re: #190 Decatur Deb
Don’t make coal mining a “white” thing. A few hours in the mine, and it was hard to tell. Several W Virginia coal towns were black-majority.
The vast majority of African Americans who migrated to southern West Virginia found new lives in coal company towns. These mining camps were favored by black migrants because jobs were there. Camps also provided available and affordable housing. The 1900 U.S. census shows that a majority of residents in many of the coal camps were African American. Black miners living and working in mining camps like Nuttallburg, Hawks Nest, and Stonecliff made up over 55 percent of the population.
Found ourselves near Nuttallburg last Summer.
The thing is that the mining nostalgia, especially the version Trump sold, was almost explicitly aimed at the white working class, because non-white working class is all but invisible to politicians.