Beth Howard

Song for a Hard-Hit People (eBook, ePUB)

A Memoir of Antiracist Solidarity from a Coal Miner's Daughter

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A story of struggle and perseverance from an Eastern Kentucky woman who answered Florence Reese's timeless question, "Which side are you on?" by organizing her people with love and solidarity.

In Song for a Hard-Hit People, activist and organizer Beth Howard shares her stories of life in Appalachian Kentucky, where her family struggled with coal bosses, cops, and the cruel tragedies of working-class life. Her dad, sometimes violent and abusive, often compassionate and inspiring, was an itinerant worker in the region's coal industry who inspired her unrepentant rebelliousness. The women in her life contended with ever-present male chauvinism, modeling a kind of feminism Beth didn't yet have the language for.

These complex men and women shaped Beth's sense of justice and solidarity, and taught her from an early age about the inextricable bonds working-class people share, despite our differences. She began to learn the powerful history of white Appalachians fighting alongside Black and Brown people, pushing back against billionaires who gain power by using racism to divide them. Today, Beth is a leading organizer in the fight for working-class antiracism, part of a long tradition of Appalachian organizers and movements who put solidarity into practice.

Beth's story is particular but not uncommon. Too many of us face the same struggle for the basic necessities of life: somewhere decent to live, good food to eat, health care that doesn't break the bank, jobs that don't kill us. As she reminds us, we haven't got a chance-unless we organize.

In the best of storytelling traditions, Beth's prose is at once heart-breaking and inspiring, insightful and provocative, and filled to the brim with courageous humanity.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Haymarket Books
• Seitenzahl: 368
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. April 2026
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798888904695
• Artikelnr.: 73673907

Autorenporträt

Beth Howard is the Cultural Strategist for Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), the largest national organization bringing white people into the fight for racial and economic justice. She grew up in a rural white working-class community in Eastern Kentucky and has organized in the American South for two decades, primarily in her beloved home state of Kentucky.

Beth has been a lead organizer on campaigns to raise the minimum wage and restore voting rights. She's also engaged white working-class Southerners on successful electoral campaigns, including ones that defeated an abortion ban ballot initiative in the 2022 Kentucky midterms and reelected Democratic Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear in 2023-and ran a rural field office in the 2020 Georgia runoff election.

Beth is the creator of the viral narrative campaign Rednecks for Black Lives, and has been featured on the NBC News National Day of Racial Healing special, Matter of Fact's Listening Tour with Soledad O'Brian, NPR's Here and Now, Now This News, in the book Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections, the New York Times, and The Boston Globe. Beth lives in Lexington, Kentucky. Song for a Hard-Hit People is her first book. You can find her on Substack at Working Class Love Notes and online at bethhowardky.com.

Inhaltsangabe

ToC: 
Introduction
Section One: Who Are Your People?
Chapter 1: My People
Chapter 2: My Father
Chapter 3: My Mother
Chapter 4: My Place
Section Two: If You Could Change Something, What Would It Be?
Chapter 5: Lifting Our Heads Higher
Chapter 6: Listening to Each Other
Chapter 7: Not Good Enough
Chapter 8: Success and Cancer
Chapter 9: Fire and Rain
Section Three: What Is Holding You Back from Taking Action?
Chapter 10: It Could Always Be Worse
Chapter 11: Something Had to Change
Chapter 12: A New Way of Living
Chapter 13: Reckonings
Section Four: Will You Join Me?
Chapter 14:
Chapter 15: