Today’s era of renewed labor activism is a great time to watch this documentary about a 1973 miners’ strike.
When the documentary Harlan County, USA came out in 1976, the people of Appalachia had been having a moment.
A couple of moments, actually.
First of all, they were tired of the way the media portrayed them—a familiar feeling today, but even worse back then.
At the same time, coal miners and their families, who of course were a sizable and widespread part of the population, had been pushing back hard on working conditions and pay at some Appalachian mining operations for a number of years.
In that context, Harlan County, USA, a film about the 1973 Brookside Strike against Brookside Coal Company in southeast Kentucky, represented Appalachian coal mining families through their own words and actions—a powerful approach that landed it the Academy Award for Best Documentary.
You can see the film at Arthurdale Heritage at 7 p.m. on Thursday, November 4, as the third in their four-film Appalachia on the Screen series.
“This is kind of the height of the 1960s-era war on poverty, when there were all these journalistic stories and photos on poverty in Appalachia,” says WVU historian Hal Gorby, who has a particular interest in labor history. He’ll be leading a discussion after the screening in Arthurdale. “So the image people have of that time is that Appalachia was a poor region and not very engaged in solving problems. But this film turns that image upside down—people are really trying to deal with the problems that exist in the region.”
Gorby shows Harlan County, USA to history classes, and he often precedes it with the 2000 Appalshop documentary Stranger with a Camera to give students context about media portrayals of Appalachia. That film is available for free on Vimeo.
He gives the filmmaker of Harlan County, USA a lot of credit for her approach. “Barbara Kopple goes out of her way to give as much agency and voice to the people who are engaged in the strike as she can,” he says. “It’s really letting their own voices drive the story.”
Although the film is primarily focused on Harlan County, it places the strike in a larger historical and geographical setting, Gorby says. “She got started on the project in the late ’60s as part of the Miners for Democracy movement to reform the United Mine Workers. So she starts the film with the strike, then steps back in time to give that context. The film covers a time period from 1968 through the mid-’70s, this key period of activism in the region, and it goes into the union reform efforts and black lung—so it covers a number of issues.”
The film has renewed relevance today, in a year when hundreds of labor actions have been launched in the U.S. already, notable among them the Warrior Met Coal strike in Alabama that has been going on since April 1.
“If we were watching this in a different moment, the audience might wonder, ‘This is all well and good, but why is it relevant now?’” Gorby says. “But this is in the height right now of a renewed sense of union organization. The film shows what it’s like to be in a long-running organizing campaign where it’s a community effort. It also shows people that this type of organizing campaign—which they may associate with a hundred years ago—these types of actions still happen.”
Striking miners’ wives got heavily involved in the Brookside Strike, picketing and even getting arrested in significant numbers. A year into the strike, a miner died in a scuffle—his mother is seen grieving painfully at the funeral in the film—and that brought the parties to the bargaining table. After 13 months, good advances were ultimately obtained for the workers.
Go see this film in our local New Deal community of Arthurdale. And mark your calendar for the fourth and final film in the Appalachia on the Screen series, at 7 p.m. on December 2: Rosemary: A Community Activist Fighting for the Friendly City.
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