Hope Series Part 2: Dollars & Cents: Race and Class in the West Virginia Coalfields by Michael and Carrie Kline, Talking Across the Lines

Dollars & Cents: Race and Class in the West Virginia Coalfields is the second installment in the Hope audio series, commissioned and directed by the Mountain of Hope Organization, supported by the West Virginia Humanities Council and produced by Talking Across the Lines, LLC, www.folktalk.org; www.facebook.com/klinesacrossthelines/

Hope is an interracial documentary project looking back 50 years on Mount Hope, WV, a truth telling. Michael and Carrie Kline, along with O.H. Jackson Napier, collected more than 40 life story interviews from sons and daughters of coal miners. The stories focus on the fabric of life and work in this small, diverse town a half-century ago. The defining occupation was coal mining with all of its dangers, health hazards, and intricate working relationships.

These heart-rending voices portray the struggles and camaraderie of this iconic work, at times facing down stereotypes of race relations, at times airing hard truths. A mixture of southern blacks, European immigrants, and white laborers from hard-scrabble local farms were employed underground, working together and watching each others’ backs. The resulting bonds that grew among working coal miners shaped the social milieu of the town above, complicating differences and minimizing conflicts across the boundaries of race, class and ethnicity found in other regions.

Yet fifty-some years later, people of color find words through this project to voice the ever present pain of racism threaded throughout intricate relations on the ballfield, the classroom and at times at times even in after school play and weekend camping trips.

More installments of Hope are available on the Talking Across the Lines podcast.