ABINGDON, Va. — “It’s critically important to tell your stories,” Brandon Crum, a radiologist from Pikeville, Kentucky, told the more than 100 coal miners and others gathered at the National Black Lung Association meeting here Sept. 11. “We have momentum from the NIOSH [National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health] report. You have to tell the personal side.” Crum told the meeting he has been interviewed by newspapers and for documentaries and these outlets “want the personal human side.”
The conference took place just a month after a report by scientists at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health documented that black lung rates are at a 50-year high, with one in three long-tenured coal miners in Central Appalachia affected.
Vonda Robinson, the newly elected National Black Lung Association president, told the Militant, “Our goal is to reach out to other states, all the coal states. We want to go out to meet with miners’ widows in the Navajo Nation.”
She said the NBLA is organizing a three-day trip to Washington, D.C., at the end of September that will include hosting “a roundtable of doctors, people from the black lung clinics, miners, widows and lawyers. We will be discussing implementation of the new silica rule, raises in black lung benefits, and a widow’s bill.” The silica rule, issued in 2024 after years of protests, mandated bosses to cut levels of permissible dust in mines by half.
Robinson said they also plan to hold signs up outside Congress to draw attention to the importance of their fight to see the silica bill implemented.
Dr. Drew Harris, a pulmonologist at the University of Virginia, gave a Zoom presentation to open the meeting that detailed the devastating facts in the NIOSH report. It shows how the rate of black lung had dropped from the 1970s until 2000, but has soared since. It also shows the dramatic difference in the rate of black lung between Central Appalachia and the rest of the country. “These numbers are outrageous,” said Harris. “Black lung is 100% preventable. Death rates from black lung are rising, with hundreds dying each year.”
In the 1960s and ’70s members of the United Mine Workers of America organized a powerful movement to take control of their union and use it to fight to bring the scourge of black lung under control, as well as take other steps in the interest of the workers. They succeeded in transforming the union, and in cooperation with supportive medical personnel who set up clinics across Appalachia, beat the disease back and won a measure of control over conditions in the mines.
Josh West, a district representative for District 17 of the UMWA, told the meeting, “We need your help to fight for safety in the coal mines. We need to organize, so we can fight around black lung, and for safety.”
Black Lung Association chapters in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia reported on efforts to reach out to coalfield communities. Over 100 people attended the first miners’ picnic in Whitesburg, Kentucky, last fall, hosted by the Southeast Kentucky chapter. Their hope is to make it an annual event. The chapter includes former miners, widows and caregivers. On Black Lung Awareness Day, the Kanawha County and Fayette County chapters in West Virginia gathered at the state Capitol in Charleston to bring attention to the debilitating spread of the disease in nonunion mines in the region.
It is in the interest of workers everywhere to get out the story of the miners’ fight against black lung.