crossposted from unbossed
Sunday marked the 20th anniversary of the start of the Pittston strike, a coal miners' strike that would drag on for 14 months into 1990. On April 5, about 1,700 miners in Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky struck Pittston Group's coal mining operations. Within a couple months there were demonstrations and solidarity strikes that involved 10 times as many people.
This was a strike that provided and still provides a window into who we were as a people and what we value. It still does. Twenty years after the strike began is time to re-examine the portrait of us as a people.