Many of you might remember in the summer of 2020 during the racial justice uprisings, SURJ staff member Beth Howard wrote a piece entitled, “Rednecks for Black Lives.” The short blog post was a love letter to her people– white Appalachian workers, rednecks, hillbillies– calling on them to return to their radical roots and stand in solidarity with Black people.
The piece went viral, both with Appalachians who saw themselves in her call to solidarity, and with people outside the region who had a lot to learn (and unlearn) about Southerners. Six years later, this call-to-action– and Beth’s personal story of politicization and transformation– have grown into Beth’s debut book, “Song for a Hard-Hit People: A Memoir of Antiracist Solidarity from a Coal Miner’s Daughter,” coming out on April 21 from Haymarket Books.
Join Beth on April 23 at 8 pm ET at a webinar, “Which Side Are You On?: organizing white Southerners for solidarity,” to help us celebrate her book, and to go deeper on its themes of personal and collective transformation, the radical history of Appalachia, and how we organize white working-class Southerners.
Whether you can make the call or not, you can still pre-order Beth’s book from her local Kentucky bookstore (or your favorite local bookseller).