Chuck Keeney, from Friends of Blair Mountain, gave a fabulous presentation at Bowdoin College last night on the history of coal mining and the unionization of miners in West Virginia. His great grandfather played a central role in the miners’ early resistance to coal company exploitation that eventually led to the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, one of the largest civil uprisings in United States history and the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War. Today, the coal company lobby remains stronger than ever, and the devastation left by continued mountaintop removal mining is horrific. Read Lisa Pohlmann’s full blog post about this about Chuck’s talk, and watch a short video from the event, at her “Notes from Lisa” blog.
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