The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns
by William Turner
West Virginia University Press, 352 pages
reviewed by Jamie Tews

When I read William Turner’s The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns, I was living in Appalachia, commuting between Eastern Kentucky and Johnson City, Tennessee for work with the Appalachia Service Project (ASP). ASP is a home repair organization that seeks to eradicate substandard housing in central Appalachia. Working with ASP, I was introduced to Turner’s work. Before ASP’s summer volunteer season began, our content specialist, Clara Leonard, spent time in Hazard, Kentucky and Harlan County, Kentucky, talking with folks about their experience in the region. Near the end of Leonard’s first video in the two-part series, she asks Turner, a sociologist, why people don’t leave. He responds simply: home is where the heart is, and Harlan County is home.

In the summer of 2019, I traveled around central Appalachia listening to people’s stories and writing about what I heard. Despite the different towns I was in, the different families I spoke with, most stories were rooted in the same sentiment: home is the most important thing, and Appalachia is home. Appalachia is not my home, but I feel I understand the sentiment. Just the other day I was driving down a back road in Magoffin County when I was momentarily overwhelmed by the beauty of my surroundings–the various shades of green on the trees, the homes that look so loved and so lived in beside creeks, the people sitting outside in the shade of their porch roof who waved as I passed. There is an easy beauty to Eastern Kentucky, in both the people and the landscape.

Harlan Renaissance explores the ways in which Turner has found home in Harlan County. With threads of his personal experience, his family’s history, and research about coal mining, race, education, and the arts, Turner creates rich scenes of what life was like in Harlan in the 1950’s and 1960’s. One of my favorite chapters is Chapter Two, titled “Between Alex Haley, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ed Cabbell, and the Affrilachian Poets.” In this chapter, Turner explores the phrase “Affrilachian,” a term for African-American artists who live in Appalachia. Instead of joining in with praising the phrase and championing the way it has given a voice to otherwise quieted artists, Turner explains the ways in which the term Affrilachian can be misguided and misleading. Turner’s language is tight, and he is as respectful in his writing as he is well-informed, whether he came to know things through research or lived experience.  Many parts of the book are researched, and it’s obvious that the author’s desire to educate himself and his readers comes from his love of the region.

Despite the scenes of personal narrative, however, I did not read this as a memoir, but rather as a researched memoir, as something written by a sociologist. In Chapter Ten, “In a Coal Mine, Everybody is Black,” Turner poses two questions: “How does one explain the level of optimism, resiliency, and intergenerational upward mobility among working-class Blacks from these places?” and “Why do we hear so little about Black Appalachians exhibiting the desperation and depression that marks the current regional opioid addiction among many Whites?” (230). These questions seem to be what Turner wants his book to explore, but, as he notes early on, there are many directions the book almost went.

Even though the book focuses on Harlan County, Turner jumps around a lot, and the sporadic nature was the most challenging part of the book. Turner is very passionate about Harlan, about informing the reader about Black people in Appalachia, Black people working in the mines and living in mining communities, but with those passions come the opportunity for tangents, and Turner spends a lot of time in this book flushing out the tangents.

William Turner claims he is of the generation of people who lived in a coal town during the golden age–he witnessed the Harlan Renaissance. He defines the Harlan Renaissance as “an extraordinary period of enhanced lifestyles, self-esteem, and upward mobility for two generations of Blacks” (307). Through telling stories about the family camaraderie in his childhood kitchen and the Black men who shared stories about the mines at picnic tables, among many other things, Turner introduces Appalachia to readers who were previously unfamiliar with the region. For the readers who were familiar, his writing conjures a feeling of comfort and nostalgia, while informing the reader that there is more to the place than they might have thought.

When I made final edits to this review, Eastern Kentucky was in the initial aftermath of devastating floods. On July 27th, 2022, torrential rainstorms came through the region overnight, which created flash floods that washed away many homes, cars, and, in some cases, entire communities. As Turner describes, there is a lot of love and perseverance among Appalachian people in Kentucky, but in the wake of this disaster, the people in these communities need support. Here are a few ways to help: The Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, United Way of Kentucky, and the Coalition for Home Repair are collecting donations for long-term recovery plans. Home is where the heart is, and unfortunately, many people have lost their homes–now is the time for people from all over to come together and help people in Eastern Kentucky.

Jamie Tews just received her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. You can find her work in The Racket, Chestnut Review, Jellyfish Review, and Appalachian Voices, among others.

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