[Review of] Ronald L. Lewis. Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780-1980

As an historian, Ronald L. Lewis has researched the role of blacks in the coal mining industry, an overall topic which has been largely ignored in treatments of American history. The resulting publication goes far in meeting the need to recognize the fact that blacks were an important part of this national economic enterprise. Lewis\u27 book is interestingly written, well-organized, and extensively documented. Having been born and raised in a coal town, Lewis has been a witness to some of the events he describes. He argues, insightfully, that Black miners did not share a monolithic experience. American coal miners have always been a culturally heterogeneous group .... Analysis of such widely divergent black experiences requires the use of a comparative regional approach