At SURJ, we organize white people from a place of shared interest – what we all have to gain when white people join in solidarity with Black and Brown people to win a world where we all have what we need: nourishing food on the table, a roof over everyone’s heads, and a dignified life.
It’s that vision of the future that brought me into grassroots organizing 20 years ago and it’s that same vision that keeps me at SURJ working every day to organize my people – working-class white Southerners – into multiracial solidarity and away from the Far Right.
My book Song For a Hard-Hit People: A Memoir of Antiracist Solidarity From a Coal Miner’s Daughter will be released on April 21st, 2026 from Haymarket Books and is available for pre-order wherever you buy books. Check out our Red Bandana pre-order package with my hometown Eastern Kentucky bookshop CoffeeTree Books.
My people, white working-class rural Appalachians, have put solidarity into practice for generations and we can be an inspiration to antiracist white people all over the country. Appalachia is often framed as a place to escape from, where people are hateful, lazy, and bring tragedy upon themselves, but that narrative only serves those who seek to keep us divided.
The truth is that we have a powerful history of white Appalachians fighting alongside Black and Brown people, pushing back against the billionaires who gain power by using racism to divide us. It’s hard-hit communities like mine that can lead the way for other white people in this country to fight back.
This pre-order package is a collaboration between Haymarket Books, The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), and CoffeeTree Books because we believe in the power of publishing, preserving, and promoting working class people’s stories. Along with an author-signed book, each pre-order package will include SURJ stickers and a book-themed screen-printed red bandana designed by Emily Robinson at Black Gum Printshop — a symbol of Appalachian working-class solidarity.
We are also offering an opt-in discounted $15 annual membership to the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, which gives members free admission and access to museum events, a subscription to the biannual Museum Journal In These Hills, and a one-of-a-kind West Virginia Mine Wars Museum membership card. With your support, the museum can continue to connect the legacy and impact of people organizing and risking their lives for their human rights, civil liberties, and labor justice in Appalachia to the movements and struggles of all people, past and present.
In the midst of divisive rhetoric, violent repression, and grifters writing elegies, may this story be a song.
In solidarity,
Beth Howard