Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle over Black Lung Disease

Employment and production in the Appalachian coal industry have plummeted over recent decades. But the lethal black lung disease, once thought to be nearly eliminated, affects miners at rates never before recorded. Digging Our Own Graves sets this epidemic in the context of the brutal assault, begun in the 1980s and continued since, on the United Mine Workers of America and rank-and-file coal miners in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields. The destruction of collective, working-class power reveals the unacknowledged social and political roots of this public health crisis. Barbara Ellen Smith's essential study, now with a new introduction and conclusion, charts the struggles of miners and their families from the birth of the black lung movement in 1968 to the present day. Through extensive interviews with participants and her own experiences as an activist, the author provides a vivid portrait of communities struggling for survival against the corporate extraction of labor, mineral wealth, and the very breath of those it sends to dig their own graves.