The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: A Conversation w/ Mitch Troutman and Kim Kelly

After mass unemployment in the 1930s, jobless miners seized coal lands by the thousands, starting small cooperative mines and selling the coal into a network of small truckers spanning the east coast. Join the book’s author (A Bootlegger Descendent) and Kim Kelly (author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor) to discuss struggle by any means necessary, the power of story to organize, and what this history could mean for today’s world.

Mitch Troutman is a writer, educator, organizer, and jack-of-all-trades living in Central Pennsylvania. He is a direct descendent of bootleg coal miners and belongs to the group Anthracite Unite.

Kim Kelly is an independent journalist, author, and organizer. She has been a regular labor columnist for Teen Vogue since 2018, and her writing on labor, class, politics, and culture has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Baffler, The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review, and Esquire, among many others. Kelly has also worked as a video correspondent for More Perfect Union, The Real News Network, and Means TV. Previously, she was the heavy metal editor at “Noisey,” VICE’s music vertical, and was an original member of the VICE Union. A third-generation union member, she is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World’s Freelance Journalists Union as well as a member and elected councilperson for the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE). She was born in the heart of the South Jersey Pine Barrens, and currently lives in Philadelphia with a hard-workin’ man, a couple of taxidermied bears, and way too many books.