In deep: the boom and bust of the coal mining industry through the eyes of Black Appalachians

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis review discusses Gone Home by Karida Brown as a project about the boom and bust of the coal mining through the eyes of Black Appalachians. Attention is paid to how the boundary-making projects of Blacks in Harlan County, Kentucky were ultimately made against the backdrop of seismic structural changes that built and then ruined the coal industry. This boom–bust cycle is told through the eyes of second-generation coal miners – that is, the children of the coal miners who migrated from the Birmingham, Alabama region. These children experience their childhood in eastern Kentucky but then are shipped off to the North, West, and East because by the time they come of age, the coal industry is kneeling to mechanization technologies. Brown presents a compelling narrative that introduces a “new” story of the Deep South and the African American Great Migration, one well worth reading.