When I was 4 years old, I placed first runner-up in my one and only beauty pageant. It was for the Little Miss Coal Festival, and I won the honor by picking a purple lollipop out of a basket. I grew up in Fairmont, W.Va., where the festival marked a time to celebrate the good fortunes coal had laid at our doorstep. It ended with a parade, where the teenage queen and her court of little girls rumbled through town on the back of a truck.
Coal had been good to Fairmont. In the ’80s a job in the mines was an entry to the middle class for many people. The United Mine Workers had won good pay, strict safety regulations and vacation time that had finally made mining a decent way to make a living. Every man in my family—except my father—worked in the mines. The good wages made Fairmont a stable coal town where families could buy a new truck every couple years or take their kids to Disney World or Ocean City, Md.
This all changed around the time I reached the fifth grade. The coal industry decided it was more profitable to mine coal in the nonunion South than in Appalachia. In just a few years, thousands of miners lost their jobs, and the economic lifeblood of Fairmont and other towns like it drained. I remember bank parking lots filled with new cars that had been repossessed and all the kids in my classes who had dads who’d lost their jobs.
By the time I was in high school, no one really worked in the mines anymore. Two of my uncles moved out of town looking for work—one to work in a nonunion mine in Alabama, another to Ohio. Others tried to get coveted jobs at the new F.B.I. fingerprinting facility outside of town. Usually people took jobs making about half what they had in the mines. I spent my high school Saturday nights in a diner smoking cigarettes and dreaming of what it was going to be like when I left Fairmont.
I moved to Washington, D.C., for college. Eventually I cultivated good friendships and created a life in the city, realizing that I never wanted to live in a small town again. By the time I watched the 1976 documentary Harlan County, U.S.A. I hadn’t thought about coal for a long, long time. All I knew was that it was a movie about eastern Kentucky and striking coal miners.
Harlan County covers the time just before I was born. This history was family lore—specifically the story of a deadly disaster in a mine where my grandfather worked in 1968. My grandfather was fine, but 78 other men died, sealed underground in an exploding mine shaft. I didn’t really think I’d be that interested in the film. It was just something I had lived around.
But watching Harlan County’s images of rural poverty matched with nervy moments of defiance sung or spoken with hard nasal accents like my grandmothers’, I saw something I had never noticed in towns like mine—beauty and passion and politics. It was no longer just a dead town. It had history and heroes.
All those people in my town and in my family were the faces of a larger struggle for justice that had always fascinated me. But it was the places far from home that had consumed my passion, places like Chile or India. Watching Harlan County felt like someone had put a camera in my backyard and stayed long enough to find this amazing story of coal miners—and particularly the tough women by their side—who wouldn’t sit down until they got justice.
The fact that the film’s director, Barbara Kopple, traveled from New York City to Appalachia to document our struggles awakened something in me. The way she did it— having the people in the town tell their own story—electrified me and revealed the possibilities of what art can do.
I was struck by the fact that while the miners in Harlan County faced down pistol-toting thugs and infuriating levels of injustice, they kept singing songs and cracking jokes—even at the tensest moments on the picket line. I realized that art has the power to make a person’s story matter to someone else. So I took a job at the Service Employees International Union, finding new ways for janitors, hospital workers, home health aids and security guards to tell their own stories.
When I’m doing this work with others, I remember what it meant to me that a woman came out to hear our story and helped us tell it. I hope that somewhere my work means as much to someone else.
A few weeks ago I talked to Barbara Kopple about Harlan County, U.S.A. which will finally be released on Oct. 15. Without a doubt, Kopple made her reputation on that film for which she won an Oscar in 1977, the first of two Academy Awards she has received. We discussed how she got to Harlan County in the first place, what it was like to shoot and what it means for people to tell their own stories.
What prompted you to think of Harlan County as a story?
I first heard about this quite a few years before when Jock Yablonski and [his family] were murdered...he was running [for UMWA president] against this guy Tony Boyle.[In response] there was a movement within the coalfields, known as Miners For Democracy, because the miners felt their union was corrupt. One of the promises they made was to organize the unorganized. I thought it was cool and I went out and started filming some of the Miners For Democracy movement. I heard about this place in Eastern Kentucky, that was trying to be part of the union--hadn't been part of the union for many years. So I wanted to see if these guys were telling the truth.
How were you received when you came down there? Because I’ve done a lot of studying about media and Appalachia, and I know that there was some resistance to poor people being documented. Hugh O’Conner was even shot while doing work for the CBC. Did you have trouble engaging with people when you came down there, and how did you manage to do that?
When we first went down there, nobody would talk to us. They weren’t sure who we were. Because, you know, there we were, these people from New York. And they didn’t know if the company had hired us to spy on them and they didn’t know who we were.
And then the second day they said, “OK, well, you can meet us on the picket line.” We were staying on top of this mountain called Pine Mountain and sort of this little motel and the road was very slick and there were no sort of guide railings, security railings, on the mountain. And so we’re going down in this little station wagon, down the hill, and this other car comes careening around us and we topple over and sort of the car goes down head-first….I mean, we were fine, so we just climb out the window and carry all our gear to the picket line, which was quite a few miles away.
And then the minute we did that—and word travels fast there—they realized that we were OK, and they totally opened up to us. And they let us stay in their homes, which we did, and that was really how trust was gained.
We promised that we would be on the picket line, and even though we had this accident, we went, and that was just incredible [to them].
How do you think staying in their homes informed the way that you documented them in the documentary?
Well, I think staying in their homes informed a lot of it, because, you know, it was a dangerous strike and people can use guns in eastern Kentucky, and you’re allowed to have them. And also the first day we were there, this guy got shot and the next day he was riding around in his car with a sign saying “.38s ain’t shit” out of his car window. That’s Harlan County.
Our feelings about the whole thing was definitely leaning toward the coal miners. They also protected us, too.
They protected you?
We found out later that I was sort of on their hit list. One of the organizers, Huston Elmore, told me later, “They had wanted to shoot you—the company—because they didn’t want you filming.” And I said, “Huston why didn’t you tell me?” And he said, “Because then you might have left.” And I said I wasn’t going to leave. I said there’s no way, but at least then I wouldn’t have been stopped on this scab picket line interviewing people—I would have known what might be in store for me. And he said, “Nope, we were not going to tell you, but we were protecting you.”
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