When eastern Kentucky coal miners went on strike in the early 1970s, a documentary film crew embedded themselves in the community, capturing the tragedies and triumph of their fight for a union contract and an indelible portrait of Appalachia.
Fifty years after its premiere, Director Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning “Harlan County USA” still stands as a monument to the Brookside strikers, and its influence can be felt across the worlds of film, music and labor.
History in the hollers
Decades before Kopple and her team came to eastern Kentucky, the region was a tense battleground for union organizers. One that, not for the last time, proved to be deadly.
When the Harlan County Coal Operators Association cut wages by 10% to maximize profits — in the thick of the Great Depression — spontaneous strikes broke out. The United Mine Workers of America tried to step in, but the coal operators blacklisted any known organizers and fired anyone believed to be in the union. Then they evicted them from coal camp homes, which were also owned by the company.
More than the miners’ economic safety was under threat, though. Heavily armed local deputies under the command of Sheriff J.H. Blair and gun thugs paid by the companies patrolled the county, shooting at organizers, gassing their homes and even kidnapping people who were usually lucky if they were just taken to the county line.
In a 1987 interview, Orville Sargent, one of the men who originally organized Harlan County for the UMWA, remembered the terror of the early 1930s. He said even having a conversation about joining the union was dangerous.
“They'd beat you up, run you out of the county. That's the way they do it,” Sargent said in an interview housed at the University of Kentucky’s Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. “There's two or three of us joined it over at Brookside. I was working there then. That's when that big gun battle come up over at Evarts.”
The Battle of Evarts, as it came to be known, saw armed strikers and company men clash outside the town of less than 1,500 nestled in the Clover Fork Valley. Accounts from people who witnessed it said more than 1,000 rounds were fired in under half an hour, leaving four men dead — three local deputies and one miner.
After that eruption of violence, the UMWA backed off its eastern Kentucky organizing efforts, but the miners’ fight didn’t stop. Groups like the radical National Miners Union — a trade group with ties to the American Communist Party — joined the fray, with thousands of miners striking in solidarity.
Just four days after the battle, strike leaders were arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder. Eight of them received life sentences. Less than a month later, most strikers were back in the mines.
The Wagner Act of 1935, a foundational U.S. labor law, outlawed company-run unions, blacklists and discrimination on the basis of union activity — all tactics employed by coal companies. As a result of the New Deal, union membership exploded in popularity to around 800,000. Even still, the Harlan County Coal Operators didn’t sign onto a UMWA agreement until 1939. Thousands of eastern Kentucky miners joined up.
Labor disputes continued for years in eastern Kentucky. In total, more than a dozen miners and five deputies died during the nine-year period known as the Harlan County War or Bloody Harlan.
In the years after World War II, UMWA leadership allowed coal producers to start mechanizing the mines, ultimately costing thousands of miners their jobs as companies replaced man with machine. A union of what was more than 500,000 miners in the mid-1940s plummeted to less than half that by the end of the ‘50s. And the southern coalfields — including Harlan County — were once again non-union.
‘There wasn’t a film there’
For Kopple, the journey to making “Harlan County USA” all started on a radio dial — her local NPR station. On the air, the young New Yorker learned about rank-and-file miners’ efforts to oust William “Tony” Boyle, then-president of the UMWA.
When progressive Pennsylvania leader Joseph “Jock” Yablonski challenged Boyle for the UMWA presidency in 1968, he lost by a 2-to-1 margin, marking the first time since 1920 an incumbent had gotten less than 80% of the vote. Yablonski conceded, but filed suit to challenge the election results on accusations of fraud. Within weeks, Yablonski, his wife Margaret and their 25-year-old daughter Charlotte were found shot dead in their Pennsylvania home.
Boyle remained president of the UMWA for years, and a new group rose up to challenge him.
“A whole movement was starting to happen, known as Miners for Democracy, and throughout the coalfields, and I thought that that would be a really incredible piece to follow,” Kopple said.
Kopple cut her teeth working with Albert and David Maysles — brothers whose work helped to define the cinéma vérité documentary movement — on films like “Salesman” and the Rolling Stones tour documentary “Gimme Shelter.” But politics were always on her mind. Her first directing credit came on “Winter Soldier,” which was put together by a group of filmmakers documenting veterans’ testimonies concerning American atrocities in Vietnam.
Armed with a $12,000 loan from Thomas Brandon — a pioneering film distributor whose efforts brought some of the most celebrated works of international cinema to U.S. audiences for the first time — Kopple set off for Appalachia in the early 1970s.
As the Miners for Democracy movement picked up steam, Kopple and her crew filmed Boyle and Arnold Miller, the MFD’s candidate of choice and a former West Virginia miner who had successfully organized to win the passage of the first black lung compensation law in the U.S. Along with cinematographer Kevin Keating, Kopple went underground with UMWA miners and captured performances by musicians like David and John Morris.
Miller beat out Boyle — who was indicted on embezzlement charges the year before — in the 1972 UMWA election.
Boyle was later arrested, tried and convicted on a charge of first-degree murder in the deaths of Yablonski and his family. Sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison, Boyle died in a Pennsylvania hospital in 1985.
In the months after Miller’s victory, the documentary crew returned to New York. Working out of Kopple’s 11th Street loft, Associate Director Anne Lewis said the team was trying to make something from what they’d captured so far, but that there just “wasn’t a film there.”
“It was obscure. It was scattered, and it didn't feel like it amounted to anything,” Lewis said. “You know, so what? There's a new president of the mine workers. Done. You know, who gives a s---?”
Meanwhile, workers at the Eastover Mining Company's site in Brookside, Kentucky, were walking off the job and striking for union recognition.
“So we're sitting there, griping and moaning, and a call comes in from the United Mine Workers, and they say to Barbara, ‘You got to get to Harlan County or there's going to be a killing,’” Lewis said. “I mean, it was like it was idiocy on our part, but it was like, ‘Yeah, we'll be there.’”
And so they hopped on a flight to Knoxville, Tennessee, and drove into eastern Kentucky.
‘Playing for keeps’
At the time, none of the “Harlan County USA” crew had ever been to the Bluegrass State. Before leaving, Lewis said she’d read two things about the area, and both scared her: the story of Canadian filmmaker Hugh O’Connor being shot and killed not even five years earlier while filming in the region and a book on Harry Simms, a young Communist organizer killed by a sheriff's deputy who also worked as a mine guard for a local coal company during the 1930s.
The late Appalachian director Elizabeth Barret’s 2000 documentary “Stranger With A Camera” traces the story of Hugh O’Connor — a pioneering Canadian filmmaker who played a role in the development of IMAX cinema — and his murder at the hands of Hobert Isom, a landlord who wanted O’Connor to stop filming his tenants’ living conditions.
“Stimulants and terror” kept Lewis awake and on edge on the way into Harlan County. When their car reached the picket line around sunrise, the crew saw a conflict already in full swing.
“There was this like insane situation going on, kind of a standoff in a way,” she said. “There was a bunch of state troopers, and they looked horrible. … Then there was these very fierce-looking women with clubs, and they looked pretty scary. … And then behind that, there were miners who were heaving rocks across.”
Within an hour, the crew was filming violent arrests and women being dragged. Later that day, they met a miner named Jerry Johnson, who put them up at his place.
As Johnson remembers it, he was “in disguise” after having already been arrested during the strike.
“I was standing there on the railroad tracks with a blonde woman wig on, and I seen them coming up the railroad track. They had cameras and, Lord, they looked kindly poorer than I was,” he said.
Johnson still lives in Kentucky. His years underground in the coal mines have left him with black lung disease and a hard-nosed belief in speaking truth to power. His involvement in organizing efforts at some mines eventually got him blacklisted by the Harlan County Coal Operators Association, but they granted him a work permit after the Eastover Mining Company — a subsidiary of Duke Power — bought Brookside in 1970.
Johnson said he was glad to be working again, but he quickly got fed up. The pay was alright, but the lax safety conditions and the state of the housing hadn’t improved much in the decades since Bloody Harlan.
“They didn't have brakes on the locomotives that hauled us into the mines. Not really enough air, and not no money much. There was only one water spigot for every six houses,” he said.
These types of living conditions weren’t uncommon at coal camps. The company had control over nearly every aspect of daily life for the workers and their families. They did little to improve housing, and they could evict them at a moment’s notice.
Robert Gumpert, a young California photographer who found himself mixed up in the UMWA’s fight, came to Harlan County after talking with Bill Worthington, a Black Harlan coal miner who would later help organize the National Black Lung Association.
Gumpert took powerful photographs on the picket lines, inside the same coal mine Kopple descended into at the beginning of the film and in a miner’s home.
"The photos the the the living condition was indistinguishable from Walker Evans photos from the [1930s]," he said. "It was just a very graphic place of ... capital exploiting folks who had no power, other than the union."
Johnson said at Brookside, miners even offered to dig their own ditches to run water lines to every house in the coal camp, but the company still said no.
“It was just everything, the whole combination of being owned,” he said.
The miners wanted the standard UMWA contract, which would give them a health and pension program, a safety committee that could shut down parts of the mine deemed dangerous and compensation for all the time spent underground — not just when they’re digging out coal. The company refused to just cave in. The demands were instead met with injunctions, hired thugs, blacklisting, outright bribery and jail terms for some of the nearly 200 striking miners.
Faced with long odds, Johnson said the miners took the fight to Wall Street to hit Duke Power where it hurt: their bottom line.
“You can get out in the street, and you can yell and scream and holler and jump up and down all day. But if it don't cost no money, they won't do nothing. You got to stop the money,” said Johnson, who “Harlan County USA” memorably captured talking to a police officer outside the New York Stock Exchange. “We went down there with the work clothes on, and we looked like we had just come out of the mines. We got proxies where we could go inside of the stock market, and we passed out leaflets [that said], ‘Dump Duke stock. It's risky business,’ and we knocked them out [of] $6 million in one day.”
Coal miners weren’t the only people on the picket line in Harlan County. They were joined by their wives, mothers and sisters who formed the Brookside Women’s Club after Judge F. Byrd Hogg limited the number of miners that could stand on the lines.
Together, the club worked to organize community meetings, distribute resources and coordinate pickets at both Brookside and nearby Highsplint, where miners would also periodically strike in solidarity.
Associate Director Anne Lewis said not long after the crew’s arrival, they worked with UMWA organizers to screen 1954’s “Salt of the Earth,” a movie made by three blacklisted filmmakers and one of the first produced independently of the Hollywood studio system. She said the film — which tells the story of women organizing during a zinc miner’s strike — was nearly impossible to see in the U.S. for years after it came out, and that it was a big catalyst for the Brookside Women’s Club.
“I always thought that a certain amount of the development of women during that strike was a result of seeing ‘Salt of the Earth’ and understanding the real importance of women in strikes,” Lewis said. “I think the other aspect of all this is that women really are the community force, and this was one of those labor strikes that's a community strike.”
Director Barbara Kopple said the women were just fighting for their families and their neighbors.
“Your grandfather worked in the mine, your father worked in the mine, and your husband, if you were married, worked in the mine, or your brother worked in the mine. So when they had the opportunity to do something, they jumped right in to do it,” she said.
One of the women who took that leap was Lois Scott.
Scott, who passed away in 2004, can be seen throughout “Harlan County USA” on the picket line and leading meetings, memorably pulling a pistol out of her top in one. Her father mined coal in Harlan County in the 1930s, she was married to a union coal miner, and her son-in-law mined for Eastover.
When a friend told Scott how the company was treating workers and their families, her son, John — who was in high school at the time of the strike — said she just knew she had to be involved.
“Mom could have sat back and said, ‘Well, my husband's got a good job, he's union. I don't have to worry about these other people.’ But that wasn't her nature,” he said.
Herb E. Smith — a founding member of the Appalachian cultural preservation nonprofit Appalshop — was in college at the time of the strikes. In the months before, he’d been shooting a documentary about coal camps at Brookside. Smith said he wasn’t surprised when things got dangerous on the picket lines.
“That wasn't just patty-cake. This was people playing for keeps, and it was their livelihood, and their home and their children,” he said. “It wasn't some kind of movie set. It was miners and their families doing their best to figure out a path forward in the midst of large-scale social and economic turmoil.”
Appalshop filmmaker Mimi Pickering said their interactions with Kopple and the “Harlan County USA” team were limited, but they weren’t above doing each other favors, like fixing equipment and coordinating plans so someone was always on the picket line with a 16 mm camera.
“They asked us if we would go over with cameras and kind of pretend to be filming,” she said. “We really didn't have any money for film to actually film, but we did go over and pretend to film on the picket line several times. The thought was that having a camera there would reduce the possibilities of violence.”
Kopple said her team would sometimes just take a camera with no film into the field. But Lewis said that’s just some mythmaking.
“You try not to waste film too much, but deliberately taking a camera out with no film? What would the point be? Of course, you'd have film in the camera. For God's sake, why would you go? That's ridiculous,” she said.
One of the tensest moments of the strike — and the documentary — came in the dark early morning hours during a standoff on the bridge at Highsplint. Basil Collins, an Eastover foreman who had survived the Bataan Death March and over three years as a Japanese prisoner of war, was leading a group of strikebreakers across the bridge.
On one side, miners, picketers and the “Harlan County USA” crew, including Lewis, who was holding small, powerful battery-powered lights called sun guns.
From his truck, Collins pointed his gun directly at the camera as he strained to see. Lewis vividly remembers the scene, shown in the film in slow motion.
“What he's pissed off about is the lights, right? He's not trying to hurt me,” she said. “He just wants those lights gone so that he can see what's behind me, and so he decided not to shoot, and he goes across the bridge, and then he motions everybody else across the bridge. … This is what was terrifying. At that point, everybody — these scabs — have lead pipes, and they're beating people over the head. And they knock me down, and they knock [cinematographer Hart Perry] down, and Barbara's trying to hit them with a microphone. It's like chaos.”
Kopple told the Harvard Crimson in 1977 that she was packing two pistols — a .45 and a .38 — into the field during the documentary shoot.
Tense standoffs and machine gun fire near the picket line during the Brookside strike were commonplace. Everyday interactions on the lines, particularly those filmed at Highsplint, saw miners and women on the pickets attempt to bar strikebreakers from getting to Eastover.
Stephen Kincer, a Highsplint miner during the strikes, said that the threat of violence was a grim reminder of his tour of duty in Vietnam.
“I was in the bush over there and … this was pretty much the same thing,” he said. “Only the thing is, we're not really in the bush, but people are shooting people. People are shooting at people. You know, people are putting people down, as John Prine would say.”
As the strike raged, the picket lines got scarier and more violent. It ultimately came to a head in its 13th month when Bill Bruner, a mine supervisor, shot and killed a striking miner named Lawrence Jones on August 28, 1974, the day after his 24th birthday. He left behind his 16-year-old wife Diana and a newborn child.
Jerry Johnson, who dug coal alongside Jones, said he was heartbroken.
“Oh, I was sadder than hell. He was one of my closest buddies,” Johnson said. “I worked with him inside of a mine. He was a nice feller, and this guy shot his brains out.”
Bruner eventually got off “scot-free,” after a Harlan grand jury failed to indict him for murder despite eyewitness testimony to the contrary. He claimed the shooting was in self-defense.
Lee Potter, a UMWA organizer on the ground in Harlan during the Brookside strike, said things moved quickly after Jones’ death.
“Lawrence Jones was a good man, a good guy on the picket lines, and this guy shot him beside the road for no reason at all, just pulled out a shotgun and killed him,” Potter said. “Then they started negotiating with our lawyers, and we felt like the end of the strike was coming and we was going to get a contract up.”
Within days, the strike that had gone on for more than a year came to a close.
The Brookside miners got their UMWA deal, just before the national coal contract expired.
‘An Oscar-winning county’
Barbara Kopple went back to New York, where she’d spend most of a year editing the more than 50 hours of film captured during the strike — in addition to the crew’s earlier footage from Appalachia — and showing it to people like folksinger Hazel Dickens, who contributed several songs to its soundtrack.
After Kopple and most of the crew left, the negotiations to renew the national coal contract failed, and some 120,000 UMWA miners once again took to the picket lines for the 1974 UMWA Bituminous coal strike. The 28-day walk-off netted miners a 54% wage-and-benefit increase over the course of three years, the nation’s first cost-of-living clause in their contract, a bump from 20 vacation days to 30, and personal leave. It also included compensation for training safety committee members, quarterly UMWA-run safety inspections, work clothing and safety equipment. But many union miners, particularly younger ones, were still dissatisfied with the deal not allowing locals to strike without approval by an arbitration review board.
Roving wildcat strikes became more frequent. In 1975 and 1976, as many as 120,000 miners joined unauthorized strikes for the “right to strike” and protested the federal court sanctions of strikers who ignored their back-to-work orders, as depicted in the end credits of Kopple’s documentary.
Late in the process, after an all-night editing session, she showed it to New York Film Festival Director Richard Roud, who convinced her to let them screen the documentary and finally found a name for it.
The working title was “The Miners Film,” but Roud suggested “Harlan County.”
“And I said, ‘Okay, great. How about “Harlan County USA?”’ He said, ‘Fine, fine,’ and we hung up,” Kopple recalled.
It premiered at the festival on October 15, 1976, to a rapturous reception. The indelible images of “Harlan County USA” would etch themselves into viewers’ collective memory: blood on concrete, a pistol pulled out during a union meeting, miners covered in coal dust, men with black lung struggling to breathe, and thousands marching in solidarity with the miners.
Kopple’s film was picked up by the radical and adventurous Cinema 5 distribution company — which brought Terry Gilliam’s “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” to the U.S., imported arthouse masterpieces by the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Lina Wertmüller, and provided a launching pad for the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger with the release of “Pumping Iron” in the ‘70s. The stakes of the strike were made crystal clear in the trailer for “Harlan County USA.”
A little more than six months later, Kopple won the Oscar for Best Documentary. After dedicating the win to “the miners of Harlan County” in her acceptance speech, she placed a cross-country call to eastern Kentucky.
“They were the first people that I called, and [they] said, ‘We're running around in our cars and honking the horn and screaming, “We won! We won!”’ And all of Harlan County was like magic,” Kopple said.
A United Press International headline called Harlan “an Oscar-winning county” days later, and the Associated Press reported that Lois Scott ran up her phone bill the night of the Academy Awards “calling everyone [she] could think of in the county” to tell them the good news.
“I got a lot of people out of bed,” Scott said in the 1977 interview. “They were the ones who didn’t have too much confidence in the movie.”
Echoes of ‘Harlan County USA’
As “Harlan County USA” made its way into theaters, the film clued moviegoers in dozens of cities into the struggle of some of the nation’s most invisible laborers. It struck a chord with audiences around the world: working class viewers, Academy Awards voters and musicians — including the West Coast punk scene.
Peter Urban managed San Francisco political punk bands like the Dils and Negative Trend in the late 1970s. He said Kopple’s documentary spoke to his political beliefs, describing it as “real labor radicalism.”
Seeing the plight of the miners in the documentary as wildcat strikes continued to mount across Appalachia, Urban said the late Nico Ordway organized a three-day benefit featuring major players in the music scene to raise money for the strikers: Punks Against Oppression!
“The house was packed, on all three days. It was a defining event for the San Francisco punk scene,” he said.
The March 1978 concerts at Mabuhay Gardens — the only venue that would allow it, according to punk zine Search & Destroy — are partially documented in Mindaugis Bagdon’s “Louder, Faster, Shorter,” which captures sets from the Avengers, UXA, the Dils, Mutants and Sleepers. The benefit raised $3,300 for striking miners, around $15,000 adjusted for inflation.
Urban said punks in the scene — who would go on to raise money for jailed Black Panther leader Geronimo Pratt and other political causes — saw something of themselves in the miners.
“Most of the thing with ‘70s punk rock is that we were all rejects. That's what brought us together,” said Urban, who now lives in upstate New York. “We were all rejects, and so what we were striving for was space to live in, right? Space to exist in, and we wanted that for everybody else as well.”
Though the film had an impact on San Francisco punks, “Harlan County USA” centers the traditional folk music of Appalachia, which was never far from the picket line.
Scores of musicians have been inspired by the performances of Hazel Dickens, the Morris Brothers, Nimrod Workman and Florence Reece in the film.
Workman was a coal miner who worked alongside Mary Harris Jones — the union activist who came to be known as Mother Jones — in West Virginia in the 1920s. Reece braved the horrors of the Harlan County War alongside her husband Sam, an organizer for the radical National Miners’ Union.
After a late-night raid on their home in the 1930s, Reece wrote one of the most widely known protest songs of all time, which was also featured in the documentary: “Which Side Are You On?”
“We was out of paper, so we had an old calendar, so I just stripped it off the wall and went to writing,” Reece said in a 1978 interview with Studs Terkel and Pete Seeger. “I couldn't write it fast enough. … I had to get it over with. And then I put the music to it from an old hymn.”
Seeger, the legendary folk musician and social activist who was blacklisted as a member of The Weavers during the 1950s, said in the interview with Terkel that labor songs like Reece’s are part of an age-old tradition.
“There's hundreds of thousands of songs written, but the few dozen which make history make history because the people make them history,” he said. “And this brings out a truth which we often forget — that while there may be famous people and famous powerful people, history is really made by masses of people. When millions of people decide to do something, that's when history gets made.”
Tony Oppegard, a Kentucky mine safety attorney who’s made a living defending miners, remembers making the trek with a buddy from Salyersville to Harlan to march in solidarity with the Brookside strikers. Decades later, the music is what lingers for him.
“There was a lot of people in downtown Harlan marching through the street, and we ended up out at Cawood High School, where they had a rally and various speakers,” he said. “Honestly, I don't remember who the speakers were except for Florence Reece.”
To this day, Appalachian artists are grappling with the extractive nature of coal mining and the human toll of the industry.
Appalshop’s JuneAppal Record label has released many albums on the subject. Louisville black metal band Panopticon explored that theme on their album “Kentucky,” and artists like Steve Earle and Tyler Childers have continued to tell stories of their Appalachian homes.
The title track to Childers’ 2020 album “Long Violent History,” is a cry for empathy.
“In the midst of our own daily struggles, it's often hard to share an understanding for what another person might be going through,” Childers said in a spoken liner note posted on YouTube.
He goes on to ask his fellow Southerners to put themselves in the shoes of the late Breonna Taylor, a Black Kentuckian who Louisville police officers shot multiple times and killed in 2020 during a no-knock raid on her apartment.
Drawing lines from modern day protests for racial justice and the bloody struggles of rural mining communities and name-checking the Battle of Blair Mountain — the largest armed uprising in the U.S. since the Civil War — Childers said he believed if white Southerners lived in that type of fear, they would band together to do something.
“If we wouldn't stand for it, why would we expect another group of Americans to stand for it?” Childers asked. “Why would we stand silent, or worse, get in the way of it being rectified?”
Western Kentucky singer-songwriter S.G. Goodman recorded her own rendition of “Which Side Are You On?” in 2020. She said Reece’s tune is “very universal to the human experience,” asking people to have compassion for others regardless of what they may have in common.
“A lot of people, then and now, don't see themselves in the plight of rural workers,” she said. “This was an opportunity, and I think it very much succeeded in allowing people who've not ventured to the hollers or the farmland of western Kentucky to be able to open their hearts and eyes, to be able to see themselves in those people.”
How the Appalachia-set film still inspires
The legacy of “Harlan County USA” echoes perhaps most loudly in the realm of film.
Director Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award for the documentary was followed by a second win for “American Dream,” her film about the unsuccessful attempt to organize Hormel Foods in the 1980s.
She is the first — and remains the only — woman to win two Best Documentary Oscars, an accomplishment that has her tied for the second most wins of all time alongside names like Walt Disney and Jacques Cousteau. “Harlan County USA” is consistently ranked among not just the best of its genre, but the best films of all time, even cracking the Sight & Sound Top 250 list made every decade by the British Film Institute.
Thom Powers — who co-founded America’s largest documentary festival DOC NYC and hosts Pure Nonfiction, a long-running podcast about the genre — called Kopple’s 1976 debut a totemic work.
“I can't think of many people working in documentary today in the 21st century who aren't touched by Barbara's influence, either directly or indirectly,” Powers said. “All of us live in relationship to power structures that can feel deeply unfair. Most of us find ourselves suffering through those power structures without the ability to to push back. So, in a very basic way, [it] is showing people who structurally in society are people who have the least means, the least power, the least access to media.”
Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck — the Peabody Award-winning and Oscar-nominated director of “I Am Not Your Negro” — told Powers in 2023 that Kopple’s cinéma vérité approach was what pushed him to start making political films, and he’s never forgotten how harrowing it is.
“To actually see people risking their lives — shots are being shot during the shooting, so it’s really life in action — this is everything that I thought documentary should be,” he said. “To be in the middle of action and you as a filmmaker, you’re not just an observer, you’re not just somebody who reports. You are part of the story.”
Steve Maing is another director mining the rich seam of labor movements. The Emmy Award winner co-directed “UNION” with Brett Story in 2024, a documentary following efforts to organize Amazon workers. Like Kopple and her team on “Harlan County USA,” the crew embedded themselves, practically living at the New York bus stop where the Amazon labor unions organizers were camped out.
Maing said — though there were some scuffles on the picket line — the corporate conglomerate, and others like it today, are waging “a more nefarious, procedural and legal” type of class warfare. Though the workers successfully rallied votes to organize a New York warehouse, Amazon still refused to come to the bargaining table. Maing said it’s nothing new. History doesn’t repeat itself, it just rhymes.
“While some things have changed, the overall kind of challenge that workers face has not, right?” he said. “We are looking at a story that will continue on for all of humanity, where capitalism, at the heart of all of this, thrives on the extractive abuse of working people.”
Grace Elizabeth Hale — a professor of history and American Studies at the University of Virginia who’s been researching the Brookside strike and its legacy for a book— said she looks at it as a marker for how we got to today.
“It's a key turning point that takes us on a path to where we are now, with the worst inequality — if not in American history, at least since the high point of the Gilded Age,” Hale said.
“Harlan County USA” is a brilliant film, she said, but parts of it are just “flat out wrong.”
“It suggests that courage, commitment [and] charisma is enough, and it isn't. It should be, but it isn’t,” she said. “It takes strategy, and it takes a lot of money to win.”
Particularly, Hale said the ending is muddled, and viewers don’t see enough of what the United Mine Workers organizers were doing behind the scenes. She said the documentary has taught organizers how to wage strikes with public relations savvy, but it also showed companies new ways to handle strikes.
“They … really see that they can violate labor law, and nobody's going to do anything about it. And even if they do, it's going to be years of hearings and investigations and [National Labor Relations Board] work and then, ultimately, they might get like two, three years down the road a $100,000 fine,” she said. “Suddenly, these consultants begin to tell businesses, ‘You don't have to go by those laws.’ … No one's going to enforce them and then, over time, court decisions continually limit their impact anyway. Ironic as it is, it taught employers how to defeat a different kind of union campaign.”
For as much as “Harlan County USA” got right, seeing films about the region can be a sore spot for Appalachians like Dee Davis. The Hazard native now serves as president of the Center for Rural Strategies and publisher of the Daily Yonder, but he started his journalism career at Appalshop the year of the Brookside strike.
“To live here and to grow up here is to have a love-hate relationship with the media that looks at this place, and a lot more hate than love,” said Davis, who ranks Kopple’s film as one of the best made about Appalachia. “There's always a feeling that somebody's looking down on us. Somebody's making fun of us. They don't respect us.”
Award-winning Appalachian novelist and educator Robert Gipe said “Harlan County USA” avoids a lot of the stereotypes that other creators lean on when writing or making a film about the region.
“It gave the people who are in it — the strikers and their families, in particular — a chance to reveal their full humanity,” he said.
Bobby Starnes, chair of the Appalachian Studies Department at Berea College, grew up hearing about the strikes of the 1930s from her father, who started working in the coal mines when he was just 11 years old. She said she’s glad somebody had a camera at Brookside to document the miners’ struggle on film, something that didn’t happen for her father’s generation.
“The first time I saw it, I thought, ‘I know those people. I know that place. I know this language. I know why they're doing that,’” she said. “Thank God somebody caught it.”
Starnes said watching “Harlan County USA” still makes her emotional.
“I get a little misty because I'm proud that those are my people,” she said. “They live in a moral and righteous place, and they are Appalachian. And they have Appalachian values, and that's what Appalachian values are to me.”
A fading memory, forever captured
In the years since “Harlan County USA,” eastern Kentucky’s coal economy has cratered.
An industry that once supported more than 75,000 miners now employs less than 5,000. Mechanization had a lot to do with it, and so did the global swing away from coal.
The Brookside mine closed decades ago and the bones of the operation have long since grown over with kudzu.
Now, there aren’t any union mines left in the state, with the last one closing in 2014.
Dee Davis, the Daily Yonder publisher, said they’re a fading memory.
“In lots of ways, the fight at Brookside was one of the last great fights for trade unions for union miners,” he said. “We just saw it [go] from a place where almost everybody had union miners in their family to a place where nobody has them.”
A lack of unions hasn’t meant a lack of labor resistance in the eastern Kentucky coalfields, though.
After Blackjewel Coal declared bankruptcy and fired around 1,700 workers in Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming in 2019, dozens of miners blockaded the company’s coal trains in Harlan County. The protesters left after two months, with the bankruptcy settlement soon after awarding more than $5 million to the fired miners. A similar blockade was mounted by Pike County coal miners in 2020, who claimed Quest Energy had denied them three weeks of pay. The company folded after just two days of protest and paid the miners.
Chad Brock runs a local hardware store in the small mountain town of Evarts, where striking coal miners in the 1930s fought one of the bloodiest battles of the Harlan County War. The former county commissioner has seen “Harlan County USA” dozens of times. He said he loves it for its sense of history and the way it captures the place he calls home.
“A lot of people know us by that,” Brock said. “When you say you're from Harlan, they know you … because of the documentary, because of the news articles about the mining and the strikes and Bloody Harlan. I guess you could say it's our heritage.”
“Harlan County USA” lives on as a historical record of more than a strike, but a portrait of a community. Kopple said the people of Harlan County will always live on in her heart.
“It doesn't feel like it was, dare I say, 50 years ago that we made the film. It feels like it could have been yesterday,” she said. “I think that when you make documentaries, they're there. Nobody can ever erase them or get rid of them and they become a permanent part of who we are as people, of our history, and the material that you get cannot be denied. And the beauty of it is that these stories will last for as long as people keep looking at films.”
“Harlan County USA at 50” was produced by WKMS and the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky, and NPR. Sign up for the weekly Porch Light newsletter here for news from around the region.
