Synopsis
Voices from the Appalachian Coalfields
About the Authors
Mike Yarrow was born in Mississippi in 1940 and grew up largely in southern California and Pennsylvania. He met Ruth Morris Yarrow at Antioch College. After college he completed alternative service as a conscientious objector to war. In the summer of 1964 he did voter registration in Mississippi supporting the right of African Americans to vote. He later earned graduate degrees at Cornell and Rutgers Universities and taught sociology for twenty years at colleges and a university in New Jersey and New York. While teaching in Ithaca, New York, he worked to elect minority candidates to the school board and helped organize the Justice for All organization that advocated for just treatment of the poor in this county.
Ruth was born in New Jersey in 1939 and grew up in many small college towns across the Midwest. After Antioch College she taught in the Peace Corps in Ghana, followed by graduate school at Cornell and marriage to Mike. Ruth taught ecology and created environmental education programs at universities and environmental centers. While in Ithaca, she launched and coordinated the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign for the county for six years and was active in local peace and justice organizations.
In the mid 1980s, the Yarrow family spent a year in Beckley, West Virginia, when Mike and Ruth conducted many of these interviews with miners and their wives. After their two children had graduated from high school and college, Mike and Ruth moved to Seattle in 1997. Ruth worked with Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility for five years, educating citizens around the state and advocating for cleanup of nuclear waste from nuclear weapons production at Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Mike worked with the American Friends Service Committee on peace issues and as organizer for Western Washington Fellowship of Reconciliation.
"I lived for 35 years in West Virginia, taking pictures and teaching high school (and striking for better pay and conditions). Now I live in Portland, Oregon. I took thousands of pictures when Occupy Portland thrived several years ago. Now I take pictures of immigrants struggling to make it here, often in unfriendly circumstances. I started taking pictures in the late 1960s. I take pictures now. Mostly of activists and actions attempting to improve life here in the US. What I strive for is pictures of proud people working to make their conditions better. I like black and white. It is a good way to take pictures of coal mines and coal miners, and it seems appropriate for the gritty way people have lived and made their living in the coal fields. It works well for the tough women who made their way into the coal mines in the 1970s, despite the age-old taboo, �no women in the mines,� I favor the black and white imperative: �never cross a picket line, never,� So when the mine workers union went on strike in 1977-1978, all of West Virginia mining stopped. And if a grievance caused a wild-cat strike, everybody walked out and it spread. Miners considered the right to strike as God given. This spirit helped spread an illegal teachers' strike West Virginia in 1990 which I participated in. All schools in all 55 counties in West Virginia were shut down."
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