#AmericanHometown #documentary #harlancounty
In 2019, five unpaid coal miners stood in front of a $1.4 million coal train in Harlan County, Kentucky, and refused to move.
To understand why, you have to go back to the day the railroad first arrived.

This is the story of Harlan County, the place America called "Bloody Harlan": how the railroad turned a quiet mountain county of 10,000 people into one of the richest coalfields in the country, and how coal later tore it apart. It covers the company towns of Lynch and Benham, the Battle of Evarts and the coal wars of the 1930s, Florence Reece's song "Which Side Are You On?", the machines that emptied the mines after 1950, the Hillbilly Highway to Detroit, the Brookside strike and the Oscar-winning film *Harlan County, USA*, the flood of 1977, and the Blackjewel miners who blocked the tracks in 2019.

CHAPTERS
00:00 The train at Cumberland
02:38 A remote corner of Kentucky
05:37 The railroad arrives
07:06 Benham and Lynch
11:21 The Depression and the coal war
15:25 Which Side Are You On?
19:18 Washington steps in
22:46 The miners win
24:08 The machines
27:09 The Hillbilly Highway
31:09 A union in crisis
32:34 Brookside
36:29 The flood of 1977
38:28 Quiet years, a song and "Justified"
40:37 Back on the tracks
43:14 Harlan County today
47:25 Coal built it