Appalachian Figures
A strike comes to Brookside
In the summer of 1973 miners at the Eastover Coal Company’s Brookside mine in Harlan County voted to affiliate with the United Mine Workers of America. When the company refused to sign a contract that matched area standards and included a meaningful right to strike, the miners walked out and set up pickets. Their stand would last roughly thirteen months, run through one winter and a second harvest, and end with an agreement reached in late August and signed in early September 1974. Contemporary dispatches placed the breakthrough on August 29 to 30. Local reporting and union sources show signatures finalized days later.
The strike became nationally known because a young filmmaker, Barbara Kopple, lived in Harlan County during the walkout and filmed what she saw. Her documentary Harlan County, U.S.A. arrived in 1976 and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The Library of Congress later published program notes that summarize how Kopple embedded with families, how the crew’s presence sometimes kept tempers from spilling over, and how the film captured the strike as it unfolded.
“We will keep the line”
The public face of the strike quickly widened beyond the men who worked underground. At Brookside the miners’ wives and other women took on night and dawn picket shifts, ran food and clothing drives, and organized themselves as the Brookside Women’s Club. Oral histories recorded soon after the strike show the depth of that commitment. In interviews conducted in August and September 1986, Lois Scott explained how and why she stepped forward, how often she worked the line at Brookside and nearby Highsplint, and how the women improvised tactics to keep gates closed and tensions down.
Ruby and Louie Stacy described the women’s club from inside the community. They recalled how women coordinated child care and rides, how they confronted harassment, and how those routines sustained the strike over many months. Their joint interview, recorded October 8, 1986, is a core first-person source on the club’s formation and work.
Reporters on the ground noticed the same transformation. In July 1974 The Atlantic published “Burning Up People to Make Electricity,” a piece built from interviews around Harlan County. It highlighted women organizers on the picket lines and recorded their voices as they explained why the strike mattered for families, not only for miners underground.
The camera and the picket
Kopple’s crew filmed the routine as well as the shock. The film contains scenes of pre-dawn confrontations, of women linking arms at the gates, and of meetings where Lois Scott called out neighbors for skipping shifts. The National Film Registry dossier notes that the production accumulated roughly fifty hours of footage and that the wives’ early skepticism gave way to trust when they saw how cameras could dampen violence. The notes also emphasize that Kopple worked sound herself and that her crew sometimes took blows while shooting on the line.
The film itself became part of the story. As one miner later put it in a Criterion feature, the presence of the crew “saved a bunch of shooting,” which is another way of saying that documentation can be a form of protection. Critics at the time and since have emphasized the central place of the miners’ wives in the movie’s narrative arc.
Loss and settlement
Violence still broke through. In August 1974 a young miner, Lawrence Jones, was shot and killed during a confrontation near the Highsplint mine. His funeral appears in the film and became one of its most searing sequences. That tragedy preceded the final push to settlement. Contemporary national coverage reported that Eastover and the UMWA reached agreement at the end of August after thirteen months of striking. Local sources and union collections show the contract executed in early September. The sequence underscores what families had risked to get a standard agreement.
After the picket: memory, archives, and a wider movement
Primary records for the strike are rich. The Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History hosts multiple interviews with Lois Scott and with Ruby and Louie Stacy, complete with searchable audio. Those tapes capture cadence, humor, fear, and pride that never quite fits on a printed page.
The film has its own archival trail. The Academy Film Archive preserved Harlan County, U.S.A. in 2004 in partnership with New York Women in Film and Television. The Archive’s collection page confirms preservation details, and the Library of Congress National Film Registry essay offers a concise guide to the production’s field methods. Public media also circled back to the story. The American Archive of Public Broadcasting catalogs a program that explicitly discusses the 1976 film and the role of miners’ wives and children in the Brookside strike.
Union paperwork stamps the paper trail. The J. Davitt McAteer mining papers at Penn State include “Correspondence – Brookside strike,” itemizing letters and contracts generated during the standoff. These collections show the strike from the vantage of organizers and attorneys who were in the room while the pickets held the line outside.
Why Lois Scott matters
Scholars have since argued that the Brookside women helped recalibrate activism in Appalachia. Jessica Wilkerson foregrounds working-class women who led in their communities during and after the War on Poverty. Sally Maggard analyzed how women’s militance at Brookside reframed gender and class in rural Kentucky. Film critics and historians of documentary have likewise reassessed Harlan County, U.S.A. as a landmark that placed women at the center of labor storytelling. Read together with the oral histories, these works make clear that Lois Scott and the Brookside Women’s Club changed both the strike and the memory of it.
Sources and further reading
- Oral history: Interview with Lois Scott 26 Aug 1986. Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. OHMS record and audio. Nunn Center
- Oral history: Interview with Lois Scott 28 Aug 1986. Continuation. Nunn Center. OHMS record and audio. Nunn Center
- Oral history: Interview with Lois Scott 11 Sept 1986. Reflections after the strike. Nunn Center. OHMS record and audio. Nunn Center
- Oral history: Interview with Ruby and Louie Stacy 8 Oct 1986. Kentucky Oral History Digital Collection. OHMS record and audio. Kentucky Oral History
- Documentary film: Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976). National Film Registry program notes, Library of Congress. The Library of Congress
- Contemporary reporting: “Burning Up People to Make Electricity,” The Atlantic, July 1974. On-the-ground interviews with strikers, including women organizers. The Criterion Collection
- Public media: Program about the Harlan County, USA Documentary Film, American Archive of Public Broadcasting catalog entry. American Archive
- UMWA records: “Correspondence – Brookside strike,” J. Davitt McAteer Mining Papers, Penn State Special Collections, digitized series overview and items. nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu+1
- Lynda Ann Ewen, Which Side Are You On? The Brookside Mine Strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, 1973 to 1974(1979). Library holdings via WorldCat. University of Illinois Press
- Jessica Wilkerson, To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice(2019), University of Illinois Press. University of Illinois Press
- Susan W. Maggard, “Women’s Participation in the Brookside Coal Strike,” Frontiers and related scholarship, 1987. Semantic Scholar
- Paul Arthur, “Harlan County USA: No Neutrals There,” The Criterion Collection essay. The Criterion Collection
- Grace Elizabeth Hale, “Documentary Noise: The Soundscape of Harlan County, U.S.A.” Southern Cultures 23, no. 1 (2017). Southern Cultures
- AFI notes on preservation and historical context for Harlan County, U.S.A. American Film Institute
- Swarthmore Global Nonviolent Action Database, case summary of the 1973 to 1974 campaign. nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu
- PopMatters review of the Criterion edition, with context on the women’s auxiliary. PopMatters