Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia

by Karida L. Brown

Since the 2016 presidential election, Americans have witnessed countless stories about 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 from the pre- to the post-civil rights era, so too did black Americans. In reconstructing the life histories of black coal miners, 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Sociology, Race

244 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 6, 2018

Reviews

[Shelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a good one on a former Black community in Eastern Kentucky (Harlan County) part of Appalachia. It details how prison labor was (and is) used as slave labor for the profit of corporations. It shows the racism in everyday life of the community. And it shows the complexity of integrating the schools. It is the only book I've found so far that explores the Black experience of Appalachia. I'd love more books about Black communities (or just individual families) in various parts of Appalachia.

[Karah Tull · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent!!!

[Candy Wood]

While the Research Appendix makes clear that Karida Brown can use sociologists’ words like epistemological and phenomenological, and that this book originated in her doctoral research, the rest of the text shows that she can engage a wider audience. By reproducing selections from oral histories gathered from mostly retirement-aged black people who lived at least part of their lives in the coal towns of Lynch and Benham, Harlan County, Kentucky, she vividly conveys the experiences of people who are usually overlooked in accounts of Appalachia. She suggests that the first generation of African American coal miners were an early part of the migration Isabel Wilkerson writes about in The Warmth of Other Suns: they left mining jobs in Jim Crow Alabama for more attractive ones in Kentucky, where the company towns excluded the worst forms of racist violence while keeping “colored” and “American” populations separate. The majority of Brown’s interview subjects lived through school desegregation, and that chapter shows that the experience was not necessarily positive. Those who were in high school after the laws changed in 1963 felt a loss of their senior status as well as of close relationships with black teachers, while at the same time they realized that they were better prepared than some of their new, white classmates. Anyone compiling a Black Lives Matter reading list should add this title.

[Matthew William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Appalachian Studies can be a wide and often interrelated field. The disciplines of Sociology, Anthropology, Literature, and History are becoming increasingly employed as one in order to understand the lives, families, and employment of the hardworking men and women, black, white, and brown, who called and still call the hills home. Dr. Karida L. Brown, a sociologist at UCLA and descendant of two families, the Davis and Brown families of Lynch, Kentucky, has written a masterful work of both narrative and scientific importance, that discusses a cross-section of the lives of those Appalachian settlers.

Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2018, 254pgs., $29.95), tells the story of the African-American citizens of the towns of Lynch, Benham, and Cumberland, in Harlan County, Kentucky. The men and women of these coal towns established homes, raised wonderful families, and made the mountains sing with laughter, hard-work, and the joy of what the future may hold. They also felt the cold and traumatic grip of institutional and personal racism, both from white citizens where they lived and the companies that they worked for. The narrative that Dr. Brown shares, which utilizes all of the above mentioned disciplines in masterful symmetry, is a narrative of self-sustaining dedication to the American dream.

Gone Home should be required reading for anyone interested in Appalachia. Dr. Brown has written a work that reads like a history as well as the scholarly work that it most certainly is. An interested reader would quickly be able to glimpse the lives that Dr. Brown chronicles as the epitome of the American dream. This review recommends Gone Home as both Appalachian History and Social Science, as well as an excellent tale of reminiscing and what might have been. It will occupy a place on my shelf for years to come.

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

This reads like a sociology dissertation, a collection of oral history interviews interspersed with some historical context. I was most interested in the multicultural mining camps of the first half of the twentieth century, since I have coal miners in my family tree. The very end of the book hit home as well, as descendants of those miners come back from all the places they live now to decorate the cemetery and reminisce. The black experience was different from the immigrant, of course, but not as much as might be thought because while the different groups lived separately, everybody's father worked side by side in the mine and everybody's mother stayed home. The second half of the book covers the Civil Rights era, school immigration, and the closing of the mines.

[Barbara Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This beautifully and brilliantly written book is amazingly well-researched and should be read widely. Rarely does an oral history trace members of a diaspora across such a variety of locations to capture their memories of a community lost or left behind and the impact on them of their experiences there. Lovingly and with great insight, the author traces the social changes across generations of African-American people who lived in the coal mining area of Eastern Kentucky. This study is well-framed within sociological theory and the historical context while having a clear and engaging writing style.

[Mary Bellamy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Four and a half rounded to 5. The book is a mix of sociological analysis, which I don't have the background to evaluate, and fascinating history. The book is about the African-American coal miners and their families who lived in the southeastern corner of Kentucky during the 20th century. The author has conducted extensive interviews with people from that world and she has done a wonderful of sharing snippets from those interviews. I was surprised by how much I hadn't known, and how much I learned by reading the book.

[Jim Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like most White people, I never considered the diaspora of Black families from the South to the Appalachian coalfields. This was a mixture of scholarly and very matter of fact oral history stories of how Black families not only survived, but advanced educationally & economically in Eastern Kentucky factory coal towns.

[Michael Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptionally well written and meticulously researched, this book presents the stories of many, many Black and African American people who lived in a coal town in Kentucky in the 20th century. Absolutely fascinating and an important and deep examination of all too easily forgotten identities and experiences that are just as authentically Appalachian as any other.

[Marianne Mersereau · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent book that discusses the"white-washing" of Appalachia and gives voice to the Black experience in this region with special focus on those who came to the area to work in the coal mines and later migrated to larger cities.

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little more scholarly/sociological than I was expecting, but still a good look into the coal industry, Appalachia and race, if you’re looking to learn more. She interweaves quotes from people who lived in that time period with her own writing and explanations.

[KELLY A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly researched and written. GONE HOME will go on my shelf beside other seminal work on Appalachia and by Appalachian authors.

[Hailey Linenkugel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really cool nonfiction book I read for my Social identities class. The oral histories are incredible and I loved learning about rural, coal-mining Kentucky!

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Kentuckian, I really loved reading the memories of black Kentuckians who grew up in Harlan County. I also felt sad that I never knew that coal towns were once home to thriving communities of black Americans. Additionally, the author covered broader issues including the long history of mass incarceration as a form of slavery and The Great Migration, which Brown rightfully calls The Great Escape. The perspectives she shared on desegregation gave me a new layer of understanding of this issue and time in our history. I picked this book up for research but wound up reading it also for enjoyment.