Please welcome guest author Barbara Ellen Smith. Smith’s research and activism focus on economic inequality and social movements, especially among working-class women and men, in Appalachia and the wider U.S. South. Her most recent co-edited book, with Steve Fisher, is Transforming Places: Lessons from Appalachia (University of Illinois Press, 2012). On November 17, Smith will be doing a live conversation on Haymarket’s youtube channel with Chris Hamby, who wrote Soul Full of Coal Dust (also about black lung), which came out from Little/Brown in August.

Adapted from the Preface to Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease by Barbara Ellen Smith, updated, revised and with a new photo gallery by Earl Dotter. Haymarket Books, 2020. All royalties go to support the WV Mine Wars Museum:  https://www.wvminewars.com/ 

Digging Our Own Graves, first published in 1987, concluded with an ominous prediction: “Black Lung disease awaits the younger generation of Coal Miners who are now at work underground.” Would that I had been wrong! Today, not only do coal miners still suffer from this lethal but preventable lung disease, they do so at younger ages, some even in their 30’s, and they are contracting the most advanced form of disease at the highest rates ever recorded.

More than fifty years after the U.S. Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969 imposed a respirable dust standard on the coal industry, designed to prevent black lung, why do such carnage and suffering persist? This updated version of the original book seeks answers to that question.

My own introduction to black lung began in the winter of 1971-1972, when I came to West Virginia to work for the Black Lung Association. I was barely 20 years old. Extraordinary political changes were in the making: coal miners, miners’ wives, and widows were challenging powerful institutions that had once commanded their acquiescence—the hierarchy of the United Mine Workers, the coal operators’ association, county political machines, the Social Security Administration.

For a young college student from the Midwest, these developments in the mountains of West Virginia beckoned with a romantic excitement. Besides, the mountains were my ancestral homeplace; now I could return to them, not on a summer vacation in the back seat of the family car, but on my own.

Working with the older coal miners and impatient young organizers who made up the Black Lung Association at that time was a formative political experience for me. Coming from a long line of subsistence farmers and rural circuit-riding preachers, I was instilled with a righteous, if vague, sense of populism that made me eager to join the struggles of “working people.”

But neither my political heritage nor my exposure to campus radicals prepared me for what I found in the coalfields of West Virginia: above all, the stark boundaries and clear perceptions of class inequality. Virtually every coal miner over the age of 65 proudly claimed to have “fought in the battle of Blair Mountain with a machine gun” in 1921 to bring the union into southern West Virginia. They were up against the combined forces of coal company guards, the state police, county sheriffs and their deputies, aerial bombers and, ultimately, the U.S. Army. I was dumbfounded.

Today, after moving away to a self-imposed exile some twenty years ago, I live once again in West Virginia. Contrasts with the 1970’s heyday of working-class activism are evident all through the landscape of boarded-up stores, rusted coal tipples, and shuttered union halls. The differences are personal as well: when I interviewed black lung activists in the 1970’s, I was the age of their daughters and granddaughters; now, I am eligible for Medicare.

As I conducted additional interviews in 2019, mostly with retired coal miners close to my age, their bodies as well as their words spoke the story of black lung disease and the physical toll of hard-labor jobs. Accustomed as a white woman to thinking of embodiment primarily in terms of gender, I was struck again and again by how the privileges of class had shielded me and become inscribed on my body.

The updated and revised version of Digging Our Own Graves, which includes two new chapters and a moving, evocative photo gallery by Earl Dotter, thus entails not only additional research into medical, legal, and economic materials relevant to black lung, but also historical reckonings both political and personal. 

The power relations that miners currently experience on the job are grim. Coal miners in southern West Virginia, once the stronghold of the UMWA in central Appalachia, where those who crossed a picket line invited ostracism if not assault, now work nonunion.

Coal companies, facing shrinking domestic markets and in many instances bankruptcy, force workers, coal communities, and American taxpayers to bear the costs of their decline. The resurgence of black lung can only be fully understood as part of the history that produced this moment, when resistance, remarkably, persists. Digging Our Own Graves analyzes the dreadful resurgence of black lung within the long history of efforts to legitimate this disease and make it visible, prevent black lung in the workplaces where it is produced, and extend dignity and a measure of justice to those for whom prevention comes too late. 

More articles on addressing black lung:

Teacher, author, activist Helen Lewis interviewed(Opens in a new browser tab)

The Wisdom of Old Blair Mountain(Opens in a new browser tab)

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