“Bill Turner knows more about black life and culture in the mountains of the American South than anybody in the world.”
The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns has been named the winner of the 2023 Kentucky Historical Society Governor’s Award!
Every four years in the last year of a governor’s term, the Office of the Governor and the Kentucky Historical Society jointly present the Governor’s Award award to an author whose book, as judged by a panel of scholars, is deemed to have made the most significant contribution to Kentucky history. The award was established in 1979.
The Governor’s Award was presented on June 3, 2023 at a ceremony in Frankfort, KY. The Kentucky Historical Society recognizes people and organizations that promote the value of Kentucky history through awareness, preservation, and appreciation of state and local history.
“Bill has been an inspiration to me in going deeper into our history...our shared stories.”
Dr. Turner and acclaimed author, theorist, educator, and social critic bell hooks at the Berea College Appalachian Center, where they were colleagues for years. Click on the image to see a lecture they delivered at Berea to celebrate Appalachian heritage.
Jenisha Watts Osei of The Atlantic recommended The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns in her latest list of what kept her entertained in 2022.
In May 2022, internationally acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma invited a small group of musicians, storytellers, naturalists, creative producers, and cultural thinkers to explore how music and storytelling—two of our oldest cultural traditions—help us make meaning in a place central to the diversity and biodiversity of our nation. Dr. Turner contributed his knowledge and expertise to help answer important questions about how the culture of southern Appalachia can help us rediscover our connection to one another and to the land we love, planting the seeds for a more hopeful and healing future for our country and society? How can the micro life of this unique ecosystem of natural and human stories help expose macro ideas for our land and planet?
Dr. William H. Turner, author of The Harlan Renaissance, shows W. Kamau Bell and CNN what’s always been so special about growing up Black in Appalachia. Check your local listings, watch on-demand, or stream United Shades of America on Discovery+.
#UnitedShades
The Harlan Renaissance has been named the winner of the 2021 Weatherford Award for Non-Fiction!
What the Judges had to say about The Harlan Renaissance
“The Harlan Renaissance is an invaluable piece of Black Appalachian history and should be celebrated as such. William H. Turner weaves together years of historical research and a personal family history/narrative that is full of rich sociological analyses and detailed memories. In a through-generational voice, Turner sheds light on the harsh historical realities of Black Appalachian life while also envisioning a future of Appalachia in which Black communities and their stories are central.”
“The Harlan Renaissance is a masterful tale that captures the souls of Black Appalachians coal camps’ social histories covering a century of coal boom and bust. The author’s passions behind each event, relationship, story, and connection to the land are evident. The book covers nearly every angle of Black life with contemporary analysis that connects the past with the future and what can happen in the future. Documentation is thorough, relying on personal experiences, interviews, and print/photo sources. Destined to be the lead volume on Black people who lived under the mountainous shadows of racism, White supremacy, company controls, and not mattering within the structures of the region.”
“Dr. Turner writes a book for the ages about Black Appalachians in the heart of Appalachia, Harlan County, KY. Mixing personal stories of growing up in Eastern Kentucky with regional history and broader figures in the fight for Black recognition and identity, Dr. Turner weaves memoir and history in a way that expands our views of place, identity, and community. This is a seminal work and will become required reading in Appalachian Studies.”
Dr. William H. “Bill” Turner, author (far right), pictured with his older siblings in 1952 (l-r), Peggy, Marie, Irvin, Evelyn.
-Photo by Robert “Smokypipe” Rutherford.
“Bill Turner’s new book (The Harlan Renaissance) is one of the most important books about Appalachia to appear in the last 50 years.”
“This is—without question—the most detailed history of those coal camps that describes how Black people built sustaining communities in the midst of racism and discrimination and still produced so many ambitious, talented, and accomplished sons and daughters...”
“It was a time and place that, in its heyday, was the ‘cultural and social epicenter’ for Blacks in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia.”
-The Daily Yonder
PROFESSOR - WRITER - SPEAKER - CONSULTANT
William H. Turner, PhD has spent most of the last half century researching and writing and serving in various ways to expand the understanding about black people in Appalachia and improving community life among the economically marginalized.
Before that he was learning all about life growing up in a big extended family and vibrant black community in a town where coal was king, in Harlan County, Kentucky.
Friends of Coal, Friends of Mine
Black coal miners in Harlan County, KY - 1996