Rednecks by Taylor Brown

Based on the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor uprising in American history pitting a multi-ethnic army of 10,000 coal miners against mine owners, state militia, and the US government. Author Interview

There is a very good PBS documentary, The Miners War, that provides context for this book (can be seen on PBS or Amazon Prime). The Mine Wars tells the overlooked story of the miners in the mountains of southern West Virginia — native mountaineers, African American migrants, and European immigrants — who came together in a protracted struggle for their rights. Decades of violence, strikes, assassinations and marches accompanied their attempts to form a union, culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War. The West Virginia mine wars raised profound questions about what freedom and democracy meant to working people in an industrial society.