Welcome.
My name is Beth Howard (she/her).
I’m a community organizer, writer, and proud redneck from Appalachia who is writing monthly love letters to you, the working class.
Working Class Love Notes is the monthly substack version of me passing you handwritten notes full of scribbled hearts and sweet words so that you know just how damn special you are.
Why? Because we deserve it.
The inspiration for this newsletter came from a conversation with my friend and mentor Jerome Scott, a leader in the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and co-founder of Project South, who shared with me: “There’s nothing too good for the working class.”
That quote, the truth of it, took my breath away.
My friends, we deserve it all. We deserve all of the goodness this world has to offer. We deserve to be treated with dignity and to feel belonging. We deserve safe affordable housing, nourishing food, a kind community, and access to the care and healing we need. We deserve more hours in the day for creativity, rest, and joy, not more work and anxiety. And, maybe most of all, we deserve love.
Working Class Love Notes is my offering of tenderness to us, the working class.
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives. You can expect love notes about working class organizing, history, politics, writing, culture, and healing.
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About me
I am the Appalachia Peoples Union Director for Showing Up for Racial Justice, the largest national organization bringing white people into the fight for racial and economic justice. I live in Lexington, KY, but I grew up in a rural white working class community in Eastern Kentucky. I have organized in the American South for seventeen years, primarily in my beloved state of Kentucky. I have been a lead organizer on winning campaigns to raise the minimum wage, restore voting rights, and win treatment programs for incarcerated people. I’ve also worked on winning electoral campaigns engaging white working class Southerners, including defeating an abortion ban ballot initiative in the 2022 Kentucky midterms and running a rural field office in the 2020 Georgia runoff election.
My forthcoming memoir Rednecks for Black Lives: A Story of Working Class Solidarity from a Coal Miner’s Daughter will be published by Haymarket Books in Fall 2025. I am the creator of the viral narrative campaign Rednecks for Black Lives and I’ve been featured on NBC News, Matter of Fact’s Listening Tour with Soledad O’Brian, NPR’s Here and Now, Now This News, the book Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections, and the New York Times, including publishing an Op-Ed in The Boston Globe. I live in Lexington, KY with my husband Andrew and our sweet dogs Brew and Verona and our adorable kittens Peeve and Sylvie. You can find me online at bethhowardky.com and @jbethiejean on Instagram and Blue Sky.
