appalachia

October 10, 2024 - In the wake of Hurricane Helene, Down Home North Carolina and allies are drawing on their networks to deliver "people-centered" relief — as well as working to ensure mountain people and communities can rebuild for the long haul.

January 24, 2022 - Drug overdose deaths are climbing nationally and across the South, driven in large part by street drugs contaminated with fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid. Many of these deaths could be prevented by allowing drug users to test their supply for fentanyl's presence, but some states still ban testing strips as paraphernalia.

August 27, 2021 - This Labor Day weekend, people will gather in West Virginia to mark the centennial of the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor uprising in U.S. history. We look at what led to the bloody battle — when 10,000 Black, white, and immigrant coal miners joined together to fight for union rights against coal companies allied with corrupt law enforcement — and how it's being commemorated.

July 26, 2018 - Vernon Haltom of West Virginia's Coal River Mountain Watch was among those who testified about coal's future before a congressional subcommittee this week. The testimony of Haltom — whose group is working to end mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia — details what boosting coal means for the communities where it's extracted.

December 14, 2017 - Attorney and civil rights movement veteran Al McSurely serves on the steering committee of the newly-launched Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival. He shares the lessons he learned organizing in Appalachia during the original Poor People's Campaign launched by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 50 years ago.

December 14, 2017 - Daniel Boyd's graphic novel "Carbon" features a villain modeled on former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, who just completed a prison stint for his role in the deadly 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in West Virginia. We talked with Boyd about Blankenship's political aspirations and his state's troubled relationship with coal.

June 16, 2017 - Rural areas draw the ire of Trump opponents on the left and right who charge that residents voted against their own interests. But in the South, which has the country's biggest rural Black population and growing numbers of rural Hispanics, many of the rural communities most threatened by Trump's policies did not vote for him.