Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress
An old mining complex in Appalachian Mountains town of Keystone in southern West Virginia, 2015.
Two years after Beth Howard enrolled in Eastern Kentucky University (EKU), the Twin Towers in New York City fell. Howard bristled at the anti-Muslim sentiments she heard, and recognized that the resulting so-called war on terror likely would be fought by low-income people. But despite going to occasional anti-war protests, she wasn’t yet an activist.
That turn happened in 2006, when Howard was a twenty-six-year-old employee of EKU and saw a poster advertising an on-campus power-building workshop sponsored by the Direct Action and Research Training Center, known as DART. Although she had never heard of DART, Howard was intrigued, racing across campus for the afternoon presentation.
Song for a Hard-Hit People: A Memoir of Antiracist Solidarity from a Coal Miner’s Daughter
By Beth Howard
Haymarket Books, 368 pages
Publication date: April 21, 2026
As Howard writes in Song for a Hard-Hit People: A Memoir of Antiracist Solidarity from a Coal Miner’s Daughter, she decided spontaneously to attend the event because the announcement had mentioned “justice” and “fairness,” both of which were in short supply in her hometown of Blaze, Kentucky. How, she wondered, could people upend the Bluegrass State’s anti-worker/anti-poor mentality? The meeting thrilled her.
In short order, she applied for a DART training program to learn the basics of community organizing, from event planning to raising funds to meeting with local residents. Next came a four-month internship with the Interfaith Coalition for Action, Reconciliation, and Empowerment (ICARE) in Jacksonville, Florida.
Howard was a quick study, diving into liberation theology, along with the ins and outs of housing, criminal justice, immigration, and social welfare policies. She describes her time at ICARE as exciting but difficult.
“The work was tiring,” Howard writes. “It was emotionally heavy. I was studying about oppression, the way the world is designed to hurt large numbers of people to ensure that some people can be billionaires, and realizing that the injustices I’d experienced, the injustices my family experienced, weren’t just happening because something broke down along the way . . . . People were being hurt, locked out, locked up, and killed because it was designed that way from the beginning.”
Still, Howard persevered, moving on to organize in a largely Black faith community in Daytona Beach, Florida. Several local campaigns took off, but she quickly found the group’s 24/7 organizing model unsustainable. When her grandmother died, she barely managed to take time off to return to Kentucky to attend the funeral and grieve. Still, she writes, “it was a badge of honor to work nonstop.”
Haymarket Books
Song for a Hard-Hit People decries this once pervasive organizing model and weaves other important lessons into the narrative, including gripping sections that address high rates of drug and alcohol use, interpersonal violence, and the workplace exploitation that is endemic throughout Appalachia.
She also writes movingly about her dad, a former coal miner and a lover of books and music who died as a result of addiction and inadequate medical care. Howard’s account is riveting and honest, and her love for her father—along with her hatred of the abuse he subjected her, her brother, and her mother to before getting sober—is a case study in navigating difficult, fraught relationships.
Howard’s own sobriety journey and romantic foibles are foundational to the memoir as well. Additionally, she offers a slew of pragmatic political insights about building power among low-income and working-class people. And, while organizing should never be formulaic, she describes learning to ask the kinds of open-ended questions that kick-start discussions and challenge racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic beliefs. It’s community empowerment writ large.
Of course, Howard hasn’t won every campaign she’s waged, nor has every person she’s recruited stayed active in movement struggles. This makes the book a realistic, well-grounded assessment of what it takes to be a successful organizer.
Now a cultural strategist at Showing Up for Racial Justice, Howard is bringing white Appalachians into the fight for racial and economic justice. “The truth is every single one of us can have a chance at the world we deserve,” she writes, “if working-class white people choose solidarity with Black and brown people instead of siding with whiteness.”