Berea College is a small, private liberal arts work college serving approximately 1,600 academically gifted students from low income backgrounds. Its students come from all across the U.S., Kentucky and the Appalachian region as well as 60+ countries worldwide and they don’t pay tuition.

Bill Turner, one of the luminaries of Appalachian studies and a former Distinguished Professor of Appalachian Studies and Regional Ambassador at Berea College, is there to discuss his new book, The Harlan Renaissance, an intimate remembrance of kinship and community in eastern Kentucky’s coal towns. Turner reconstructs Black life in the company towns in and around Harlan County during coal’s final postwar boom years, which built toward an enduring bust as the children of Black miners, like the author, left the region in search of better opportunities.

The Harlan Renaissance invites readers into what might be an unfamiliar Appalachia: one studded by large and vibrant Black communities, where families took the pulse of the nation through magazines like Jet and Ebony and through the news that traveled within Black churches, schools, and restaurants. Difficult choices for the future were made as parents considered the unpredictable nature of Appalachia’s economic realities alongside the unpredictable nature of a national movement toward civil rights.

Unfolding through layers of sociological insight and oral history, The Harlan Renaissance centers the sympathetic perspectives and critical eye of a master narrator of Black life in Appalachia.