The good folks at PM Press and Working Class History are fundraising to launch the new graphic novel Black Coal Red Bandanas! The book is an excellent, action-packed graphic introduction to the story of the West Virginia Mine Wars, culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1920, which saw some 10,000 unionist coal miners battling a defensive force of State Police and vigliante anti-union forces along a 13 mile ridgeline in the Appalachian forests of southern West Virginia. A true tale of a people’s history which was excluded from textbooks and barely mentioned by historians for decades, Black Coal Red Bandanas features a story by Raymond Tyler and art by Summer McClinton, edited by Paul Buhle and with a foreward by Appalachian labor historian Gordon Simmons. I did some editorial advising on drafts of the book, and wrote an introduction which frames our work at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in the context of current struggles for collective memory and people’s history.
This Kickstarter is essentially a pre-sale for the book, but there’s some great reward tiers too, including a “redneck” bandana which I designed (union printed by the folks at Commonwealth Press in Pittsburgh) and a one-year membership to the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, the genuine people’s history institution in the coalfields which I’m proud to be a part of. There’s even a “buy one + donate one” option, where you get a copy of the book and another copy is donated to the museum’s education program! This means we’ll be building a library of loan copies of Black Coal Red Bandanas for public school teachers to borrow so that they can teach about the Mine Wars in their classrooms, all part of our nefarious plot to poison the minds of students with lessons about radical ideas like human rights and organized labor.