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What It Will Take to Stop Trump’s Assault on Coal Miners (and the Rest of Us)
How can we beat back the Trump administration’s assaults on working people, the environment, and democratic rights? The coal miners of 1969 offer us a strategic proposal.
May 02, 2025
If there was any doubt that U.S. President Donald Trump’s love of coal is driven by concern for coal companies’ profits rather than workers’ well-being, further proof came on April 8.
The same day he announced new measures to prop up the industry, his Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) paused a rule limiting silica dust in mines. Trump also plans to close dozens of MSHA field offices and gut the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which both play essential roles in protecting coal workers.
Since the paused rule would save thousands of mineworkers from death and illness, the unions representing them have sued the administration.
Lawsuits may reduce the damage from Trump’s mass-homicidal orgy. But they won’t reverse five decades of unchecked, unilateral class war by U.S. elites, nor stop polluters from destroying the habitability of our Earth.
Whatever the courts decide in this case, it’s clear that lawsuits won’t be enough to stop the Trump administration. Whether its targets are workers, children, refugees, patients, the millions of ill and starving people who will be killed by sadistic cuts to foreign aid, or the entire world, defeating the assaults will require additional weapons. Coal workers’ history here is instructive.
Coal workers have won their biggest victories not through lawsuits but by striking. In the 1950s a U.S. coal miner was killed on the job every 18 hours. In later decades that rate declined significantly, and not just because of downsizing. Mine safety was strongly correlated with workers’ collective action: More frequent strikes meant fewer injuries and fatalities.
Known deaths on the job don’t include the many thousands who died prematurely from pneumoconiosis, caused by inhaling coal dust. It took the historic “black lung” strikes of 1969 to impose limits on dust and methane levels and to win compensation for disabled workers.
A few months before, 78 workers had been killed in an explosion at Consolidation Coal’s mine outside Farmington, West Virginia. The accident brought national attention to miners’ plight. Yet similar accidents had resulted in toothless reforms to safety regulations.
That might have happened again in 1969. Coal companies opposed strong regulations, and other powerholders dutifully obeyed. West Virginia’s governor wrote off the explosion as just “one of the hazards of being a miner.” President Lyndon Johnson’s assistant secretary of the interior lauded Consolidation Coal’s efforts “to make this a safe mine.” The autocratic president of the United Mineworkers called Consolidation “one of the best companies to work with as far as cooperation and safety are concerned.”
It was rank-and-file coal miners, not the top union leaders, who pushed for legislative reform. They formed the West Virginia Black Lung Association in January 1969. Aided by a handful of physicians, they organized mass meetings to educate and rally coworkers. They quickly realized that lobbying wouldn’t be enough. On February 11, thousands of miners went to Charleston to demand a robust compensation law. Some carried signs threatening to strike: “No law, no work.”
When coal companies obstructed the bill’s passage, rank-and-file workers responded with a wave of strikes unsanctioned by the union leadership. Within two weeks some 30,000 were on strike, rising to 45,000 by early March. They “shut down virtually all coal mining operations in the state,” observed the Charleston Gazette. Some miners in Ohio and Pennsylvania struck in solidarity.
The legislature and governor got the message. The strike worked, and even strengthened the final legislation by requiring companies to pay compensation unless they could prove a worker’s lung illness was not caused by coal dust. The Gazette’s editors accused the workers of “lobbying with [a] club,” decrying that state legislators had “felt compelled to” vote for a strong compensation law. The worst fear of companies and politicians alike was that more workers would begin using strikes to influence government, not just their bosses.
The impact rippled outward from West Virginia. Several other coal-producing states soon passed similar laws. In December the U.S. Congress passed the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act. The federal bill extended compensation for black lung victims across the country. It also mandated the world’s toughest coal dust standard.
President Richard Nixon initially refused to sign it. After a week and half of White House stalling, around 1,200 West Virginia mineworkers launched another wildcat strike. The coal barons warned that “a widespread work stoppage now could pose a serious threat to fuel supplies,” reported The New York Times. Nixon quickly changed his mind. He signed the bill within “a matter of hours.”
The law brought compensation for around half a million disabled mineworkers over the next decade. It also made a real contribution to workplace safety. Unfortunately black lung has since come roaring back in the neoliberal era, a sign of government’s unwillingness to hold coal companies accountable.
Beyond their direct impacts, the black lung strikes hold a lesson for today’s resistance. How can we beat back the Trump administration’s assaults on working people, the environment, and democratic rights? The coal miners of 1969 offer us a strategic proposal.
Lawsuits may reduce the damage from Trump’s mass-homicidal orgy. But they won’t reverse five decades of unchecked, unilateral class war by U.S. elites, nor stop polluters from destroying the habitability of our Earth.
We need more aggressive measures. As the heroes of the black lung strikes realized, those measures only become feasible if we embrace the daily work of organizing and educating the people around us.
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Social Justice and Eclipse: Predicting and Preparing For Change
It is best to approach social justice the same way the world prepares for an eclipse—with foresight, community, and coordination.
Apr 23, 2025
Millions of people across the United States and parts of Canada and Mexico recently witnessed a total solar eclipse—a rare and breathtaking alignment of the Earth, moon, and sun. Scientists had predicted its precise timing and path years in advance, with detailed maps showing where the event would be most visible.
Across the U.S., communities prepared—gathering in fields, schools, and rooftops with protective glasses and cameras in hand. They trusted science. They trusted preparation. They showed up.
In the same week one year later, over 600,000 people across all 50 states signed up to protest against U.S. President Donald Trump and his ongoing threat to democracy for the Hands Off Protests in 1,300 locations. These protests were not spontaneous—they were planned, anticipated, and powerfully aligned. Total estimates for the day’s peaceful protests are 3 million people.
It is not always possible to predict the exact moment of breakthrough, but one can prepare for the shift through mutual aid, political education, youth leadership, and conflict transformation training.
If it is possible to chart the movement of celestial bodies with such precision, then it is also possible to chart the social conditions that produce change. Responses to the conditions that cause criminality, injustice, or violence can also be charted and faced.
A crime can unfold in seconds, but its consequences—especially in marginalized communities—can last a lifetime. The root conditions that set the stage—poverty, childhood trauma, environmental injustice, disinvestment in education, and systemic racism—are all in place and can be addressed.
Knowing the precursors of injustice, it is prudent not to sit still and wait for tragedy before taking action. It is best to approach social justice the same way the world prepares for an eclipse—with foresight, community, and coordination.
Research from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) confirms that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)—like neglect, abuse, or household dysfunction—can have long-term impacts on health, behavior, and justice involvement. Communities with higher poverty rates have higher crime rates, not because of moral failure, but due to decades of disinvestment and inequality.
As someone who has spent decades working for criminal and social justice reform in communities and far beyond, I see that systems and practices can indeed seed meaningful social change.
The Theory of Change is a framework that maps how and why desired change is expected to happen in a particular context. It’s not magic. It’s modeling. And when used correctly, it helps communities anticipate outcomes and align resources toward justice.
Like eclipse chasers who travel to be in the “path of totality,” social justice organizers prepare to be where the change is coming. They build coalitions, train communities, and develop infrastructure so that when the time is right, they do not to miss the moment to act.
At this time in history when daily political efforts are aimed at reversing timeworn, proven paths to social justice, such as defunding financial assistance to federal programs, universities, associations, and individuals based on principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, it is urgent to prepare and put into place ways to counter the effects.
This preparation involves policymakers, funders, nonprofits, communities, advocates, individuals, families, institutions, and faith-based organizations to work toward the goal of social change of equity, fairness, access, and justice.
You cannot stare directly at an eclipse without special tools. Similarly, you often can’t see the slow build of a movement until it’s in full swing. Yet humans can sense change—like animals do before an eclipse, like trees that darken and cool in response to a shadow overhead.
Similarly, social change is intangible yet deeply felt. It is not always possible to predict the exact moment of breakthrough, but one can prepare for the shift through mutual aid, political education, youth leadership, and conflict transformation training.
Preparation now is crucial. Facing funding cuts nationally to vital services, rollbacks of civil rights protections, and an increasing normalization of political violence, it is urgent to create needed structures that assess possibilities in order to anticipate and respond proactively.
Throughout history, research shows that Black women have sensed these shifts and led people and communities through them—not just during well-known moments—but in everyday resistance throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
For example, Rosa Parks didn’t just refuse to give up her seat one time; she was a seasoned organizer and a supporter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or the SNCC Legacy Project. Shirley Chisholm wasn’t just the first Black woman to run for president—she helped reframe what political leadership looks like.
Barbara Jordan called out President Richard Nixon with such clarity it redefined accountability in American politics. Tennis icon Serena Williams crip-walked across a tennis court and reclaimed joy on a global stage. First Lady Michelle Obama wore sleeveless dresses and shattered expectations of what dignity and leadership looked like in a Black woman’s body.
A 2021 Texas A&M University study reports, “Black women, through their inclusive, community-based activist endeavors, continue to carve out fugitive spaces and counterpublics where counternarratives are actively generated to fight for a more equitable and inclusive democracy that serves all.”
As a Black woman, I see that Black women are the eclipse, the unexpected alignment. They have known through history how to bring light through the dark.
Social change can happen in quiet corners—in small towns, church basements, classrooms, or in the act of mentoring one young person. It doesn’t have to be a massive protest or a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. It can be both.
But when those moments do arrive—like the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the LGBTQ+ rights movement—they are rarely surprises. They are the result of decades of work, layered with setbacks and strategy.
As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But that arc doesn’t bend on its own. It requires intention and action.
It is time not just to watch the changes happening, but to prepare and to make change, witnessing the outcomes together.
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How to Fight Back Against Trump’s Escalatory War on the Poor
Poverty will end when poor people and their allies refuse to allow society to remain complacent about the suffering and death caused by economic deprivation.
Apr 15, 2025
The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the 10 richest people in the world—including nine Americans—expanded their wealth by nearly $64 billion, the greatest single-day increase in recorded history. Since then, an unholy marriage of billionaire investors, tech bros, Christian nationalists, and, of course, Donald Trump has staged an oligarchic assault on our democracy. If the nation’s corporate elite once leveraged their relationships within government to enrich themselves, they’ve now cut out the middleman. We’re living in a new Gilded Age, with a proto-fascistic and religiously regressive administration of, by, and for the billionaires.
With the wind at their backs, leading elements in the Republican Party have rapidly eschewed euphemisms and political correctness altogether, airing their anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-poor prejudices in unapologetically broad and brazen terms. The effect of this, especially for the most vulnerable among us, is seismic. During the first two months of the second Trump administration, we’ve witnessed nothing less than an escalatory war on the poor.
The attacks are many-pronged. Rural development grants, food banks, and environmental protection measures have all been slashed in the name of “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs.” Planned Parenthood and other life-saving healthcare services for poor and marginalized communities have been defunded. Homelessness has been ever more intensely criminalized and Housing First policies vilified. The Department of Education, which has historically provided critical resources for low-income and disabled students, has been gutted, while the barbaric conditions in overcrowded immigrant detention centers have only worsened. Billions of dollars in funding for mental health and addiction services have been revoked. Worse yet, these and other mercenary actions may prove to be just the tip of the spear. Tariff wars and potential cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and SNAP could leave both the lives of the poor and the global economy in shambles.
As the hull of our democracy splinters and floods, the question remains: How do we chart a more just and humane path forward?
This volatile moment may represent an unprecedented, even existential, threat to the health of our democracy, but it is building on decades of neoliberal plunder and economic austerity, authored by both conservative and liberal politicians. Before the 2024 elections, there were more than 140 million people living in poverty or one crisis away—one job loss, eviction, medical issue, or debt collection—from economic ruin. In this rich land, 45 million people regularly experience hunger and food insecurity, while more than 80 million people are uninsured or underinsured, 10 million people live without housing or experience chronic housing insecurity, and the American education system has regularly scored below average compared to those of other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Amid tremendous social and economic dislocation, traditional American institutions and political alignments have steadily lost their meaning for tens of millions of people. The majority of us know things aren’t well in this country. We can feel it, thanks not just to the violent and vitriolic political environment in which we live, but to our bank statements and debt sheets, our rising rent and utility bills. As the hull of our democracy splinters and floods, the question remains: How do we chart a more just and humane path forward? There are no easy answers, but there are profound lessons to be learned from the past, especially from movements of poor and dispossessed people that have inspired many of this country’s most important moments of democratic awakening.
This is the focus of our new book, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty. Drawing on Liz’s 30 years of anti-poverty organizing, we poured over old pamphlets and documents, memories and mementos to gather evidence that social transformation at the hands of the poor remains an ever-present possibility and to summarize some of the most significant ideas that, even today, continue to animate their organized struggles.
Homeless, Not Helpless
In the late spring of 1990, hundreds of unhoused people across the country broke locks and chains off dozens of empty federally owned houses and moved in. Bedrooms and kitchens carpeted with layers of dust suddenly whirled with activity. Mattresses were carried in and bags of food unpacked. Within hours, the new occupants made calls to the city’s energy companies, requesting that the utilities be turned on. They were remarkably disciplined and efficient—single moms who had been living in their cars, veterans, students, and low-wage or recently laid-off workers, and people battling illness without healthcare. They were Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and white, and although they came from radically different slices of society, one simple fact bound them together: They were poor, in need of housing, and fed up.
That wave of takeovers was led by the National Union of the Homeless (NUH), one among many carried out by the group in those years. The NUH was not a charity, a service provider, or a professional advocacy group but a political organization led by and for unhoused people, with close to 30,000 members in 25 cities. Liz was introduced to it on her first day of college. Within a few months, she had joined the movement and never left.
NUH members included people who had recently lost their manufacturing jobs and could no longer find steady work, as well as low-wage workers who couldn’t keep up with the growing costs of housing and other daily necessities. In such dire times, the reality of the unhoused only foreshadowed the possible dislocation of millions more. The NUH emphasized this truth in one of its slogans: “You Are Only One Paycheck Away from Homelessness!” The name of the organization itself reflected a connection between homelessness and the new economy then being shaped. As industrial work floundered and labor unions suffered, there was a growing need for new unions of poor and dispossessed people.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NUH won a string of victories, including new policies guaranteeing 24-hour shelter intake, access to public showers, and the right of the unhoused to vote without a permanent address. They also won publicly funded housing programs run by the formerly unhoused in nearly a dozen cities. Such successes were a barometer of the incipient strength of the organized poor and a corrective to the belief that poor people could perhaps spark spontaneous outrage but never be a force capable of wielding effective political power.
At the heart of the NUH were three principles: First, poor people can be agents of change, not simply victims of a cruel history; second, the power of the poor depends on their ability to unite across their differences; and third, it is indeed possible to abolish poverty. Those guiding principles were crystallized in two more slogans: “Homeless, Not Helpless” and “No Housing, No Peace.” The first captured a too-often obscured truth about the poor: that one’s living conditions don’t define who we are or limit our capacity to change our lives and the world around us. The second caught the political and moral agency of the impoverished—that there will be no peace and quiet until the demand for essential human needs is met.
Another NUH slogan has also echoed through the years: “You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take.” It’s a favorite of ours because it expresses a crucial argument of our book: that poverty and economic inequality won’t end because of the goodwill of those who hold political power and wealth (as is abundantly clear today) or even through the charitable actions of sympathetic people.
Change on such a scale requires a protagonist with a more pressing agenda. Poverty will end when poor people and their allies refuse to allow society to remain complacent about the suffering and death caused by economic deprivation. It will end when the poor become an organized force capable of rallying a critical mass of society to reorder the political and economic priorities of our country.
Projects of Survival
In the mid-1990s, Liz was active in North Philadelphia’s Kensington Welfare Rights Organization (KWRU). Kensington’s workforce had by then been decimated by deindustrialization and disinvestment. People without steady or reliable housing were moving into vacant buildings or cobbling together outdoor shelters, while tenants refused to leave homes from which they were being evicted. In its actions, KWRU reached deep into this well of experience, taking the spontaneous survival strategies that poor people were already using and adapting them into “projects of survival.”
The phrase “project of survival” was borrowed from the Black Panther Party, which, in the 1960s and 1970s, created successful “survival programs” like the Free Medical Clinic Program and the Free Breakfast Program. In 1969, the head of the national School Breakfast Program admitted that the Black Panthers were feeding more poor children than the state of California. The Panthers, however, were concerned with more than just meeting immediate needs. They were focused on structural transformation and, through their survival programs, they highlighted the government’s refusal to deal seriously with American poverty, even while then spending billions of dollars fighting distant wars on the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.
Today, amid the rising tide of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s billionaire-fueled authoritarianism, there’s an urgent need for defiant and militant organizing among a broad cross-section of society.
KWRU learned from the Black Panthers. In the late fall of 1995, a cold front swept through a large KWRU encampment known as Tent City. In need of indoor shelter, the group set its sights on a vacant church a few blocks away. Earlier that year, the archdiocese of Philadelphia had shuttered St. Edward’s Catholic Church because its congregants were poor and the drafty building expensive to maintain. Still, some of those congregants continued to pray every Sunday in a small park outside the shuttered church. Eventually, dozens of residents from Tent City walked up the church steps, broke the locks on its front doors, and ignited a highly publicized occupation that lasted through that winter.
On the walls of the church, Liz and her compatriots hung posters and banners, including one that asked, “Why do we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?” As winter engulfed the city, residents of St. Ed’s fed and cared for one another in a fugitive congregation whose youngest resident was less than a year old and whose oldest was in his 90s. That occupation ultimately pressured the archdiocese to refocus its ministry on poor communities, while electrifying the local media to report on the rampant poverty that had normally been swept under the rug.
Such projects of survival enabled KWRU to build trust in Kensington, while serving as bases for bigger and bolder organizing. As a young woman, Liz gained new insight into how bottom-up change often begins. While media narratives regularly depict poor people as lazy, dangerous, or too overburdened with their own problems to think about others, there is an immense spirit of cooperation and generosity among the poorest people in our society. Indeed, that spirit of communal care is the generative ground from which powerful social movements emerge.
A Survival Revival for These Times
Today, amid the rising tide of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s billionaire-fueled authoritarianism, there’s an urgent need for defiant and militant organizing among a broad cross-section of society. As our democratic horizons continue to narrow, we find ourselves operating within a critical window of time. In our work, we call this a “kairos moment.” In the days of antiquity, the Greeks taught that there were two ways to understand time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is quantitative time, while kairos is the qualitative time during which old and often oppressive ways are dying while new understandings struggle to be born.
In kairos moments such as this sinister Trumpian one, it is often the people whose backs are up against the wall who are willing to take decisive action. In every popular, pro-democracy movement, there is a leading social force that, by virtue of its place in the economic pecking order, is compelled to act first, because for them it’s a matter of life-or-death. And by moving into action, that force can awaken the indignation and imagination of others.
Right now, there are tens of thousands of Americans already in motion trying to defend their communities from the growing ravages of economic, environmental, and political disaster. Their efforts include food banks and neighborhood associations; churches and other houses of worship providing sanctuary for the unhoused and immigrants; women, trans kids, and other LGBTQ+ people fighting to ensure that they and their loved ones get the healthcare they need; community schools stepping into the breach of our beleaguered public education system; mutual-aid groups responding to environmental disasters that are only increasing thanks to the climate crisis; and students protesting the genocide in Gaza and the militarization of our society. Such communities of care and resistance may still be small and scrappy, but within them lies a latent power that, if further politicized and organized, could ignite a new era of transformational movement-building at a time when our country is in increasing danger.
Indeed, just imagine what might be possible if so many communities were operating not in isolation but in coordination. Imagine the power of such a potentially vast network to shake things up and assert the moral, intellectual, and political agency of those under attack. Food pantries could become places not just to fill bellies but to launch protests, campaigns, and organizing drives. Ever more devastating superstorms, floods, and forest fires could become moments not just for acute disaster response but for sustained relationship-building and communal resilience, aimed at repairing the societal fissures that worsen extreme weather events.
Last month, the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, where we both work, published a new report on the theory and practice behind this approach to grassroots organizing, A Matter of Survival: Organizing to Meet Unmet Needs and Build Power in Times of Crisis. Authored by our colleagues Shailly Gupta Barnes and Jarvis Benson, it describes how—beginning during the Covid-19 pandemic and continuing today—dozens of grassroots organizations, congregations, mutual-aid collectives, artists, and others have been building projects of survival and engaging in communal acts of care.
Over the coming months, the Kairos Center plans to draw inspiration from such stories as we launch a new and ambitious national organizing drive among the poor. The “Survival Revival,” as we call it, will connect with and link the often-siloed survival struggles of the poor into a more unified force. Together, we will study, strategize, sing, pray, and take the kind of action that, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once put it, can be “a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.” Together, we will lift from the bottom, so that everyone can rise.
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