"Everybody Was Black down There": Race and Industrial Change in the Alabama Coalfields

Through extensive research in union, business, and government records, in addition to interviews with black and white coal miners, Woodrum found that although the miners' union "did not openly discriminate against its black members, as did craft unions or even most other industrial unions," it did not go as far as embracing "civil rights unionism" (p. 6). Woodrum, moreover, points out that "this book argues that the union's accords on race ultimately left its black members vulnerable to the economic and technological changes that transformed the coal industry after World War II" (p. 5).