Chapter 26: The Appalachian Resistance Tradition — From Blair Mountain to Buffalo Creek to Climate Activism

"People say Appalachians are fatalistic, that they just accept whatever happens. Those people have never met an Appalachian who was mad. My grandmother marched a picket line when she was eight months pregnant. My uncle got tear-gassed at Brookside. My mother chained herself to a bulldozer to stop a strip mine. We don't just accept things. We never have." — Teri Blanton, environmental activist, Harlan County, Kentucky, interview with Appalachian Voices, 2010

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Identify a continuous thread of resistance spanning more than 150 years of Appalachian history, from the mine wars through environmental justice activism, challenging the stereotype of Appalachian passivity
2. Describe the Buffalo Creek disaster of 1972 — its causes, its devastation, and how it transformed survivors into citizen activists who changed the trajectory of Appalachian organizing
3. Analyze the Pittston Coal strike of 1989 and Camp Solidarity as a model of community-wide nonviolent resistance and as the last great coal strike in American history
4. Connect historical resistance movements to contemporary Appalachian activism around mountaintop removal, pipeline opposition, and climate justice

Introduction: The Myth of the Passive Mountaineer

There is a story that America tells itself about Appalachian people. In this story, mountain people are passive — fatalistic, resigned, accepting of whatever the world does to them. They endure poverty without complaint. They watch their mountains be destroyed without protest. They bury their dead and go back to the mines. They are objects of pity, not agents of change. They are the people things happen to, not the people who make things happen.

This story is a lie.

It is not a lie told out of malice, necessarily, though some of those who tell it have their reasons. It is a lie told out of ignorance — the kind of ignorance that is possible only when you do not know the history, when the history has been deliberately suppressed, when the textbooks you read in school devoted a paragraph to "labor unrest" and moved on.

This chapter is about the truth that the lie conceals: that Appalachian people have fought — organized, marched, struck, litigated, testified, occupied, blockaded, and put their bodies on the line — in every generation, against every form of exploitation this textbook has documented. The resistance tradition in Appalachia is not episodic. It is continuous. It stretches from the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s (Chapter 10) through the mine wars of the 1920s (Chapter 17) through the black lung movement of the 1960s (Chapter 21) through the anti-mountaintop removal campaigns of the 2000s (Chapter 24) and into the climate justice movements of the present.

The people who fought were not heroes imported from outside. They were coal miners and their wives and children. They were farmers and preachers and schoolteachers. They were people who had nothing to gain from fighting except dignity, and who fought anyway because dignity was the one thing they were not willing to surrender.

This chapter connects the dots — drawing the line that runs from the armed miners who marched on Blair Mountain in 1921 to the citizens of Buffalo Creek who organized after a coal waste dam killed 125 of their neighbors in 1972, to the miners and their families who built Camp Solidarity during the Pittston Coal strike of 1989, to the activists who are fighting pipelines and fracking and the legacies of extraction today. The thread is resistance. The thread has never broken.

The Roots of Resistance: A Brief Recollection

Before we move into the stories that are new to this chapter, it is worth pausing to recall how deep the resistance tradition runs. The chapters you have already read contain the evidence.

The Whiskey Rebellion (1794), described in Chapter 10, was the first organized Appalachian resistance to distant authority — frontier farmers refusing to pay a federal excise tax on whiskey, which was not merely a beverage but a form of currency in the cash-poor mountain economy. The rebellion was put down by federal troops, but the pattern was established: mountain people would resist policies imposed from outside that threatened their economic survival and local autonomy.

The Civil War divisions described in Chapter 11 included organized resistance to Confederate conscription — mountain Unionists who refused to fight for a slaveholders' rebellion, who hid in the mountains, organized guerrilla bands, and risked execution for their defiance. This was not passivity. It was resistance against a government that had not earned their allegiance.

The mine wars of Chapter 17 were the most dramatic expression of Appalachian resistance: armed miners marching by the thousands, fighting pitched battles against private armies and the U.S. military, demanding nothing more than the right to organize, to be paid in real money, and to live as human beings. The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 — ten thousand armed miners, the largest armed uprising in the United States since the Civil War — was not the act of a passive people. It was the act of a people who had been pushed beyond endurance and who fought back with everything they had.

The Harlan County wars of the 1930s and 1970s (Chapter 17, Case Study 2) extended the resistance tradition across decades. Florence Reece writing "Which Side Are You On?" at age nineteen while gun thugs searched her home. The women of the 1973 Brookside strike organizing picket lines and facing down company security forces. Barbara Kopple documenting it all for the film that would bring Harlan County's story to a national audience.

The Black Lung movement of the late 1960s (Chapter 21) was resistance in a different key — not armed insurrection but collective political action, as disabled miners and their families demanded that the industry and the government acknowledge the disease that was killing them. The 1969 West Virginia wildcat strike — 40,000 miners walking off the job to demand black lung legislation — was one of the largest labor actions in American history.

These are not isolated episodes. They are chapters in a single story. And the story does not end with the mine wars or the black lung movement. It continues — through Buffalo Creek, through Pittston, through the fight against mountaintop removal, and into the present.

Buffalo Creek: The Disaster That Changed Everything

On the morning of February 26, 1972, at approximately 8:00 a.m., a coal waste dam on Middle Fork at Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West Virginia, collapsed. The dam — built by the Buffalo Mining Company, a subsidiary of the Pittston Coal Company — had been constructed by simply dumping coal waste across the head of the hollow, creating an earthen barrier that held back millions of gallons of coal waste and water.

The dam was not engineered. It was not inspected by any regulatory authority. It was not built according to any design specifications. It was, in the words of the Pittston Coal Company's own vice president, who testified before Congress after the disaster, "just a coal refuse pile."

When the dam gave way, approximately 132 million gallons of black water and coal waste surged down the narrow valley of Buffalo Creek. The flood — a wall of water, mud, coal debris, and wreckage — was thirty feet high in places and moving at devastating speed. It hit the communities along the creek like a battering ram.

125 people died. More than 1,100 were injured. Over 4,000 were left homeless. Sixteen communities along the seventeen-mile length of Buffalo Creek were damaged or destroyed. Houses were swept from their foundations and smashed to kindling. Cars, trucks, and mobile homes tumbled through the flood like toys. Bodies were found miles from where the victims had been standing when the water hit.

The disaster happened on a Saturday morning. Many victims were in their homes — cooking breakfast, getting children ready, doing morning chores. They had no warning. The wall of water came around the bend of the hollow and there was nothing to do but run, and for many there was not time to do even that. Parents grabbed children and scrambled for high ground. Some made it. Some did not.

The scene that rescuers encountered in the hours after the flood was beyond description in any language adequate to human suffering. Bodies tangled in debris. Children separated from parents. Houses reduced to piles of splintered wood and mud. Survivors wandering in shock, coated in black slurry, unable to find their families. The sound of people calling names that no one answered.

The Pittston Coal Company's Response

The Pittston Coal Company — the parent company of the Buffalo Mining Company that had built and operated the dam — responded to the disaster in a manner that would become a template for corporate behavior in the aftermath of industrial catastrophe.

First, Pittston denied responsibility. The company's vice president, Nicholas Camicia, described the dam failure as an "act of God" — a natural disaster, caused by heavy rainfall, for which no human agency could be held accountable. This characterization was contested immediately by engineers, geologists, and federal investigators who examined the dam's remnants and concluded that it had been structurally inadequate from the beginning — that it was not a dam at all, in any engineering sense, but a pile of refuse that had been allowed to grow until it could no longer contain the water behind it.

Second, Pittston hired the most expensive lawyers it could find — including the prominent Washington law firm of Arnold & Porter — to defend against the lawsuits that the survivors began to file. The legal strategy was delay and attrition: keep the cases in court as long as possible, depose every plaintiff, challenge every expert, and wait for the survivors to run out of money and energy.

Third, Pittston lobbied against regulatory changes that might prevent similar disasters. The company argued that coal waste disposal was adequately regulated (it was not) and that additional oversight would impose unnecessary costs on the coal industry.

The survivors of Buffalo Creek, however, were not passive. And what they did in response to the disaster would change the trajectory of Appalachian activism for the next fifty years.

The Survivors Organize

The survivors of Buffalo Creek faced a choice that disaster survivors throughout history have faced: accept what happened and try to rebuild, or fight for accountability. They chose to fight.

Their fight took multiple forms. They filed lawsuits — both individual injury claims and, more significantly, a class action lawsuit against the Pittston Coal Company that would become one of the most important disaster litigation cases in American legal history. They were represented by Gerald Stern, a young attorney from Arnold & Porter who, in a remarkable turn, had been asked to represent the survivors rather than the company. Stern's work on the Buffalo Creek case — documented in his book The Buffalo Creek Disaster — became a model for public interest disaster litigation.

The lawsuit argued not just that Pittston's dam had failed but that the company had known the dam was structurally inadequate and had done nothing to prevent the disaster. The evidence supported this claim. Internal company documents showed that Pittston officials had been aware of the dam's deficiencies. Federal investigators had expressed concerns about the dam's stability before the disaster. The dam had been leaking. Warning signs had been ignored.

The case was settled out of court in 1974 for approximately **$13.5 million** — a significant sum at the time but, divided among more than six hundred plaintiffs, an amount that averaged roughly $13,000 per family for the loss of their homes, their communities, their health, and in many cases their loved ones. Many survivors considered the settlement grossly inadequate but accepted it because they could not afford to continue fighting.

But the lawsuits were only one dimension of the survivors' organizing. The disaster also produced a generation of citizen activists — people who had been ordinary community members before February 26, 1972, and who became organizers, advocates, and political actors in the aftermath.

The mechanism was straightforward: the disaster taught the survivors that the systems that were supposed to protect them — the coal company, the state government, the federal regulators — had failed. The coal company had built a dam that killed their families and then called it an act of God. The state had failed to inspect the dam. The federal government had failed to require inspections. Nobody had protected them, and nobody was going to make it right unless they demanded it themselves.

Primary Source Excerpt — Testimony of Shirley Johnson, Buffalo Creek survivor, before the West Virginia legislature, 1973: "Before the flood, I trusted the coal company. I trusted the government. I trusted that somebody was looking out for us. After the flood, I didn't trust anybody. And I realized that if we wanted somebody to look out for us, it was going to have to be us. That's when I started going to meetings. That's when I started speaking up. That's when I stopped being quiet."

Johnson became a community organizer and environmental advocate in the decades following the disaster, working with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition on mountaintop removal issues.

The Psychological Aftermath: "The Second Buffalo Creek"

The physical destruction of Buffalo Creek was devastating. But it was the psychological destruction that social scientists found most significant — and most enduring.

Kai Erikson, a sociologist at Yale, conducted an extensive study of the Buffalo Creek survivors, published as Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (1976). Erikson's research documented what he called a "second Buffalo Creek" — a psychological disaster that followed the physical one.

The physical disaster had destroyed not just houses and infrastructure but community — the web of relationships, mutual obligations, shared memories, and collective identity that had bound the hollow communities together. When the survivors were relocated to temporary housing — FEMA trailers scattered across the region, with no attention to keeping neighborhoods or communities together — they lost not just their homes but their neighbors, their churches, their daily rhythms, their sense of belonging.

Erikson documented widespread symptoms of what would later be recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): nightmares, anxiety, depression, inability to trust, emotional numbness, and a pervasive sense of vulnerability. But he also documented something that went beyond individual trauma — a collective trauma, a shattering of the community bonds that had sustained people through generations of hardship. The survivors did not just lose their houses. They lost their world.

Erikson's work was groundbreaking. It established the concept of collective trauma as distinct from individual psychological injury and provided the framework that would be used to understand the psychological impact of disasters — both natural and industrial — for decades afterward. His findings also had legal significance: the concept of psychological injury, as distinct from physical injury, was incorporated into the Buffalo Creek litigation, expanding the legal framework for disaster compensation.

The Regulatory Response — And Its Limits

The Buffalo Creek disaster produced a wave of regulatory activity. Congress held hearings. The West Virginia legislature passed new mine dam safety legislation. Federal agencies tightened oversight of coal waste impoundments. The Dam Safety Act provisions were strengthened. New inspection requirements were imposed.

But the regulatory response had limits that would become painfully apparent in the decades that followed. The Martin County sludge spill of 2000 (Chapter 24) — twenty-eight years after Buffalo Creek — demonstrated that the structural conditions that had produced the disaster had not been adequately addressed. Coal waste impoundments continued to be built over abandoned mines. Inspection regimes remained inadequate. The political influence of the coal industry continued to weaken enforcement.

The survivors of Buffalo Creek had forced the system to respond. But they had not forced the system to change fundamentally. The extractive structure — coal companies building waste disposal infrastructure in the cheapest possible way, in the valleys where the poorest people lived, with minimal regulatory oversight — remained intact. The resistance had won concessions. It had not won justice.

The Pittston Coal Strike of 1989: The Last Great Coal Strike

Seventeen years after the Buffalo Creek disaster, the Pittston Coal Company was back in the headlines — and back in conflict with the people of the coalfields.

In April 1989, approximately 1,900 UMWA miners at Pittston Coal operations in Virginia and West Virginia went on strike. The immediate issue was healthcare. Pittston had unilaterally ended retiree healthcare benefits for miners who had worked for the company for decades — men who had spent their careers underground, who were now sick with black lung and other occupational diseases, and who depended on the healthcare provisions of their union contract.

But the Pittston strike was about more than healthcare. It was about whether the coal industry could simply walk away from its obligations to the workers and communities that had generated its profits. It was about whether a contract meant anything. And it was, in the deepest sense, about whether the people of the coalfields would accept the progressive dismantling of everything the labor movement had won over the previous half century.

They would not accept it. And the way they fought was extraordinary.

The Strike's Character

The Pittston strike was remarkable in several respects that distinguished it from earlier coalfield labor conflicts.

First, it was nonviolent. Unlike the mine wars of the early twentieth century, which involved armed combat, assassination, and the deployment of private armies, the Pittston strike was conducted with deliberate, disciplined nonviolence. Strikers were trained in nonviolent resistance techniques. They sat down in roads, blocked coal trucks with their bodies, and occupied a coal processing plant — all without resorting to the violence that had characterized earlier coalfield conflicts. The nonviolent discipline was maintained even when strikers were arrested, pepper-sprayed, and dragged away by state police.

The choice of nonviolence was strategic and philosophical. The UMWA leadership, under President Richard Trumka, understood that the legal and media landscape of the late twentieth century was different from the early twentieth century. Armed resistance would have provided the coal company and the state with justification for a violent crackdown and would have alienated the public sympathy that the strikers needed. Nonviolence put the moral burden on the company and the state.

Second, the strike was a community-wide action, not just a workplace dispute. While the 1,900 striking miners were the core of the action, the strike mobilized the entire coalfield community — miners' wives, children, parents, neighbors, local businesses, churches, and civic organizations. Women played particularly prominent roles, organizing food distribution, running community kitchens, maintaining morale, and participating directly in blockades and sit-ins. The strike was not something that happened at the mine gate. It was something that happened in every hollow, every church, every kitchen in the coalfield communities.

Third, the strike generated national and international solidarity on a scale that surprised both the company and the union. Camp Solidarity — a sprawling tent city and rally ground established near the Pittston operations — became a gathering point for supporters from across the country. Union members from other industries, church groups, students, politicians, and concerned citizens traveled to Camp Solidarity to walk the picket lines, deliver food and supplies, and express their support. At its peak, Camp Solidarity hosted thousands of visitors and became a symbol of working-class solidarity that transcended the coalfields.

Camp Solidarity: A Community in Resistance

Camp Solidarity deserves particular attention because it represented something unusual in the history of American labor conflict: a physical space of collective resistance that was also a community — a place where people lived, ate, sang, prayed, debated, and sustained each other through months of uncertainty and hardship.

The camp was established on private land near the Pittston operations, and it grew organically as the strike continued. There were tents, trailers, a community kitchen that served hundreds of meals daily, a stage for rallies and music, and a constant flow of visitors. Union locals from across the country sent delegations. Church groups sent food and supplies. Musicians came to perform. Politicians came to be photographed.

But the heart of Camp Solidarity was not the visiting dignitaries or the media attention. It was the community of strikers and their families who sustained the strike day after day, through the exhaustion and uncertainty of a labor action that stretched from April 1989 into early 1990. The women who ran the community kitchen. The retired miners who walked the picket lines because their healthcare was at stake. The children who grew up in an atmosphere of collective purpose and learned, by observation, what it meant to fight for something.

The cultural dimension of Camp Solidarity was significant. There was music — old labor songs, new songs written for the strike, gospel music, country music. There was storytelling — miners telling their stories, connecting the Pittston strike to the longer history of coalfield labor conflict, invoking the memory of Blair Mountain and Harlan County and the tradition they were continuing. There was prayer — the churches of the coalfield communities providing spiritual sustenance and moral authority to the strike.

"Camp Solidarity was the best thing and the hardest thing I ever did," a former striker told an oral history interviewer in 2005. "It was like the whole community came together in one place and said, 'We're not going to take this anymore.' And for a few months, we weren't just fighting the company. We were building something. We were showing that we could take care of each other."

The Moss 3 Occupation

The most dramatic single action of the Pittston strike was the occupation of the Moss 3 coal processing plant in Carbo, Virginia, on September 17, 1989. Approximately ninety-eight miners and one minister entered the plant at 4:00 a.m. and occupied it, shutting down Pittston's primary processing facility.

The occupation lasted four days. The miners inside the plant conducted themselves with extraordinary discipline — they caused no damage to the facility, maintained order, and communicated with the media and the public through a sophisticated communications operation. The minister who accompanied them, Reverend Jim Sessions of the Commission on Religion in Appalachia, provided spiritual support and served as a liaison with authorities.

The Moss 3 occupation was a calculated escalation — designed to increase pressure on Pittston while maintaining the nonviolent character of the strike. It succeeded on both counts. The occupation attracted intense national media coverage and increased political pressure on the company to settle. And it demonstrated the miners' commitment and discipline: they had occupied a major industrial facility without violence, without damage, and without losing the moral high ground.

The occupation ended peacefully when the miners voluntarily left the facility, and the legal consequences were limited. But the message had been delivered: the strikers were willing to escalate, they were capable of sophisticated action, and they would not be broken.

The Settlement — And the Legacy

The Pittston strike was settled in February 1990, after ten months on the picket line. The settlement, mediated by Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole, restored the healthcare benefits that Pittston had attempted to eliminate and established a framework for resolving future disputes. The UMWA declared victory, and by most objective measures, the miners had won — they had preserved the benefits that the company had attempted to strip away.

But the victory was bittersweet. The Pittston strike was the last great coal strike in American history. The coal industry was beginning its long decline, and the UMWA's membership was shrinking. The solidarity that Camp Solidarity had embodied — the community-wide, cross-generational, class-conscious resistance of the coalfield communities — would never be mobilized on the same scale again. Not because the spirit had died, but because the industry was dying, and with it the economic and social structures that had made community-wide labor action possible.

The Pittston strike's legacy, however, extends beyond its immediate outcome. It demonstrated that nonviolent community-wide resistance could succeed against a powerful corporation. It showed that the labor movement could generate national solidarity in the late twentieth century. It trained a generation of organizers — many of whom went on to lead environmental justice campaigns in the coalfields — in the techniques of nonviolent direct action. And it added another chapter to the resistance tradition that runs through Appalachian history like a vein of coal through a mountain.

Women in the Resistance Tradition

No honest account of the Appalachian resistance tradition can be written without centering the role of women — because in every major struggle this chapter has described, women were not auxiliary participants. They were essential.

The erasure of women from resistance history follows a familiar pattern: the dramatic confrontation (the march on Blair Mountain, the Moss 3 occupation) is remembered, while the sustaining work that made the confrontation possible (the community kitchen, the childcare, the emotional labor of maintaining morale through months of hardship) is forgotten. But the sustaining work was as necessary as the confrontation. Without the women who ran the Camp Solidarity kitchen, the Pittston strike would have collapsed. Without the women who organized the tent colonies at Paint Creek, the mine wars could not have been sustained. Without the women who testified at congressional hearings, documented health effects, and organized communities, the anti-mountaintop removal movement would have had no foundation.

The women of the Appalachian resistance tradition were not spectators watching their men fight. They were fighters in their own right:

Florence Reece wrote "Which Side Are You On?" while hiding her children from company gun thugs — an act of creative resistance that produced the most enduring labor anthem in American history.

The women of the 1973 Brookside strike in Harlan County organized picket lines, confronted company security forces, and were captured on film by Barbara Kopple doing work that was at least as dangerous as anything the male miners did.

Hazel Dickens, a West Virginia miner's daughter who became one of the most powerful voices in American folk music, used her art as a weapon — singing of black lung, of Buffalo Creek, of the lives of ordinary mountain people, in a voice that could make a concert hall full of people weep.

Judy Bonds, Maria Gunnoe, and Teri Blanton were among the most prominent leaders of the anti-mountaintop removal movement — women from coalfield families who organized their communities, testified before Congress, and accepted the threats and harassment that came with challenging the most powerful industry in their region.

The pattern is consistent across more than a century of resistance: when the men went to the picket line, the women went to the community. When the men went to prison, the women kept the families alive. When the men came home defeated, the women refused to accept defeat. And when the struggle shifted from the mine gate to the mountaintop, the women were there — often leading rather than following.

The Appalachian resistance tradition is, to a degree that the traditional telling has not acknowledged, a women's tradition. Recovering the women's stories is not supplementary to the history. It is essential to it.

The Black Lung Movement Revisited: Resistance Through Organization

The black lung movement of the late 1960s, described in Chapter 21, deserves particular attention in this chapter because it represents a distinctive form of resistance — one that combined grassroots organizing, medical testimony, and political action in a campaign that changed federal law.

The movement was triggered by disabled miners who had spent decades being told that their lung disease was not real — that the industry's paid doctors were correct and their own suffocating bodies were lying. When physicians like Dr. I.E. Buff and Dr. Donald Rasmussen provided the medical evidence that coal dust caused the disease, the miners organized.

The Black Lung Association, formed in 1968, mobilized thousands of disabled miners and their families across the coalfields. In February 1969, approximately 40,000 West Virginia miners walked off the job in a wildcat strike — unauthorized by the UMWA leadership — demanding that the state legislature pass a black lung compensation law. The strike shut down the West Virginia coal industry for three weeks. The legislature, confronted with the economic consequences of a statewide shutdown, passed the law.

The West Virginia black lung strike was followed by federal legislation — the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, which established federal black lung compensation and imposed new safety standards on the coal industry. The law was imperfect and its implementation was contested for decades, but it represented a tangible victory won through organized resistance by the people most directly affected.

The black lung movement is significant in the resistance tradition because it demonstrated that resistance did not require arms or picket lines. It required organization, evidence, and the willingness of ordinary people to make their suffering visible and to demand that the system respond. The disabled miners who organized the Black Lung Association and walked off the job in 1969 were not dramatically different from the miners who marched on Blair Mountain in 1921. They were people who had been pushed too far and who fought back with the tools available to them.

Environmental Justice: The Resistance Continues

The decline of the coal industry did not end Appalachian resistance. It transformed it. The same communities that had fought for labor rights in the mines now fought for environmental rights on the mountains.

The anti-mountaintop removal movement, described in detail in Chapter 24, was the most visible expression of this transformation. The organizations that led the fight — the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Coal River Mountain Watch, Appalachian Voices, the Appalachian Citizens' Law Center — were staffed and led, in many cases, by people who had been forged in the labor movement or who came from families steeped in the resistance tradition.

Judy Bonds, who became one of the most prominent anti-mountaintop removal activists before her death in 2011, was the daughter and granddaughter of coal miners from the Coal River Valley in Raleigh County, West Virginia. She had grown up in the labor tradition. When mountaintop removal operations began destroying the mountains above her community — contaminating the water, filling the air with dust, cracking the foundations of homes — she organized. She did not organize because an outside environmental group told her to. She organized because that is what people in her family did when something was wrong.

Maria Gunnoe, from Bob White in Boone County, West Virginia, became an internationally recognized environmental justice activist after mountaintop removal operations above her property caused repeated flooding and water contamination. Gunnoe won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2009 — the world's most prestigious award for grassroots environmental activism. She was from the mountains. She was fighting for her home. She was continuing a tradition that her great-grandparents would have recognized.

The continuity between the labor resistance and the environmental resistance was not just biographical. It was structural. The fundamental dynamic was the same: outside corporate interests extracting wealth from Appalachian land while leaving the communities with the costs. The response was the same: local people organizing, educating, litigating, and putting their bodies in the way. The enemies were, in many cases, literally the same companies: Massey Energy, which fought the UMWA, was the same company that conducted the mountaintop removal operations that the next generation of activists fought.

Pipeline Opposition: The Newest Front

The resistance tradition has continued to evolve. In the 2010s and 2020s, the focus shifted to natural gas infrastructure — specifically, the massive pipelines proposed to carry fracked gas from the Marcellus and Utica shale formations through the Appalachian mountains.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) — a 303-mile pipeline proposed to carry natural gas from northwestern West Virginia through the mountains of southern Virginia — became a focal point of resistance. The pipeline's route cut through rugged mountain terrain, crossing streams, forests, and steep slopes that environmental scientists warned were particularly vulnerable to erosion and landslide. It cut through communities whose residents had not been consulted and did not consent.

The opposition to the Mountain Valley Pipeline drew on the full repertoire of Appalachian resistance. There were legal challenges — communities and environmental organizations filed lawsuits challenging the pipeline's permits and its environmental impact assessments, winning temporary victories in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that delayed construction and forced permit revisions. There were public hearings at which citizens testified, sometimes for hours, about the risks the pipeline posed to their water, their land, and their communities. Landowners who had never been activists before found themselves standing at microphones in public hearing rooms, speaking with the clarity and passion of people defending their homes — echoing, whether they knew it or not, the miners' wives who had testified at congressional hearings about Harlan County fifty years earlier.

There were direct actions — people sitting in trees along the pipeline route, occupying construction zones, chaining themselves to equipment. And there was something that earlier generations of Appalachian resisters did not have: social media. The pipeline opposition used Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to document construction damage, share community testimonies, and build national awareness in ways that the organizers of Blair Mountain or Buffalo Creek could not have imagined. The technology was new. The anger was ancient.

Tree-sits along the MVP route — activists living in platforms built in trees that were slated for removal — became symbols of the resistance, drawing national media attention and echoing the direct-action traditions of the environmental movement. The tree-sitters endured harsh weather, legal threats, and physical hardship to delay construction and maintain public attention on the pipeline's impacts.

Anti-fracking organizing in Appalachia has also connected to the resistance tradition. Communities across West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio have organized against the health and environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing — contaminated water, air pollution, earthquake risk, and the industrialization of rural landscapes. The organizing has been community-based, drawing on the same networks of churches, community organizations, and informal associations that sustained the labor and environmental movements before it.

Climate Justice from Within Appalachia

Perhaps the most significant recent development in the Appalachian resistance tradition is the emergence of climate justice activism from within Appalachia — by people who live in the region, who understand its history, and who refuse to accept that the communities that powered America's industrial economy should be abandoned as that economy transitions away from fossil fuels.

This activism challenges both the coal industry and the national environmental movement. It challenges the coal industry's insistence that the only future for Appalachia is more extraction. And it challenges national environmentalists who treat Appalachia as a sacrifice zone — a place that was destroyed to produce cheap energy and can now be written off as the country moves to cleaner sources.

Organizations like Appalachian Voices, the Appalachian Citizens' Law Center, and the STAY (Stay Together Appalachian Youth) Project have articulated a vision of just transition — a transition away from fossil fuels that does not leave coalfield communities behind. They argue that the people whose labor and land powered America's economy for a century deserve a seat at the table when decisions are made about the energy future. They argue for investment in renewable energy, in economic diversification, in infrastructure, in healthcare, and in education for the communities that are most affected by the energy transition.

This activism is rooted in the same analysis that has driven Appalachian resistance for 150 years: the understanding that the people of the mountains have been exploited by an economic system that extracts their resources and discards them when the resources are gone. What has changed is the specific resource — from coal to natural gas to the question of what comes after fossil fuels — and the specific tools of resistance — from picket lines and dynamite to litigation and community development. What has not changed is the fundamental commitment: the people of these mountains will not go quietly. They never have.

The Anchor Examples: Resistance Across the Region

Each of this textbook's four anchor communities illuminates a different dimension of the Appalachian resistance tradition:

Harlan County, Kentucky is, by any measure, the capital of Appalachian resistance. No other county in the region has produced as sustained, as intense, or as well-documented a tradition of organized fighting back. From the Battle of Evarts in 1931 through the Brookside strike of 1973-74 and into the environmental and economic justice campaigns of the twenty-first century, Harlan County has been the place where the fundamental tensions of Appalachian life — between corporate power and community survival, between extraction and resistance, between fatalism and fury — have been contested most openly and most violently. Florence Reece's question — "Which side are you on?" — was born in Harlan County, and it has never stopped being asked there.

McDowell County, West Virginia presents a more complicated picture. McDowell was the site of labor organizing, including UMWA activity during the mine wars era, and its diverse coalfield population (Black, white, and immigrant miners, as described in Chapter 19) created conditions for interracial solidarity that were remarkable for their time. But McDowell also experienced the devastating consequences of union defeat and industry decline — the hollowing out of community infrastructure that made sustained organizing progressively more difficult. McDowell's resistance story is as much about the obstacles to resistance as about resistance itself: when the population collapses and the institutions dissolve, who is left to fight?

The New River Valley, Virginia has a resistance tradition that is less visible than those of the coalfield counties but no less real. The region's history includes frontier resistance to federal authority, Civil War division, and — more recently — opposition to the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which cuts through the New River Valley and has provoked sustained community organizing by landowners, environmental groups, and local governments. The New River Valley's resistance tradition is shaped by its relative economic stability: the presence of Virginia Tech and a more diversified economy means that resistance does not always take the desperate, existential form it takes in the coalfields. But it is resistance nonetheless.

Asheville, North Carolina has become, in the twenty-first century, a hub for a different kind of Appalachian activism — one focused on cultural reclamation, economic justice, and the challenge of gentrification. Organizations in Asheville have organized around affordable housing, workers' rights in the tourism industry, and the preservation of Appalachian identity in a rapidly changing city. The resistance tradition in Asheville is younger and more urban than in the coalfields, but it draws on the same fundamental commitment: the insistence that the people who live in a place should have a voice in its future.

The Suppression of Resistance History

The resistance tradition documented in this chapter is not hidden in obscure archives. It is not a matter of scholarly debate. It is thoroughly documented in legal records, newspaper accounts, government investigations, oral histories, photographs, films, and academic studies. The evidence is available to anyone who looks for it.

And yet most Americans have never heard of Blair Mountain, Buffalo Creek, or Camp Solidarity. The Appalachian resistance tradition has been suppressed from the national historical narrative — not through the deliberate destruction of evidence (though some evidence has been lost) but through the systematic exclusion of Appalachian history from the curricula, textbooks, and media narratives that shape Americans' understanding of their own country.

The suppression serves specific interests. If Americans do not know that Appalachian people have fought — organized, marched, struck, litigated, and put their bodies on the line — it is easier to dismiss them as passive, backward, and undeserving of investment. If the mine wars are not taught in schools, the structural dynamics they revealed — concentrated corporate power, captive labor, state violence on behalf of economic interests — can be treated as relics rather than patterns. If Buffalo Creek is forgotten, the coal industry's accountability for industrial disasters can be minimized. If Camp Solidarity is unknown, the possibility of working-class solidarity across racial and geographic lines can be denied.

The recovery of Appalachian resistance history is, therefore, not merely an academic exercise. It is a political act. It restores to the people of Appalachia a history that has been taken from them — a history of courage, of solidarity, of the refusal to accept exploitation — and it challenges the rest of America to confront the role it has played in the exploitation that the resistance tradition opposed.

Primary Source Excerpt — Elizabeth Catte, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia (2018): "Appalachian people have a long, well-documented history of political radicalism, labor organizing, and fierce resistance to exploitation. This history is routinely erased from popular narratives about the region, replaced by stories of passivity, fatalism, and dysfunction. The erasure is not accidental. It serves the interests of the same economic and political forces that Appalachian people have been fighting against for over a century."

The Thread: Resistance as Appalachian Identity

This chapter has traced a line from the Whiskey Rebellion to climate activism — a line that passes through Blair Mountain, Buffalo Creek, Harlan County, the black lung movement, Camp Solidarity, Kayford Mountain, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and a hundred other sites of resistance that could fill chapters of their own.

The thread is not that Appalachian people are natural rebels. The thread is that when people are pushed hard enough — when their water is poisoned, their mountains are destroyed, their healthcare is taken away, their communities are treated as expendable — they fight. Not always successfully. Not always in the ways that outside observers expect. But always.

The resistance tradition is as much a part of Appalachian identity as the music, the language, the foodways, and the landscape. It is the active dimension of Appalachian culture — the refusal to accept that the way things are is the way things must be.

And it is ongoing. The people who are fighting today — against pipelines, against the legacy of mountaintop removal, against the abandonment of coalfield communities in the energy transition — are not starting something new. They are continuing something old. They are adding their names to a list that includes Mother Jones and Sid Hatfield and Florence Reece and the miners of Blair Mountain and the survivors of Buffalo Creek and the strikers of Camp Solidarity and Larry Gibson on Kayford Mountain.

The list is long. And it is not finished.

Community History Portfolio Checkpoint

For your selected Appalachian county, investigate the following:

1. Resistance history. Research whether your county has a history of organized resistance — labor strikes, environmental protests, political organizing, or community activism. Use local newspaper archives, county historical society records, and oral histories to identify specific events, organizations, and leaders.

2. Connecting the thread. If your county has a resistance history, trace the connections between different eras of organizing. Did the people who fought in labor conflicts go on to participate in environmental activism? Were community organizations that formed around one issue (e.g., mining safety) later repurposed for another (e.g., mountaintop removal opposition)?

3. Contemporary activism. Is there active organizing in your county today? Around what issues? Who is involved? How does contemporary activism connect — or not connect — to the county's historical resistance tradition?

4. Missing stories. Whose resistance stories in your county have not been told? Women? Black community members? Young people? Look for evidence of resistance by groups whose contributions may not appear in the official records.

Write a 500-word assessment of the resistance tradition in your county, connecting local history to the broader patterns described in this chapter. If your county lacks documented resistance activity, analyze why — what structural conditions made organized resistance more difficult or less necessary?

Chapter Summary

The Appalachian resistance tradition is not episodic but continuous — a thread that runs through 150 years of regional history, connecting the Whiskey Rebellion to the mine wars, the mine wars to the black lung movement, the black lung movement to Buffalo Creek, Buffalo Creek to Camp Solidarity, Camp Solidarity to the fight against mountaintop removal, and the fight against mountaintop removal to contemporary climate justice activism.

The Buffalo Creek disaster of 1972 — in which a coal waste dam failure killed 125 people — became a transformative event not just because of its devastation but because of the organizing it produced. Survivors who had trusted the coal company and the government discovered that neither had protected them, and they became citizen activists who fought for accountability and regulatory reform.

The Pittston Coal strike of 1989 — the last great coal strike in American history — demonstrated that community-wide nonviolent resistance could still mobilize the coalfields. Camp Solidarity, the tent city that supported the strike, became a symbol of working-class solidarity and trained a generation of organizers who carried the resistance tradition into the environmental justice movement.

Contemporary Appalachian activism — against mountaintop removal, against pipelines, against fracking, and for a just transition away from fossil fuels — is not a new phenomenon. It is the latest expression of a tradition as old as the mountains themselves. In every generation, Appalachian people have fought. The stereotype of the passive mountaineer is not just wrong. It is the opposite of the truth.

In Part VI, we turn from resistance and reform to the culture that sustained Appalachian communities through all of the struggles documented in the preceding chapters — the music, literature, religion, foodways, and language that are as much a part of Appalachian identity as the mountains themselves.