too did black Americans. In reconstructing the life histories of Black coalminers, Brown shows the mutable and shifting nature of collective identity, the struggles of labor and representation, and that Appalachia is far more diverse than you think.
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Gone Home details the history of black coal miners in Appalachia. Many left the south for better opportunities but were still subject to Black Codes, Jim Crow, & social inequities, such as not being able to find a store willing to sell them a suit for a job interview & temporary shanty towns becoming permanent residences because better facilities weren‘t made available to them. Interesting topic but read like a term paper mixed with interviews.