Gone Home
Race and Roots through Appalachia
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this analytical history, Brown digs into a lesser-known portion of the Great Migration (during which approximately six million African-Americans left the rural South for better usually urban opportunities elsewhere): migration from Alabama to Harlan County, Ky. As the descendant of some of these migrants to Appalachia, Brown includes her personal experiences along with those of former residents of the county. These remembrances gain power when quoted at greater length, such as in the surprisingly heartbreaking chapters on integration and the decline (and in some cases, partial destruction, including bulldozing) of coal towns. While moving to a rural coal community may seem an unlikely choice for migrants seeking equality and economic opportunity, Brown argues that black men "transformed from peasants to proletariats" in the coal mines. This assertion isn't fully supported, however, because, Brown points out, the coal companies still owned everything, from homes to schools, and neighborhoods remained segregated. Her discussion of the sudden, difficult transition to school integration in the early 1960s is mesmerizing. In this tale of the collective African-American search for a place to call home, Brown provides an insightful look at 20th-century American culture.
