Beth Howard

Beth Howard is the Appalachia People’s Union Director for Showing Up for Racial Justice, the largest national organization bringing white people into the fight for racial and economic justice in the country. She lives in Lexington, KY, but grew up in a rural white working class community in Eastern Kentucky. She has been organizing in the American South for sixteen years, primarily in her beloved state of Kentucky. Beth has been a lead organizer on winning campaigns to raise the minimum wage, restore voting rights, and win treatment programs for incarcerated people. She has worked on winning electoral campaigns that engaged white working class Southerners, including defeating an abortion ban ballot initiative in the 2022 Kentucky midterms and running a rural field office for the 2020 runoff election in Georgia. She is the creator of the viral narrative campaign “Rednecks for Black Lives” and has been featured in Matter of Fact’s Listening Tour with Soledad O’Brian, NPR’s Here and Now, Now This News, the book Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections, and the New York Times, including publishing an Op-Ed in The Boston Globe.