Trouble! at Coal Creek

This gripping graphic novel tells the story of the 1891 Coal Creek War-one of the most significant yet overlooked labor and abolitionist uprisings in the history of the United States.

is the epic story of a cross-racial struggle to abolish the system of convict-leasing in the mines. Austin Sauerbrei’s evocative black-and-white illustrations and masterful storytelling show the personal battles and motivations that led thousands of miners to repeatedly take up arms against the powerful companies, their militias, and politicians.

Lured by coal companies’ promises of good pay, stability, and opportunity, the narrator’s father brought their family across the Atlantic Ocean for work in the mine. The job, however, was deadly, and life grew unbearable as the coal companies immiserated miners and their families. Meanwhile, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, racist terror, and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan were still fresh memories for most. Coal companies relied increasingly on the forced labor of mostly Black prisoners who were loaned out from the state, an extremely profitable continuation of the old system of racist brutality. As Ida B. Wells noted at the time, “The Convict Lease System and Lynch Law are twin infamies which flourish hand in hand.”

The miners of Coal Creek, however, set fire to the edifice of convict-leasing and inspired similar rebellions throughout the South. In this captivating graphic novel, Saurbrei brings their overlooked story to life for new generations of organizers.

Author Biography

Austin Saurbrei is a community organizer and sequential artist based in Tennessee. He currently serves as the Director of Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM), a 52-year-old, member-led organization dedicated to empowering Tennesseans in their efforts to have a greater voice in determining their own future. Austin spent years as a neighborhood and tenant organizer in Nashville, and then as the organizer for both the Chattanooga and Knoxville-Oak Ridge AFL-CIO Labor Councils. A lifelong comics enthusiast, Austin practices visual storytelling as a form of popular education. He and his wife, Claire Brown, live in Athens, Tennessee, with their three children.