The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns by William H. Turner (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns by William H. Turner Susan E. Keefe The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns. By William H. Turner. (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2021. Pp. xiii, 390.) William Turner invites us to meet the Black residents of Lynch, Kentucky, the model mining town built by U.S. Steel in 1917 and named for the company’s president, Thomas Lynch. The town was one of many in the Appalachian coalfields populated in part by southern Black workers recruited in the first half of the twentieth century. Turner compares the emergence of Black cultural life in Harlan County during the coal boom to the Harlem Renaissance in Manhattan around the same time. This is more than a memoir; it is an encyclopedic review of everything that was important to Black people like him at the time. Of course, the reader comes to know Turner’s family and friends, but he also captures the way of life in Lynch—then a town of 10,000 including 4,000 Blacks—where his father mined coal while urging his children to avoid the occupation. Turner describes all aspects of the Black community—the segregated school and meeting hall, the churches, the secret societies, the UMWA union, the Black baseball team, the holiday celebrations, the local customs like nicknaming and trash talking, and more. This book is also a love letter from a native son. Turner is clearly proud of his hometown. While Blacks were segregated, they did not feel inferior to whites because they were paid the same wages and lived in the same company housing. In fact, he argues their social segregation created a sheltered existence for Black residents. Lacking television and news beyond Jet and Ebony magazines, Blacks in Lynch were unconcerned about racial issues and civil rights (although Turner went on to be involved in both later in life). They were proud of their Black schools where children had good role models and teachers who introduced them to Black authors and history. Despite being impoverished and isolated, the Black community was stable and close-knit, bound by affection and neighborliness. Turner is by turns entertaining and frustrated, angry and sentimental, sad and nostalgic. But he is never boring! He takes the opportunity to settle scores, as for example in his takedown of the term “Affrilachian” and the Affrilachian Poets. He also traces his personal intellectual and spiritual journey [End Page 120] from Alex Haley to Ed Cabbell (his coeditor of Blacks in Appalachia). Nevertheless, his main achievement is to counter the white-centered accounts of Appalachia as racially homogeneous. For Turner, his story is the intersection of being Black and Appalachian, where identity hinges on being Black-not-Appalachian while sharing many cultural traits with whites in the region (including food, love of place, family ties, and religiosity) although living racially separate lives. Turner is careful to place his family’s situation in the context of paternalistic capitalism. Lynch was a company town where everything was corporately owned and operated, from the mines and housing to the schools, churches, theaters, hospital, bank, post office, and, of course, the company store where miners who were paid in scrip could shop. Residents were supported by the company and given free health care if they were employed. Once mechanization and other changes eliminated jobs and the coal industry became less profitable, former Black employees—like others—were abandoned without resources and forced to emigrate from the area. Today, no coal is mined in Lynch, which has become a “ghost town.” Ever the optimist, Turner points out that, despite the impediments of coal-town life for African Americans, he and many in his family and neighborhood experienced social mobility, gaining a good education and moving into better jobs and careers. His book joins the small number of other recent works on Blacks in Appalachia and reminds us that more work needs to be done to reveal racial and ethnic diversity in the mountains. Susan E. Keefe Professor Emerita Appalachian State University Copyright © 2023 West Virginia University Press