Beth Howard

Beth Howard is author of the memoir Song For a Hard-Hit People: A Memoir of Antiracist Solidarity From a Coal Miner’s Daughter and the Cultural Strategist for Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), the largest national organization bringing white people into the fight for racial and economic justice. She grew up in a rural white working-class community in Eastern Kentucky and has organized in the American South for two decades, primarily in her beloved home state of Kentucky.

Beth has been a lead organizer on campaigns to raise the minimum wage and restore voting rights. She’s also engaged white working-class Southerners on successful electoral campaigns, including ones that defeated an abortion ban ballot initiative in the 2022 Kentucky midterms and re-elected Democratic Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear in 2023—and ran a rural field office in the 2020 Georgia runoff election. She is a co-founder of Kentucky Peoples Union in Ashland, KY, a local community organizing group.

Beth is the creator of the viral narrative campaign “Rednecks for Black Lives”, and has been featured on the NBC News National Day of Racial Healing special, Matter of Fact’s Listening Tour with Soledad O’Brian, NPR’s Here and Now, Now This News, in the book Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections, the New York Times, and The Boston Globe. Beth lives in Lexington, Kentucky. You can find her on Substack at Working Class Love Notes and online at bethhowardky.com.