On August 5, 2021, Richard L. Trumka died of a heart attack. He served three terms as president of the United Mine Workers of America, fourteen years as secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations, and nearly twelve years as its president. Shortly after his passing, many, including two US presidents, paid their respects.1 UMWA president Cecil Roberts wrote, “We will miss him terribly, but we know that he has joined Mother Jones, John L. Lewis, William Green, Phil Murray, and all other UMWA leaders who have gone before him.”2 Indeed, Trumka's years in leadership put him in select company in US labor history, but they were decades of decline in union membership and influence. As scholars assess Trumka's contributions and legacy, one challenge will be evaluating his leadership against a backdrop of virulent antiunionism, deindustrialization in the United States, the rise of neoliberalism, and widening societal divides.Trumka was the son of a coal miner, born on July 24, 1949, in Nemacolin, Pennsylvania. At that time, the UMWA was one of the most powerful unions in the country, negotiating with the Bituminous Coal Operators’ Association (BCOA) the following year for a wage increase, better benefits, and increased funding to its newly created Welfare and Retirement Fund.3 In the coming decade, while mechanization displaced tens of thousands of miners, those who remained experienced rising standards of living. Many a miner's home had pictures of Jesus Christ and John L. Lewis hanging side by side.4When Trumka entered the mines in the turbulent 1960s, Tony Boyle was leading a UMWA regime rife with corruption. In the 1969 UMWA election, Trumka supported reform candidate Joseph “Jock” Yablonski, but Boyle declared himself winner amid charges of fraud. Then, on December 31, 1969, Yablonski and his wife and daughter were fatally shot in their home by killers later traced to Boyle.5 At Yablonski's funeral, the Miners for Democracy (MFD) movement formed to rid the union of corruption and reinvigorate the rank and file. While Trumka worked in the mines by day and attended classes at Penn State Fayette at night, the MFD was democratizing the union, and miners were carrying out an unprecedented number of wildcat strikes.6 Trumka attended Villanova Law School, interned with the UMWA legal staff in the summer, and earned his JD in 1974. In 1981, he was elected to the UMWA International Executive Board. With the membership increasingly frustrated by UMWA president Sam Church's negotiating, Trumka ran for president, declaring “no backward steps,” and won by a two-to-one margin. He was sworn into office on December 22, 1982.Many miners hoped Trumka would drive a hard bargain, have new ideas, and bring some stability to their lives.7 Trumka successfully petitioned delegates at the 1983 UMWA convention to endorse a selective strike strategy, moving the union away from industry-wide strikes.8 To Nick Molnar, a District 2 vice president from Cambria County, Pennsylvania, the new strategy was “a heck of a lot smarter than the nationwide walkout that we normally had because that was just like jumping off a cliff and not knowing where the bottom was.” Molnar said he hated strikes and “always thought that there had to be a better way.”9 While Terry Steele of Local 1440 in Matewan, West Virginia, also wanted stability, he saw a new battle taking shape in southern West Virginia when the A. T. Massey Coal Company opened two large nonunion operations at Marrowbone and Elk Run. The Reagan administration had emboldened union-busting companies like Massey, and Steele recalled, “These nonunion mines were put in to help break the union.” When Massey refused to sign the national BCOA agreement on October 1, 1984, the UMWA declared a selective strike against the company. Don Blankenship, a Massey subsidiary's president, led the strikebreaking effort, hiring armed security guards, helicopters to “monitor” picketing, and numerous nonunion workers to cross picket lines.10 Terry Steele saw the strike against Massey as a battle for the future of the union and thought that Trumka made a big mistake relying on a selective strike. He worried that miners’ solidarity was unraveling and that Massey was an existential threat. Steele still thinks it should have been an all-out effort. After Massey broke the strike, he recalled, “almost every mine that went in after that was nonunion.”11In 1989, the Pittston Coal Group withdrew from the BCOA and stopped payments to the health insurance fund for retirees.12 Steele believes that Trumka and his team learned important lessons from the Massey strike, deciding on an all-out effort to win at Pittston. Miners’ wives, daughters, and widows formed the Daughters of Mother Jones, organized nonviolent direct actions, and established Camp Solidarity in southwestern Virginia to host miners and labor activists from around the country. Women miners were prominent among those organizing solidarity actions around the coalfields. Nick Molnar remembered the solidarity car caravans from District 2. He was one of thousands arrested and sent to jail in Abingdon, Virginia. On September 17, 1989, a large group of activists wearing the now-iconic camouflage T-shirts dramatized their struggle by occupying Pittston's Moss #3 coal preparation plant.13 The eleven-month strike ended in February 1990 with what Trumka called “bittersweet” results when Pittston signed a compromise contract. While the solidarity actions inspired many around the country, the costs were extraordinary: millions of dollars in fines and strike support, thousands of arrests, and growing divisions in coalfield communities.14Kipp Dawson of Local 1197 in Washington County, Pennsylvania, recently talked with her union sisters during the hundredth-anniversary UMWA march to Blair Mountain. “While we had some important disagreements with Brother Trumka along the way, we should respectfully note the support he gave to women miners and to national conferences of the [women miners'] Coal Employment Project,” she wrote. “His support empowered our UMWA locals’ leaders also to make possible our extensive traveling in solidarity with workers from PATCO and Eastern Airlines to the meatpackers striking in Minnesota to our sisters and brothers striking in Great Britain and more.”15 Trumka handpicked Nick Molnar to observe the 1994 election in South Africa when Nelson Mandela defeated F. W. De Klerk. “That was indeed one of the major highlights of my life,” Molnar remembered.In 1995, Trumka successfully ran for the AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer on the New Voice ticket led by presidential candidate John J. Sweeney. During New Voice's fourteen-year term, the labor movement continued to decline in membership. Frustrations led the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to leave the AFL-CIO to form Change to Win. In 2009, with Sweeney's retirement, Trumka ran for president unopposed. Under his leadership, the AFL-CIO won back some Change to Win unions, and membership grew by some 10 percent, from 11 million to 12.5 million.16 When President Barack Obama spoke at the AFL-CIO convention, it seemed that the time was right for a dramatic turnaround, but daunting challenges emerged. Between 2012 and 2017, statehouse Republicans in Michigan, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and Kentucky—once union strongholds—passed right-to-work laws. The Wisconsin and Ohio governors led attacks on public sector union rights. The Employee Free Choice Act failed to gain a majority in the Senate, and in 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that public employees do not have to pay dues despite receiving union representation. When federal protection of organizing efforts did not materialize, neither did the dramatic turnaround. The AFL-CIO continued to fight rearguard battles, especially at the state level.17Trumka will likely be remembered as an AFL-CIO president who took progressive public stances on some of the nation's most pressing issues. Campaigning for Obama, he took on racism in the labor movement. In his address to the 2008 United Steelworkers of America convention, he condemned the disinformation and racism he encountered in his hometown, saying that union members knew all too well how racism was “used to divide people.”18 He spoke out in 2014 about the police killing of Michael Brown and in May 2020 in support of Black Lives Matter after the police killing of George Floyd. Yet he faced criticism for not taking more substantive action, such as expelling the International Union of Police Associations.19In 2014, Trumka addressed climate change, calling it a threat to “human civilization” and insisting that solutions must include working people to be effective and just, using the solidarity of environmentalists in miners’ fight for pensions and healthcare as an example.20 In 2021, he focused a lot of his efforts on trade agreements, convincing key Democrats to the support the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, pushing the US Department of Labor to disburse funds to Mexico to enforce regulations, and having the AFL-CIO file one of the first complaints under the agreement's process.21 “This isn't a perfect agreement,” he said. He hoped it was an improvement that would begin to reverse harm done by NAFTA.22After Trumka's passing, Rosemary Trump, a retired SEIU organizer and former Local 585 president, said she remembers him as the man who changed seats on an airplane to sit next to her and talk about her experiences in the labor movement. He was, she remembered, down-to-earth but also a visionary who inspired others.23 Nick Molnar said he had disagreements with Trumka over the years but always respected him. Molnar said, “I think they should change the name of it from the PRO Act to the Trumka Act. I think it'll be the best thing that ever happened to organized labor.”I would like to thank Ken Fones-Wolf, Dave Coker, and especially Kipp Dawson for their help.