As an Appalachian African-American woman, Memphis Tennessee Garrison belonged to a category of persons who have been triply ignored by historians. The daughter of former slaves, she moved to Gary, West Virginia, at the age of eight and died at the age of 98 in Huntington, West Virginia. The coalfields of McDowell county were among the richest seams in the nation and Gary, home of U.S. Steel, was one of the largest mines in the country. As Garrison makes clear, the backbone of that workforce - those who laid the railroad tracks, manned the coke ovens, and dug the coal - were black miners....

Contemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development. Effie Waller Smith, an African American woman writing of her love for the Appalachian mountains, wove discussions of women's rights, racial tension, and cultural difference into her Appalachian poetry. Grace MacGowan Cooke participated in avant-garde writers' colonies with the era's literary lights and applied their progressive ideals to her fiction about the Appalachia of her youth. Emma Bell...

"Red, White, Black, and Blue" began as a collaborative memoir by William M. Bill Drennen, a European American, and Kojo (William T.) Jones, an African American. These Appalachian men grew up in the South Hills section of Charleston, West Virginia. As boys they played on the same Little League baseball team and experienced just one year together as schoolmates after the all-white Thomas Jefferson Junior High School was desegregated in 1955. After that, class, race, and choice separated their life experiences for forty-five years.
In 1992 both had returned to Charleston from lives mostly...